Guest Post
By Mark M.J. Scott
President of Northern Pixels Inc.
Building a deep tech startup isn’t just challenging—it’s statistically brutal. Less than 0.4% of technology startups reach $10 million in annual sales. Of those rare companies that do achieve commercial success, an even smaller fraction successfully exits through acquisition.
As a deep tech founder, you’re not just building a company—you’re staking your reputation and dedicating years of your life to an arduous yet inspiring journey to change the world. Considering the odds, choosing the right strategic partners can literally make the difference between joining the elite fraction of successful companies or becoming another cautionary tale.
Here’s what makes this choice particularly challenging: most deep tech founders possess exceptional engineering and scientific expertise but have little to no marketing experience. This knowledge gap often leads them to engage a “commercial guide” without demonstrated deep tech experience, potentially steering them down costly dead-end paths with no clear exit strategy.
Mistake #1: Misunderstanding Your Deep Tech Marketing Requirements
The most consequential mistake deep tech founders make happens before they even start their agency search—they fundamentally misunderstand what deep tech marketing requires and overestimate their readiness to work with an agency.
Unlike traditional B2B marketing, deep tech marketing demands market shaping capabilities. Your innovation likely targets use cases that don’t yet exist or audiences who don’t yet understand they need your solution. This reality creates two distinct scenarios that determine your agency requirements:
Scenario one: You need a marketing strategy. Your team lacks startup or scale-up marketing expertise, and you need an agency to architect a comprehensive market development strategy. This isn’t about promoting an existing product to an existing market—it’s about creating market demand for breakthrough innovation. A world of difference.
Scenario two: You have experienced internal marketing leadership. Your marketing team has already developed category breakthrough strategies, positioning frameworks, and market education plans. You need specialized execution power to implement projects in support of your established marketing strategy.
Founders often underestimate what’s required to effectively engage an agency on projects and what foundational guidance and materials are needed to support agency success. Without proper briefing materials and strategic frameworks, even the best deep tech marketing agencies struggle to deliver meaningful results. Additionally, ill-defined agency projects result in soaring costs, as there is no alignment against briefing materials that include clear positioning, counter-positioning, and how the project is supported by other marketing initiatives.
Before engaging any agency, honestly evaluate your team’s marketing capabilities against your next 24 months of board commitments and begin the agency search in that context—versus a spontaneous ad hoc project approach engagement.
Mistake #2: Not Understanding Deep Tech Market Shaping
Many founders don’t understand the critical role of deep tech market shaping and how this comprehensive master plan accelerates valuation increases while reducing product and commercial risks. Deep tech solutions often transform business sectors and product categories—the target ecosystem, clients, tech analysts, associations, and thought leaders need to be nurtured, educated, and aligned behind the founder’s vision through strategic market development initiatives.
Unaware of these strategies, founders often launch too early into costly marketing projects, PR, media, videos, and social projects with one or several agencies, resulting in disjointed messaging with no credible industry voices supporting the vision.
Advocacy is the most important foundational element in a deep tech market shaping strategy. Find a deep tech marketing agency that has demonstrated experience aligning Global 500 brands, leading tech analysts, associations, sector thought leaders, and strategic ecosystem players behind an emerging technology—it requires a mix of opportunity development from a marketing perspective that generates quantifiable business and valuation results.
Mistake #3: Not Understanding the Delicate Sequence of Deep Tech Marketing Strategies
There is an immutable law of sequence to deep tech marketing success—few deep tech founders understand that law, and as the statistics show, they suffer the consequences. In deep tech marketing, sequence matters more than in traditional tech marketing—market education and influence must precede broad promotion.
The most frequent mistake: prioritizing public relations without a market shaping strategy that builds support from target sector ecosystems and related influencers. Tier-one media will always seek support for articles on emerging technology with a credible counter-point opinion. In the absence of strong advocacy from the ecosystem market, out-of-sequence early media engagements often deliver exposure that negatively impacts deep tech company valuation rather than improving it.
Source an experienced deep tech marketing agency that understands how to weave advocacy and market shaping strategies into the larger startup strategy—versus an outsourced approach that is disconnected. Founders who succeed understand that tier-one media exposure for aligned advocates is a powerful reward that helps nurture further advocacy and attract new sector champions behind the vision. One more reminder: it’s all interconnected.
Mistake #4: Choosing Passive Marketing Agency vs. an Opportunity Sourcing Agency
Selecting agencies that wait for direction rather than agencies that proactively develop market opportunities for their deep tech clients and understand the unique challenges of technical innovation commercialization and market creation.
Agencies that work on individual initiatives—PR, website, campaigns—rely on the technology and business sector expertise from the founder team as they are not experienced enough to proactively identify opportunities. This often results in resource-constrained startups investing more leadership time in the agency than value they receive in return.
Seek an experienced deep tech marketing agency that can quickly understand industry sector dynamics, influential leaders, and develop marketing strategies to engage these forces, convert them to advocates, and develop marketing programs that elevate a startup’s brand through brand association with leading sector suppliers, advisors, and thought leaders. It’s a delicate mix of marketing and business development.
Mistake #5: Choosing an Agency Based on Aesthetics Over Strategy
Considering how objective and analytical deep tech founders are, it’s difficult to believe this is on the list of most frequent mistakes—but it is. Too often, deep tech founders select an agency based on design portfolios they find appealing, or one-off viral campaigns they’ve seen on LinkedIn, rather than seeking an architected marketing strategy that delivers quantifiable value growth.
Founders need to appreciate that just like their product development strategy requires interconnecting finely purpose-built modules into a greater product—successful go-to-market strategies require the very same diligence and approach. When form outweighs function and performance, it compromises the overall outcome.
Find a deep tech marketing agency that prioritizes strategic business outcomes more than brand vanity. Founders are frequently surprised that they can often get their cake and eat it too when they choose the right partner in growth—a seasoned deep tech marketing agency will happily work with other creative firms to merge strategy success with brand excellence.
Making Your Deep Tech Marketing Agency Decision
The choice of marketing agency partner is one of the most critical decisions you’ll make as a deep tech founder. Considering success rates are extraordinarily low and the personal and professional stakes are exceptionally high, prioritize agencies that demonstrate deep tech sector expertise with proven case studies of successful market shaping, strategic thinking capability that extends far beyond tactical execution, and genuine market creation experience in emerging technology categories.
About the author:
Mark M.J. Scott is President of Northern Pixels Inc., the world’s only marketing firm founded and led by deep tech and advanced tech startup veterans, each with a track record of successful commercialization and exits via acquisition. Mark has held pivotal leadership roles in several startup successes, including a cryptography company acquired by AppDirect, an optics firm acquired by Toyota, and TrueContext, an enterprise low-code platform acquired by Battery Ventures in 2024. Recently, Mark was engaged by Quebec’s $435M-funded Quantum Innovation Zone to design and implement commercial strategies that accelerate startup growth and success. Mark can be found on X / Twitter: https://x.com/MarkMJScott