Knowledge is power in deep tech, so start asking better questions
By Ioana Knopf, Activate Fellow, Cohort 2023
“Uproot your questions from their ground and the dangling roots will be seen. More questions!”
Ioana Knopf (Cohort 2023) is a scientist and deep-tech entrepreneur who has been working in the Boston startup ecosystem for the past 8 years. Originally from Romania, Knopf relocated to the United States to pursue her interests in chemistry and materials science and earned her Ph.D. in carbon dioxide utilization from MIT.
Hard Truth on the Trade-Show Floor
In May 2024, I was a solo, deep-tech founder attending the largest plastics trade show in the Americas. With over 2000 exhibitors packed into a million square feet of exhibition space, I made a detailed plan for navigating the event, identifying exhibitors who collectively represented the end-to-end value chain of the plastics industry.
At the end of two full days speaking to hundreds of exhibitors – and logging new daily records on my pedometer app – I was forced to accept that I didn’t have a business case in the plastics industry. As the loud background buzz of the trade show started to fade, I came to an even more alarming realization: I may not have a business case at all.
I founded Arrakis Materials in the hopes of building a business that could make carbon storage and utilization economically viable. I had successfully developed a low-energy, low-pressure, scalable process to turn carbon dioxide into carbon-negative minerals that could be used as additives for plastics, paints, construction materials, and more. I had a lab prototype in hand, and a viable solution for reducing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, but until attending the trade show, I had not really asked myself whether reducing GHG emissions was even a priority for the plastics industry.
The hard truth I confronted on the trade-show floor was impossible to ignore – banner after banner advertised recycling and waste solutions rather than reducing carbon footprint. This didn't mean reducing emissions was not important, it just wasn’t a priority, and that was a critical element to understand.
I had assumed that the minerals I could create hadn’t come to market because no one had previously developed a good enough technology for manufacturing them at scale. The truth is that the biggest challenges for my business had very little to do with chemical processes, and everything to do with cost and market demand – or lack thereof. No matter how good the chemistry was, no amount of technology development could overcome the fact that my solution had no place in the industrial value chain. I had inadvertently focused on the wrong problems to solve because I hadn’t been asking the most important business questions, ones I should have been grappling with right from the start.
“The truth is that the biggest challenges for my business had very little to do with chemical processes, and everything to do with cost and market demand – or lack thereof. ”
Ioana Knopf first presenting her company during Activate Boston’s Meet the Cohort event in July 2023
Tougher Than Tech: Identifying Problems
If you are also starting a deep-tech company, you probably care about impact and societal benefits in addition to building a viable business. You’re probably used to pitching a big vision of the future enabled by your technology. But the day-to-day grind is a much less sexy reality filled with uncertainties. If you want that big vision to come true, you have to accurately identify the biggest risks and challenges ahead of you. Wide-scale adoption of your solution depends not only on whether you can productize your technology, but also on whether you can solve complex business problems for your customers.
Of course, you already know this. You’ve already considered the classic questions: Who is your customer? What problem are you solving for them? Resources like the NSF I-Corps Program are fantastic introductions to customer discovery and are well known to entrepreneurs seeking to build technology companies. Yet technical founders have an inherent instinct to focus on technology gaps, and we remain at a disadvantage when it comes to identifying gaps in other areas of our businesses.
Deep-tech entrepreneurs would benefit from reframing customer discovery as end-to-end value chain discovery. This expansion in the range of business questions we ask early on in the lifecycle of our company can transform how we identify barriers and bottlenecks to the adoption of our technology.
Ioana Knopf showcasing her technology and company at Activate’s 2024 Spring Demo Day in Boston
The Value Chain: Your Customer’s Reality
Doing customer discovery well is hard for any entrepreneur, but it’s especially hard for deep tech founders. Chances are that you’re not developing a consumer-facing product where your customer is the end user, the purchaser, and has well-defined requirements. You are probably aiming to sell into a complex value chain with many different stakeholders. It’s not enough to understand what problem you are trying to solve for your direct customer.
Your customer is not a monolith. To understand your value creation potential, you need to zoom into the nuances of their business. Consider which department(s) has the problem or which other stakeholders in the organization support or oppose the adoption of your solution. Who affects their decisions? Whose decisions do they, in turn, influence or dictate?
Your customer’s reality extends far beyond their own business. It frequently changes in response to the needs and decisions of stakeholders both downstream and upstream from them in the value chain. Understanding the end-to-end value chain requires you to both zoom out and consider the priorities of the industry at large and zoom in on specific points of the value chain to identify how these priorities manifest and why specific decisions are being made.
“Doing customer discovery well is hard for any entrepreneur, but it’s especially hard for deep tech founders. ”
To further complicate matters, it is not uncommon for the people in the value chain who would purchase your solution to be different from those who set the specifications for the product. Moreover, the champion for adoption of your solution may be someone else entirely.
In the early days of my customer discovery journey, I was investigating applications for my carbon-negative minerals in construction materials such as concrete. It was a critical revelation to learn that concrete manufacturers, my hypothesized customers, don’t have much, if any, flexibility in choosing what types of additives they can use. As it turned out, the material specifications for these projects were set much earlier by architects and structural engineers.
Question Everything, Then Do it Again
I do not claim to have the answers for you, but I have learned that the path to getting those answers necessarily involves knowing which questions to ask. To that end, I am launching an evergreen web resource, askbetterquestions.tech, with key questions I came across in my own entrepreneurial journey. Most don’t have a definitive answer. Neither can they be answered once and crossed off a list; they are meant to be asked over and over to guide your learning in an ever-evolving world.
Deep tech is distinguished by its pursuit of transformative scientific and technological advancements. But the value chain is commensurately complex. Deep-tech entrepreneurs need better tools for customer and value-chain discovery, and that process starts with asking better questions.
Read about more Activate Fellows who have moved from the lab to commercialization to defining new industries in Activate’s 2024 Annual Report.
