Deep Tech’s Secret: Building Markets Before They Exist

Building Ground‑Zero Markets

In the world of next‑gen deep tech, the most formidable tools often started with no market at all. From programmable finance to AI‐native vector infrastructure, these innovations didn’t just climb a ladder—they had to dig a new one.

Why Existing Go‑To‑Market Models Fail

Traditional sales frameworks presuppose a buyer with a clear problem and a catalog of solutions. Emerging tech flips that premise:

• No pre‑existing buyers.
• No established categories.
• Engineering is cutting‑edge; marketing tools are legacy.

Consequently, the first milestone is not sales closure but problem education. The marketer must frame the challenge before demonstrating the product.

Xian Huang’s Market‑Creation Blueprint

With a track record spanning AI infrastructure and fintech, Xian Huang has engineered go‑to‑market systems for brands such as Paxos, Pinecone, and Highnote. Her methodology illustrates a new discipline in product marketing: grow a market from scratch, not scale an existing one.

Key Pillars of Huang’s Approach

• Problem Framing – Teach stakeholders how to define the issue.
• Solution Mapping – Align the product as the optimal answer.
• Category Creation – Build a brand perception that becomes the market’s foundation.

In practice, this means product marketing becomes a market‑creation engine, reshaping habits, triggers, and beliefs to lay the groundwork for a brand’s future success.

Why traditional GTM collapses in emerging markets

Reimagining Go‑to‑Market in Uncharted Infra

Why Traditional B2B Playbooks Fail

• Assumed competition – Most frameworks expect clear rivals.
• Pre‑defined value – Buyers are believed to know the category.
• Predictable journey – A linear buyer path is presumed optimal.

Emerging Infra: The New Frontier

• No common vocabulary – Messaging lacks a shared language.
• No mental model – Stakeholders have no anchor for concepts.
• No buyer path – Optimization is impossible without a predictable journey.

Huang’s Manifesto for Foundation‑Building

“Selling a product that distorts existing architecture isn’t just a transaction.” – Huang explains.
“You’re constructing the market’s own foundations.”

Practical Impact Across Emerging Tech

• Paxos – Spearheaded the regulated stablecoin narrative.
• Pinecone – Pioneered the AI vector infrastructure market.
• Early‑stage adoption – Built GTM systems that translated unfamiliar tech into scalable business value.

Translating new financial infrastructure in an ambiguous environment

Paxos’s Global Stablecoin Launch

Huang’s Arrival – At a key inflection point, Paxos welcomed its first product marketer. The U.S.-regulated stablecoin, USDP, boasted solid technical and regulatory underpinnings but reached only a niche crypto audience. With no scalable marketing systems, Paxos faced low brand visibility, prolonged partner onboarding, and confusion among institutional prospects new to stablecoins or blockchain infrastructure.

Strategic GTM Implementation

• Tiered Partner Engagement – Huang introduced a multi-tier model that trimmed integration friction and shortened onboarding cycles.
• Localized Messaging – She crafted messaging strategies that supported international expansion, especially across Latin America and Asia.
• Repeatable GTM Architecture – The architecture aligned product readiness with evolving regulatory clarity and empowered technical, legal, and business stakeholders to evaluate and adopt the product.

Outcome and Legacy

Huang’s system became the cornerstone of Paxos’s partner ecosystem, expanding to nearly 100 financial platforms worldwide. In just one year, USDP’s market capitalization grew from under $100 million to over $1.4 billion. The frameworks she established laid the foundation for Paxos’s ongoing stablecoin initiatives, including international expansion and multi-jurisdictional regulatory approvals. Her work institutionalized a scalable marketing and partner infrastructure that continues to support Paxos’s position as a global leader in compliant digital asset issuance.

Framing the invisible infrastructure of AI

Reimagining Pinecone’s Market Journey

Setting the Scene

Pinecone’s venture into the AI arena began with a groundbreaking invention: the vector database. Yet, at its infancy, most enterprise buyers were unfamiliar with this novel technology, its role within AI ecosystems, or its tangible benefits for everyday scenarios.

Bridging Technical Excellence and Business Impact

• While low-latency search and horizontal scalability were pivotal technical benchmarks, Huang reframed these achievements as essential business outcomes.
• These outcomes were categorized into:
  • Reduction of genAI hallucinations
  • Persistent memory for autonomous agents
  • Enhanced semantic relevance in retrieval frameworks

Orchestrating Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Huang synergized product, sales, and developer relations to construct a structured use‑case taxonomy.
• She translated core technical strengths into emerging AI workflows such as:
  • Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG)
  • Candidate generation
  • Multimodal search
• Her leadership guided go‑to‑market plans for pivotal product launches, ensuring messaging aligned with market readiness and enterprise adoption objectives.

Outcome Achievement

These integrated efforts accelerated Pinecone’s growth trajectory, resulting in adoption by over 30,000 enterprise users and a spotlight in Forbes’s AI 50 list.

Continued Momentum

As Pinecone evolves, the blend of technical mastery and business‑centric communication remains the cornerstone of its success.

Industry implications and future outlook

Shaping the Future of Market Creation

The New Frontier of Product Marketing

In a world where finance, AI, and infrastructure are continuously reimagining their fundamentals, companies are racing to deliver products before the market even knows how to judge them. This shift means product marketing is no longer about simple messaging execution. Instead, it’s a strategic endeavor that builds mental models, shapes buyer understanding, and navigates uncertainty.

• Market Creation as a Strategic Layer – Go‑to‑market strategy is now a core component of how markets are formed, not just a back‑office function.
• Ambiguity Management – Successful teams are those who can ship breakthrough products while also teaching the world how to adopt them.
• Maturing Categories – Emerging fields like agentic AI and programmable financial systems are maturing, demanding teams that can bridge the gap between innovation and adoption.

Key Takeaway

As new technologies reshape foundational layers, the companies that will thrive are those who not only deliver transformative products but also lead the world in understanding and adopting them.