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Building Trust Through Technical Excellence: A Deep Tech Go-to-Market Journey

When leading a deep tech company at the frontier of innovation, traditional boundaries between technical and business roles often blur. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Devin from Arcturus shared insights into navigating this complexity while building infrastructure for volumetric video, offering valuable lessons for technical founders on bridging the gap between breakthrough technology and market adoption.

The Technical Founder’s Dilemma

For many technical founders, the instinct is to focus purely on building groundbreaking technology. But as Devin learned, “You can’t just stick your head in the sand and make the thing that you think is cool, hoping that everybody else wants to use it.” This realization came through hard-earned experience, leading to a fundamental shift in how Arcturus approached both product development and go-to-market strategy.

Evolving Beyond Traditional Partnership Models

Arcturus’s initial go-to-market strategy relied heavily on partnerships with capture stages – specialized facilities where volumetric video could be recorded. “We initially hoped to go to market through all of these capture stages where this data was being captured, selling through the stages to the customer with partnerships with the stages,” Devin explains.

However, they quickly discovered a critical flaw in this approach. While early capture stage partners had deep technical understanding and could effectively communicate Arcturus’s value proposition, newer stages struggled to grasp and convey the technology’s potential. This led to a strategic pivot: “We worked to overcome this in a couple of ways. One is to sort of sit on top of the capture stage so folks would come to us instead as a complete solution and we’d bundle the capture as sort of a subcontract to the overall project.”

Breaking Down Silos in Deep Tech

Perhaps most importantly, Devin’s experience highlights why traditional organizational boundaries can be counterproductive in deep tech companies. “With a company like ours, where the technology is so bleeding edge, there almost necessarily has to be more of a mind meld happening between the units of the company that are more business oriented and the ones which are more technology oriented.”

This integration goes beyond surface-level collaboration. As Devin explains, “You want to have a mini product manager in everybody in the company… You want them to understand what is it that our customer needs, what is it that we’re offering as a value prop and how can what I do in my day to day contribute most effectively to that?”

Creating Safety for Critical Feedback

The challenge of bridging technical innovation with market needs requires creating an environment where feedback can flow freely. Devin emphasizes that “feedback will come to you one way or the other,” and the key is ensuring it comes through constructive channels rather than manifesting as hidden frustrations or resistance.

This approach has proven particularly valuable as Arcturus navigates rapid market evolution. Their impressive growth – a 150% increase in processing volume and 575% increase in end-viewer distribution over the past year – suggests their ability to quickly process and adapt to feedback has been crucial to their success.

The Future of Technical Go-to-Market

Looking ahead, Devin envisions a world where volumetric video capture becomes as ubiquitous as smartphone photography. “The future is going to look like people capturing these holograms or this volumetric video on their cell phone or with wearable headsets like AR glasses or other types of computing or pervasive computing devices you have around your house.”

This vision requires not just technical excellence, but a deep understanding of how technology adoption happens at scale. It’s a reminder that in deep tech, success often depends not just on breakthrough innovation, but on creating organizational structures that can effectively translate technical capabilities into market value.

For technical founders pushing into new markets, this suggests the need to rethink traditional organizational boundaries. The key lies in creating cultures and structures that can effectively bridge the gap between technical innovation and market adoption, ensuring that groundbreaking technology can find its path to widespread implementation.