Marina Leivald
CMO/Tech Strategist
Selling Innovation
Try selling someone a pixelated JPEG for six figures in 2019. Or goggles that “replace your office” in 2023. Or a stitched-demo AI agent that supposedly “runs your company overnight” in 2024. To the uninitiated, each looked like scams. To insiders, they looked inevitable - until they didn’t.
Founders make the same mistake: they answer the unknown with campaigns. Campaigns are fireworks. They make noise, light up the sky, and vanish. Impressive, but ephemeral. What actually works is a grid: infrastructure that powers trust, credibility, and liquidity long after the sparks fade. Fireworks sell hope. Grids sell inevitability.
Designing for Adoption Curves
Everett Rogers’ diffusion of innovation still applies: innovators → early adopters → early majority → late majority → laggards. But in unpredictable markets, you don’t wait for diffusion to happen — you build adoption rails that accelerate the curve and lay foundation for your narratives.
Early adopters → insider drops, Discord-first launches, and invite-only previews that make joining feel like a privilege.
Early majority → credible media partnerships, city-scale pilots, and industry validation that normalize the product.
Late majority → trust-driven UX, anti-hype positioning, and “default option” framing.
When a product “doesn’t exist yet” the market resists. You’re the first one storming the beachhead, doing activations in strange new niches. If you’re lucky, you unlock value. If you’re unlucky, you unlock it for everyone else - only to realize you don’t have the infrastructure to scale while copycats swarm in.
The job isn’t just to run activations; it’s to shape the entire buying path in people’s heads. You’re teaching the market how to believe in something alien. And once belief takes root, inevitability follows — usually with all the baggage: patent wars, copycats, commoditization.
Scripting inevitability looks like this:
Seed narrative with insiders — early adopters on Discord, in Telegram, in niche conferences.
Amplify through credible partnerships — cities, institutions, industry validators who make the story “safe.”
Normalize via cultural adoption — festivals, civic rituals, and mainstream use cases that make the weird thing ordinary.
Drone Shows
At first, they were exotic stunts in closed circles — insider videos, test runs at niche festivals. Then came amplification: Dubai and Shanghai commissioning them for civic events. Finally, normalization: drone shows reframed as the “responsible” replacement for fireworks. The cycle ended where all inevitability does — commoditization. Today, dozens of operators can run shows. The real moat isn’t the spectacle anymore, it’s the system you built around it.
Don’t get sentimental. If your product becomes inevitable, it will also become a commodity. That’s not failure — that’s physics. Your edge is how well you prepare for the moment the hype turns into a price war.
System Design Over Playbooks
Innovations don’t fit into existing categories. That’s why they’re innovations. If you try to jam them into old marketing frameworks, you don’t just waste money - you actively prove to skeptics that you’re lost. The answer is a system.
Adaptive funnels → messaging flexes as adoption signals emerge.
OSINT → tracking capital flows, regulatory noise, cultural chatter, builder velocity.
Feedback loops → retention curves feedback into pricing, distribution, and narrative.
ICOs in 2017 were fireworks: raise fast, burn faster. DeFi in 2020 was a grid: liquidity pools, governance rails, composability. The difference? One left ashes. The other left infrastructure. The lesson is simple. If your “marketing” can’t survive without ad spend, you’re not running a business — you’re running a bonfire.
Credibility Architecture for Skeptical Markets
Every radical product looks scammy at first. Renting a stranger’s couch? Scam. Paying for digital skins? Scam. Flying drones instead of fireworks? Scam. Until suddenly, it isn’t. Campaigns amplify doubt. Systems neutralize it.
Proof comes first — not glossy Photoshoped dashboards or nano Banana demo tricks dressed up as breakthroughs, but live metrics and visible traction that can’t be faked. Transparency follows — open repositories, public roadmaps, even raw shipping logs that show the work as it happens. And finally, partnerships matter — the fastest way to anchor the unknown to credibility is to stand next to those who already have it, whether that’s Nvidia aligning with AI labs or governments licensing next-gen tech for civic use.
Who Eats You Alive
When you fail to build systems, someone else eats. Who benefits from your fireworks?
Platforms → love your campaigns; they sell you the clicks.
Agencies → love your fireworks; they bill you for the sparks.
Copycats → love your activations; you just unlocked the market for them.
Incumbents → love your credibility; they’ll buy the story you couldn’t scale.
Lab-Grown Meat
Startups proved the tech worked, unlocked regulators, seeded adoption with tastings at niche restaurants. Then Big Food swooped in with scale and distribution. The pioneers lit fireworks. The incumbents built the grid. Don’t forget: your competition isn’t just other startups. It’s the billion-dollar giant that thanks you for doing their R&D.
Case Files: The Unknown in Action
Boston Dynamics Robots (2013–23): Viral demos = fireworks. Residue: engineering credibility, no real market.SpaceX Reusable Rockets (2008–21): Proof on the launchpad. Residue: reusability as the new industry default.Lab-Grown Meat (2016–25): Futurist hype, regulatory drag. Residue: patents + cultural literacy.AI Influencers (2018–25): Novelty at first. Residue: synthetic celebrities now a mainstream ad channel.
From Fireworks to Grids
History won’t remember the startups that lit the sky with viral demos. It will remember those who built the rails, scaled the systems, and survived the meat grinder long enough to own the infrastructure.
Field Note Final: If you’re still betting on campaigns, you’re burning cash to teach customers for your competitors. In chaotic markets, survival isn’t flashy. It’s structural. The grid is the brand.
