Over the past 10 years, Spotlight has partnered with hundreds of firms ranging from start-ups all the way to publicly traded tech industry juggernauts. We deliver custom analyst relations programs, each designed to achieve unique goals based on the size and maturity of the firm. For large firms, the goals and approach for engaging the analyst channel are well understood by its stakeholders. But for startups, the path to value is often less clear to its founders and leaders: When is my startup mature enough to engage the analyst community? How early do analysts want to hear from startups? What value can my startup expect if I invest the time and effort needed to engage analysts?

A new survey, “State of Startups with Industry Analysts (SSIA),” was conducted by the University of Edinburgh Business School and AR firms Schaffer AR and Holscher.one aims to answer these questions from the perspective of three stakeholder groups: startups and scaleups, the ecosystem of investors and accelerators, and industry analysts.

Andrew’s Take

“This SSIA survey reveals some valuable insights about the relationships startups should be having with industry analysts. One surprising finding from the survey was that a slight majority (53%) of analyst respondents wanted to learn about startups as early as the MVP and beta stages! This was much sooner in a startup’s journey than I had expected. A less surprising finding was that a large majority (~80%) of analysts felt that startups could achieve earlier success by tapping into analyst wisdom for product strategy and market fit.

Based on this survey data, ambitious tech startups should engage the analyst community early and often. The value of decreasing execution risk through better product-market-fit and increasing brand amplification through citations in research seems well worth the consideration by founders and leaders.”

Andrew Hsu

A new survey, “State of Startups with Industry Analysts (SSIA),” was conducted by the University of Edinburgh Business School and AR firms Schaffer AR and Holscher.one aims to answer these questions from the perspective of three stakeholder groups: startups and scaleups, the ecosystem of investors and accelerators, and industry analysts.

Spotlight is proud to be a sponsor of this work. If you’d like to see a video of the survey results, head on over to the SSIA Youtube channel. To download the full report, head here (North America) and here (European and other countries). 

Questions about the data? Feel free to connect with Chris Holscher of Holscher One (chris.holscher@holscher.one), Robin Schaffer of Schaffer AR (robin@schafferar.com), and Professor Neil Pollock of the University of Edinburgh (neil.pollock@ed.ac.uk).