Because of our deep industry experiences, we are uniquely positioned to coach frontier tech startups on initial customer selection and how to create compelling marketing pitches. We facilitate meetings with lighthouse customers and help frontier tech startups achieve success fast.
Frontier tech startups need to define the right Minimum Viable Product (MVP), select the right customers and develop highly compelling marketing pitches in order to shorten the time to market and create barriers to entry before competition come in.
Customer Selection
Here are the ideal characteristics of initial customers:
- Facing a pain point or wishes to do something and can’t
- Willing to try new technology
- Have budget driven by a market or technology disruption (e.g. carbon neutrality)
- Short buying cycle
- Allow you to use as reference for others
- Opportunity to grow wallet share within the customer
Frontier tech startups that identify the right initial customers are able to develop the right product and gain initial market share quickly. On the contrary, frontier tech startups that start with the wrong initial set of customers waste a lot of time with them without getting any market traction.
Lighthouse Customers
Lighthouse customers lets you develop the product as they adopt it, and lets you reference them for future customers. They are technology enthusiasts see the future potential of technology and are patient with technology that is imperfect. It is crucial to identify and develop strong relationships with these lighthouse customers early.
Compelling Frontier Tech Marketing Pitches
Once the right customer selection is done, the next crucial part for a tech startup is the marketing pitch, targeted at this chosen customer. Yet, often frontier tech startups pitch technology and functionality, and fail to realize that customer only consumes commercial benefit at the end of the day.
The keys to a compelling marketing pitch are:
- translating technical features and performance to commercial benefit
- clearly articulating the contrast between having and not having this frontier technology
Business Plans
Link to Customer Selection and Marketing
A well crafted business plan incorporates the key marketing messages. VCs want to understand your target customer segment and how you pitch to them.
See our perspectives on how to create compelling business plans.
