Go-To-Market Strategies

From Prototype to Early Majority

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Robotics Business Double-Chasm Challenge

Go-to-Market (GtM) for Robotics Startups is different, especially when compared to pure software startups. We fondly refer to the challenge as the “Robotics Double Chasm”. The first chasm can occur when moving from prototype to early adopter customers. The second chasm typically occurs when trying to scale the number of customers beyond the initial set of early adopters. Any tech startup, from SaaS, Robotics, Biotech and Deeptech faces the first chasm as they strive to confirm initial product market fit (PMF). Once across this chasm, SaaS companies typically have a more continuous process of product refinement and customer expansion. However, with hardware involved, the second chasm for Robotics companies becomes much more distinct. This chapter outlines the key challenges and recommended approaches for both chasms.

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  1. The First Chasm – From Prototypes to Winning Early Adopter Customers
    Key challenges:

    • Establishing a Robust Prototype and Validating Lead Customers
    • Establish initial Product Market Fit (PMF)
    • Don’t Forget about Marketing
  2. The Second Chasm – From Early Adopters to Early Majority (in many cases the tougher one!)
    Key challenges:

    • Sharpening PMF to win the Early Majority
    • Expanding your Customer Pipeline
    • Executing the Expand part of “Land and Expand” with early lead customers

Beyond the Chasms – Scaling through Early Majority customers – a topic for another chapter!

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1- The First Chasm – From Prototyping to Early Adopters

A- Establishing a Robust Prototype and Validating Lead Customers

At this point, a startup has identified a market focus, zoomed in on a primary use case and conducted initial customer interviews, producing a preliminary set of target customers (see Chapter 3 on Evaluating Vertical Markets and Use Cases). Additionally, a working prototype has been defined and built (see Chapter 4 on Product Scoping & Definition). The combination of a working prototype and a set of target customers is an initial hypothesis toward validating the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and achieving initial PMF.

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Product-Market Fit Journey to Customer Success
Phase Key Success Factors
Optimize the Prototype for Customer engagement

Goal: Establish customer interest
  • Define essential features required for the initial version of the product.
  • Prioritize features based on their impact on solving the stated problem.
  • Getting the Cost / Capability balance right with a well understood BoM cost down roadmap
  • Speed of execution at the early stage when capital is limited is critical
  • In robotics, it is paramount to set the hardware design early so you can continuously add capabilities and improvements via software over time, and limit hardware iterations, which can be expensive from both hard cost and opportunity cost perspectives
Prototype to Product

Goal: Confirm customer adoption
  • Focus on the customer’s main pain point
  • Work with customers to get initial feedback & expectations
  • Define the minimum features that will be required to achieve initial adoption
  • Consider the minimum integration needed with customers’ systems
  • Make sure to get this as close as possible to the final product: unlike SaaS, the cost of major hardware platform changes will be expensive and time consuming
  • Don’t delay focus on exceptional industrial design, UI, UX and usability
  • Features should enable adaptability to diverse tasks that are both uniform and varied.
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B – Establish initial Product Market Fit (PMF)

The Go-to-Market (GtM) starts when you have a robust first product and begin customer pilots with lead customers, kicking off the search for Product-Market-Fit (PMF).

Product Development Journey

Software startups famously utilize the concept of MVPs – an initial minimum viable product that developers can quickly iterate and continuously improve with the opportunity for fast, incremental advancements in between major software releases. In robotics, the MVP approach can apply to the software, but it is more complex for hardware. Robotics products need to be considered in stages that are defined by the major hardware iterations. A typical progression is: (1) robust prototype, (2) first product for pilots, (3) second product for early production and initial scaling.

This product development journey runs in parallel to identifying your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and winning customers. The two activities are heavily intertwined, and the ultimate goal is all about achieving PMF. And you should make some revenue along the way…

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Find your first ideal customer profile (ICP)

Finding your first ICP, which can be a single customer or a set of customers, is critical for focusing your product development efforts and go-to-market plans. These are the customers you will take to the pilot testing stage.

Target first customers who are truly early adopters with a willingness to try new solutions. It’s likely that the first deployment of the robot will not be perfect and meet all of your and the customer’s goals, but the right customer will provide high quality feedback and be patient.

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Product-Market Fit Journey to Customer Success
Phase Key Success Factors
Pilot engagement

Goal: Early product-market fit validation
  • Continuously validate assumptions and hypotheses through prototypes, pilot programs, and user feedback.
  • Trusted lead customer relationships with win-win, alignment of incentives
  • Management support – it’s risky to just have an individual engineer or group of engineers as your only sponsors. Important to work top-down and bottom-up
  • Clear goals that are mutually agreed upon
  • Clear roles and responsibilities – ensure the customer is providing the necessary support to be successful – people, access to their facilities, commitment to actively evaluate and share data, feedback on results
  • Ideally this is a paid pilot even if modest compensation from the customer. One benefit of higher cost paid pilots is that it will require more buy-in and lead to management review/approval.
  • Work hard to exit the pilot phase – some customers can keep you in pilot phase for long periods of time avoiding commitment and continuing to absorb your precious resources
  • More than one round of pilot programs is often necessary to refine product-market fit
  • The best approach is paid, performance-based pilots that if achieved, directly convert to a contract to purchase.
Early Production

Goal: Lock in customer commitments
  • If the pilot is done properly, you should be ready to develop a robust version of the product capable of going to production
  • This involves optimizing supply chain and manufacturing partners to achieve better performance and cost at scale
  • Testing, validation and certification are key here to make sure that the solution will deliver a superior customer experience, be safe and compliant
  • Packaging/shipping, ease of deployment and integration are important at this stage
  • Iterate the product based on ongoing, real-world testing and broader market responses.
  • Integrate customer success and support into the design
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C- Don’t Forget about Marketing

For many robotics companies, marketing is a forgotten activity and too often undervalued. Good slide decks and a good website are the basics, but once early customer traction starts, expanded marketing can become a major multiplier for direct sales and customer engagement activities.

Key early stage marketing strategies

Engage customers for marketing impact:

  • Alongside the product goals of first customer engagement, the marketing goal should be to build a case study and develop videos that make the product look great and highlight the early deployment significance.
  • The best videos are done with or by the customer in the customer voice promoting the merits of your product.
  • Look for opportunities to make a key manager a hero within the customer organization, which can lead to executive tours and positive marketing outcomes.
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General marketing strategies:

  • Discover where your customers go to find new ideas, see new products, learn new things, show off their products – what conferences and exhibitions they attend, what news outlets they follow, publications they read, etc.
  • Utilize social media, podcasts, and speaking engagements to elevate the founder’s profile and voice in the industry. Don’t hesitate to target top-tier publications – everyone is looking for a good story!
  • Develop relationships and stay in touch with engaged journalists to discuss relevant news as it pertains to your industry for quote placement in stories with journalists and content creators covering your industry.
  • Outsourcing to marketing firms or freelancers can be a good way to get started on building out your marketing strategy.

Marketing done well at the early stages should drive inbound interest, complement and feed your sales team, and save on cold calling and hunting for new customer accounts.

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2- The Second Chasm – From Early Adopters to Early Majority

A- Sharpening PMF to win the Early Majority

The first 3 to 5 customers often have different attributes than customers 5-10 and customers 10-50. It’s extremely common to learn that you need to add more features and capabilities (hopefully all in software or minor hardware changes) to elevate the value proposition and win over the next wave of new customers.

These insights come from more customer conversations, onsite work with customers in live use of the product and service, and a deeper understanding of customer care-abouts.

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Typical Concepts for Expanding Customer Fit
Impact Actions
Unlock high potential growth
  • Find multi-robot purchase/lease customer opportunities and pursue multi-year contracts
  • Adapt the business model or offer more options to fit a wider range of customer needs
  • Find large adjacent market opportunities utilizing the same or slightly modified product
Maximize value proposition
  • Finding particular features that customers really value and doubling down on expanding that aspect of the product capability
  • Discover major improvements to shorten payback, strengthen ROI
  • Uncover adjacent customer pain points that can be readily solved with the existing product or with modest feature additions
Improve Product Effectiveness and Reliability
  • Solving challenging edge cases in the application
  • Solving reliability and robustness challenges to ensure a good customer experience and maximize up time
  • Addressing mundane but critical topics such as how to reliably ship and deliver robots to customers
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B- Expand your customer pipeline

You have secured your first customer wins, validating your product and reinforcing your confidence in the ICP. With this foundation in place, it is now time to add new customers to your pipeline.

Here’s some of the key next steps:

1 – Refined Customer Segmentation

Using lessons learned from crossing the first chasm, perform a rigorous refresh of your customer segmentation, considering factors such as use case, buying preferences, willingness to take risks, enterprise or SMB, geography, etc.

2 – Expand Customer Outreach
Using your refined and segmented customer targets, drive outreach to new customer targets that fit (or approximately fit) your initial ICP.

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3 – Optimize your Sales Process and Customer Engagement

Key aspects include:

  • Demos – great product demos are extremely important. Make it easy for customers to observe and experience the product’s value and differentiation. Often, this is easy to say but hard to do well. Strive for “Wow!”.
  • ROI workshops – Significant, early ROI is very important in robotics
    • Refine your own ROI analysis based on lead customer experience.
    • Embed the ROI workshop in your customer engagement process. This is a great way to discover customer needs, in the customer voice, with the customers’ own data.
    • Use customer data to build a clear, customized ROI and business case to deliver to your customer champion, so that they can advocate effectively for the robot sale within the customer organization.
    • Look for additional value-add opportunities such as how your product can deliver valuable insights, data and analytics, and/or streamline operations.
  • Ideal engagement – Map individual customer organizations to identify power, influence and the decision makers. Then, target a tops down approach, a bottoms up approach, or both.
  • Sales funnel optimization – Develop a structured process to qualify customers, define your sales cycle(s), and determine the number of qualified leads needed at the top of the funnel to achieve your sales goals. Most robotics startups underestimate the required funnel size and the time needed for conversion.
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A note on the key elements of ROI

An effective way to drive sales within an organization is by clearly demonstrating the return on investment (ROI) of your robotics solution. A comparative chart showcasing how your solution reduces direct costs while simultaneously improving operational efficiency can be a compelling tool for decision-makers.

Additional strategies to showcase ROI include:

  • Before-and-After Metrics: Present key performance indicators (KPIs) from real-world deployments, such as increased throughput, reduced downtime, or improved quality control.
  • Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Analysis: Compare long-term costs of manual processes versus automation, factoring in labor, maintenance, and productivity gains.
  • Scenario Modeling & Predictive ROI: Use data-driven models to project cost savings, efficiency gains, and scalability benefits over time.
  • Regulatory & Compliance Benefits: Highlight how automation can reduce errors, improve safety, and ensure adherence to industry standards, minimizing legal and financial risks. You may not get “credit” from customers for these savings, but it’s important to explore. Certain customers may place significant value on it.
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4 – Sales Playbook

Start building your Sales Playbook in preparation for adding sales to the team. This will be an evolutionary process but being disciplined about what works (and doesn’t work) and documenting it is a best practice.

5 – Building out the Sales Team

It’s always a good idea to take a direct sales approach in the beginning to maintain control over the customer process, gain insight to the use case, and directly capture invaluable customer feedback and insights. This also gives startups a front row seat from which they can honestly assess the product capability and PMF. It’s common that the startup CEO is the Sales Champion in the early stage of a robotics company. However, as startups prepare to expand beyond first customer success, it’s time to assess your first sales hire to complement the CEO’s activities. The exact timing is very dependent on the needs of the business, the preferences of the CEO, and market dynamics such as sales cycles.

In any scenario, CEOs should be highly discerning when hiring sales candidates who have great industry experience and network, but don’t fit a startup’s culture or have potential for long-term leadership in the company. Mistakes in sales hires is one of the most common team building mistakes a startup CEO will make. The art of scaling your sales team could be an entire Playbook chapter.

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6- Expanding Your Channels to Market

Beyond your direct sales activities, the key question is how do you 5-10x your own sales without expanding your team to capitalize on your PMF success and ICP knowledge. There are three typical paths to consider for robotics startups:

  1. Sales through distribution and value-added reseller channels
  2. Sales through systems integrators
  3. Sales through complementary partners already selling to the same segments

With sales partnerships, it’s best to pick an initial partner and test the model to validate a win-win for both parties before scaling it up. Set a realistic time (6 months to 1 year) for these partnerships to gain momentum and be quick to abandon if it’s not working. Finding the right partner(s) can be a great growth accelerator. Engaging the wrong channel partners can be painful causing you to lose time and waste valuable resources on your team to support the failing partner. Pay close attention to distributor agreement terms and make sure your business can afford the gross margin impact.

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Double Chasm Challenge
First Chasm
Second Chasm