Why Atlas Space Operations Built for a Market That Didn’t Exist Yet

Why Atlas Space Operations Built for a Market That Didn’t Exist Yet

Building infrastructure for customers that don’t exist yet is either visionary or delusional. The difference is whether you’re right about the timing.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Brad Bode, Founder CTO & CIO of Atlas Space Operations, a ground software as a service platform that’s raised over $37 million, explained how they built for years before their target market materialized. His framework for recognizing—and surviving—early market positioning reveals principles that apply far beyond space infrastructure.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Early Markets

Here’s what most founders don’t want to hear: Atlas Space started building when they didn’t have enough potential customers to justify their business model. “It’s important to note that there’s not a lot of satellites, particularly at that time, there wasn’t a lot of satellites that needed this service per se,” Brad admits.

This wasn’t a minor timing issue. They were building ground software infrastructure for a satellite industry that was still mostly theoretical. The number of commercial satellites that would need their services could be counted on two hands. The growth everyone predicted was still years away from materializing.

Most advice tells founders to find product-market fit quickly, to iterate based on customer feedback, to validate demand before building. Atlas Space did the opposite. They built first, then waited for the market to catch up. “We were banking on the fact that the growth of the satellite industry would come, and it did,” Brad explains.

The Signal Hidden in Economics

What separated Atlas Space’s bet from pure speculation was understanding the underlying economic shifts that would inevitably drive demand. Brad identified three converging trends that would make satellite launches explode.

First, launch costs were plummeting. SpaceX was making it dramatically cheaper to put satellites into orbit. This wasn’t speculative—it was happening in real-time. “The success of SpaceX in launching satellites, just launching and making it inexpensive to launch satellites, is a major factor in a lot of these startups being able to even succeed,” Brad notes.

Second, hardware costs were dropping. Satellites that would have cost tens of millions to build twenty years ago could be built for a fraction of that. “The hardware is often inexpensive compared to even 20 years ago,” Brad observes. Lower hardware costs plus lower launch costs meant the barrier to entry for satellite companies was collapsing.

Third, venture capital was starting to build space portfolios. “We had venture capital companies that were expressing a lot of interest in starting a space portfolio, you know, 20, 16, 17, 18,” Brad recalls. When capital flows toward a sector, entrepreneurs follow. When entrepreneurs follow, customers emerge.

These three trends—cheaper launches, cheaper hardware, available capital—created the conditions for explosive growth. The growth hadn’t happened yet in 2015, but the economics made it inevitable.

The Investor Blind Spot

What’s particularly interesting about Atlas Space’s early positioning is that most investors were looking in the wrong direction. VCs were funding satellite companies—the startups building and launching the satellites themselves. “Most of the time they were interested investing in the satellites, which was always very interesting to me,” Brad notes.

But Brad saw a logical flaw in that investment thesis. “The satellites are about data, you know, collection, right? They collect some kind of data, they have to get it back to Earth and then they have to process it. So, you know, there’s a lot of value in data, but everything had to get back to Earth,” Brad explains.

Every satellite company would need ground infrastructure. They’d all need to communicate with Earth. They’d all need antennas and software to coordinate that communication. “And everyone had used the same method, which was antennas, that they used RF communication to send it back to Earth,” Brad says.

The infrastructure layer—the pipes that would carry all that satellite data back to Earth—was more inevitable than any individual satellite company’s success. Yet almost no one was investing in those pipes. “I wasn’t sure why there wasn’t someone jumping on saying, hey look, you guys want the data pipeline, you want to own the data pipeline from space?” Brad recalls thinking.

This is the kind of insight that only comes from domain expertise. Brad had spent 12 years at TRW and Northrop Grumman. He understood how satellite communication worked. He knew what infrastructure was needed. And he could see that investor attention was focused on the application layer while ignoring the infrastructure layer that would enable everything else.

The Casey Cowell Validation

Atlas Space’s earliest investor was Casey Cowell, who founded US Robotics and sold it for billions in 2001. “He saw that there was an opportunity there,” Brad notes. Cowell’s investment provided more than capital—it provided validation that someone with a track record of building infrastructure businesses saw the same opportunity.

This matters because early market bets need validation beyond founder conviction. You need someone with pattern recognition to confirm you’re not just early, but correctly positioned. Cowell had built modems—another infrastructure layer that enabled applications he’d never see. He understood the value of owning the pipes.

The Consensus on Growth, Uncertainty on Pace

One crucial detail about Atlas Space’s market timing: they weren’t making a contrarian bet that space would grow. Everyone agreed on that. “I think everybody agreed that it was going to keep growing,” Brad confirms.

What was uncertain was pace. “It was unclear as to the pace. I think in the early days, the industry reports, which were very few, had a hard time estimating what it would actually be in three, four or five years,” Brad explains.

This distinction matters for founders considering early market positioning. You want consensus that growth will happen, but uncertainty about when. If everyone knows exactly when growth will materialize, you’re too late. If no one believes growth will happen, you’re too early (or wrong). The sweet spot is when the direction is clear but the timeline is foggy.

How to Survive Being Early

Atlas Space’s survival strategy had three components. First, they bootstrapped to extend runway. Brad worked without pay for nearly two years while consulting on the side. This gave them time for the market to develop without burning investor capital on a market that didn’t exist yet.

Second, they focused on government contracts. Government agencies like NOAA needed satellite communication regardless of whether the commercial satellite market had materialized. “We signed noaa, which is the National Oceanographic Agency. They do weather prediction models for distributed across the globe. Data comes from all sorts of different locations,” Brad explains. Government provided revenue while commercial demand developed.

Third, they built for the future while selling to the present. The ground software they were developing anticipated needs that satellite companies would have once the market grew. But they could sell versions of that capability to government customers who needed it immediately.

The Trillion Dollar Vindication

The bet paid off. “But now you look at it and there is a race to space, so to speak,” Brad observes. SpaceX’s Starlink alone has launched thousands of satellites. “Now, a lot of the satellites that have gone up into space are SpaceX satellites due to Starlink. But what that’s done is create an opportunity for other companies to piggyback off the success that even just SpaceX is having and come up with novel ideas about how to collect data from space,” Brad notes.

The market Atlas Space built for in 2015 is now massive. “I think now it’s widely considered the next, you know, trillion dollar industry,” Brad says.

The Framework for Early Market Positioning

Three principles emerge from Atlas Space’s market timing:

First, identify economic shifts that make growth inevitable, even if timing is uncertain. Don’t bet on customer enthusiasm or market predictions. Bet on economics. When it becomes 10x cheaper to do something, demand will follow.

Second, find revenue in adjacent markets while you wait. Government contracts sustained Atlas Space while commercial satellite demand developed. Your adjacent market might be enterprises while you wait for SMB adoption, or one vertical while another matures.

Third, build infrastructure that enables multiple application layers. Atlas Space didn’t bet on any specific satellite company succeeding. They built the pipes that all satellite companies would need. Infrastructure positions are more defensible than application positions when markets are emerging.

When to Ignore Your Own Timeline

The hardest part about early market positioning is accepting that your timeline will be wrong. Brad thought growth would happen faster. Industry reports couldn’t accurately predict timelines. Even with perfect insight into economics, pace remains uncertain.

The founders who survive early markets are those who structure their businesses to be wrong about timing. Bootstrap to extend runway. Find adjacent revenue to sustain operations. Build incrementally so you can survive being two years early without burning all your capital.

“We were banking on the fact that the growth of the satellite industry would come, and it did,” Brad says. That “and it did” is doing a lot of work. It’s easy to say in retrospect. It’s terrifying to bet on when you’re living through two years of market development that hasn’t arrived yet.

But for founders building infrastructure in emerging categories, being early isn’t optional. Someone has to build the pipes before the applications arrive. Atlas Space’s $37 million in funding and position as category pioneers came from being willing to build before the market was ready—and structured to survive until it was.