5 Go-to-Market Lessons from EcoCart’s Category Creation Journey
Sometimes the best business ideas come from trying to solve your own problems. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Dane Baker, CEO and Co-founder of EcoCart, shared how his team’s struggle to implement sustainability practices in a previous venture led to building what could become the standard sustainability layer for e-commerce. Here are the key go-to-market lessons from their journey:
- Build from Personal Pain Points The genesis of EcoCart came from Dane’s experience running a peer-to-peer rental marketplace. “As we scaled, however, it became very difficult and quite expensive to maintain that sustainability ethos as a company. We tried everything, tried to buy offsets, hire consultants. It’s very complicated and it was very expensive.” This firsthand experience with the complexity of sustainability implementation became the foundation for EcoCart’s value proposition.
- Position at Points of Intent Rather than pursuing aggressive outbound sales, EcoCart focused on being present where customers were already searching for solutions. As Dane explains, “Most of our brands and partners come to us organically… directly through search and searching in search engines, as well as directly into things like a Shopify App Store.” This organic-first approach leverages existing market demand rather than trying to create it from scratch.
- Create a Category Through Education When you’re building something new, education becomes a critical part of your go-to-market strategy. “First and foremost, a lot of the work that we do is education,” Dane shares. “We are creating a category. We are educating our potential partners on the importance of doing this work and also what this work means.” This education-first approach positions EcoCart as the thought leader in their space.
- Maintain Message Consistency Across Segments Even when serving different market segments, from DTC brands to enterprise retailers like Walmart, EcoCart maintains a consistent message. As Dane puts it, “The beautiful thing about what we’re doing is that the message is the same because the value proposition is the same.” This consistency helps strengthen their category leadership position.
- Time Your Market Entry Understanding where your category sits in its evolution can inform your entire go-to-market strategy. Dane describes their timing advantage: “We’re in this golden era between sustainability being a sort of nice to have solution to an absolutely must have.” This positioning allows them to shape the category while demand is growing but before the space becomes overcrowded.
Looking ahead, EcoCart’s vision suggests they’re building for ubiquity rather than exclusivity. As Dane predicts, “We believe what we’re building is becoming ubiquitous and standard in the e-commerce landscape. And that in five years from now, looking forward, you and I, as consumers, won’t be able to go through a checkout experience and not have an option to make our purchase carbon neutral.”
For founders building new categories, these lessons highlight the importance of organic growth, market timing, and consistent messaging. But perhaps most importantly, they demonstrate how solving a widespread pain point – even if you discovered it through your own experience – can lead to category creation.
The key is recognizing when your solution has potential beyond your specific use case. As Dane notes, “There’s not a lot of work being done specifically in this vertical elsewhere.” When you find that gap between market need and available solutions, you might just have the opportunity to create a new category.