Up to now, the humanoid robotics industry has been all promises and pilots. While important in the eventual deployment of new technology, these programs involve a small number of robots and often don’t graduate into anything more meaningful. On Thursday, however, Agility announced that it has entered into a formal deal following a successful pilot with logistics giant GXO.
Digit’s first job will be moving plastic totes around a Georgia Spanx factory — which is most definitely not a euphemism. Neither party has revealed precisely how many of the bipedal robots will be pulling boxes off cobots and placing them onto conveyor belts, which likely means the figure is still on the small side. When we’re talking tens or hundreds of thousands, the parties involved would typically be eager to share that info.
The systems are being leased as part of a RaaS (robots-as-a-service) model, rather than being purchased outright. This allows the client to defer the massive upfront costs of such a complex system, while still having access to support and software updates.
GXO began piloting Digit robots last year. The logistics firm also recently announced a pilot deal with one of Agility’s biggest competitors, Apptronik. It’s not clear how one will affect the other.
Peggy Johnson, who stepped into Agility’s CEO role in March, has stressed the firm’s focus on ROI — a marked difference in a category where the results are still largely theoretical.
“There will be many firsts in the humanoid robot market in the years to come, but I’m extremely proud of the fact that Agility is the first with actual humanoid robots deployed at a customer site, generating revenue and solving real-world business problems,” Johnson said. “Agility has always been focused on the only metric that matters — delivering value to our customers by putting Digit to work — and this milestone deployment raises the bar for the entire industry.”
Oregon-based Agility has been ahead of the rest of the market in terms of development and deployment, so it’s not surprising to see the company be the first to another key milestone. Of course, this is still very much early days for the industry and no clear market leader has emerged.
Amazon began piloting Agility systems in its own warehouses last October, but neither company has made a formal announcement with regard to next steps.
Up to now, the humanoid robotics industry has been all promises and pilots. While important in the eventual deployment of new technology, these programs involve a small number of robots and often don’t graduate into anything more meaningful. On Thursday, however, Agility announced that it has entered into a formal deal following a successful pilot with logistics giant GXO.
Digit’s first job will be moving plastic totes around a Georgia Spanx factory — which is most definitely not a euphemism. Neither party has revealed precisely how many of the bipedal robots will be pulling boxes off cobots and placing them onto conveyor belts, which likely means the figure is still on the small side. When we’re talking tens or hundreds of thousands, the parties involved would typically be eager to share that info.
The systems are being leased as part of a RaaS (robots-as-a-service) model, rather than being purchased outright. This allows the client to defer the massive upfront costs of such a complex system, while still having access to support and software updates.
GXO began piloting Digit robots last year. The logistics firm also recently announced a pilot deal with one of Agility’s biggest competitors, Apptronik. It’s not clear how one will affect the other.
Peggy Johnson, who stepped into Agility’s CEO role in March, has stressed the firm’s focus on ROI — a marked difference in a category where the results are still largely theoretical.
“There will be many firsts in the humanoid robot market in the years to come, but I’m extremely proud of the fact that Agility is the first with actual humanoid robots deployed at a customer site, generating revenue and solving real-world business problems,” Johnson said. “Agility has always been focused on the only metric that matters — delivering value to our customers by putting Digit to work — and this milestone deployment raises the bar for the entire industry.”
Oregon-based Agility has been ahead of the rest of the market in terms of development and deployment, so it’s not surprising to see the company be the first to another key milestone. Of course, this is still very much early days for the industry and no clear market leader has emerged.
Amazon began piloting Agility systems in its own warehouses last October, but neither company has made a formal announcement with regard to next steps.
Only 7% of founders have a pitch deck with a reasonably good go-to-market (GTM) narrative. Given that a lot of founders are raising money to acquire new customers, allow me to put words to what that means: It’s an absolute embarrassment.
The vast majority of slide decks barely qualify to be called even a coherent brainstorm. As an investor, when I’m looking at such a deck, I despair. Why should I give you $5 million when you clearly haven’t the foggiest clue how you’re going to deploy that money in a meaningful way?
Trust me when I say this: Fundraising is hard right now, and there are no signs that things will get easier. It’s crucial to have a basic level of competency.
Here’s how to approach designing a competent go-to-market slide:
It’s key to develop a deep understanding of your customers for developing an effective go-to-market strategy and persuasive slide. This involves more than just demographic segmentation; it requires immersing yourself in your potential users’ lives to grasp their challenges, needs and decision-making processes. This demands diligence, empathy and strategic market research. Your understanding of your customers often shows up elsewhere in the deck (under “target customer” or similar), but without it, the GTM slide often doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Once you have your data, it’s up to you to distill it and identify patterns in their behaviors, preferences and needs. For instance, if you’re launching a new fitness app, you might find many prefer personalized workout plans. Such insights are crucial for customizing your GTM strategy to your market’s specific needs. That customization, in turn, informs the channels you’ll be using to market your product.
Such info can go in the appendix, but it informs your market segmentation. Since customers differ, various segments may need distinct approaches in your GTM plan. For example, engaging tech-savvy millennials might require a different strategy than reaching baby boomers, even if both groups could benefit from your product.
Putting all of this together will result in a much stronger go-to-market narrative — one that’s backed by evidence. It’ll also show that you’ve done some experimentation and that you have a baseline you can hopefully improve over time.
Tying the GTM to your cost
The truth is, an innovative product is just the start. Most startup founders over-index on that part. Yes, it’s important, but the real challenge is reaching your target customers. This is where your customer acquisition strategy comes in — how will you attract and bring new users or clients to your product or service? For startups, it’s crucial to engage customers meaningfully to build loyalty. Your GTM plan should outline how to attract, engage, and convert prospects cost-effectively and scalably.
So far, this is all very wishy-washy. The real rubber hits the road when you’re drawing up the plan for execution. What channels will you use? What will it cost? What is your custom acquisition cost (CAC) per channel, and what is your overall CAC per customer across all channels (often referred to as “blended CAC”)? When you have all of those numbers in place, you’ll come across as a founder who has a very clear view of where they are today and where they need to go.
An example of a go-to-market slide with a half-decent plan. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / TechCrunch
While organic reach is valuable, paid advertising can boost your efforts, especially in the initial days. Platforms like Google and Facebook Ads let you target advertising to reach specific demographics. The key is to create ads that resonate with your target audience, and optimize campaigns for the best return on investment.
From there, your strategy will require ongoing adjustment based on data and feedback. A/B testing different approaches can help identify what works best with your audience. By being open to experimentation, you can refine your strategy for better effectiveness and efficiency — and you can set goals around that. “We acquire customers at $390 right now, but we think we can optimize that to $240 per customer,” is a powerful statement. Back it up with some evidence for your hypothesis, and suddenly you’re telling a very compelling story.
CAC is more than a number; it’s a way to evaluate the effectiveness of your customer acquisition strategy. It should be considered alongside the Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer, and LTV should significantly exceed CAC for a viable, scalable business model. The CAC-to-LTV ratio is an important metric. Measure it, report it and benchmark it against the industry.
Market expansions
Growth often involves entering new markets or segments. This could mean targeting a new geographic area, addressing a different customer segment, or expanding your product line. Each of these strategies requires thorough market research to identify opportunities and understand the unique challenges they present. For instance, geographic expansion might involve navigating different regulatory environments or cultural nuances.
A clear understanding of these factors is crucial for tailoring your approach to each new market effectively — if part of your GTM is “Launch in Germany” when so far you’ve only operated in the U.S., it’s crucial to show how risky this approach is. Do you have access to the right channels? Do you understand the market? What are the risks of this approach? If your plan works, what is the upside?
It’s universally true that your human capital is crucial for any form of growth, and your team is your most valuable asset for scaling. As you grow, attracting, retaining and developing talent becomes increasingly important. This involves hiring individuals with the right skills and mindset, and fostering a culture that supports innovation, agility and continuous learning. Does your organization have the right people in the right seats to drive and sustain growth? Awesome! Weave that into the narrative, too.
Metrics for the win
So how do you know if what you’re doing is working? You measure it. Metrics are a cornerstone of marketing, and your investors will want to see that your plan is aggressive, but achievable.
Crafting financial projections requires balancing optimism with realism. Estimate your revenue for a future period (monthly, quarterly or yearly) based on market size, pricing, sales efforts and capacity. If you want to go all-out, model it so and include best-case, worst-case and likely scenarios to navigate market conditions in an appendix slide.
If you don’t have a fully fleshed-out plan yet, that’s OK. Show how you’re going to get there and the first few steps. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / TechCrunch
For the core deck, though, a firm grasp of your life-time value, the customer acquisition cost, gross margin and monthly or annual recurring revenue (MRR/ARR) helps show that you understand the financial levers driving your growth.
Finding the narrative
There’s a lot going on in your go-to-market strategy, and you don’t have to tell the full, detailed story in the core deck. Some of the best pitch decks I’ve seen include a strong go-to-market strategy only for the beachhead audience — the first customer profile you are going after. They then include additional approaches in the appendix, but that helps clarify that you have a solid, well-thought-through Plan A for how to acquire customers. All of that together helps an investor justify why they might be interested in writing a check.
When I started working from home in the late 1980s as a freelance technical writer, I was clearly an outlier. Even contractors mostly went into the office in those days. Over time, though, that slowly changed, and the pandemic — along with generationally shifting views on work-life balance — accelerated worker sentiment away from going into a formal office every day, even if some CEOs wish it weren’t so.
Today, 14% of U.S. workers work at home full time (including me), and that number is expected to increase to 20% by next year, according to data published by USA Today. In total, 58% of white-collar employees want flexibility in their work schedules to work at home a few days a week, per that same USA Today data. Yet, we are continually getting post-pandemic mixed messages about returning to the office.
Some companies like IBM and Amazon have been pushing hard to get people back to the office, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reportedly telling employees if they wanted to stay remote, it probably wouldn’t work out well for them. Wayfair, the Boston-based online furniture company, concentrated on remote workers over in-office folks in a layoff earlier this year, according to a WSJ report.
Big tech CEOs like Jassy and Elon Musk have been pushing back hard against remote work; Musk called it “morally wrong” for some people to work at home while service workers had to show up. Meanwhile, Michael Bloomberg suggested remote workers weren’t actually working, but playing golf (which honestly sounds like projecting to me). Even Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, whose company pushed the notion of a digital HQ during the pandemic, began preaching about a return to the office, blaming working from home for lack of productivity, especially among new employees.
That’s a lot of executive energy being directed against working from home and toward working in the office. Some have suggested that it’s because these companies have invested heavily in office buildings and need people to fill them. Maybe it’s just a need to have the employees in front of managers for control purposes, or they genuinely believe that workers are more productive in the office. Whatever the reason, they seem quite committed to getting back to the office.
Do they have a point? Will workers be more productive under the watchful eye of their managers sitting in cubicles instead of the comfort of their homes? Perhaps more importantly to results-driven CEOs, will their companies make more money? Research from the University of Pittsburgh Katz School of Business published earlier this year suggests not necessarily.
“Our findings are consistent with employees’ concerns that managers use RTO (return to office mandates) for power grabbing and blaming employees for poor performance. We provide evidence that RTO mandates hurt employee satisfaction but do not improve firm performance,” the report found.
Karen Mangia, president and chief strategy officer at the Engineered Innovation Group, who has studied and written extensively about remote work, says she was surprised to find that workers tended to value flexibility over place; it wasn’t so much where you needed to be, so much as your ability to control when you worked, to maintain a proper work-life balance.
“All of the research I’ve been looking at shows the same thing: that employees who have some degree of flexibility over where and when they work are reporting higher levels of employee engagement. That is the group of people that is demonstrating to be more engaged and more productive,” she said.
What’s more, Mangia has found that those companies forcing employees to go back to the office are unsurprisingly having to deal with more employee burnout. “The argument so many times behind this return to office mandate is that employees will be more productive because we can collaborate in person and, and things get done. Well, being burnt out and sustaining a burnout level is the opposite of being more productive,” she said.
There are also good reasons to encourage hiring more remote employees, including access to a much broader and diverse employee base than you could get from one geographical location.
“I’ve had a big Midwestern consumer packaged goods company say ‘we’re finding all sorts of talent. Whereas before we insisted all employees must be local or must be in the city, now we’ve opened it up more broadly, and we got way better candidates. We don’t ever want to go back and we’re going to open that up permanently,’” said Dion Hinchcliffe, an analyst at Constellation Research who has been watching this trend for a long time.
The next debate is how much, if any, time should employees be required to spend in the office and for what reasons. There are many tech companies that are leaving it up to their employees to decide where they want to work, and it seems to work quite well.
GitLab is a prime example of a company that has been fully remote from the day it was founded a decade ago. Other tech companies with a flexible approach include Dropbox, Atlassian and Okta, none of which require a specific number of days in the office.
As for startups, anecdotally the vast majority of founders I speak to are remote-first. Hinchcliffe says this is part of a shift to a decentralized workplace where startups in particular avoid the regular overhead of having an office. Instead they often rent space in the WeWork model to get together with customers, press and analysts, or each other, as needed.
Mangia says that the one worker demographic that does tend to struggle in all-virtual environments is new hires out of college, who benefit from being in an office. “When you have new-hire employees, especially early in their career, they do ramp up faster and report a better experience with a lower degree of burnout when they can come into a place where there are other people to help them,” she said, giving some credence to what Benioff was saying.
Even the most ardent work-from-home advocates understand there will be times when there is value in getting together for team building, to meet customers or to collaborate and brainstorm in person, but in spite of the cries from big CEOs, employees have tasted this flexibility, and it’s going to be hard to get the genie back in the bottle. For now, it continues to be a debate between labor and management about where and how work gets done.
