🚀 How to learn a new market?

Tactical startup advice from OpenAI’s CPO, Lightspeed’s Founding Partner, Higgsfield’s founder and more

Join 200+ founders getting actionable and personalized advice on building startups in the early days at the DECODE Conference on November 15.

💬 Have intimate roundtable discussions with speakers including:

• Kevin Weil | Chief Product Officer, OpenAI

• Tony Jebara | Former VP of Engineering, Head of AI/ML, Spotify

• Arvind KC | Chief People & Systems Officer, Roblox

• Alex Mashrabov | Founder & CEO, Higgsfield AI

🍽️ Join an invite-only dinner with advisors including:

• Keith Enright | Former Chief Privacy Officer, Google

• Mark Settle | 7X CIO (including Okta)

• Esther Wojcicki | ‘Godmother of Silicon Valley’

• Mike Grandinetti | Faculty at Brown, Harvard and Rutgers; CXO with 7 exits

💻 Demo your product to investors including:

• Barry Eggers | Founding Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners

• David Jen | MD of Finance at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory 

• Hamet Watt | Founder & CEO, Share Ventures

• Nicole Baer | Chief Marketing Officer, Carta; Limited Partner, GTMfund

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3 tactics to learn a new market

🔀 Untangle the flow of money and decision-making

• Pore over any industry chatter daily (e.g. news stories, LinkedIn posts, research papers, etc) and set up exploratory conversations with industry leaders you might sell to

• Learn the decisions and sequences needed to complete a transaction

  • Identify every role involved (eg. supplier, manufacturer, distributor, buyer)

  • Map how a purchase happens: who influences, who decides, who sets the terms, how the transaction occurs, and who pays

• Align incentives with all the different players involved in the transaction

  • What do you offer that’s different, and how does that difference influence the incentives of all participants?

  • If some participants are disadvantaged by your product, what can overcome that?

  • Is the value you offer so big that other participants will pressure the blockers?

• Understand whether buyers see your product as a core solution or just a feature inside a larger system they already purchase

  

💰 Dwell into costs and unit economics

• List each step that’s needed to deliver your product and figure out how much it’ll cost; use real costs and not estimates with big error bars

• Determine a target price point that customers would realistically pay, then work backwards to see if costs allow it and which steps can be optimized

• Identify which inputs dominate the cost structure, and how you can negotiate each component: 

  • Ask for discounts (suppliers often give them if you ask and push)

  • Build fallback options to increase leverage

  • Understand supplier incentives (eg. end-of-quarter incentives, prefer pre-payments, bulk orders, longer terms, etc)

  • Unbundle supply to remove unnecessary safety buffers that add cost (tail end of reliability sometimes costs significantly more to manage)

🔎 Study the incumbents

• Talk to industry players about products they currently use and analyze how your product differentiates compared to existing players

• Unpack why your approach hasn’t worked in the past for existing incumbents; new technology alone is generally not a viable business model in the long run

  • E.g. Standard supply-and-demand laws might not apply and low prices doesn’t unlock access if market gatekeepers control purchasing

  

2 traps to avoid

🚨 Engaging ‘celebrity’ experts over hands-on experts

• Celebrity advisors often lack time and real-world execution experience; focus on assembling top experts who are a level or two down the management tree and actively doing the work 

• Use straightforward incentives like cash or project-based partnerships,

• Get the product in their hands early to learn what buyers truly value and define MVP boundaries

🚨 Clinging to initial assumptions

• Early wins like fundraising or top hires ≠ proof your plan works or you know the market

• Hold assumptions loosely as you learn the nuances of how the market operates

• Focus on learning and adapting, not defending initial assumptions

1 tool to leverage

📖 Best practice on researching incumbents

• Understand how incumbents control the market: identify gatekeepers, pricing models, and distribution channels that limit adoption

  • A product that is ‘better, faster, cheaper’ might struggle if there isn’t an open liquid market to compete in

• Leverage tools like IBISWorld to perform market research on incumbents

Bonus: 1 trend to spark startup ideas

📈 CRM is being replatformed and disruption is finally possible

• According to Gartner, 3 of the top 5 enterprise app categories make up CRM (customer support, sales, marketing); it’s also the stickiest

• CRM has been dominated by giants (Salesforce has a 20%+ market share) because of high switching cost

• 3 shifts are rewriting the rules:

  • Data in warehouses: Customer data now lives in Snowflake, Redshift, and other lakes, reducing legacy CRM lock-in and startups can build intelligent applications directly atop these sources

  • Multi-modal, unstructured data: Customer data is increasingly coming in various formats (e.g. Emails, Zoom calls, LinkedIn activity, usage metrics, etc) and LLMs can process these faster than manual CRM entry

  • Agentic interactions: Static database UIs are giving way to AI-driven workflows that prep account research, join meetings, and recommend next steps in real time

• High-impact opportunities:

  • Enhance existing relationships: Shift enterprise sales from hunting new clients to cultivating existing accounts with automated insights and next-action suggestions

  • Automate admin tasks: Free reps from repetitive work, letting top performers scale exponentially