Hugo van de Haar

Commercial strategy for European space and deep-tech. Grounded in research I publish myself.

I help space and deep-tech companies work out who buys what they build, and say it in a way those buyers recognise. That rests on two kinds of research: the European market, which I publish openly as The Demand Side, and your own market and buyers, which I research per engagement and never publish.

Autumn 2026 now booking

Positioning is a commercial question before it is a design one.

Which is why the work starts with your market, and not with your homepage.

The work is the answer, applied.

The work starts with a demand-side read of your own market: who actually buys what you build, for which decision, and what they need to believe first. What comes out is a positioning and a messaging hierarchy your whole team can use.

Only then does it land anywhere. The site is one surface. The executive profiles are another, and for early-stage companies often the one that moves first. The one-pager is what gets forwarded inside a customer or a fund when you are not in the room.

If what you want is a website, there are good studios for that. This is the question underneath it, and the reason the answer is worth writing down.

How the work runs, and what it costs →

The sector celebrates funding rounds while the harder question goes unasked: who is the customer, and for which decision are they paying?

Europe has no shortage of technology or capital. Buyers are scarcer. That gap is measurable, and it is what I study.

In July, 1,109 jobs were open across 100 European space companies. 102 of them were commercial.

Commercial means the roles whose job is to find a customer: sales, business development, marketing, partnerships, bids. For each one of those, 7.7 engineering vacancies were open beside it.

Counted from public job boards on 23 July 2026, one snapshot of a market that moves daily. Method and company list in Research & method.

9.2%of open positions in European space are commercial roles

786 engineering
159 finance, HR, legal and supply chain
62 unclear from the title
102 commercial