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Why We Treated Our Go-To-Market Strategy as an Experiment

​When we started working on DayLight Technologies, we did what most early-stage teams do: we focused heavily on the product. Design, technology, functionality. All important — but quickly we realised that product quality alone wouldn’t determine success.

The real challenge wasn’t what we were building, but how people would understand and value it.

DayLight is an indoor daylight-like lamp designed to improve wellbeing and the experience of indoor spaces. From the start, we faced a classic startup problem: our product could logically fit into several markets. Was it a lamp? A wellness solution? A design object? A health intervention? Each of these categories comes with different buyers, expectations, and price perceptions.

Committing to the wrong one too early would risk slow adoption, weak demand signals, and structural underpricing. So instead of locking ourselves into a single go-to-market plan, we decided to treat our GTM strategy as something to experiment with.

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Learning Before Scaling

Our approach closely followed Lean Startup logic (Ries, 2011): rather than assuming we knew our market, we tested our assumptions through small, low-cost experiments.

Instead of waiting for a fully finished product or spending money on advertising, we reached out directly to decision-makers across multiple industries — including healthcare, coworking spaces, interior design studios, and hospitality. Our message was simple: would you be interested in learning more or exploring a pilot?

What we looked for wasn’t praise or opinions. It was behaviour.

Replies, follow-up questions, meeting requests, and openness to pilots became our main learning signals. This allowed us to compare industries side by side and understand where real interest existed, without large upfront investments.

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Why Category Framing Turned Out to Matter So Much

One of the biggest lessons we learned is how strongly category framing shapes perceived value. Research by Kuijken, Gemser, and Wijnberg (2017) helps explain why. When products are new and difficult to evaluate, people rely on category cues as value anchors. They use the average price and norms of the category to infer what a product should be worth.

We saw this clearly in practice. When DayLight was implicitly framed as “a lamp,” conversations quickly gravitated toward comparisons with conventional lighting products. When we framed it as a wellbeing or experiential solution, expectations — and perceived value — shifted noticeably.

A useful analogy here is Bentley. The brand doesn’t rely on mass-market car shows to position its vehicles. Instead, it often appears in luxury lifestyle contexts such as private aviation terminals or invitation-only events. By choosing where it shows up, Bentley controls what it is compared to — and therefore how its value is perceived.

For us, this reinforced an important insight: where and to whom you present your product shapes how people judge what it’s worth.

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Why We Paid More Attention to Behaviour Than Opinions

In early conversations, many people were positive about the idea. But we quickly learned that enthusiasm alone doesn’t mean much. Research on entrepreneurial strategy shows that stated preferences often don’t translate into real action (Gans, Stern, & Wu, 2019).

That’s why we focused on observable behaviour. Did people respond to our outreach? Did they want a follow-up call? Were they open to testing the product?

Silence was just as informative as interest. This approach mirrored the real sales process and helped us avoid false validation.

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Testing Markets Before Committing to One

Strategy research suggests that early-stage firms benefit from exploring multiple paths before committing fully (McGrath, 2010). Rather than betting everything on the “biggest” market upfront, we prioritised learning speed.

Through our outreach experiments, we noticed clear differences between sectors. In some industries, daylight was seen as a nice-to-have feature. In others — particularly health-related environments — it was perceived as central to service quality and client experience.

That insight only emerged because we tested multiple markets in parallel.

What This Taught Us About Strategy

The biggest takeaway from our work on DayLight Technologies is simple: early strategy isn’t about being right from the start. It’s about learning faster than the alternatives.

By treating go-to-market as an experiment — testing categories, observing real behaviour, and adjusting based on evidence — we reduced uncertainty and gained clarity about where our product creates the most value.

For other founders facing similar uncertainty, our advice is straightforward:

Don’t ask customers what they think.
Watch what they do

That’s where real strategy begins.

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-The Daylight Team