Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: How This Drone Company Found Success Through Specialization
Most startups begin with a broad vision of their market opportunity. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Guilhem de Marliave shared how his tethered drone company found success by doing the opposite – recognizing and embracing market specialization.
The Market Evolution Insight
The company’s journey to specialization began with a crucial insight about their market’s maturity. “The maturity of the drone market is now at a stage where for each application it will have a specific aircraft with different capabilities. So we are going away from the time where everyone thought that one drone would solve everything,” Guilhem explains.
Discovering Their Niche
This understanding shaped their entire go-to-market strategy. As Guilhem notes, “It’s kind of a long tail problem for us challenge because we are on a niche technology, so we had to export the system. We have a few targets per country, very precise.”
Focused Development Through Early Struggles
The path wasn’t immediately clear. “At first we tried a lot of things and the pricing weren’t right, the targets weren’t right, and so on. So it took, I don’t know, eight, nine months and we finally made the first sale,” Guilhem shares.
Finding the Right Applications
Instead of trying to serve every possible use case, they focused on specific applications where tethered drones offered unique advantages. For instance, in Montana, “they used our tele drones for Pear Stadium and they were looking on the mountains around to see there were people lost at night. They were so checking money transfers between sales points of beverages and food. They were looking into restricted areas to see if no one was over trespassing.”
High-Profile Validation
This specialization led to major deployments. “We have systems on the Super Bowl, for instance, in Atlanta. And this year or so we have been engaged also in the Football World Cup in Qatar on the Rider cup,” Guilhem notes.
Key Lessons in Specialization
- Market Evolution Drives Specialization Understanding how markets mature helps identify specialization opportunities. The drone market’s evolution from general-purpose to specialized solutions provided their opening.
- Focus Enables Better Product Development “The challenge is always in the hardware space to reduce the cycles of developments,” Guilhem explains. Specialization helped them optimize these cycles for specific use cases.
- Scaling Through Focus The company achieved 50% growth last year and has deployed over 1,000 systems globally by maintaining their specialized focus.
Future Vision Within Specialization
Even as they grow, they’re staying focused. Their vision of “developing fully autonomous tele drone boxes that can be remotely deployed on sites borders and controlled through kind of a cloud system” shows how they’re innovating within their specialized niche rather than broadening their focus.
Building on Success
The company continues to expand while maintaining their specialized approach. “We are around 60 people now. The pool is great. We have a lot of new products coming this year. Last year was a year of development and we kept the same range of products. And this year we have three or four new releases,” Guilhem shares.
For B2B tech founders, the lesson is clear: success often comes not from trying to serve every possible use case, but from understanding your market’s evolution and positioning yourself to excel in specific, high-value applications. It’s about finding the right specialization at the right time, then building deep expertise and capabilities in that focused area.
As markets mature, the opportunity for specialized solutions often grows larger than the opportunity for general-purpose products. The key is recognizing when this shift is happening and having the courage to focus when others are still trying to do everything.