Startups don’t need to limit growth to one market. At Cogwear, we partnered with adtech leader GlassView to co-create GlassView Origin, entering the advertising market quickly by leveraging their sales expertise. Partnerships let you focus on building great products while experts handle the selling. You build, they sell—everyone wins.
As a startup founder, you’ve probably been told to focus. Focus on your product. Focus on your market. And for good reason—it’s sound advice. Many startups fail because they try to do too much with too few resources.
But what does "focus" really mean? For many entrepreneurs, the idea gets translated into one product for one market. While that’s one form of focus, it doesn’t leverage a valuable concept: economies of scope.
According to Harvard Business Review, “Economies of scope exist where the same equipment can produce multiple products more cheaply in combination than separately.” In other words, if you’re building a platform technology, it could very well be more cost-effective to develop that solution for multiple markets from the start instead of making it work for one market at a time.
And skeptics will ask, what about sales? After all, the most expensive part of a start-up is usually scaling the commercial organization. Most startups struggle to build one sales organization, let alone have the bandwidth, expertise, or funding to build a dedicated sales team for every industry their technology touches.
That’s where partnerships come in. Rather than hiring and training sales teams for each vertical, startups can work with commercial partners that already have strong sales channels and relationships in place.
Let the partners sell the product for you. In a nutshell: you build, they sell.
One of the reasons this idea of focus can be misunderstood is because it’s often assumed that a startup needs to be the expert in every market it wants to enter. Or that you need to build a dedicated salesforce to successfully commercialize your product in each industry. This mindset assumes that you, as the startup founder, need to understand all the nuances of each market. While that would be ideal, it’s not realistic nor is it truly necessary.
I’m here to tell you, you don’t have to be the expert in everything. Focus instead on building a product or platform that is versatile, and partnering with existing market experts who can handle the sales.
That is what I have done as CEO of Cogwear a brain technology startup. Our team realized early on that our platform technology could be applied across multiple markets—from neuromarketing to sports safety to many healthcare applications. But we decided that our resources would be better spent building our technology than building a sales team for every vertical. So we turned to partnerships.
By building partnerships with companies that have deep roots in their respective industries, we’ve been able to tap into new markets without stretching our internal team too thin.
Case Study: Entering Adtech
In the world of advertising, Cogwear partnered with GlassView - NeuroPowered Media™, a leading ad tech company, to bring neuromarketing solutions to their clients. GlassView already had strong customer relationships and a dedicated salesforce. Not only that, the team at Cogwear quickly learned that the advertising market has many more players and more complexity than we could have imagined. It would have taken us a decade or more to replicate what GlassView brings to the table.
Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait that long. Working together, we were able to leverage Cogwear’s platform technology to co-create GlassView Origin, a groundbreaking neuromarketing solution that helps brands optimize ads and media buying.
With this new solution, GlassView exponentially grew sales, repositioned itself as a neuromarketing company, and gained a strategic advantage over competitors.
At the same time, Cogwear earned revenue from each sale and gained a foothold in a sector that we couldn’t have entered as effectively on our own. This approach proves that startups don’t need to limit themselves to just one product or market—they just need to find the right partners.
As a startup, your focus should be on what you do best. If you’re building a platform technology, stay focused on creating the best product possible. Don’t get bogged down by the idea that you need to be the expert in every market or build massive sales teams to cover every vertical.
Instead, conduct market research and look for partners that complement your strengths. They know their market, they know their customers, and (if they are established) they know how to sell. Your role is to validate and understand their pain points so you can build a product with the right functionality and then let them bring your product to market in that vertical.
Here are a few key takeaways:
Partnerships allow you to scale faster
. You don’t need a sales team for every industry—let your partners do the selling.
Pick your partners wisely
. The right partner can take your product further than you could on your own, while the wrong one could slow you down.
Choose investors that appreciate economies of scope
. The right investors will understand that focus doesn’t mean a startup should do one thing and one thing only. If you can, try to work with investors who understand the concept of economies of scope and who appreciate why going to market this way mitigates risk and increases ROI on their investment.
At Cogwear, we’ve adopted this approach and seen success across multiple industries. We focus on building the technology, and we partner with the best in each market to bring our solutions to their customers. This model has allowed us to stay lean, stay focused, and still grow in multiple directions at once.
If you’re a founder with a platform technology, consider how partnerships can help you scale without adding massive overhead. And if you’re an investor, keep an eye out for companies that are leveraging this approach—it could be the key to unlocking sustainable growth across multiple markets.
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