Inside Scrona’s First Product Launch: From CEO Onboarding to Semicon West in 30 Days

Inside Scrona’s First Product Launch: From CEO Onboarding to Semicon West in 30 Days

Thirty days. That’s how long it took Patrick Heissler to go from joining Scrona as CEO to launching a product at one of the semiconductor industry’s most important trade shows.

Most product launches take months of planning. Marketing campaigns, messaging frameworks, sales enablement, demo preparation, booth design. Patrick skipped almost all of it. Instead, he focused on the single thing industrial customers actually need: a datasheet with specifications they could evaluate.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Patrick Heissler, CEO of Scrona, a high-resolution printing platform that’s raised $15.5 million, explained how and why he moved so fast. His approach reveals why industrial customer acquisition operates on fundamentally different principles than SaaS or consumer products.

The Timeline

Patrick joined Scrona full-time as CEO in June 2024. By July, the company was at Semicon West in San Francisco with a product ready to ship.

“We had the rollout of our generation 3 gen 3 8, which we call it, which is an 8 nozzle printhead, an off the shelf version of this product,” Patrick explained. “We had it available in July and we rolled it out at Semicon west in San Francisco with a data sheet with something that people can take, have a look at, see the facts and can start implementing it.”

The critical phrase: “with a data sheet with something that people can take, have a look at, see the facts and can start implementing it.”

Not a demo. Not a pitch deck. Not a video. A datasheet. Because that’s what manufacturing engineers need to evaluate whether technology fits their production lines.

Priority Zero: Define the Product Roadmap

Patrick’s first action as CEO wasn’t planning the trade show appearance. It was fixing the product roadmap. “The first thing we did is we clearly defined a product roadmap,” he said.

This sequencing matters more than most founders realize. The product roadmap wasn’t just an internal planning document. It became the primary tool for communicating with industrial customers who needed to understand not just what Scrona could deliver today, but what the scaling path looked like.

“Have a roadmap towards higher nozzle counts, have a roadmap towards an integration pack that people can directly take and integrate into a bigger tool to use our printheads,” Patrick explained. “So just defining this kind of product roadmap and timelines that help our customers really making use of the product.”

The roadmap answered the questions that matter most to manufacturing engineers: How does this scale? What are the integration requirements? What’s the timeline to production-ready versions? Can we plan our own product development around these milestones?

Without clear answers to these questions, even the most impressive technology demonstration is useless to industrial customers.

Why Datasheets Trump Demonstrations

The emphasis on datasheets over demos reveals a fundamental difference between selling to industrial customers versus other markets. Consumer products need compelling demos. SaaS products need interactive trials. Manufacturing technologies need specifications.

Manufacturing engineers don’t evaluate potential. They evaluate specifications against their production requirements. Can this printhead deliver the precision we need? What are the tolerance ranges? What operator training is required? How does it integrate with our existing tool sets? What are the throughput characteristics?

A datasheet answers these questions. A demonstration doesn’t. You can show impressive results in a controlled environment, but manufacturing engineers need to know whether those results will replicate consistently in their specific production context with their specific operators using their specific integration approach.

Patrick understood this distinction intuitively. The Gen 3 8-nozzle printhead launched with complete specifications that manufacturing engineers could evaluate independently. No sales pitch required. No demo needed. Just facts that allowed technical evaluation.

The Strategic Importance of Trade Show Presence

Semicon West wasn’t chosen randomly. For semiconductor manufacturing technology, industry trade shows serve specific functions that differ from typical conference dynamics.

First, they concentrate qualified buyers. The people attending Semicon West are exactly the manufacturing engineers, equipment purchasers, and technology evaluators that Scrona needs to reach. The customer density makes trade shows far more efficient than distributed outreach.

Second, they establish category legitimacy. Being present at the industry’s primary trade show with a booth and product signals that you’re a serious player, not a research project. For a company making the transition from academic research to industrial products, this credibility matters enormously.

Third, they enable face-to-face technical conversations. While datasheets provide specifications, engineers inevitably have questions about integration nuances, scaling characteristics, and application-specific considerations. Trade shows concentrate these conversations into a few intense days rather than spreading them across months of individual meetings.

Patrick’s decision to launch at Semicon West within 30 days of joining wasn’t rushed. It was strategic recognition that industrial customer acquisition requires physical presence at the venues where qualified buyers congregate to evaluate new manufacturing technologies.

The Product Roadmap as Sales Tool

Patrick’s emphasis on the roadmap reveals sophisticated thinking about what industrial customers actually buy. They don’t buy current capabilities. They buy confidence in future scaling.

A manufacturing company evaluating new technology for production lines needs to know that the technology will scale with their volume requirements. They need confidence that integration support will be available. They need assurance that the company will continue developing capabilities that match their evolving needs.

The roadmap communicated all of this. By showing clear timelines toward higher nozzle counts and complete integration packs, Patrick demonstrated that Scrona understood industrial customers don’t just need technology that works today. They need a development partner committed to supporting their production scaling over multi-year timelines.

This approach transformed the roadmap from an internal planning document into a customer acquisition tool that answered questions before they were asked.

The Integration Pack Strategy

Patrick’s repeated emphasis on integration packs reveals another crucial insight about industrial sales. Manufacturing customers don’t want breakthrough technology. They want breakthrough technology that integrates easily with their existing systems.

“Have a roadmap towards an integration pack that people can directly take and integrate into a bigger tool to use our printheads,” Patrick explained. The integration pack wasn’t an afterthought. It was central to the product strategy because it addressed the primary barrier to adoption: integration complexity.

Manufacturing engineers evaluate new technologies based on total cost of ownership, which includes integration engineering, operator training, qualification testing, and ongoing support. An integration pack that simplifies the first three dramatically reduces the perceived risk of adoption.

By making integration pack development a visible part of the roadmap, Patrick signaled that Scrona understood these economics and was building specifically to reduce customer adoption friction.

The 100+ Nozzle Vision

The Gen 3 8-nozzle launch was just the beginning. Patrick’s roadmap included clear progression toward production-scale capabilities: “We will have the Generation 3 platform with a hundred plus nozzles out there in Q1 of 2025. That’s our goal right now, to have that out there, including an integration pack which you can easily take and put it into a machine and directly start printing.”

The significance of this progression wasn’t just quantitative improvement. It represented the fundamental transition Patrick had been driving since joining: “So this is a huge step forward for the company, also for the technology itself, because we’re going from R and D and prototyping work into really volume manufacturing capable technology.”

From R&D to volume manufacturing capability. That’s the gap most deep tech companies fail to bridge. By making this transition explicit in the roadmap and demonstrating progress with the Gen 3 8-nozzle launch, Patrick showed customers that Scrona was serious about industrial scale, not just research demonstrations.

The Underlying Principle

Patrick’s 30-day launch reveals a principle that applies broadly to industrial customer acquisition: specifications matter more than demonstrations because industrial customers buy confidence, not capability.

They need confidence that specifications will hold across production volumes. Confidence that integration won’t require months of engineering. Confidence that the company will be around to support production scaling. Confidence that the roadmap aligns with their own product development timelines.

Datasheets, roadmaps, and integration packs build this confidence. Impressive demonstrations don’t. You can show remarkable results in controlled conditions, but manufacturing engineers have seen too many technologies fail the transition from lab to factory floor.

For founders commercializing deep tech, Patrick’s approach offers a clear playbook: fix the product roadmap first, create specifications that allow independent technical evaluation, make integration simplicity a core product feature, show clear scaling timelines that allow customers to plan around your development, and establish category legitimacy by being present where qualified buyers congregate.

The speed wasn’t reckless. It was strategic focus on what actually matters for industrial customer acquisition. Thirty days from CEO to product launch. Most companies couldn’t execute that timeline. Patrick did because he understood that industrial customers don’t need more time to prepare impressive pitches. They need less time to get evaluable specifications into their hands.