Many tech founders think that their startups must enter (or perhaps create) a market by tackling the biggest issues that their technologies can potentially overcome to be attractive for Venture Capital.

For some technology there is no choice: or you break into that market, or you will vanish (think about Drugs targeting specific diseases).

For many other technologies, that is not the case. Many innovative technologies can be defined ase Platform Technologies, or technologies that can serve multiple applications.

In most of the cases, therefore, tackling the biggest opportunities can be lead your startup toward self destroying path, limitating consequently the fundraising opportunities of your initiative.

This fact usually leads to dramatic outcomes for initiative at Pre-Seed and Seed stage, since you are still developing your invention and the advantages of your technology still needs to be proven.

Before stating that you want to bring back the man on the moon, delete cancer in the world, or enable the world to go net-zero with your invention in just a few years, you should start legitimizing yourself in front of the people that are potentially enabling you to take a shot.

Because stories are good, but VC money is given if you show progress on a reasonable VC-like timeframe .

And unfortunately most of the time the only way to reach your technological maximum potential at scale is to pass through investors that can afford to carry the enormus risk of investing in unproven technologies.

So what should you do to be able to secure your next round of financing?

You should find your “Scalable” Use Case Key Stakeholder (or shortly, SUCKS)

If you are asking yourself what does SUCKS means for your business, you should remember that what you are selling to the VC is not your product but (literally) your plan to introduce a new technology in the market that can generate VC like returns in a fixed and limited framework of time.

What they want to see to keep financing the development of your technology is therefore a PROVE that you are de-risking the path to technological adoption in the industry.

The best way to do it is to focus on validating your tech in a real world application. But be aware that this application must adhere with VC backable metrics.

This imply that the use case you are selecting should fit in a market that is suitable to scale, even if it is not your end goal (or your initial dream), but that can help you reach your long term vision of industrial adoption.

Finding your SUCKS is therefore paramout to your survival, but is also really hard with unproven technologies, because you have to explore multiple path before finding a potential right path.

The problem is that many early stage Deep-Tech startups working on “Platform Technologies” have no idea on how to find this path.

<aside> 💡 That’s why with Deep-Tech startups what you have to cross is not the Death Valley but the Death Maze.

</aside>

• In the Death Valley, you know the direction that you need to take to climb out of it.
• In the Death Maze, on the other hand, usually you have no idea of where to go when you start, and many of the routes you will explore will lead nowhere, making really hard for you to survive.

So where should you start from?