In a Challenging Market, Make Your Product Feel Tangible

Economic uncertainty can be tough for startups. We’ve written before about the opportunities inherent in a time like this, and also talked about why we’re not concerned about the long-term future. We absolutely stand behind all of this. That said, when you’re going through it, it can be tough.?

In this article we want to explore a tactic that we’ve seen be successful for a number of startups in our portfolio: making your product feel tangible.?

From Concept to Reality

Startups are always strong on ideas, and on vision. Great founders manage to turn that vision into reality - a product that prospective customers want to buy and use. When founders think about the challenges they’ll face, they typically consider messaging, differentiation, logistical issues, R&D hurdles, perhaps regulatory components; the building blocks of success.?

There’s one challenge which often gets overlooked, because it’s not inherent to the business or the product. It’s in the eye of the beholder: the gap between the vision and the reality, even when you’re looking at a product that already exists.?

Selling a dream is one thing. Founders have decks, mockups, and demos. There are ways to make the vision feel real enough that early investors and early clients will sign up for the ride. What many startups don’t realize, though, is that this challenge continues even once you have a live, working product that can show results.?

Congratulations, you’ve taken the concept and made it reality. But does it feel real to people outside your company?

Example: Let’s Look at Berry Juice

Better Juice is a B2B food tech company that reduces sugar in the juices that are used in food manufacturing. Facing the challenges of rising diabetes and health issues, and increased awareness of the dangers of high sugar content in food, many food companies are looking for alternatives to natural sugars. Most search for alternatives. Better Juice enables companies to keep using natural juices - while at the same time, reducing the sugar.?

Better Juice has already proven through pilots and strategic partnerships that their technology is very effective, able to reduce simple sugar content by 30%-50% across a range of fruit juices. Having those results is great. But what prospects really needed was to be able to see how they could do this themselves, using the technology.?

Better Juice leveraged their partnership with GEA Group, one of the largest suppliers for food processing technology, to make their success tangible. They invited prominent berry fruit juice manufacturers from Europe, the USA, Australia, and Brazil to come to a site set up by GEA, so that they could try it out for themselves, on their own brands.

The impact was everything that Better Juice could hope for. The results matched the data that Better Juice had been talking about - but being able to see it happen for their own products, in front of their eyes, was a whole different experience for the manufacturers. It was tangible.?

Even better, seeing the innovation in front of them enabled companies to think about the future possibilities as well. In the case of Better Juice, that means expanding the horizon of disruption from fruit juices to a far wider range of natural sugars including milk, honey, maple, and beer.

All About Software? Maybe Show it With Hardware

You might think, well, that’s all very well with juice, when you really do have something tangible to work with. What about software startups?

Wi-Charge is a great example of a startup that faces this challenge, and has found innovative ways to solve it. Wi-Charge enables companies to use infrared wireless technology for over-the-air power charging of electronics devices. They’re about the technology, not the devices.?

Wi-Charge’s product is an invisible technology that charges all sorts of devices without wires. It doesn’t get much more abstract. So they’ve focused on promoting the real life applications, instead - with the result that they were honored an astounding 3 times in the 2023 CES Awards; in the context of Xbox controllers, electric toothbrushes, and a wireless charging pad.

Similarly, Wi-Charge has recently partnered with Toho to increase flexibility in physical layout in manufacturing facilities, an area which also lends itself to obvious physical expression and examples of their technology.?

An image might be worth 1,000 words, but the nature of the image matters; videos and photos of real successes are far more powerful than diagrams and demonstrations.

Edge Towards the End Consumer

Another way of making a product tangible is to shift focus down the funnel towards the end consumer, even if as a company you’re never planning to sell B2C.

Lab grown diamond manufacturer Lusix is a strong example in this category. Lusix makes gorgeous “sun grown diamonds,” so called because they’re grown using solar energy. They provide the stones, generally rough diamonds, to companies who polish them and sell to the consumer.?

Lusix is differentiated in their market because of their sustainability, their partnership with LVMH, and the exceptionally high quality of their stones. All of those things are enormously powerful in the right context, but they’re not tangible.?

Teaming up with TAG Heuer to provide the stones for dazzling new watches, on the other hand, produced very tangible results. Not only are the stones visually stunning in situ, it’s apparent to any expert that the way the stones have been used would simply not have been possible with mined diamonds. This creative new application is only possible with very high quality lab grown diamonds.

Take Care of the Heavy Lifting

Sometimes the application of your technology might be clear, and its advantages, but it’s clear that there would be work involved for your prospective customers in order to actualize the potential. In this case, your success might feel too far away for them to really believe in - it might not feel tangible enough.?

When this is the case, you can meet them more than halfway. Take care of the heavy lifting for them.

Equinom is a great example of a company that has done this effectively. Equinom is a food tech company that exists far up the funnel of food production; they create plant-based protein seeds that grow plants that are better and healthier for food manufacturing. Healthier, more efficient, more reliable, and more sustainable. But hard to imagine.?

So Equinom invested in showing ways that their product can be used as ingredients, such as recipe ideas. They worked out how best to use their product in the manufacturing process. They made it as easy as possible for companies further down the “food chain” to see how impactful their product could be.?

Feel Like You Can Touch It

Which techniques you use to make your product feel tangible should vary depending on the nature of your product, your industry, your target audience and your goals. This is an area where it pays to get creative.?

What is important is not to skip this crucial step. The more tangible your product feels to your audience, the more likely they are to believe in it, invest it in, and leverage it. Now, and long term.