We launched a satellite and then built its market

Mahesh Murthy, Co-Founder and Chief Executive of Satellize reveals, how AI is helping smaller businesses challenge industry giants, proving that ambition, expertise and smart content strategy can outweigh even the biggest marketing budgets.

The Indian government kept saying no.

We had built India’s first private satellite. Working, tested, ready to fly. We asked ISRO, repeatedly, for a launch slot. For 21 months, the answer was various forms of no.

So we put our satellite in a backpack, flew it to California, and put it on a SpaceX rocket. On 3 December 2018, it rode a Falcon 9 into orbit. India’s first private satellite was launched on an American rocket, because its own country wouldn’t touch it.

The news broke. The morning after, the Indian establishment that had spent nearly two years saying no started calling. Doors opened. Policy loosened. Within a few years we had built and launched a few more satellites on ISRO rockets and started helping them build 4,000kg geostationary satellites.

The satellite in the backpack is my first lesson about ambition. The second lesson is the one I want to spend the rest of this piece on.

The giants in the room 

We are Satellize. A six-person, largely self-funded company that has put five satellites in orbit. (Yes, we paid for that first launch ourselves.)
Our category is shaped by four giants: two large incumbents, a multinational space agency and the company that flew our first satellite. Airbus’s defence and space business does around €13 billion a year. Boeing’s defence and space arm does over $27 billion. The European Space Agency runs on an €8.3 billion budget. SpaceX cleared $18 billion last year.

We cannot out-engineer them. We cannot outspend them. We cannot out-rank them on the big category search terms. If we spent our life trying to beat Airbus for the words “commercial satellite,” we would lose, and so would any CMO who picked the same fight with their category’s incumbent.
So in May 2026, we chose a different game.

Satellize. A six-person, largely self-funded company that has put five satellites in orbit. (Yes, we paid for that first launch ourselves.)
Our category is shaped by four giants: two large incumbents, a multinational space agency and the company that flew our first satellite. Airbus’s defence and space business does around €13 billion a year. Boeing’s defence and space arm does over $27 billion. The European Space Agency runs on an €8.3 billion budget. SpaceX cleared $18 billion last year.

We cannot out-engineer them. We cannot outspend them. We cannot out-rank them on the big category search terms. If we spent our life trying to beat Airbus for the words “commercial satellite,” we would lose, and so would any CMO who picked the same fight with their category’s incumbent.

So in May 2026, we chose a different game.

Niche, smiche.

Our CFO said we didn’t have the money to go after the whole category, so pick a slice. Pick a niche and a geography the giants are ignoring.

That advice may have been correct in 2018. It is no longer correct in 2026, because the cost of producing expert content has collapsed.

Our bet was simple. We felt the whole category was addressable, as long as we were willing to answer every question a real buyer might ever ask. Not the questions the giants answer in investor reports and press releases, but the questions the engineer in the ministry asks at eleven at night when the minister wants a brief by morning.

How does a country without a space programme start one? What does it actually cost to put a 50kg payload in orbit next year? How do you get your own satellite internet if you don’t want your country’s security to depend on a trillionaire’s whims? How does a university space club get its first mission to flight?

A six-person team couldn’t have covered all that in 2018. Not even close. In 2026 we did.

We aren’t the first to do this. Zapier became the default answer in workflow automation by publishing a page for almost every integration question a buyer could ask. Ahrefs built its position in SEO software by out-teaching larger rivals rather than out-spending them. The trend is now reaching B2B categories that even a tiny team can take on.

What we actually built

2,100 indexed pages on satellize.com. Two to four long-form stories a month. All built on our own mission learnings, our ground-station data, and nearly eight years of operating in orbit.

Not AI slop, but AI-assisted expert content. The difference matters. The former gets punished by every search engine and AI assistant on earth. The latter gets rewarded.

The giants write white papers for governments. We write for the engineer the government calls when the white paper doesn’t answer the actual question.

What it's returned so far

In 150 days, we have grown to 5,000 unique real visitors a month, not counting bots, from over 70 countries. 

We get four to eight inbound leads a month. Typically, two are serious, each with an expected contract value of $100,000 or more, and any one of them can grow into a multi-million-dollar order. A pipeline that didn’t exist six months ago, all on zero paid promotion.

The budget to produce and distribute all of it is a fraction of what one mid-level manager at Airbus would cost for a month. The marketing team is effectively one person, with AI tools and a mandate.

That is ambition in action.

What this means if you are a CMO

You are not being ambitious in 2026 by picking a bigger slice. You are being ambitious when you look at the category your CFO has told you to leave alone and decide to go after all of it anyway. That financial constraint has just stopped being binding.

Companies ten thousand times your size are set up to defend market share. They are not set up to defend attention from a small team that is willing to show up every day with answers to questions nobody else is bothering to answer.

If you’re the incumbent, the small team in your category is already doing this. In twenty-four months, they will have taken away the attention you were paid to defend.

Getting the satellite into orbit took money and nerve. Building the market took both as well. But far less of the money, while AI supplied far more of the nerve.