7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Disrupting a $20M Hardware Market

7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Disrupting a $20M Hardware Market

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Fabi Riesen, CEO of Loft Dynamics, a flight training platform that’s raised over $29 million, described a counterintuitive reality about building in regulated industries: “Building a simulator is 2% of the whole thing, although 98% is making sure that we can qualify the simulator in a regulatory framework from aviation.”

That statement encapsulates why Loft Dynamics succeeded where others might have failed. From zero revenue in 2018 to breakeven in 2022, their journey from living room prototype to the only company with qualified VR flight simulators offers a masterclass in hard tech go-to-market strategy. Here are seven lessons that apply far beyond aviation.

Lesson 1: Regulatory Validation Can Replace Traditional Product-Market Fit

Most startups obsess over customer validation. Loft Dynamics got something better: regulator validation. “In 2018, we’ve been contacted by the European Aviation Authority, based on seeing a YouTube video, what we did,” Fabi recalled. A YouTube video led to inbound interest from the gatekeepers who could make or break their entire market.

This inbound regulatory interest completely changed the company’s trajectory. “That’s where they reached out, and we realized that apart from having a passion, we out of a sudden build something where is the real problem,” Fabi explained.

The lesson here extends beyond aviation. In highly regulated markets, regulators aren’t obstacles—they’re potential first customers who understand market problems intimately. They evaluate existing solutions constantly and see exactly what’s broken. Getting them interested early doesn’t just validate your technology; it validates the problem itself and opens doors that customer testimonials never could.

For founders in regulated spaces: engage regulatory bodies early, treat their feedback as product direction, and recognize that their endorsement carries more weight than dozens of pilot customers.

Lesson 2: The Qualification Process Is the Moat, Not the Technology

Here’s where most technical founders miss the opportunity. VR headsets aren’t proprietary technology. Anyone can build a flight simulator with VR. But “by today, we are still on the whole world, the only company which is having qualified simulators using that head mounted technology,” Fabi noted.

That exclusivity comes from the 98% effort—the regulatory qualification work that takes years and deep expertise to navigate. While competitors can replicate your technology, they can’t shortcut the qualification timeline. This creates a multi-year moat during which you’re the only option for customers who need certified solutions.

The strategic implication: in regulated markets, invest disproportionately in understanding and navigating the qualification process. Make it a core competency, not a checkbox. Build relationships with certification bodies. Document everything. Create systems that can consistently meet standards. This operational excellence becomes your sustainable competitive advantage.

Lesson 3: When You Change Economics by 20x, You Create New Customers

Traditional flight simulators cost $20 million. This price created centralization. “Three years ago, there were two simulator centers in whole Europe where it was possible to get a check ride on the H-125 simulators,” Fabi shared.

By making devices “more than 20 times cheaper,” Loft didn’t expand the existing market—they created an entirely different one. “All of a sudden, you have a small helicopter operator which is able to afford their training device instead of sending their pilots far away to a place to get trained,” he explained.

These weren’t just new customers—they were completely different customers with different needs, constraints, and expectations. Training centers had engineering teams. Small operators had pilots. The product, service infrastructure, and entire go-to-market approach had to transform.

The lesson: dramatic price disruption requires rethinking everything, not just pricing. Your new customers will have different technical capabilities, different purchasing processes, different success metrics, and different service needs. Don’t just make your existing product cheaper—rebuild it for the customer who couldn’t buy before.

Lesson 4: Product Simplification Enables Market Expansion

Selling to a new customer base meant radical product simplification. “We had to build the product first of all much more simple to use,” Fabi explained. The target became enabling “a flight instructor can make half a day training, and then the flight instructor will be able to use the device with his student or with his pilots without a lot of engineering work needed around.”

Half a day. That’s the entire training budget. Every interface decision, configuration option, and maintenance procedure needed to be simple enough for someone with half a day of training to operate confidently.

This level of simplification in a traditionally complex device category represents genuine innovation. It’s not about dumbing down features—it’s about making sophistication accessible. The technology can be complex, but the experience must be simple.

For B2B founders: when entering new market segments, your onboarding time becomes a design constraint. If your target user can’t become proficient quickly, you haven’t actually made the product accessible to them, regardless of price.

Lesson 5: Build Service Infrastructure as Part of the Product

The customer transformation also demanded operational transformation. “We also had to create a huge organization which takes care of the customer that machine is always qualified, gets re-qualified, is maintained and so on,” Fabi noted.

This wasn’t an afterthought—it was essential to the product. Small operators couldn’t handle regulatory compliance themselves. The device needed to work “just as a tool embedded in their regular workflow” without requiring specialized knowledge.

Building this service infrastructure represents significant cost and complexity. But it’s also a retention mechanism and revenue stream. The ongoing service relationship creates switching costs that pure hardware sales don’t provide. You’re not selling a device—you’re selling reliable, compliant training capability over time.

This lesson applies broadly: when you serve customers who lack internal technical resources, your service infrastructure becomes as important as your product. Plan for it from day one, budget for it appropriately, and build it into your business model.

Lesson 6: When Quality Gaps Are Large Enough, Product Experience Drives GTM

Helicopter pilots historically hate simulators. “In helicopter, people try never to go on the simulator. They hate simulator because the simulator is simply not representative like the real aircraft,” Fabi explained. Decades of poor simulation created deep skepticism.

Yet Loft’s GTM strategy centers on a simple approach: “Get the pilot on the device and then it’s a done deal.” Why does this work? “The moment most skeptical pilots are sitting on the device, they get hands on, they immediately gone,” Fabi said.

This product-led strategy only succeeds because the quality gap versus alternatives is massive. “Everyone who is a real pilot immediately understands the big advantage,” he noted. The advantage comes from enabling training that’s impossible elsewhere: “In real helicopter you can’t do a lot of things you should do. You can’t do emergency training and so on. Malfunction training, you can only talk about it on the simulator. You can do real malfunction training.”

The lesson: when your product creates an emotional experience dramatically different from alternatives, center your entire go-to-market on enabling direct experience. No amount of marketing collateral replaces the conversion power of trial when the quality gap is this large. Focus resources on getting prospects to experience the product rather than explaining it.

Lesson 7: Start With the Hardest Problem to Validate Everything Else

Loft made a strategic choice that seems counterintuitive. “We started in aviation, we started in the helicopter, in the rotorcrafts, in helicopter, which is more a niche in the whole aircraft, which is also the area where the visual system is very important flying close to the ground. So from that point of view, it is the most demanding area,” Fabi explained.

This wasn’t masochism—it was strategy. “Fixed wing are going to be easier as well. eVTOLs it’s much more logical to use that type of technology,” he continued. By tackling helicopters first, where realistic visual simulation matters most, they proved the technology in the most demanding environment.

Success in the hardest use case makes everything else easier. It demonstrates capability to skeptics, simplifies future regulatory approvals, and creates immediate differentiation. If you can solve the problem where it’s most acute, expansion into adjacent markets becomes straightforward.

For founders: identify the most demanding, most skeptical segment of your target market. Win there first. The credibility translates everywhere else, and you’ll have solved edge cases that competitors won’t anticipate until much later.

The Three-Year Path to Breakeven

These lessons combined to create impressive results. From deciding to “create the whole company into direction that we really generate business” in 2018, Loft secured first launch customers in 2019 and reached breakeven in 2022. Three years from serious commercialization to profitability in a highly regulated hardware business.

The market transformation is visible in their growth. From “two simulator centers in whole Europe” three years ago, they’ve expanded to “already 15” with “nine will follow very soon.” Each installation represents not just a customer but a fundamental shift in how an industry approaches training.

“Every day we get more requests to be part of the Loft capital,” Fabi shared. “The moment it’s understood how that several billion business is getting disrupted, the appetite is increasing.” Understanding—not just technical capability—drives success in disruptive hard tech.

The common thread across all seven lessons: successful go-to-market in regulated hardware markets requires treating non-obvious things as core products. The qualification process. The service infrastructure. The simplification work. The regulatory relationships. These aren’t obstacles to route around—they’re competitive advantages to invest in deliberately.