Now Is the Time to Start Talking About Your Hardtech Startup

Picture this: after years of R&D, your deep tech product is ready for prime time. Now all you need is a partner to test it in their products. So you start making calls.

At first, you’re encouraged: people are interested to hear what you’ve built.

But then, reality hits: they can get your product in their roadmap – for a year or more down the line.

Uh-oh.

You can’t wait another year to start selling. You’ve already spent several years not selling; your product is finally ready. This is when revenue is supposed to start.

This, my friends, is why you need to be doing comms for your deep tech startup right now – even if you won’t be ready to sell for years.

Before Customers Buy, They Need to Trust You

It’s ludicrous to expect any large organization to buy unknown technology from an unknown brand after a single pitch. Heck, I needed several years of validation before I was willing to try leggings as pants.

And yet, when you’re developing new tech, it’s easy to skip the work that builds trust with your future partners, investors, customers, and employees.

After all, you’re still developing the thing. It’s still changing. Why would you talk about it in this state? Your future customers shouldn’t trust it yet.

Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is that to even consider your technology, your future customers must first trust you.

This is a pretty universal rule. Think about your loved ones: whose restaurant recommendations do you always believe? And who’s always sending recipes for “delicious” healthy cookies that somehow include a cup of kale?

In the world of deep tech, it can feel impossible to do the work required to build trust at the time you need to do it – mostly because you’re using all available resources to build the actual technology in question.

In this piece, I’ll get into why now is absolutely the time to start talking up your tech and the problems it solves and how you can do that in a way that leads to meaningful customer, partner, employee, and investor relationships down the road.

Why Now? Reason 1: Build and Sell in Parallel

B2B tech companies have famously long sales cycles. For deep tech startups, sales cycles are even longer – often several years.

This means you can’t wait until your product is ready to use to start selling. You need to be on customers’ radar well before they’re ready to make a purchase (and well before you’re ready to make a sale).

How early do you need to be on a customer’s radar? Work backwards. How long might a customer of yours need to scope you out, evaluate specs, run pilots, and so on? How long does it take them to allocate CapEx, infrastructure, or other fundamental, big-picture things that would make a partnership work?

That’s your timeline. So if that comes to five years and you’re five years of R&D away from having a viable product, it’s time to start your comms program.

If you don’t start getting on future customers’ radar now, those customers can’t start planning for future purchases from you.

For example: our client LiquidPiston, which develops ultra-efficient rotary engines, signed a $9 million contract with the US military. The gist: “We (the Army) will give you money to develop this technology; if we like what you do, we’ll buy a bunch of it from you.”

This kind of funding doesn’t just power your operations for the short term; it also helps shape your product road map in a way that leads to more sales down the road.

Another example: K1 Semiconductor, a startup we mentored this summer, recently sent an update noting that, based on customer discussions, they’re tweaking their form factor so their product is more of a drop-in replacement for competitors’ products.

When you’re developing in partnership with a specific potential user of your technology, fork-in-the-road moments become easier to navigate. You can get their input on early iterations of your product, then refine it to make them more likely to buy and more successful if they do.

Why Now? Reason 2: It Takes Time to Make New Ideas Familiar

At mHUB’s Hard Tech Summit a couple years ago, Tempus founder and CEO Eric Lefkovsky did a keynote where he talked about the importance of comms for deep tech founders.

It’s not the first time you tell someone about a new idea that they get on board, he said. You have to tell the story over and over and over and over and over (I think he really did use five “overs”).

Why? Because it takes people time to get used to new ideas.

In the case of deep tech, it sometimes takes several repetitions for people to even understand new ideas.

Think about all the “cloud computing” explainers you read in 2011.

It wasn’t until a few years later, when people started to understand what the cloud was that the big cloudward migration (and cloud-first infrastructure by default) took hold.

So the question you should be asking yourself is this: What does your audience need to hear now that will lay the groundwork to make them eager to buy in three years?

Why Now? Reason 3: Your Sales Team Needs More Than “Hey, Just Following Up.”

Let’s get tactical. Your sales cycle lasts years. In that time, how often will your biz dev reps reach out to prospects to stay on their radar? How often will they actually have something to say?

Even if you start these relationships at an in-person event, you can only email so many times saying “just thought I’d check in.”

But if you’ve been telling your story as it unfolds – if you’ve been documenting milestones and new hires and small wins and updates to your space – your BDRs will have plenty of fuel for their outreach.

They can reach out to share photos of a new prototype that addresses an issue they talked about last time.

They can follow up with the FAQs you just published about the specs of your newest iteration.

They can send the latest thought leadership piece from your founder, especially if it addresses a question that came up during their last conversation.

An experienced BDR can initiate the necessary connections and lay the groundwork for fruitful long-term relationships. But to sustain those relationships for the long term, they’ll need support. A comms program can provide that support.

So what should a comms program look like to build trust for a hard-tech company in the years before the product is market ready? So glad you asked.

How to Do Comms for Deep Tech: 4 Pillars of Building Trust

In B2B comms, there are four pillars that help build trust: authority (your leaders are experts in their fields), credibility (your company is built to last and your product works as you say), momentum (your company is executing), and community (you’re connected to the leaders in your industry and your team is trusted by those leaders).

Here are some examples of each in the context of deep tech startups:

Where do you get material for all these updates?

One way is to reframe your thinking. Instead of simply doing the work to build your company, start thinking about how you can document that work. Documentation is how you make the work that’s only visible to you and your team visible to future customers, partners, and investors.

It involves capturing…

• Literal images of your team doing its work and of the product itself;
• Leaders’ thoughts on relevant industry issues;
• Milestones and achievements;
• Evidence of your forward motion (like new partnerships, new hires, pilot projects, etc.);

… and then packaging them to share with your target audiences (via social media, a blog, newsletters, third-party publications, press releases, etc.).

If you’re strapped for time, it’s best to start with channels where the output is most predictable:

• Social media. Post pictures of your team at work and events, the product itself, your lab, etc., along with captions that offer insight about what you’re doing. Tag the people featured.
• Newsletters. A newsletter is a direct line to the people in your network. Quarterly updates keep your name on their radar while keeping them invested in your growth.
• Blog. You have complete control over your blog: messaging, timing, voice, design, etc. Whatever you think is important to say, you can say on the blog. A big benefit here is that anyone checking out your company will look at your website, so blog content has a decent chance of being seen.
• Press releases. For a fee, anyone can put a press release out on the wire. Doing so communicates a certain level of importance: the news in a release is significant enough to merit an official announcement. Be warned, though: if you publish a release alone, you’re not likely to see any news outlets pick it up. For best results, make the release part of an outreach effort, not the entire effort.

If you’ve got more time on your hands or you’ve got budget to work with an agency, it’s time to consider trust-building comms that have a less-certain return but that can pack an extra punch of trust:

• Contributed articles: You pitch these to industry publications and write them yourself (or have a ghostwriter help). The likelihood that they’ll be accepted depends on the quality of the pitch and the writing. When they are, you get the trust boost of a third-party publication co-signing your perspective and legitimacy.
• Podcast appearances: Podcasts are increasingly pay-to-play, but many industry podcasts offer access to a highly targeted audience. Research and pitching take time, but when you get on the mic with the host, you can have a deep-dive conversation that gets into the weeds of your technology and product.
• Quotes in reported articles: This requires ongoing media outreach. It also typically requires you to be able to provide commentary on issues as they happen, which can be hard to prioritize. The benefit, though, is big: you’re cited as an expert source by a trusted reporter.
• Company profiles: These often require time, luck, and some important moment or milestone. When you land a profile of your company in a relevant publication, though, it’s a powerful trust-building asset.
• Awards: While applying for awards may not be time-intensive, finding relevant awards to apply for can be. If you’re interested in getting some trust-building badges for your website, check out our top startup awards roundups.
• Speaking opportunities: As with awards, finding suitable and realistic opportunities can be time consuming. But getting on a stage in front of your target audience is a great way to build your authority and credibility, while growing your community. Plus, in-person events offer a host of promotion opportunities before, during, and after.

Trust Gets Technology on the Roadmap

One of the most uncomfortable things for some deep tech founders is talking about the future state of their tech before they’ve actually achieved the technical milestones necessary to reach that future state. But if you want to give your product a fighting chance, you’ve got to do it anyway.

Communicating about your vision, your team, and your progress are how you lay the groundwork for customer adoption.

So get out your phone. Snap some pictures. Get them up on LinkedIn. Set a reminder to do it again next month. The best time to start a comms program was a year ago; the second best time is today