5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from Persefoni’s Category Creation Journey

Discover key go-to-market lessons from Persefoni’s founder on category creation, market education, and strategic investor selection in the climate tech space. Learn how they grew from 12 to 200+ customers in one year.

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5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from Persefoni’s Category Creation Journey

5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from Persefoni’s Category Creation Journey

When Larry Fink’s watershed letter declared climate risk as financial risk in 2020, Persefoni was already positioning itself for the seismic shift in carbon accounting. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, founder Kentaro Kawamori shared insights from their journey that reshaped how companies approach climate disclosure and carbon accounting.

  1. Build Your GTM Strategy Around Market Education The greatest challenge in category creation isn’t technology—it’s education. “When you’re in the early part of a hype cycle, the customer base and the market are saying a whole lot of things, but they don’t even know what they’re asking for most of the time,” Kentaro explains. This insight shaped Persefoni’s entire go-to-market approach, focusing on helping customers understand not just what they need, but why they need it.
  2. Choose Strategic Investors Over Available Capital In 2021’s funding frenzy, Persefoni made an unconventional choice. “I was very intentional not to take capital from crossover funds or Silicon Valley software weighted funds for various reasons,” Kentaro reveals. The logic? “The last thing I want to do as a Founder and CEO is spend my time educating my investors on where the market’s heading. I want my investors to be able to help educate me.”
  3. Maintain Unwavering Focus on Your Core Thesis Success in category creation requires conviction. “When I look at how close our founding thesis was to now, we’ve just started year four of our business, it is remarkable how little that’s changed,” Kentaro notes. This consistency helped Persefoni grow from about a dozen customers at the beginning of 2022 to over 200 by early 2023.
  4. Simplify Complex Solutions for Market Adoption Making complex technology accessible becomes crucial in new categories. “How do you make the complex simple?” Kentaro asks. “Boy, there is nothing harder than making something complex at least seem simple, because you generally can’t make it simple, but you have to make it seem simple for the user.” This principle guided Persefoni’s product development, helping them translate complex carbon accounting into an intuitive system.
  5. Position Your Solution Within Familiar Frameworks Rather than reinventing the wheel, Persefoni anchored their solution in familiar concepts. “Think of that very similar to what financial accounting does. It takes in a wide variety of data sources… Same exact concept for carbon accounting,” Kentaro explains. This approach helped customers understand the product through existing mental models.

For founders embarking on category creation journeys, these lessons underscore a crucial truth: success isn’t about having all the answers from day one. It’s about maintaining clear vision while being adaptable in execution. As Kentaro puts it, you’re either going to be “phenomenally right or phenomenally wrong. On this market timing, there’s not going to be a whole lot in between.”

The most valuable insight? Market education becomes your primary go-to-market strategy in category creation. Your role extends beyond building a great product—you must actively shape how the market understands and values your solution. This requires patience, conviction, and the right partners who understand your vision and can contribute to market education rather than requiring education themselves.

For B2B founders navigating similar journeys, Persefoni’s experience offers a blueprint for building in nascent markets: focus on education, choose strategic partners, maintain consistent vision, simplify complexity, and anchor new concepts in familiar frameworks. These principles helped them scale rapidly in a new category, setting an example for others looking to create and dominate their own market spaces.

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