SEMRON’s Demonstrator Strategy: Why Your Entire GTM Plan Should Be One Perfect Prototype

SEMRON’s Demonstrator Strategy: Why Your Entire GTM Plan Should Be One Perfect Prototype

Product-led growth says let users try your product for free. Freemium models say remove friction from the signup flow. Self-serve onboarding says eliminate sales entirely. And none of it works when your product costs millions to manufacture and requires months of integration work.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Aron Kirschen, CEO of SEMRON, an AI chip maker that’s raised $7.3 million, described a GTM strategy that collapses four years of development into a single critical deliverable: “For us, it all comes down to these demonstrators going out to customers, showing them our FPGA together with our hardware.”

Not a landing page. Not a free trial. Not a self-serve sandbox. A demonstrator that proves your hardware can run their models.

This is product-led growth for hardware companies: build one perfect prototype that eliminates all doubt.

Why Software GTM Principles Break for Hardware

Software companies can afford to iterate publicly. Launch an MVP, gather feedback, ship updates weekly. The cost of being wrong is a sprint or two. The cost of pivoting is a few engineering weeks.

Hardware operates under different physics. SEMRON is four years into development and just now “close to process freeze”—the moment when they finalize their semiconductor device and can start building actual demonstrators.

You can’t A/B test a chip design. You can’t hot-fix a semiconductor process. You get one shot to prove your technology works, and that proof needs to be irrefutable.

This reality reshapes what “product-led” means. In software, product-led means reducing friction until anyone can try your product. In hardware, product-led means building a demonstrator so compelling that customers can’t ignore it.

The demonstrator isn’t a minimum viable product. It’s the complete argument for why your technology matters, compressed into something customers can touch, test, and integrate.

What Makes a Demonstrator Different from a Prototype

Most hardware companies build prototypes. Prototypes prove internal feasibility—can we actually build this thing? Demonstrators prove external value—does this solve a customer’s specific problem?

The distinction matters enormously. A prototype might run synthetic benchmarks or standard test workloads. A demonstrator runs customer models on customer data solving customer problems.

Here’s how SEMRON approaches it: they receive proprietary AI models from potential customers—the actual neural networks these companies need to deploy. “We try to make it fit into that,” Aron explains. “And so we discussing with them about, okay, what can we do about your models? And come back with a nice performance simulation.”

This isn’t a demo. It’s custom proof-of-concept work where SEMRON deploys customer IP on their hardware architecture (currently emulated with test structures) and generates actual performance data.

The demonstrator answers the only question that matters: Does this work for my specific use case, with my specific models, within my specific constraints?

The Software Layer That Hardware Companies Miss

Here’s where SEMRON’s approach reveals something most hardware founders overlook. “Even though we are hardware company, so today hardware means you have to do a lot of software.”

This software layer is what transforms a prototype into a demonstrator. Customers don’t just need chips that work. They need chips that integrate with their existing AI model pipelines, their deployment infrastructure, their development workflows.

The software layer proves end-to-end viability, not just hardware performance. Can their engineers actually work with your hardware? Can their models compile efficiently? Can they debug performance issues? Can they iterate on model architectures?

For hardware founders, this reframes your development timeline. You’re not just building to process freeze. You’re building to the moment when a customer can take your demonstrator, run their models, and get results that prove business value.

This typically means developing:

• Model compilation tools that work with customer frameworks
• Performance profiling infrastructure that shows bottlenecks
• Integration libraries that connect to customer systems
• Documentation that their engineers can actually use

The demonstrator isn’t just hardware. It’s a complete system that proves feasibility.

The Economics of Demonstrator-First GTM

Traditional product-led growth relies on volume. Lower acquisition cost, increase conversion rate, optimize for scale. The economics work when marginal cost approaches zero.

Hardware economics work differently. SEMRON targets “five, six big entities that is generating millions of revenue.” When your entire business depends on single-digit customers, you can afford completely different economics.

You can invest months of engineering time building custom demonstrators for each potential customer. You can deploy their proprietary models. You can iterate on performance optimization. You can provide hands-on technical support.

The unit economics that would never work for a SaaS company make perfect sense when a single customer represents 20% of your total revenue.

This creates a counterintuitive advantage: your competitors can’t afford to compete on demonstrator quality if they’re trying to scale to thousands of customers. By targeting five customers, you can provide a level of custom technical validation that’s economically impossible at scale.

When Demonstrators Replace Marketing

In SEMRON’s world, the demonstrator isn’t a marketing tool. It is marketing. “It’s very intense, very technical, very detailed, of course, but it is less standard marketing,” Aron notes.

There’s no content marketing funnel generating awareness. No demand gen campaigns driving MQLs. No sales team nurturing prospects through a pipeline.

The entire GTM motion is: identify the right five companies, build demonstrators that prove value for their specific use cases, and let engineering teams validate together.

This works because the buying decision isn’t emotional or aspirational. It’s technical and binary. Either your hardware runs their models at acceptable performance and cost, or it doesn’t. No amount of marketing can change that equation.

The demonstrator is how you prove the positive case. And proving the positive case is your entire GTM strategy.

The Customer Engagement Model

What’s striking about SEMRON’s approach is when demonstrator work begins: during sales, not after. They’re doing custom proof-of-concept work before there’s a contract, often before there’s even a commercial conversation.

This inverts the traditional sales process. Usually you pitch, negotiate, close, then deliver. With demonstrators, you prove technical feasibility first, then discuss commercial terms.

The logic is sound: why waste time on commercial negotiations if the technology doesn’t work for their use case? Better to invest engineering time upfront proving viability, then structure deals around demonstrated value.

For customers, this reduces risk enormously. They’re not signing contracts based on promises and projections. They’re signing based on actual performance data from their actual models.

For SEMRON, it qualifies customers perfectly. If they’re not willing to share proprietary models and engage technically, they’re probably not serious buyers. The demonstrator work becomes a qualification mechanism as much as a sales tool.

The Ocean Years Before Demonstrators

Perhaps the hardest part of demonstrator-first GTM is the timeline. Aron describes the experience bluntly: “For a semiconductor startup that for three, four years worked like it feels, it felt like swimming in the ocean. And you never had the real feedback.”

You can’t build demonstrators until you have working hardware. You can’t have working hardware until you reach process freeze. You can’t reach process freeze until you’ve developed and validated your semiconductor device.

Those years of swimming in the ocean—building without real customer feedback—are unavoidable in hardware. The market validation you get is superficial: “We might be interested, blah, blah.”

But when you finally reach the demonstrator phase, everything changes. “It’s really like we understand what they need in an application. And of course it completely reshapes your coordinate system. You never thought about that before.”

This is the moment when real GTM begins: when you can demonstrate actual value on actual customer workloads. Everything before that is just preparation.

The Principle: Eliminate All Doubt

What makes demonstrator-first GTM work isn’t just technical validation. It’s the elimination of doubt.

When a customer sees their models running on your hardware, hitting their performance targets, within their power budget, at their target cost—there’s nothing left to question. You’re not asking them to believe in a vision or trust your roadmap. You’re showing them it works.

For hardware founders facing multi-year development cycles and single-digit customer counts, this principle offers clarity: invest everything in building one perfect demonstrator that eliminates all doubt. That’s your entire GTM strategy.

Forget growth hacking. Forget funnel optimization. Forget conversion rate testing. Build something so undeniably valuable that customers can’t say no. Sometimes the best product-led growth strategy is just building an undeniably great product.