6 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from a Hardware Startup’s Journey to Category Leadership

Sometimes the best business insights come from unconventional places. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Guilhem de Marliave shared how a regulatory constraint – having to tether a drone for a Paris flight – led to building a global leader in tethered drone technology. Here are the key go-to-market lessons from their journey:

1. Challenge Industry Marketing Conventions

While defense technology companies typically rely on relationship-based sales, Guilhem’s team broke the mold with a digital-first approach. “We builded all the marketing, the go to market strategy through the web, through internet. Even if at first it sounded a bit counterintuitive, especially in the defense sector, but actually it worked well,” he reveals.

This unconventional strategy emerged from a clear understanding of their market dynamics: “It’s kind of a long tail problem for us challenge because we are on a niche technology, so we had to export the system. We have a few targets per country, very precise.”

2. Embrace Market Evolution Rather Than Fighting It

Instead of trying to build a one-size-fits-all solution, the team recognized and adapted to the market’s natural evolution. “The maturity of the drone market is now at a stage where for each application it will have a specific aircraft with different capabilities. So we are going away from the time where everyone thought that one drone would solve everything,” Guilhem explains.

This insight helped them focus their product development and marketing efforts on specific use cases rather than trying to serve every possible application.

3. Use High-Profile Deployments as Market Validation

The company strategically leveraged major events to demonstrate their technology’s capabilities. “We have systems on the Super Bowl, for instance, in Atlanta. And this year or so we have been engaged also in the Football World Cup in Qatar on the Rider cup,” Guilhem shares. These deployments served as powerful proof points for potential customers while providing valuable real-world testing opportunities.

4. Accept That Finding Product-Market Fit Takes Time

The path to product-market fit wasn’t immediate. “At first we tried a lot of things and the pricing weren’t right, the targets weren’t right, and so on. So it took, I don’t know, eight, nine months and we finally made the first sale,” Guilhem admits. This period of experimentation was crucial for understanding their true market position.

5. Build for Market Maturity

The company’s approach to customer education evolved with the market. Initially, they had to educate customers about what tethered drones were and their potential applications. Now, as Guilhem notes, “Our customers, they know what a tether drone is and they know how to use it and what for. It’s more a question of scaling programs and convincing Erkey and using it in real life situation to scale.”

6. Navigate Hardware-Specific Challenges

For hardware startups, development cycles present unique challenges. “The challenge is always in the hardware space to reduce the cycles of developments. It’s a lot easier with the software, but we worked in a fab lab at first and then refined our ways to get shorter and shorter cycles of developments,” Guilhem explains.

The company’s success – achieving 50% growth last year and deploying over 1,000 systems globally – validates their patient, focused approach to market development.

For founders building hardware companies or entering regulated markets, these lessons highlight the importance of challenging conventional wisdom while maintaining a clear focus on specific market needs. The journey shows that success often comes not from fighting market constraints, but from turning them into competitive advantages.

Looking ahead, the company continues to evolve its go-to-market strategy, focusing on making their technology “fully autonomous” and developing “fully autonomous tele drone boxes that can be remotely deployed on sites borders and controlled through kind of a cloud system.” This vision demonstrates how category leaders must constantly innovate to maintain their market position, even after achieving initial success.