{"id":1456,"date":"2023-03-13T13:23:16","date_gmt":"2023-03-13T07:53:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lokawiz.com\/blog\/?p=1456"},"modified":"2023-04-29T10:42:18","modified_gmt":"2023-04-29T05:12:18","slug":"deeptech-startup-progress-foundation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.lokawiz.com\/blog\/default\/deeptech-startup-progress-foundation\/","title":{"rendered":"A Look-Back on Progress: Foundation"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>\n
Cover Background Image: Austin Distel<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a> <\/span><\/strong><\/h6>\n
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One must have “first of all” a solid foundation.<\/em><\/strong>
– Sri Aurobindo<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

You can’t build a great building on a weak foundation. You must have a solid foundation if you’re going to have a strong superstructure.<\/strong><\/em>
– Gordon B. Hinckley<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A startup aspiring to become a great company must build its foundation solid and constantly improve it.<\/span><\/p>\n

At\u00a0<\/span>Lokawiz<\/span><\/a>, we spent most of the past two calendar years (2021 and 2022) laying down a solid foundation for the subsequent stages of our startup journey.<\/span><\/p>\n

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  1. In the back end, we a) enriched and matured our innovative products and solutions with product R&D and b) stepped up our delivery capabilities by selecting relevant sourcing partners and signing agreements with a few.<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. On the business side, we focused on customer development with hundreds of lean experiments, identified our beachheads, made several customer segment pivots and positioned ourselves for continual growth for the next several years.<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. On the top level, we refined our mission, developed our strategy based on market learnings, and built stewardship agreements for crucial business functions to reinforce their strategic alignment.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Such a solid foundation couldn’t have been possible without the quality learning we gained from our customer development activities. We engaged with several hundred prospects to identify the target Beachheads and Earlyvangelists for our emerging products and solutions.<\/span><\/p>\n

    A summary of the learnings we gained is in the points below:<\/span><\/p>\n

    Assumptions<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0based on conventional wisdom can be painfully invalid for a deep-tech startup. In our experiments to test over 100 hypotheses, we invalidated a majority. The following top-level initial ones turned out to be the most painfully invalid.<\/span><\/p>\n