How to Go From Research Breakthrough to Market-Ready Product: Obsess Over Customers

No one hands startup founders a manual on their first day in the role, but if they did it would likely include the advice, “start with the problem, not the solution.” 

As Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham put it: “The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.”

This is startup orthodoxy. But is it always right? What about startups that grow not out of personal frustration but cutting-edge research? If you start with a scientific breakthrough and then look for ways to commercialize the new technology, are you doomed to failure? 

Not according to two Greek founders who took this less common approach. Nikolaos Mellios, co-founder and CSO of precision medicine startup Circular Genomics, and Philip Poulidis, co-founder and CEO of AI-powered HealthTech startup ODAIA, spoke to Endeavor Greece about how they rewrote the usual startup playbook for finding product-market fit. 

“Fall in love with the problem, not the technology.” 

Nikolaos was obsessed with a problem - the terrible toll neurological disorders can take and how doctors continue to struggle to treat them - but his approach initially wasn’t to start a business, but become a research scientist. 

“Everyone has folks in their family, friends that have gone through this journey and they're disappointed [by the current standard of care]” he says.”It shouldn't be that we have to wait for years to get proper treatment.”

He trained as a physician in Greece and then went to UMass Medical School and MIT to study brain disorders. There, he focused on circular RNAs; tiny donut-shaped molecules that can cross the blood-brain barrier and be detected with a simple blood test.

He realised they could help create tests to detect Alzheimer’s early or predict if antidepressants would work for a patient. But for that to happen, these tests needed to reach doctors and patients. 

“The only way I can make that happen is that the product is commercially successful. If it's not, I'm not helping patients and physicians enough,” Nikolaos realized. 

Making that happen required not just solid science, but a deep understanding of market dynamics and a great go-to-market plan, both of which Nikolaos lacked. Knowing what you don't know is incredibly important, he stresses. 

He and his co-founders and initial investors started looking at hiring a CEO with significant experience in precision medicine who could build a strong commercial team. In doing so, Nikolaos was pleasantly surprised how willing people were to provide guidance to an early start-up. “We just knocked on the proper doors with the proper message and people were generous with their expert advice,” he remembers. 

Even with the right team, going from lab to business involved a lot of learning and pivots. “I had the assumption that compelling science speaks by itself,” Nikolaos says. He quickly discovered other considerations matter equally, including fitting into doctors’ existing workflows and figuring out who pays. 

“It's not a straight line. Be ready to make a turn, even a U-turn, if needed,” he says. “The science is a good start, but it's just the start.” 

Navigating this winding journey successfully demands cognitive flexibility and a willingness to adapt as you learn. “Fall in love with the problem, not the technology,” Nikolaos advises. 

“Obsess over getting a few customers to love you.” 

Philip Poulidis isn’t an academic researcher but a serial entrepreneur who spent his career leveraging technology to solve business problems. So when his academic co-founder Helen Kontozopoulos, then at the University of Toronto, came to him with a promising new technique to apply AI techniques to process mining, he was intrigued. 

It was clear that the technology could be commercially useful, but it wasn’t clear exactly how. To figure out the right application for this breakthrough, Philip and his co-founders considered VC interest and explored applying the technology in different verticals like finance, telecoms, and life science by booking a ton of exploratory meetings. One led to a breakthrough. 

At a top ten pharma company a senior manager laid out how the company spends months analyzing patient journeys to figure which physicians to target when selling new drugs. Philip realized his technology could do the same thing basically instantly: “That was our eureka moment.” 

They had found the right problem to solve. Now they needed to bring in the necessary expertise to take advantage of the opportunity. Like Nikolaos, Philip focused on finding experts “that really understand all the landmines and all the blind spots that we're going to need to know.” 

Also like Nikolaos, he engaged in a long, detailed discovery process digging into the workflow and habits of potential customers. Often, the best insights came from companies that opted against using ODAIA’s platform.  

“It's every entrepreneur's job to dig and dig and dig and really find out exactly what caused that potential customer to walk away,” Philip says. People may be too polite to share their concerns, so how you frame your question matters. 

“We ask questions like, ‘What could we have said that would have made you immediately say, yes, this is for me?’ It puts them in your shoes as the seller of this technology. Then an entrepreneur is going to hear things that they would've never heard before,” he promises. 

Through this process, ODAIA discovered many customers expected implementing their technology to be hard work. In response they made it more modular to make it less daunting. They also found they needed to educate the market about the technology. 

“It was almost too good to believe, so we had to show up at conferences, speak at events, host our own webinars, find those early adopters to speak on our behalf and tell their peers, this is working,” Philip says.  

You might think this process sounds a lot like the traditional process of finding product-market fit. But Philip advises founders to view it differently: “Don't obsess over product market fit. Obsess over making your first few customers fall in love with what you've built. Really focus on the few that are going to give you honest feedback. You need to hear the unvarnished truth.” 

Don’t worry if that involves doing things that don’t scale at first. “You'll figure out what you can scale within that delivery and engagement process,” Philip promises. But you won’t know what you’re aiming for if you don’t build a close, open relationship with customers initially. 

Flipping the script on product-market fit 

Is it possible to flip the script for finding product-market fit and start with a breakthrough technology and then find the problem it solves? These founders’ stories prove it is. But doing so successfully demands an obsessive focus on customers’ needs and a willingness to shift your thinking and your plans in response. 

It’s a journey Nikolaos hopes more researchers and academics consider taking. 

“Young scientists or not so young scientists that are really interested in solving problems in their field should entertain the thought of starting their own company or working with others to translate their research findings to an actionable product that can impact society,” he urges. 

Scale Up Stories is a new blog series by Endeavor Greece capturing honest reflections from founders who’ve been through it all - the pivots, the breakthroughs, and the internal shifts. Raw and real, these are stories of resilience, clarity, and everything in between. Written by Jessica Stillman, Author at Inc.