About Market Scouting

Market Scouting (aka metrics-driven market validation) is a new approach to rapidly determine the best B2B markets for deep-tech, scientific, or disruptive startups.

Market Scouting combines entrepreneurship and marketing insights to help entrepreneurs discover, understand, and assess their technology's potential applications, customers, and business cases in a B2B (or B2G) context. 

Market Scouting appeals to scientists and engineers who want to follow a repeatable, easy-to-understand process to accelerate their market validation and the go-to market.

Market Scouting users

Market Scouting provides benefits for two groups:

  • Science-driven or technology-based entrepreneurs can use a tool that simplifies and accelerates their go to market.
  • Startup support organizations can use and customize the approach to accelerate market validation and go to market with their startups.

The approach 

Market Scouting suggests the following process to startups:

  1. Customer hypothesis list: Use LLMs to help with the following:
    1. Create a list of potential users and customers of a technology
    2. identify the business processes the technology would affect
    3. identify the KPIs the process is measured with
    4. assess the KPI improvement potential
    5. estimate the economic benefit of this KPI potential.
  2. Market outreach:
    1. Choose the customer hypothesis that is most attractive for the startup (attractive for customers, easy to implement, high growth potential, etc.).
    2. Use LLMs to understand as much as possible how the business process is executed today. Learn the language and terminology of the process and its context. Check and adjust your hypotheses.
    3. Build a compelling script to reach experts, users, and deciders in the customer context.
    4. Contact experts to check and adjust your hypotheses and get contacts to potential customers.
    5. Reach out to customers to check and adjust your hypotheses and assess their interest in building a pilot.
    6. Repeat this process until you gather about 3-4 committed pilot customers. Then, start building the first version of the product.
    7. Use this first version to reach out to other customers and/or, if needed, to venture capital and business angels.

Market Scouting provides checklists and forms to help startups navigate through the process.

Why it works

Market Scouting rests on the following pillars:

  1. Customers buy benefits, not features: Focus on understanding the impact of a technology, not the features of a product.
  2. Customer-first: Only customers can understand and assess the value of a product. Investors, experts, consultants, or coaches can provide additional insights and ideas.
  3. Collaborative product development: The fastest way to innovate is to build a product together with a customer. Building a product in advance and trying to sell it later usually doesn't work.
  4. Paid MVPs: Pilot customers contribute to MVP development. This is the key to their active engagement with the actual development and reduces the development cost and risk.
  5. Empowering customer innovation: Market Scouting helps startups focus on the impact they generate with the customers, thus helping them innovate.
  6. Focus on cost reduction in high-value processes: A technology's biggest impact is when it reduces the cost (or the risk or the duration) of processes that are very important for a customer.

Benefits of the Market Scouting approach

Benefits for support organizations

  1. Boosts Success Rates: Minimizes risks by focusing on customer-driven validation, increasing startup success.
  2. Efficient Resource Use: Streamlined, step-by-step method ensures optimal allocation of time and funding.
  3. Scientific and Technological Impact: Brings high-impact research to market, aligning with the mission to promote innovation.
  4. Proof of Market Fit: Data-driven validation supports funding and strategic decision-making.
  5. Financial Sustainability: Customer-funded MVPs reduce dependency on external funding.
  6. Scalable Framework: A structured, repeatable method adaptable across diverse startups.

Benefits for technology- and science-driven entrepreneurs

  1. Direct Relevance: Focuses on solving real market problems, enhancing product-market fit.
  2. Reduced Market Risk: Customer-validated development mitigates entry risks.
  3. Early Customer Engagement: Enables meaningful feedback from decision-makers, refining product direction.
  4. Resource Efficiency: Conserves budgets by focusing on high-impact processes.
  5. Evidence-Based Decisions: Uses KPIs to guide predictable, data-driven growth.
  6. Clear, Guided Path: Step-by-step framework eases the journey from lab to market.

Next steps

Market Scouting is currently piloted by a innovation support organization of a university. Parallel to that, many entrepreneurs use it and help to improve it everyday.

If you're interested in trying Market Scouting for your support organization or your startup, reach out to j@janfuelscher.ch.