Loft Dynamics’ Regulator-First GTM Strategy: When Certification Bodies Become Your Best Sales Channel

Loft Dynamics’ Regulator-First GTM Strategy: When Certification Bodies Become Your Best Sales Channel

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Fabi Riesen, CEO of Loft Dynamics, a flight training platform that’s raised over $29 million, revealed the moment that transformed a passion project into a business. It wasn’t landing their first customer or closing their first deal. It was something most founders would never think to optimize for.

“In 2018, we’ve been contacted by the European Aviation Authority, based on seeing a YouTube video, what we did,” Fabi recalled.

No pitch deck. No formal presentation. No customer referrals. Just a YouTube video that caught the attention of the regulatory body that could make or break their entire market opportunity.

This moment reveals a counterintuitive GTM strategy that applies far beyond aviation: in certain regulated markets, regulatory validation matters infinitely more than customer validation. And getting regulators interested early can open doors that years of traditional sales and marketing never could.

The Passion Project That Wasn’t Looking for Validation

What makes this story remarkable is that Loft wasn’t even trying to build a business when the European Aviation Authority reached out. Founded in 2016, the company had a singular focus. “Until 2018, our goal was not to create business from that, our goal was to create the world’s best simulator,” Fabi explained.

The team worked nights and weekends, iterating on prototypes, solving technical challenges. They documented their work and shared it publicly—not as a marketing strategy, but simply as engineers excited about what they were building.

That authentic documentation is what caught regulatory attention. The European Aviation Authority wasn’t responding to a sales pitch. They were seeing evidence of innovation that could solve problems they dealt with constantly. “That’s where they reached out, and we realized that apart from having a passion, we out of a sudden build something where is the real problem,” Fabi explained.

This is the first principle of regulator-first GTM: build transparently and document publicly. Regulators are looking for solutions to problems they understand deeply. If you’re solving a real problem, they’ll find you—if you make your work visible.

Why Regulatory Validation Beats Customer Validation

Traditional startup wisdom says to find product-market fit through customer development. Talk to prospects, understand their pain points, iterate on solutions. This works brilliantly—in unregulated markets.

In highly regulated industries, customer enthusiasm means nothing if regulators won’t certify your solution. You can have a hundred customers ready to buy, but if you can’t get regulatory approval, you have zero revenue.

Loft’s approach inverted this. Instead of gathering customer testimonials to prove market need, they got regulatory validation first. This validation accomplished several things simultaneously.

First, it confirmed the market problem was real. Regulators don’t reach out about solutions to non-existent problems. They engage when they see potential answers to challenges that plague their entire industry. The European Aviation Authority understood better than any customer just how broken traditional flight simulator technology was.

Second, it de-risked the entire venture. The biggest uncertainty for Loft wasn’t whether they could build VR simulators—it was whether regulators would ever certify them. Getting inbound interest from regulators suggested the path to certification existed, even if it would take years to navigate.

Third, it created a unique positioning. “By today, we are still on the whole world, the only company which is having qualified simulators using that head mounted technology,” Fabi noted. That exclusivity comes directly from engaging regulators first and deeply understanding what they needed to see.

The Sales Channel Nobody Teaches

Here’s where the regulator-first strategy becomes a GTM advantage: regulatory bodies become your best sales channel.

Think about the traditional sales challenge in aviation training. You’re trying to convince operators to adopt new technology that replaces something they’ve used for decades. Every prospect needs education about the technology, reassurance about reliability, and proof that it meets standards.

Now imagine regulators become advocates for your approach. Not explicitly, of course—they can’t endorse specific companies. But when the European Aviation Authority certifies your technology as the first of its kind, when they work with you to establish standards, when they understand your approach deeply because they’ve been involved from early stages—that creates credibility no amount of marketing can buy.

Loft’s path to market demonstrates this. They decided to “create the whole company into direction that we really generate business” in 2018 after regulatory engagement. First launch customers came in 2019. Breakeven arrived in 2022. Three years from serious commercialization to profitability in a highly regulated hardware business.

That timeline is remarkable—and it’s only possible because regulatory validation came first. Customers didn’t need to be convinced that the technology could be certified. It was already certified. The regulatory risk was eliminated before the sales process even began.

The Strategic Choice: Start With the Hardest Problem

Loft’s regulator-first approach also shaped their market entry strategy. They didn’t start with the easiest use case—they started with the hardest.

“We started in aviation, we started in the helicopter, in the rotorcrafts, in helicopter, which is more a niche in the whole aircraft, which is also the area where the visual system is very important flying close to the ground. So from that point of view, it is the most demanding area,” Fabi explained.

Why start there? Because helicopters require the most realistic visual simulation. It’s where traditional simulators fail most obviously. “In helicopter, people try never to go on the simulator. They hate simulator because the simulator is simply not representative like the real aircraft,” Fabi noted.

By engaging regulators around the hardest problem first, Loft established credibility that transferred everywhere else. “Fixed wing are going to be easier as well. eVTOLs it’s much more logical to use that type of technology,” Fabi continued.

This is the second principle of regulator-first GTM: if regulators certify your solution for the most demanding use case, expansion becomes straightforward. The regulatory precedent is established. Future certifications follow clearer paths.

What This Means for Building in Regulated Markets

If you’re building in healthcare, fintech, aerospace, or any other heavily regulated industry, Loft’s playbook offers a different path to market:

Engage regulators before customers. Don’t wait until you have a finished product to start regulatory conversations. Understand what certification bodies need to see, what standards they expect, what testing they require. Build those requirements into your development process from day one.

Document and share publicly. Regulators are actively looking for better solutions. If you’re building something innovative, make your work visible. Not through marketing spin, but through authentic documentation of what you’re solving and how.

Treat regulatory feedback as product requirements. When regulators express interest or concerns, that’s not compliance overhead—that’s product direction from people who understand the problem space better than anyone. “Building a simulator is 2% of the whole thing, although 98% is making sure that we can qualify the simulator in a regulatory framework from aviation. So that’s basically the main task,” Fabi explained.

Start with the hardest regulatory problem. Don’t begin with the easiest path to approval. Start where certification is most challenging, where standards are most demanding, where the need is most acute. Success there creates credibility that transfers everywhere else.

Build qualification as a core competency. Don’t outsource regulatory work to consultants. Make it a central organizational capability. “We also had to create a huge organization which takes care of the customer that machine is always qualified, gets re-qualified, is maintained and so on,” Fabi noted. This ongoing qualification management becomes a competitive moat.

The Compound Effects of Regulatory Validation

The benefits of Loft’s regulator-first approach compound over time. From “two simulator centers in whole Europe” three years ago, they’ve expanded to “already 15” with “nine will follow very soon.” Each installation represents not just a sale but validation of the entire approach.

Investor interest follows regulatory success. “Every day we get more requests to be part of the Loft capital,” Fabi shared. “The moment it’s understood how that several billion business is getting disrupted, the appetite is increasing.” Investors recognize that regulatory moats are among the most sustainable competitive advantages.

Perhaps most importantly, the regulator-first approach enabled complete market transformation. By making simulators “more than 20 times cheaper” while meeting certification standards, Loft didn’t just serve existing customers better—they created an entirely new customer base. “All of a sudden, you have a small helicopter operator which is able to afford their training device instead of sending their pilots far away to a place to get trained.”

This market creation only happened because regulatory validation came first. Without certification, price doesn’t matter—you can’t sell at any price. With certification achieved through deep regulatory engagement, the path to market transformation opens up.

The YouTube Video Strategy Nobody Plans

The irony of Loft’s story is that their most effective GTM channel—a YouTube video that attracted regulatory attention—wasn’t a deliberate strategy. It was authentic documentation of work they were passionate about.

That’s the ultimate lesson: in regulated markets, the best path to validation might not be traditional go-to-market at all. It might be building something genuinely innovative, documenting it transparently, and letting the people who understand the problem best—the regulators themselves—find you.

Most startups obsess over landing their first customer. Loft Dynamics got something better: they got regulators interested first. Everything else followed from there.