5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from Accure’s Journey: A Technical Founder’s Playbook
Technical founders often struggle to translate deep expertise into business success. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Kai-Philipp Kairies, founder of Accure Battery Intelligence, shared hard-earned lessons from building a battery analytics company that now serves major energy players globally.
- Market Focus Beats Technical Breadth
The temptation to chase multiple markets can be particularly strong for technical founders who see widespread applications for their technology. Kai learned this lesson firsthand: “We do battery analytics in general. We could improve every battery around, right, from micro mobility scooters toys at home, to high end cars, to batteries and airplanes in ships.”
But pursuing multiple verticals can be deadly: “After seven or eight of those customers, you’re basically a consultancy and no longer a product company. And that’s really what can kill your company.” Instead, Accure focused specifically on grid-connected batteries, where they could demonstrate immediate ROI: “This is the revenue you would make without us. This is the revenue you would make with us.”
- Leverage Technical Credibility for Early Sales
While technical expertise alone isn’t enough, it can provide crucial early momentum. Kai explains: “The first contracts that we got, the first one, and then also the next three or four ones, they all came from my network… it was people that I had a relationship with that trusted me, and that most of them had worked in other situations with me or my team before.”
- Translate Technical Complexity into Business Value
Technical founders often struggle to communicate their value proposition effectively. As Kai admits: “Just imagine it’s just Accure is we’ve got a number of founders, but like three full time main founders, and we all got a PhD in some really nerdy topics… The three of these people will not come up with crisp language when describing what they do at day one.”
The breakthrough came when a VC spent two hours helping refine their pitch: “I had that all in my head, but I just didn’t think it was necessary to lay it out in detail at first.” This experience taught them to focus on communicating value rather than technical details.
- Start the Sales Transition Early
Many technical founders hold onto sales too long, believing their technical expertise makes them irreplaceable. Kai warns against this: “As CEO Founder, your responsibility is to make the company successful. So there’s this very big incentive to involve yourself in sales… But it’s a trap, right, because you can only dedicate so many hours in a week to this topic.”
The key is starting the transition before it becomes critical: “If you only start to transfer your responsibilities to a team when you hit the limit of your own hours in a week, it’ll be too late. They won’t have the time to find their feet.”
- Market Education as Long-term Strategy
Rather than pushing for immediate sales, Accure invested in educating their market about battery analytics. This approach proved prescient: “Three or four years ago they didn’t [know about battery analytics]. And I believe that we’re a part of this education of the market.”
This patience aligned with market maturation: “Now, as these batteries become a vital part of their business, all of a sudden performance safety lifetime really matters… they’re much more open to solutions.”
The journey from technical expertise to business success requires more than just great technology. It demands strategic focus, effective communication, scalable processes, and market understanding. For technical founders, these business capabilities deserve the same rigorous attention as product development. As Kai’s experience shows, success often comes from recognizing and adapting to these challenges early, rather than trying to power through with technical expertise alone.