5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building an Industrial Tech Platform

5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building an Industrial Tech Platform

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Brian Lozes shared how his industrial immersive experience platform evolved from a simple VR demo to a solution now used by Fortune 100 companies globally. His journey offers valuable insights for founders bringing innovative technology to traditional industries.

1. Start with a Quantifiable Industry Problem

The most compelling GTM strategies begin with a clear, measurable problem. Brian identified that “as a country, we spend trillions of dollars every year on capital projects, and there’s empirical data that’s showing upwards of 8% to 10% of that money is wasted every year just due to construction related rework.” This precise understanding of the problem’s scale helped validate the market opportunity and create a compelling value proposition.

2. Create Adoption Bridges

Perhaps the most crucial GTM lesson from Brian’s journey was the importance of creating “bridges” for adoption. Rather than forcing customers to make a complete technological leap, they developed a hybrid approach. “What we had to do was to create a bridge. And that bridge is what we call our mouse and keyboard or PC mode,” Brian explains. This strategy allowed organizations to adopt the technology gradually, with some team members using VR while others participated through traditional interfaces.

3. Let Customer Usage Guide Product Evolution

While the initial product focused on design review for new construction, customer behavior revealed unexpected opportunities. As Brian notes, “We had a hunch that people also wanted to see the site as it existed.” This insight led them to become “the world’s first to actually incorporate the footage from drones and laser scanning gear.” By remaining attentive to customer needs, they discovered valuable new use cases in maintenance and training.

4. Build Success Stories Through Pilot Projects

Brian’s team mastered the art of turning pilot projects into expansion opportunities. “We’ve got now several Fortune 100 companies using our product across the globe,” Brian shares. “And what’s exciting is they all start there’s, typically a pilot project and pilot application. And the success of that pilot every time is resulting in multiplication what they use inside their organization.”

5. Focus on Measurable Business Impact

Rather than selling technology for technology’s sake, Brian’s team focused on concrete business outcomes. A recent customer success story illustrates this approach. Instead of requiring multiple stakeholders to fly helicopters to a remote site for days of meetings, their solution enabled the same work to be completed in hours. As Brian recounts, “They said that they not only fully recovered the value of that contract, they started bringing additional savings into their organization in one meeting.”

The success of this approach is evident in their growth trajectory. As Brian notes, “We multiply year over year with revenue, with the number of individual customers that we have on board, and it just seems to be accelerating.”

Looking ahead, Brian’s vision extends beyond just facility visualization to broader industry transformation. “Three to five years from now, we want to be in every worker’s hands and attributable to a vast reduction in the amount of time people are spending in dangerous environments,” he states.

These lessons underscore a broader truth about bringing innovative technology to traditional industries: success often depends less on the technology itself and more on how you help customers adopt and integrate it into their existing operations. By focusing on practical value, creating adoption bridges, and remaining responsive to customer needs, Brian’s team has built a solution that’s not just technologically innovative, but practically valuable for some of the world’s largest industrial operations.

For B2B tech founders navigating similar challenges, these lessons offer a valuable framework for thinking about their own go-to-market strategies. The key isn’t just having groundbreaking technology – it’s making that technology accessible, valuable, and transformative for your target customers.