7 GTM Lessons from Spinning Out a Research Institute with 20 Employees

7 GTM Lessons from Spinning Out a Research Institute with 20 Employees

Most founders worry about finding product-market fit with a small team. Christian Stein, CEO of Threedy, had the opposite problem: spinning out from Fraunhofer research with 20 employees, existing enterprise customers, and complex stakeholder obligations—all while his wife was about to give birth to their first child.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Christian shared the hard-won GTM lessons from building Threedy, an industrial 3D platform that’s evolved from research project to venture-backed company serving German automotive giants. These aren’t theoretical frameworks—they’re battle-tested insights from someone who learned by doing it wrong first.

Lesson 1: Early Customers Don’t Validate Your GTM Strategy

Threedy had something most startups would kill for: paying customers before they even incorporated. “We actually got the first paying customer roughly four years before we founded the company, which was also kind of the trigger to decide that, hey, we got something here,” Christian explains.

But here’s the trap: early research customers who find you through academic channels operate completely differently than customers you need to find through repeatable sales processes. The innovators at large German automotive companies who were willing to work with a research institute weren’t representative of the broader market Threedy would need to reach.

The lesson? Having customers doesn’t mean you have a GTM strategy. It means you have relationships—and relationships don’t scale the same way processes do.

Lesson 2: Technical Founders Overburden Sales Teams with Complexity

This is where most technical founders trip up, and Christian’s candid about Threedy’s mistake. Coming from research, the team assumed replicating their early success would be straightforward.

“When we hire the first guys for the sales to go out and share the vision and sell the technology, I guess we overburdened them with the complexity of talking to different ICPs, of delivering, let’s say the full story and kind of going into detail on all the different aspects and possibilities,” Christian admits.

The problem wasn’t that salespeople couldn’t understand the technology—it’s that they couldn’t execute when given too many potential customer profiles, use cases, and value propositions simultaneously. A visual computing infrastructure middleware that enables development of fast and scalable industrial 3D applications can mean a hundred different things to a hundred different prospects.

“The core learning there, I guess, was that over the first years now we kind of stripped it down into different core use cases, into sweet spots where we can deliver very strong values,” Christian shares. They reorganized around “having our salespeople work on very specific topics, specific core customers, and a lot more successful with that.”

The fix wasn’t simplifying the product—it was simplifying the sales motion.

Lesson 3: Build Sales Organizations Like Software Systems

For technical founders struggling to understand go-to-market, Christian offers a useful mental model: treat your sales organization like an engineering problem.

“For me, as a technical guy, at least the same way that you would build your software, you need all these small parts that fit into each other,” he explains. “You need to have very clear understanding on how your processes should be structured, how the information flows, where, which kind of departments should be involved. So really building a machine that continuously optimizes the way it works.”

This means defining clear interfaces between functions, understanding data flows (from lead generation through close), identifying bottlenecks, and continuously iterating. Sales isn’t magic—it’s a system that can be debugged and optimized like any other.

Lesson 4: Know When Founder Expertise Isn’t Enough

There’s a specific inflection point where founder-led GTM stops working, and recognizing it is crucial. For Threedy, it came during their Series A process.

“I think the core decision was understanding and accepting that given all the understanding that we might have as a Founder, there’s a point in time when other expertise is also required,” Christian reflects. During the Series A, “we decided to restructure the whole commercial side of the company and get a very senior expert on board who can handle this and bring the company to the next level.”

This isn’t about admitting defeat—it’s about recognizing that building a repeatable sales machine requires different skills than building technology or landing early customers. The transition from founder-led sales to professional sales leadership is a feature, not a bug, of scaling.

Lesson 5: Market Timing Matters More Than You Think

Threedy’s Series A fundraising offers one of the most expensive lessons in market timing. They had a clear shot during the metaverse hype cycle—and chose to wait.

“We did probably a huge mistake by deciding to delay the fundraising for six months. While we are right in the middle of the metaverse hype, which obviously given our core topic, Threedy was right playing into our cards,” Christian admits. “But then we missed the hype cycle and into the declining economy.”

That six-month delay cost them dearly. The environment changed dramatically: “It was very difficult I guess to find out what was the right amount to look for” as the market shifted beneath them. The company faced constant recalibration “while at the same time the environment was drastically changing quarter by quarter.”

His takeaway for next time? “Looking forward the next time we’ll definitely try to prepare maybe and the decisions and process for a longer time and make sure that the timing is not so bad.”

When macro conditions align with your story, raise the money. You can’t predict when windows will close.

Lesson 6: Mismatched Maturity Creates Fundraising Friction

Threedy faced a challenge many technical founders encounter: their product development was ahead of their commercial maturity. This mismatch complicated their Series A narrative.

Having strong technology but less mature commercial operations meant constantly proving different aspects of the business to different investors. Some wanted to see product capabilities, others wanted commercial traction metrics. The gap between these two made it harder to craft a coherent fundraising story.

The lesson: as you approach institutional fundraising rounds, audit where you have gaps between technical and commercial maturity. You don’t need perfection, but you need to understand and address the gaps in your narrative.

Lesson 7: Don’t Build Your Growth Strategy on a Single Industry

With German automotive as their core customer base, Threedy is now feeling the pain of concentration risk. “Given that we have this historic core of the business with the German automotive and how economy is looking for them right now and for the supplier networks, we decided that the core strategy focus for this year should be to win new logos outside of automotive,” Christian explains.

They’re targeting “first customers in the US and India” while building out a partner network. It’s “all about kind of seeding the market for growth outside of the automotive.”

This diversification should have started earlier. When one industry represents the bulk of your revenue, any sector-specific downturn becomes an existential threat. The time to diversify is when you don’t need to, not when you’re forced to.

The Through-Line

What connects all these lessons is a common theme: the things that get you from zero to one rarely get you from one to ten. Early research relationships don’t validate GTM strategy. Comprehensive product explanations don’t scale into sales processes. Founder expertise eventually hits its ceiling. Perfect market timing windows close.

Christian’s journey with Threedy shows that recognizing these transitions—and acting on them—is what separates research projects from venture-scale businesses. The technology might be complex, but the GTM lessons are surprisingly straightforward: simplify your sales motion, systematize your processes, hire expertise when you need it, and don’t miss your window.