3 Comments

Hi Tony great piece! Nice to see Deep Tech put into realistic perspective beyond the usual marketing aorund the great promises of this technologies. I am curious to know your thoughts on how to best approach market substitution or adoption of new biobased chemicals/molecules considering that some of them have never been used in the industry and that usually start-ups or companies at an early stage don't have the capacity to supply at the scale it's usually required.

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I think your best bet is to sample people from the lab, get customer validation/feedback, and start talking to contract manufacturers. This might be challenging if your customer wants you to provide 1-2 lbs for free. Spend as much time here as possible really figure out what your business looks like and if it's viable. Figure out the prices your customers are willing to pay and understand your manufacturing costs down to every hour of cycle time. If your business doesn't make money here figure something else out.

Also, figure out the rules on new chemicals in your specific country. If you are in the US do you need to do a PMN and would you qualify for low volume exemption once you started trying to sell.

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Really enjoy your article. Great insight.

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