Guest Post By Mark M.J. Scott
President of Northern Pixels Inc.
You’ve cracked the impossible. Your deep tech solution is genuinely groundbreaking. But a year into commercialization, you’re watching your runway burn while “interested” prospects disappear into endless technical evaluations that never convert to revenue.
You’re not failing because your technology isn’t good enough. You’re failing because you believe having the best solution means you’ll automatically win — the same trap that kills most deep tech startups.
The Revenue Death Spiral Every Deep Tech Founder Recognizes
Picture this scenario: You’re a deep tech founder in your first year of commercialization. You’ve invested years getting to this point, but revenue traction remains elusive. Despite your team working around the clock, initial interest consistently morphs into endless technical requests and bureaucratic loops.
You find yourself spinning your wheels in a frustrating pattern:
The Technical Champion Trap: You’re engaging with companies that seem like perfect fits, but you never reach decision-makers. Instead, you’re stuck in meetings with technology teams who consume your resources with additional capability demands while lacking any purchasing authority.
The POC Purgatory: You agree to complex proof-of-concepts, but senior leadership remains unaware these evaluations are happening, or of their outcomes. You’re more than a year into relationships, worried about going over your champion’s head.
The Multiplication Problem: This exact scenario is playing out simultaneously across three or four other accounts, creating a resource drain that threatens your entire operation.
Deep tech startups consistently underestimate the resource drain of extended technical evaluations. Founders project 6-month sales cycles but face evaluations that stretch well over a year, often without converting to revenue. The technical validation approach creates a deadly pattern where companies prove their technology works but never prove the market wants to buy it.
This pattern compounds because you’re not just stuck in one endless evaluation, you’re trapped in three or four simultaneously, each burning runway while promising future revenue that never materializes. Meanwhile, your board meetings are approaching, and those optimistic revenue projections you made when announcing these POCs are starting to look like fantasy.
When the Board Meeting Becomes a Reckoning
You have critical board meetings approaching. When you initially announced those POCs with impressive brands, you projected revenue. Now you’re realizing your own leadership team and prospects have settled into a comfortable engagement pattern, content to continue free work indefinitely with no close date in sight.
And it gets worse. You’ve quadrupled down on the same mistake: betting on technical teams with no buying authority to sell to their leadership on your behalf. This has also forced you to shelve initiatives that could have demonstrated real market traction.
When that dreaded board meeting arrives, you face two paths:
Path 1: The POC Death Spiral. Show up and tell the board you’ll continue the current course, remaining confident it will eventually work. That brief, curious silence after your statement will be followed by the board agreeing to an executive session, with you sitting outside, wondering what storm is brewing.
Path 2: The Pivot to a Logical Revenue Plan. Present a market shaping strategy to accelerate revenue generation. This means building industry credibility, analyst relationships, and strategic partnerships that create market alignment and momentum. The most successful deep tech companies use this approach to transform technical validation into commercial traction — a clear, logical framework that boards immediately understand.
In the race for revenue, most founders skip market shaping and go straight for the sale — and fail. Founders do not understand Market Shaping is not only vital part of the sale — it accelerates bookings.
Market Shaping Confronts Your Core Problem
The fundamental mistake deep tech founders make is believing they’re addressing a need with a logical solution, rather than influencing and shaping a market on a new approach to respond to a problem.
Decision-makers with purchasing authority are confused by technical noise. While they sense innovation can bring value, inaction typically results from not understanding why or how one solution is fundamentally better than alternatives. This confusion pushes evaluation down to technical teams who happily engage in project after project without clarity on whether POCs will ever be purchased and deployed.
The challenge compounds when startups expect technical champions to sell upward to the C-suite. These champions rarely access decision-makers, and when they do, they can’t effectively communicate business value or urgency.
The Market Shaping Framework
Market shaping embraces four irrefutable truths that build momentum and drive revenue — ignore these truths and you will fail:
- Peer Influence Trumps Sales Pitches: Professionals trust what their peers say far more than anything your sales team communicates.
- Analyst & Thought Leader Authority: Industry analysts, and sector thought leaders significantly influence Fortune 500 decisions, providing third-party validation that propel revenue.
- Partnership Validation: Strategic partnerships — including technical alliances, professional services relationships, and reseller networks — demonstrate brand trust and elevate startup credibility.
- Media Amplification: Media exposure reinforces peer validation, analyst credibility, and partnerships — but never works in isolation. The fatal mistake many founders make is treating media coverage as a silver bullet without the underlying credibility foundation. Random awareness doesn’t drive revenue – media exposure that showcases credible industry forces aligning behind your solution does.
The Strategic Advantage of Market Shaping
Market shaping’s power lies in building your foundation while simultaneously creating vital frameworks that build trust and confidence among your board, investors, and partners — earning you extra confidence and runway when you need it most.
Founders who bypass market shaping find themselves empty-handed when a slow quarter hits. They’ve built nothing to demonstrate that their strategy is working or that industry forces are aligning behind them.
Market shaping accelerates time to revenue by strengthening business sector confidence, it empowers top-down selling and cuts through noise and clarifies your leadership position. When executives hear about your solution from multiple trusted sources before you ever reach out, you’re positioned as voice of authority in the room, providing valuable strategic guidance – not simply selling a product.
Technical champions and POCs remain essential to success — but market shaping changes the game entirely. When you have top-down buy-in, decision makers are not only aware of technical evaluations, but they are also engaged in the outcomes. This transforms your technical champions from isolated advocates into recognized internal experts whose recommendations carry weight. The result: faster revenue cycles, stronger account relationships, and technical teams who become your biggest supporters because you’ve elevated their visibility and impact within their organization.
The Path Forward
Deep tech innovation requires market sophistication alongside breakthrough technology. The companies that survive understand that shaping the market isn’t separate from building the product — it’s integral to commercialization success.
Your technology might be revolutionary, but without market shaping, it risks joining the deep tech graveyard. The question isn’t whether your solution is good enough — it’s whether you’re ready to build the market momentum that transforms technical excellence into revenue.
Mark M.J. Scott is President of Northern Pixels Inc., the world’s only marketing firm founded and led by deep tech and advanced tech startup veterans, each with a track record of successful commercialization and exits via acquisition. Mark has held pivotal leadership roles in several startup successes, including a cryptography company acquired by AppDirect, an optics firm acquired by Toyota, and TrueContext, an enterprise low-code platform acquired by Battery Ventures in 2024. Recently, Mark was engaged by Quebec’s $435M-funded Quantum Innovation Zone to design and implement commercial strategies that accelerate startup growth and success. Mark can be found on X / Twitter: https://x.com/MarkMJScott
0 Comments