Positioning for the Next Platform Shift: How Making Immersive Experiences Accessible — and Why Timing is Everything

Every decade or so, technology undergoes a seismic shift. The web replaced the Yellow Pages. Smartphones redefined personal computing. Today, immersive 3D content — augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) — is quietly moving from futuristic concept to everyday expectation.

Kunal Patel, co-founder and CTO of BrandXR, is betting that this shift is already underway. His company’s mission: make it as easy to create immersive content as it is to build a website on Squarespace.

It’s a bold positioning move — and one rooted in a clear-eyed understanding of the buyer, the market’s readiness, and how to bridge the gap between innovation and adoption.

Lesson 1: Position Your Product for the Market That Exists Today

BrandXR didn’t begin as a no-code platform. Patel’s team was initially delivering large, custom-built AR and VR projects for NASA, Microsoft, and other enterprise clients.

While these projects proved demand, they also exposed the bottleneck: immersive content took too long, cost too much, and required highly specialized teams.

Patel’s insight was a classic positioning play:

Early adopters (enterprise “big boys”) needed pro services now.
The broader market wasn’t yet ready to create AR content themselves — but they would be soon.

By serving the innovators first while building a no-code platform in parallel, BrandXR positioned itself to ride the adoption curve at just the right moment.

Lesson 2: Use Buyer Intelligence to Shape the Roadmap

Patel didn’t lock himself in a lab building what he thought the market wanted. He and his team spoke with over 200 potential buyers about budgets, use cases, and pain points.

What they learned:

There was a massive gap between enterprise AR budgets and what mid-market buyers could afford.
Many potential customers had partial capabilities — like creative ideas and calls-to-action — but were missing critical assets like 3D models.
Competing solutions left too many “gaps” for buyers to fill themselves, creating friction and killing deals.

This intelligence shaped BrandXR’s product + services model: subscription access to the platform, plus optional pro services to fill capability gaps.

Lesson 3: Combine Product and Services to Accelerate Adoption

Many SaaS purists frown on pairing services with a product, but Patel’s approach turns that into a competitive advantage:

Platform subscriptions start around $1,000/month.
Pro services (3D modeling, creative support) are offered as needed, eliminating “I can’t” objections.
As the platform improves, reliance on services naturally decreases — but they remain available to smooth onboarding.

For a new category, this hybrid model is less about revenue diversification and more about market creation. Without it, BrandXR’s early customers might never have gotten to “yes.”

Lesson 4: Market the Shift, Not Just the Product

Patel frames AR/VR adoption in familiar terms:

“In the mid-90s, people asked why they’d type in a URL when they could just open the Yellow Pages. A few years later, if you weren’t online, you were a dinosaur. We’re at the same point now with immersive 3D content.”

This narrative positions BrandXR as the survival kit for the next extinction event — a far more compelling story than “we make AR easy.”

Lesson 5: Time Your Launch for Technology Readiness

BrandXR’s no-code platform wouldn’t have worked five years ago. AR/VR hardware was expensive, consumer adoption was low, and smartphone AR capabilities weren’t standard.

Today:

Nearly every smartphone can run AR experiences.
Major players (Apple, Meta, Microsoft) are investing billions in AR hardware and consumer education.
Businesses are beginning to view immersive content as a competitive advantage, not a novelty.

Patel’s advice to other SaaS founders: watch for the moment when buyer awareness, enabling tech, and your own capabilities align — then move fast.

Why This Matters for SaaS & Tech Companies

BrandXR’s playbook is a masterclass in entering an emerging market:

Anchor your positioning in a clear, inevitable trend.
Gather buyer intelligence to identify adoption barriers.
Bridge capability gaps with services until your product alone can carry the load.
Tell a market-shift story that makes your solution urgent.
Time your scale-up to match technology readiness.

For SaaS and tech companies, the lesson is clear: the next big opportunity may not be about inventing something entirely new — it’s about positioning yourself to make the inevitable shift accessible to the masses.