Finding Your First: The Most Important Secret in Deep Tech
The Contrarian Truth About Markets
Most deep tech founders are lying to themselves.
They create pitch decks with hockey stick growth curves and massive TAM slides showing markets worth hundreds of billions. They tell investors and themselves that their technology will disrupt entire industries immediately.
They're wrong. Not because their technology isn't revolutionary but because they fundamentally misunderstand how revolutionary technologies actually conquer markets.
The conventional wisdom says to aim for the largest market possible. The contrarian truth is that the path to dominating massive markets begins by completely ignoring them.
Here is one of the most important secrets in technology commercialization: Finding your first real user matters more than your total addressable market. Not a little more. Vastly more.
This isn't a minor tactical adjustment to your go-to-market strategy. It's a fundamental reconceptualization of how breakthrough technologies actually transform industries. And it's a secret hiding in plain sight.
The Monopolist's Path
In 2004, a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina developed a technique called PRINT (Particle Replication In Non-wetting Templates). This technology allowed for unprecedented precision in creating nanoparticles with specific shapes, sizes, and chemical properties. The potential applications spanned pharmaceuticals, electronics, and materials science. A market worth hundreds of billions.
When they founded Liquidia Technologies to commercialize this platform, conventional wisdom dictated that they should target the largest possible markets. Instead, they did something that seemed almost self-sabotaging: they chose a tiny slice of the pharmaceutical industry, focusing exclusively on creating precisely shaped particles for respiratory drug delivery for a few specific lung conditions.
This wasn't just a small market. It was microscopic compared to their technology's potential. But this seemingly irrational choice revealed a deeper understanding of how technology markets actually work.
The most valuable companies don't compete in large markets. They create monopolies in small markets, then expand outward. Facebook didn't start by trying to connect everyone on the planet. It started by dominating the Harvard student body, a minuscule market by any standard. But it was a market they could monopolize completely, and that monopoly became their beachhead for expansion.
Liquidia followed the same counterintuitive logic. By focusing on a narrow application, they could establish a complete monopoly in a small market rather than being a minor player in a large one. And monopolies, even small ones, are where value is created.
The Anti-Market Approach
The conventional approach to commercialization starts with market analysis: identify large markets, determine which segments to target, and develop products to serve them. This is precisely backward for deep tech.
The revolutionary approach starts with the technology itself: identify what unique capabilities it enables, find specific users who desperately need those specific capabilities, and ignore everyone else initially.
This is how Oxford PV, spun out of Oxford University in 2010, approached commercializing perovskite solar cells. Their technology could transform the entire solar industry. But rather than targeting this massive market directly, they chose a specific beachhead: integrating perovskite as a tandem layer on conventional silicon solar cells, focused initially on residential rooftop applications.
Why this seemingly limited approach? Because they understood a profound truth: markets don't assess technology objectively. They assess it relative to their specific needs and existing alternatives.
The difference between Oxford PV and failed competitors like Nanosolar wasn't technological superiority. It was the strategic focus.
Nanosolar raised nearly $500 million to develop thin-film solar panels, then attempted to compete broadly across the solar market. They're now defunct. Oxford PV continues to advance toward commercial success.
This pattern repeats across technological history with such consistency that it's astonishing that more founders don't recognize it. The most transformative technologies don't start by transforming entire industries. They start by solving specific problems for specific users who have no alternatives.
The Technology Adoption Revolution
The standard diffusion curve for new technologies. Innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards. It's well-known but deeply misunderstood. It suggests a smooth, continuous process where adoption spreads evenly across a market.
But real technological revolutions don't work this way. They proceed through distinct phases, each with completely different adoption mechanisms:
Most deep tech companies die in the gap between phases 1 and 2. They build something that works technically but never finds those crucial first users. The ones that survive don't do so by having better technology but by finding better first users.
Consider Illumina, now the dominant player in gene sequencing. Their path to reshaping biology didn't begin with comprehensive human genome sequencing for clinical applications. It began with genotyping microarrays for research institutions. A specific application where their technology offered immediate advantages despite its limitations.
From this narrow beachhead, they methodically expanded, first into research applications for sequencing, then gradually into clinical diagnostics. Today, over 90% of all sequencing data ever generated has been produced on Illumina instruments.
What's remarkable isn't that Illumina found a beachhead market. It's that every successful deep tech company follows this pattern, yet most founders still believe they can skip these phases and directly transform entire industries.
The Anti-Failure Pattern
The history of technological commercialization isn't just littered with success stories that followed this pattern. It's defined by failures that ignore it.
Range Fuels developed technology to convert wood chips and other cellulosic biomass into ethanol and methanol. Their gasification-based approach was technically sound and attracted over $240 million in funding. But rather than starting with a focused application where their technology had clear advantages, they attempted to compete directly with conventional ethanol production across broad markets.
This approach exposed them to direct cost competition with established technologies before they had refined their process. By 2011, Range Fuels was bankrupt, despite having technology that actually worked.
Similarly, Aquion Energy developed innovative saltwater batteries using abundant, non-toxic materials. Their technology had genuine advantages for specific applications. But rather than focusing exclusively on these applications, they competed broadly across the energy storage market, including segments where lithium-ion batteries had insurmountable advantages.
Despite raising over $190 million, Aquion filed for bankruptcy in 2017. The technology worked. The strategy failed.
These companies didn't fail because their technology was flawed. They failed because they violated the most important principle in deep tech commercialization: Find your first real user, then worry about your total addressable market.
The Desperate User Principle
When you develop a revolutionary technology, you face a fundamental paradox: The more revolutionary your technology, the fewer people will initially adopt it. This isn't because the technology doesn't work. It's because most potential users have strong incentives to stick with existing solutions, even if they're inferior.
The only users who will adopt your technology initially are those who are desperate. Those for whom existing solutions completely fail to solve their problem. These desperate users are your beachhead market. Not the users who would benefit most from your technology in theory, but the users who need it so badly they'll tolerate all its initial limitations.
Boston Metal, which is commercializing molten oxide electrolysis for carbon-free steel production, understood this principle. Their technology could transform steel manufacturing, which accounts for 8% of global carbon emissions. But rather than immediately targeting large-scale steel production, they focused on high-value ferroalloys. Specialized inputs for steel manufacturing where customers were willing to pay a premium for a green solution.
This wasn't just a matter of starting small. It was a matter of starting with the right users. Those desperate enough to adopt an unproven technology because nothing else solved their specific problem.
The same principle applies across deep tech. Ginkgo Bioworks, now a synthetic biology powerhouse, began by producing rare rose oils for the fragrance industry. A narrow application where clients were willing to pay premium prices for compounds that were difficult to source naturally.
Whether in materials science, biotechnology, or energy, the pattern is consistent: The path to broad impact begins with finding users so desperate they'll adopt your technology despite its initial limitations.
The Non-Obvious Path to Dominance
Most founders approach market entry with a frontal assault strategy: identify the largest, most lucrative market and attack it directly. This approach almost always fails for deep tech.
The non-obvious path to market dominance is what military strategists call an indirect approach. You don't attack the main target directly. You establish a secure position in an adjacent, less defended territory, then use that position as a base for further expansion.
The most successful deep tech companies follow a clear expansion pattern:
Adjacent Expansion. Once you've dominated your initial beachhead, you move to similar applications where your established credibility reduces adoption barriers. Wildcat Discovery Technologies began with materials for consumer electronics batteries, where product cycles were faster, before expanding to electric vehicle batteries. A larger market with similar technical requirements.
Vertical Integration. As you establish credibility, you can expand up or down your value chain. Twist Bioscience began by selling synthetic DNA to researchers, then gradually expanded into creating their own pharmaceutical candidates using their DNA synthesis platform.
Platform Evolution. The ultimate goal is to transform a product for specific applications into a platform that enables many applications, often developed by others. Illumina evolved from selling genotyping arrays to creating the dominant platform for all genomic analysis.
This pattern isn't just a tactical approach. It's the fundamental mechanism by which revolutionary technologies transform industries. Even the most ubiquitous technologies today began with specific beachhead applications:
The non-obvious truth is that the path to dominating massive markets isn't to target them initially. It's to ignore them completely and focus instead on dominating tiny markets where your technology's unique advantages matter most.
The Secret No One Wants to Hear
Most deep tech founders, when they learn about this approach, nod in agreement and then promptly ignore it in practice. They acknowledge the principle intellectually but fail to apply it to their own technology.
Why? Because there's a powerful psychological barrier to embracing this approach. It requires admitting that your revolutionary technology, which you've spent years developing, isn't ready to transform the world immediately. It requires starting with applications that might seem trivial compared to your grand vision.
This is a bitter pill for many founders to swallow. They've invested their careers in developing technology that could change the world, and now they're being told to focus on a tiny slice of the market that doesn't align with their original vision.
But this psychological barrier separates the founders who build world-changing companies from those who merely build interesting technologies. The former understand that transforming the world is a multi-stage process that begins with transforming a small corner of it. The latter insist on transforming everything at once and end up transforming nothing.
The most important secret in deep tech isn't technical insight.
It's a strategic one: Your first real user matters more than your total addressable market. Not because that first user represents significant revenue but because they're the key that unlocks everything else.
They're not just a customer. They're a partner in proving, refining, and scaling your technology. They're the difference between a scientific achievement and a world-changing company.
Find them. Listen to them. Build with them. And from that foundation, you can truly change the world, not in a single leap, but through a series of focused solutions that gradually expand from specific applications to broad impact.
The contrarian truth is that the most direct path to changing the world is the one that doesn't try to change it all at once.