Selling deeptech, in plain language.
Three guides, read in order. They cover the work that turns working technology into industrial revenue: choosing a market, pricing it, and getting from pilot to contract.
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Selling deeptechEverything between a working technology and a repeatable commercial motion.Read the guide overview →- What is deep tech, and why does nobody tell you the selling is the hard partDeep tech is a funding category, not a customer category. Nobody buys deep tech. They buy a fix for a problem that costs them money, and they buy it s
- Europe does not have an innovation problem. It has a scaling problem.European deeptech wins the science and loses the sale. The missing piece is not more grants or better research. It is the boring, decade-long work of
- Picking a beachhead market when your buyers are factoriesEvery deeptech deck has a slide with five industries and a giant TAM. Every successful deeptech company started in one narrow segment and stayed there
- A go to market strategy for deeptech is one page. The hard part is what you leave off.Most GTM templates were written for software: channels, funnels, CAC. Deeptech sells twelve machines a year to committees. Here is the one-page struct
- Customer discovery with industrial buyers: nobody has time for your surveyIndustrial buyers will not fill in your survey and they will not join your discovery call about pain points. But they will talk for an hour if you ask
- Your first ten customers are three different jobs, not oneGetting from zero to one customer is a story everyone tells. Getting from one to ten is where deeptech companies actually stall, because customers two
- Your first industrial customer is not found. They are manufactured.Technical startups wait for the first customer to appear. Industrial first customers do not appear. They are built, meeting by meeting, through a sequ
- Industrial B2B marketing when your buyer is a factory, not a feedIndustrial B2B marketing is not software marketing with longer cycles. What it is, how manufacturers actually get leads, and what a real industrial ma
- Founder-led sales works until it does not. Here is how you know.Every deeptech founder sells the first deals themselves. That is right and necessary. The mistake is not founder-led sales. The mistake is not seeing
- Your first sales hire will probably fail. Here is why, and what to do first.Technical founders hire their first salesperson too early, for the wrong job, with nothing written down. The hire fails, and the company learns the wr
- Scaling founder-led sales without hiring: the answer is a system, not a personThe founder is the best salesperson the company will ever have, and the worst bottleneck. Scaling without hiring means turning what is in the founder'
- Enterprise sales, mapped: the meeting you are not in decides the dealYou are not convincing one person. You are helping several people defend a decision to people who will never meet you. The cast, the gates, and the en
- OEM sales: the design win is not the revenueYour part disappears inside their product, and your revenue arrives on their schedule. What the design-in window is, what OEMs really evaluate, and ho
Pricing technical productsHow to set a price when there is no market rate to copy.Read the guide overview →- How to price something nobody has ever bought beforeNo comparable product means no comparable price, and founders freeze. But your buyer is not comparing you to another product. They are comparing you t
- Value based pricing for technical products, explained with a pumpYour buyer does not care what your technology cost to build. They care what their problem costs to keep. Value based pricing starts from their spreads
- Cost-plus feels honest. It is also why hardware startups stay poor.Cost-plus pricing feels like integrity: fair margin on real costs. In hardware it quietly does three things: caps your price at your BOM, invites proc
- Pricing your first deal: why founders discount at the wrong momentYour first industrial customer asks for a lower price. Founders almost always say yes, and at exactly the wrong moment. Here is when discounting is sm
- Your price is not expensive. Their problem is expensive. The TCO case that proves itProcurement will always compare your price to the cheap alternative. The TCO case changes what is being compared: not your price against theirs, but t
- The capex approval process: why your champion cannot say yesYou won the pilot. Then the deal disappeared into a document you will never see. How industrial capex approval actually works, and why the calendar ma
- Stop selling robots. Sell the hour nobody has to work.The robot is your unit of production. It does not have to be your unit of sale. On RaaS pricing, which risk you own at each price point, and the cash
From pilot to contractThe steps between a successful trial and a purchase order.Read the guide overview →- Your pilot worked. So why did nobody buy?The pilot proved your technology works. It did not prove the organisation can buy it. On pilot purgatory, buying groups, and why movement is not commi
- The pilot agreement: five things to settle before anyone plugs anything inMost pilots fail commercially long before they fail technically. The reason is almost always a document nobody wrote: what success means, who decides,
- Design partners: free development department or your first real customer?Every hardware startup collects design partners. Few ask the one question that matters: is this company a customer in disguise, or a free consultancy
- An LOI is not an order: what actually counts as commercial proofYou have a signed letter of intent. An investor asks if it is revenue. A procurement team knows it is not. Here is what LOIs, MOUs and purchase orders
- Your customer wants exclusivity. Excellent. Now make them pay for it.A broad exclusivity clause in a joint development agreement is not commitment. It is a request for yours. How to trade field-of-use exclusivity for re
- Your material is 20% better. The customer still won't qualify it.Industrial customers do not buy the best material. They buy a qualified one. On qualification timelines, requalification events, and picking the first
- Your customer says they'll buy it. Will their bank believe them?Twenty interested customers can be worth less than one offtaker with its balance sheet behind future demand. On LOIs, conditional offtake, take-or-pay
- Your chip passed the evaluation. So why is nobody designing it in?An evaluation board on an engineer's desk is not a deal in progress. It is an option someone bought cheap. The gap between eval and design win is wher
- TRL vs MRL: your prototype works, and that is not the question anyone is askingFounders pitch TRL 8. Buyers hear MRL 4. The gap between those two numbers is where deeptech deals, and deeptech companies, quietly die.
- Manufacturing readiness levels, explained by someone who has watched a line stopYour prototype works. That is level 4 of 10. The other six levels are where hardware startups discover that making one thing and making a thousand thi
- Supplier qualification: the part of the sale that happens after they say yesThe buyer agreed in March. The first order came in September. Nothing went wrong. Here is what happens in those six months, and how to get through it
- The approved vendor list: why being better is not enoughYour product won the technical evaluation. The order still did not come. Here is how the approved vendor list actually works, and how small suppliers
- First article inspection: the paperwork that decides if you can actually make the partYou made one perfect part by hand. The FAI is where the customer asks you to prove the process made it, not the heroics. Here is what the inspection a
- The factory acceptance test: the exam you get to write yourselfThe FAT is the last gate before your machine ships. Startups treat it as a formality. Industrial buyers treat it as the moment of truth. Write the exa
Semiconductor commercialisationHow chip, equipment and design-services companies get to a repeatable order.Read the guide overview →- Your chip passed the evaluation. So why is nobody designing it in?An evaluation board on an engineer's desk is not a deal in progress. It is an option someone bought cheap. The gap between eval and design win is wher
- Congratulations on your design win. Now you only have two years to wait for the money.A design win is a serious commercial commitment, but it is not yet revenue. On NRE, design-in economics, and what your first corporate customer should
- OEM sales: the design win is not the revenueYour part disappears inside their product, and your revenue arrives on their schedule. What the design-in window is, what OEMs really evaluate, and ho
- Industrial B2B marketing when your buyer is a factory, not a feedIndustrial B2B marketing is not software marketing with longer cycles. What it is, how manufacturers actually get leads, and what a real industrial ma
- Supplier qualification: the part of the sale that happens after they say yesThe buyer agreed in March. The first order came in September. Nothing went wrong. Here is what happens in those six months, and how to get through it
- The approved vendor list: why being better is not enoughYour product won the technical evaluation. The order still did not come. Here is how the approved vendor list actually works, and how small suppliers
- First article inspection: the paperwork that decides if you can actually make the partYou made one perfect part by hand. The FAI is where the customer asks you to prove the process made it, not the heroics. Here is what the inspection a
- The factory acceptance test: the exam you get to write yourselfThe FAT is the last gate before your machine ships. Startups treat it as a formality. Industrial buyers treat it as the moment of truth. Write the exa
Grants for deeptechNon-dilutive funding for technical companies, written for founders who would rather build than administrate.Read the guide overview →- EIC Accelerator for deeptech: what the 2026 scoring means for technical foundersThe EIC Accelerator still funds breakthrough innovation, but the scoring has shifted. Here is how technical founders should read the call and shape a
- The indirect-cost line that kills deeptech grant budgetsGrant budgets fail at audit when indirect costs, partner contributions and personnel time are not documented. Here is how to build a budget an auditor
- NWO and TTW for Dutch deeptech: when to applyNWO and TTW fund Dutch technical research at different stages. Here is how deeptech founders decide which instrument fits their readiness level and co
Venture capital for deeptechRaising capital for a deeptech company when the technology is real but the market is still being proved.Read the guide overview →- Why deeptech VCs ask about the beachhead market before the technologyThe first question a deeptech VC should ask is not how the technology works. It is who will pay for it first. Here is why market focus wins the meetin
- How technical founders run a first funding process without a full-time CFOA first fundraising process is a sales campaign with a few dozen buyers. Here is how technical founders run it without getting buried in finance theat
- What a deeptech term sheet actually saysDeeptech term sheets hide commercial assumptions inside legal language. Here is how to read the clauses that matter before you sign.