Here’s What the Most Successful Deep Tech Teams Are Doing Differently
You Can’t Build Deep Tech With a SaaS Mindset...
You Can’t Build Deep Tech With a SaaS Mindset
Field notes for those building and backing deep tech ventures in 2025
There’s a familiar story playing out across labs and boardrooms.
A team of exceptional scientists, spinning out from top universities or R&D centers, raises their first round.
They’re tackling serious challenges—next-gen catalysts, sustainable materials, or breakthrough quantum processes.
The ambition is clear. The science is compelling.
The slide deck ends with “platform potential.”
Twelve to eighteen months later, the tone has shifted.
The update talks about “strategic pivots” or a “longer go-to-market path than anticipated.”
Often, the tech still holds promise.
But the runway is gone.
What happened?
More often than not, they followed the wrong map.
They borrowed assumptions from a world that doesn’t operate by the same physics—literally and figuratively.
Deep Tech Is Not SaaS
The startup world has spent 20 years optimizing for one model: fast, lean, digital, low-CAPEX, infinitely scalable.
That mindset created giants.
But it also created a blind spot.
Deep tech isn’t just “harder tech.”
It’s a different game entirely.
And too many founders—and investors—are realizing that only after burning through a runway built for a product that doesn’t live in the cloud.
Here’s what breaks when you try to build deep tech with a SaaS mindset:
1. Customer Discovery Doesn’t Work the Same
In SaaS, you can run 20 customer calls in a week, mock up an MVP in Figma, and test paywalled features by Friday.
You’re navigating known behaviors and predictable incentives.
In deep tech?
Your customer might be a procurement manager who’s never heard of your material.
Or an energy operator who’s three years away from trying anything new.
What matters isn’t what they say they want.
It’s how their supply chain works.
It’s what line item your solution replaces—and who has the authority to sign off.
This is not a “user persona.”
This is industrial anthropology.
2. You Don’t Sell the Solution — You Sell the Problem
The best SaaS startups obsess over UX.
The best deep tech startups obsess over pain.
You’re not selling your quantum coating.
You’re selling:
18% efficiency gains in a grid where every basis point counts
Compliance with PFAS bans that threaten $400M in SKUs
Sovereign independence from Chinese rare earths
If your pitch leads with your material, you’ve already lost.
Lead with the urgency.
3. The Laws of Scaling Are Inverted
In SaaS, scale lowers your marginal costs.
In deep tech, scale often reveals new problems:
The reaction works in the lab, but not at 500L
The material is stable for 2 weeks, but not 12 months
The pilot used purified feedstock—your customer doesn’t
You can’t “just scale” a novel process like it’s compute.
That’s why smart teams build scale into the R&D:
They start techno-economic modeling at TRL 3.
They involve manufacturing partners before Series A.
They raise enough to fail at scale—before betting the company.
4. The Wrong VCs Can Kill You
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Most VCs are still optimizing for software returns, on software timelines, with software instincts.
They’ll push you to ship faster, raise bigger, promise more.
But a materials venture that overpromises at Series A won’t make it to B.
Because no one wants to fund a 40% gross margin business with 7-year payback cycles—unless they understood that from Day 1.
Smart deep tech founders don’t just raise capital.
They curate it.
They find investors who know:
That revenue isn’t everything early on
That regulatory tailwinds matter more than ARR
That building a plant is not a pivot
5. Narrative Discipline Isn’t Optional
This might surprise you, but the best deep tech founders are also great communicators.
Not in the TED Talk sense—but in the “build belief” sense.
They know how to frame their venture as:
A wedge into a massive shift (like the Inflation Reduction Act or PFAS phaseouts)
A linchpin in a bigger supply chain reshuffle
A bet that must be made now, or someone else will
In a market where buyers are skeptical, timelines are long, and capital is constrained—narrative is leverage.
So What’s the Alternative?
If the SaaS mindset doesn’t work… what does?
Here’s what we’re seeing in the smartest teams today:
Co-development > stealth mode
They build with strategic partners from day one.Regulatory timing > “first to market”
They don’t just invent—they align with laws.Techno-economics > TAM slides
They model cost curves at the bench, not post-revenue.Pilot discipline > proof-of-concept theater
They pick pilots with scale logic, not logo appeal.Narrative clarity > hype cycles
They tell a story investors and customers can act on.
This isn’t easy.
It’s not fast.
But if you’re doing it right, you’re not just raising funds.
You’re reshaping industries.
Where to Go If You’re Actually Building This
If this resonates, it’s probably because you’ve already been in the room:
Trying to explain a materials breakthrough to a finance guy.
Or figuring out how to price something the world hasn’t seen before.
Or spending 9 months just to get a letter of intent from a partner who still needs 6 more approvals.
We get it—because we’ve spent the last year collecting the tools you wish you had in those moments.
We’ve spent hundreds of hours inside real deals—from founder debriefs to investor standoffs, from first pilots to million-dollar scale-ups, and hard-won lessons from people who usually don’t share what they know...
And we turned it all into a reference library.
Built to be used—not just read.
Here’s what’s inside:
Tactical breakdowns of how the best teams negotiate with industry giants
Frameworks to build traction when your product still lives in a lab
Deep dives into markets where $100B shifts are quietly happening under the radar
Lessons from founders who’ve actually raised, shipped, and scaled in deep tech—not in theory, but in practice
This is everything we’ve collected—So far.
And we’re not done….
✨ Here’s the Entire Collection:
The full collection is reserved for Premium Members of The Scenarionist.
The Scenarionist Premium is built to make you a sharper Deep Tech Founder, Investor, and Operator. Premium unlocks exclusive access to this one-of-a-kind collection—plus our weekly insight drops and Venture Guides that go deep where others skim.
Chapter 4 is coming soon…
…and it’s the one you’ll want in your back pocket when you sit across the table. Tactical negotiation techniques, real-world founder playbooks, and how to own the room when the stakes are highest.
Stay tuned.