Scale the credibility before you scale the business
When I work with science-led software companies entering a new market, the instinct is usually the same: find the prospects, build the pipeline, start selling. It's what works elsewhere, and it feels like momentum.
In scientific markets, it stalls. Not because the product isn't good enough, but because scientists need evidence before they change how they work. Evidence that the tool solves a real problem, produces results they can trust, and is worth the disruption of changing an established workflow. A demo or a well-written case study isn't enough. It has to come from someone whose scientific judgment they respect.
That's why the first question I ask a company entering a new scientific market isn't about pipeline. It's about believers. Who in your network already knows your work, understands the problem you're solving, and is willing to engage honestly with what you've built? Those people aren't just potential customers. They're your first source of proof.
A cheminformatics company I worked with faced exactly this challenge. They had built something that worked in a new way, with capabilities that existing methods couldn't match, but they were entering a market they didn't yet fully understand. They didn't know how project teams would want to apply the software, or where it would deliver the most value. Rather than trying to sell software licenses, they first sold collaborative research services. They applied the technology to prospective customers' own data, worked alongside their scientists, and presented results in terms that spoke directly to what those scientists cared about.
The approach answered two questions at once. It showed the vendor how their software created value and how to sell it confidently. It gave them the material to build demos, case studies, and conference presentations; the proof points that a sales conversation in a new market depends on. And it gave scientists firsthand evidence, based on their own data, that the tool was worth adopting. Only once that evidence existed did the conversation shift toward a self-service product. By then, the scientists already believed in the result. Adopting the tool that produced it was a small step, not a leap of faith.
This is what I mean by scaling credibility before scaling the business. The pilot isn't primarily a product test. It's the moment where belief either gets established, or it doesn't. The measure isn't whether the software performs under evaluation conditions. It's about whether, at the end of the process, a scientist will tell their peers, unprompted, that this product changed how they work for the better. That's the credibility that makes everything downstream easier.
The companies that enter scientific markets successfully don't skip this stage. They treat the first relationships as the foundation everything else is built on. If you're planning a market entry and the conversation is mostly about finding prospects and signing contracts, it's worth pausing to ask a simpler question first: who believes in this enough to say so publicly? If the answer is nobody yet, that's where to start.