CisLunar Industries’ Framework for Building With Flexibility: Why They Refused to Pick a ‘Killer App’

CisLunar Industries’ Framework for Building With Flexibility: Why They Refused to Pick a ‘Killer App’

Every product leader faces pressure to focus. Pick your ideal customer profile. Optimize for one use case. Build deep, not wide. It’s good advice—when you know your market.

But what do you do when your market doesn’t exist yet?

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Gary Calnan, CEO and Co-Founder of CisLunar Industries, explained why his team deliberately refused to pick a “killer app” for their technology. That decision to maintain flexibility rather than optimize prematurely became the difference between a company with one potential application and a company with multiple revenue streams.

For founders building in emerging markets where customer needs are still forming, CisLunar’s approach offers a framework for when to stay flexible and when to commit.

The Optimization Temptation

CisLunar is developing technology to process metals in space—specifically, recycling space debris. It’s the kind of vision that demands focus. Pick one application, optimize everything around it, ship fast.

They could have said: “We’re building this for space-based solar power arrays.” Or: “This is for lunar base construction.” Any of those choices would have given them a clearer ICP and simpler investor pitch.

But Gary made a different call.

“We always try to approach what we’re building to maintain as much flexibility as how it could be applied as possible,” Gary explains. “We didn’t say, like, what’s our killer app? It’s going to be large antennas in space or whatever. We don’t know because it’s such a new market.”

That last sentence is key: “We don’t know because it’s such a new market.”

When You Don’t Know, Don’t Pretend

Conventional wisdom around focus assumes you understand your market well enough to make intelligent bets. But in truly emerging categories—where infrastructure doesn’t exist and use cases are theoretical—optimization is guessing dressed up as strategy.

Gary’s philosophy recognizes this. Rather than picking a use case and hoping it’s right, CisLunar built their core technology to work across multiple applications.

The architecture was modular—”almost like Lego bricks, where you can build them up to be as big as you need them to be, or scale them down and apply them to different use cases.” That modularity was deliberate, maintaining optionality in a market where nobody knew which door would open first.

The Payoff: Discovery Through Flexibility

Here’s what happened because CisLunar didn’t over-optimize:

They built a power converter for their metal processing furnace. An engineer miniaturized it from toaster-oven size to the size of a deck of cards. They showed it to a collaborator at Colorado State University while discussing the furnace.

The collaborator said: “You know what, guys? This thing looks a lot like a power processing unit for propulsion and for other things, too, that people need in space.”

If CisLunar had optimized that power converter exclusively for their furnace—made it work brilliantly for metal processing but nowhere else—that conversation would have ended differently. The collaborator wouldn’t have seen the broader application because it wouldn’t have existed.

Instead, because they’d built with flexibility, they could immediately explore adjacent markets. They discovered the entire space industry needs power conversion. Every satellite, every thruster, every space-based system—all running on electrical power that needs transformation.

That discovery became their primary near-term revenue driver while their decade-out metal processing vision develops. The flexibility they maintained in their architecture created the optionality they needed when an unexpected opportunity emerged.

The Framework: Flexibility vs. Focus

Build flexibly when:

Your market is genuinely emerging—not “growing fast” but “doesn’t commercially exist yet.” CisLunar’s market won’t be commercial for a decade. Predicting the first major application is impossible.

Your underlying technology has multiple potential applications without major architectural changes. Don’t artificially constrain it unless you have strong conviction about which market moves first.

You’re exposing your work to potential customers regularly. Gary’s team showed their technology to experts, creating opportunities for people to spot unexpected applications.

The cost of flexibility is low relative to the value of optionality. For CisLunar, building modular components didn’t significantly slow them down.

Optimize hard when:

You’re in a known market with established buying patterns and validated willingness to pay.

Speed to market matters more than finding perfect fit. Racing competitors requires focus.

Maintaining flexibility creates significant technical debt or produces worse products for any single use case.

The Tension: Flexible Architecture, Focused Exploration

Here’s the nuance: CisLunar maintained architectural flexibility while still pursuing specific opportunities with focus.

They didn’t build a general-purpose power converter and hope someone would buy it. They explored the high-power satellite market specifically—one kilowatt and above—where few competitors operated. They pursued government contracts with clear proposals.

Flexible architecture doesn’t mean unfocused exploration. It means building components that could serve multiple purposes while actively pursuing the most promising applications today. When new opportunities emerge, you can pivot quickly.

Avoiding the Premature Optimization Trap

The deeper lesson from CisLunar’s experience: premature optimization kills optionality, and in uncertain markets, optionality is often more valuable than efficiency.

This runs counter to most startup advice, which emphasizes focus, niche selection, and deep optimization for one customer segment. That advice works brilliantly in established markets. It can be fatal in emerging ones.

Gary’s approach suggests a different question: instead of “who is our ICP and how do we optimize for them?” ask “what architectural decisions maintain our ability to serve multiple customer types as this market develops?”

The goal isn’t to be all things to all people—that’s a recipe for mediocrity. The goal is to be excellent at a core capability that could serve several applications, then let market feedback guide you toward which applications to pursue most aggressively.

The Meta-Lesson

CisLunar’s flexibility framework ultimately comes down to intellectual honesty about what you know versus what you’re guessing.

When Gary says “We don’t know because it’s such a new market,” he’s not making excuses—he’s accurately assessing reality. In that context, maintaining flexibility isn’t lack of focus. It’s refusing to bet the company on a guess disguised as strategy.

For founders in genuinely emerging markets, the question isn’t whether to stay flexible. It’s whether you’re honest enough about market uncertainty to resist the pressure to over-optimize before you have real information.

Sometimes the smartest product strategy is admitting you don’t know which application will matter most—and building so you can find out.