For geospatial & space ventures
Make your geospatial product sell. Into committees, procurement, and the long cycle.
You sell geospatial and space tech into energy, oil and gas, infrastructure, and telecom at once, each with its own committee and long cycle. Tell a different story for each and what you actually do gets lost. The product is not the problem; the system that carries it through never got built. I build it, and I have sold in your world.
The short version
Why won't enterprise buyers buy our geospatial product, even when it works?
Because in energy and infrastructure the decision is not one person's. It moves through the user who loves it, IT, security, procurement, and finance, each with a veto and none with urgency. The buyer has no budget line for a category they cannot yet name, switching means changing a workflow people trust, and the value is pinned to a far-off ROI they can argue with. So a working product stops moving, not on merit, but on a buying process built to slow new things down. Selling here is a system that carries the product through that process. It is rarely built, and it is what I build.
Sound familiar?
If this is your world, you will know these.
- ✓Your product is dual-use: the same tech sells into defence and into government agencies, each with its own gatekeepers, clearances, and pace.
- ✓Those buyers are sensitive, so you can barely name a customer or show a case study, and every new prospect starts you back at zero trust.
- ✓You were funded through an incubator, a cohort, or a grant. You have runway, but almost no real exposure to the market yet.
- ✓Your buyer trusts the data. It is the workflow around it, and who has to sign off on it, that will not move.
- ✓The pilot wins the technical team, then gets stuck in security, legal, or procurement.
- ✓Users love it. Procurement does not buy it.
Recognize three of these and it is not how you are selling. The decisions under your pitch were never locked, and the world you sell into is built to slow new things down.
Why it is harder here
Why does a working geospatial product still not sell?
It looks like a long cycle. It is really a chain of small refusals, each one reasonable on its own, and together they stop a product that works.
01
The one who loves it cannot buy it
The engineer trusts your map. But the budget sits with someone who never saw the demo, and there is no category to file you under, so there is no line to spend from.
02
They have to defend your data, without you in the room
Before anyone signs, someone inside has to explain where your data came from and how accurate it is, to colleagues who never sat in your pitch. The map can be right and the deal still gets stuck, on the method, not the merit.
03
You slide from a product into a project
So you answer every question and build to their requirements list: the integration, the format, the certification. Slowly you stop being a product with a price and become a project with a scope.
04 · the one that costs you most
You sell their five-year ROI instead of your one job
To justify that scope, you reach for the buyer's far-off gain, what an asset owner saves over years. It is slow, and it is easy to argue with. What sells is smaller and truer: the one job your product does for them now, named in plain words. Price that, and the chain of refusals gets a lot shorter.
I know your world
I built the product and the buying path, from the inside.
You do not pay me to learn your industry while the clock runs. At VirGeo, a Fugro geo-data venture, the tech and the IP were strong, but after three years of planning there was still no product a buyer could try on their own. Every trial needed a consultant in the room.
I came in as interim product and go-to-market lead. I cut the product back to what created value, rewrote the story around how customers actually work, and built a loop so the team could test instead of plan. The product started shipping and selling. That is what a buying path looks like, built from the inside.
I came in as interim product and go-to-market lead. I cut the product back to what created value, rewrote the story around how customers actually work, and built a loop so the team could test instead of plan. The product started shipping and selling. That is what a buying path looks like, built from the inside.
5 of 15
At VirGeo I led 15 conversations with qualified prospects and closed 5. Not the advisor who watched, the operator who had to make it work.
What I build
Lock the decisions, build the system, sell the same way every time.
01
One customer, one use case to start
One buyer, one user, one job, and a price tied to what your product actually does for them. So your homepage qualifies the right people in ten seconds.
02
A story that travels
Homepage, deck, and brief say the same thing, so the committee hears one story without you in the room.
03
Proof a committee can act on
What convinces the user, the budget holder, security, and procurement, not a feature tour.
04
A first step that de-risks the pilot
A low-risk way in, not "book a demo" and hope.
Built for how geospatial actually sells, not a generic playbook. It starts with a free read of your homepage.
From your world
Geospatial and space teams that built a repeatable motion.
Our homepage didn't match our deck. Our deck didn't match sales. Thorsten rebuilt everything, aligned. Now prospects understand in the first minutes.
Every call, someone asks 'but which use cases?' and we end up listing every industry. It is painful, for us and for them. The work cut through it: we were completely underselling what we do, and now it clicks.
Nader · Co-founder, Lyrasense Prospects stopped asking 'which problem do you solve?' We get to yes or no in half the time.
The bench in your world
Who I work with in geospatial and space.
You are not just getting me. In this world I work with a small network I trust, so a founder gets the whole go-to-market covered, with clean handoffs.
Emmanuel Mondon
AdviceGEO
Geospatial & EO advisor, deep-tech scout
25 years across geospatial and Earth Observation (ERDAS, Intergraph, DigitalGlobe, Maxar), Munich-based. He co-founded Space Cooperative Europe and spots founders whose product works but who cannot sell it yet.
Emmanuel on LinkedIn→
Space Cooperative Europe
SCE
The European space cooperative
The first open, independent European cooperative for the space business: 26 members and 500+ stakeholders across space, finance, and acceleration, with a funding platform and an accelerator. Munich-based, co-founded by Emmanuel.
spacecoop.eu→
Mike Swetman
Morpheus
Go-to-market & technical talent
Places go-to-market and technical hires into startups and scale-ups, permanent or interim, with a focus on geo-data, robotics, AI, and renewable energy, so the hires already understand the space.
Morpheus→
Mitchel van Luit
AceDigital
Behavioural digital marketing
Behavioural psychology meets digital marketing: high-converting websites and customer-journey advertising built on how buyers actually decide.
AceDigital→Questions you're asking
Three fair objections, answered straight.
We sell to multiple industries. Will you make us pick one?
No. I make you frame one bet clearly enough to act on. Then you decide, with eyes open, whether you can and want to run another in parallel. Framing one well usually makes that choice obvious.
Our cycles are 6 to 12 months. How can this help?
Fuzzy decisions add months, because the buyer needs extra calls just to understand what you do. Lock them and the cycle shrinks. The work is short; the time it saves per deal is not.
We already have a deck. Why doesn't it work?
Because it was built from decisions that were never locked, so each slide drifts. I lock the decisions first. Then the deck is built straight from those decisions, and your team delivers it the same way every time.
Start here
Start with a free read.
Send me your homepage. I read it the way your buyer reads it, and send back where it loses them. No call required, and it is the same first step every founder takes.
Built in geospatial and space, but the system is the same one I build for any founder.