7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a $47.8M Air Conditioning Company

7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a $47.8M Air Conditioning Company

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Daniel Betts, CEO and Co-Founder of Blue Frontier, shared how his team turned frustration with existing technology into a category-defining company. Their journey from National Labs license to commercial market entry offers tactical lessons for hardware founders entering entrenched markets.

Lesson 1: Let Market Pain Guide Product Development

Daniel started with a problem that refused to go away. Working in power generation, he kept hitting the same wall. “Air conditioning was always the thing that would turn on at the wrong time when it was hottest,” Daniel explains. “So you get this air conditioning at the hottest period. That’s when everything else is running at lowest efficiency.”

He quantified the impact: “Air conditioning sizes, everything. So the entire grid, the entire power generation system is all sized to give you the power necessary for your air conditioners.”

The lesson: Deep market pain creates defensible businesses. When you’re solving a problem that impacts billions in infrastructure costs, customers will find you.

Lesson 2: Strategic Patience Beats Speed to Market

Blue Frontier launched in December 2017 but didn’t raise venture capital until 2019. “We didn’t feel ready right at the beginning to raise venture with any sort of strength to negotiate a good equity deal,” Daniel explains.

Instead, they secured grants from NYSERDA, Southern California Gas, and Oak Ridge National Labs—”just enough money for us not to pay ourselves, but to reinvest into the company.” This gave them leverage when approaching VCs.

The result? $1.25 million on favorable terms, followed by a $20 million Series A. The lesson: De-risk your technology before raising institutional capital to maintain control and command better valuations.

Lesson 3: Hardware Requires “Unfair Advantage,” Not “Slightly Better”

Daniel is blunt about the bar for hardware success. “Hard tech gives you that mode of technology that is very difficult for someone to come in and just copy and just implement around you,” he notes.

Blue Frontier’s technology delivers three times the efficiency of conventional air conditioning. “We’re three times the efficiency,” Daniel states. “So now you’re in a very different world.” They also embedded energy storage capabilities, creating value streams conventional technology can’t match.

The lesson: In hardware, incremental improvements get crushed. You need technology so superior it changes the rules of competition.

Lesson 4: Pick Markets with Replicable Learning Loops

Choosing your initial market in hardware is choosing where you’ll spend years iterating. Daniel’s framework: “Choose a market that will give you enough replicable product that you get to learn and have generational improvements that occur fast. That also gives you economies of scale so that you can drive the cost down of the product.”

They landed on commercial building air conditioning, specifically dedicated outdoor air systems. Every building owner has multiple buildings. Every building has multiple units. High customer lifetime value meets high volume, creating tight feedback loops.

The lesson: Find markets structured to accelerate your learning and scale your manufacturing.

Lesson 5: Entry Point Strategy Matters More Than Market Size

Within commercial buildings, Blue Frontier could have targeted any air conditioning application. They chose dedicated outdoor air systems—units that bring ventilation air into buildings. “That humid air basically is a river of water into the space, and you need to get rid of that water,” Daniel explains.

Conventional systems over-cool this air to remove humidity, then reheat it—wasting enormous energy. Blue Frontier’s liquid desiccant technology removes humidity without over-cooling, delivering 50 to 90% energy reductions. “You’re gaining like 30% reductions in energy consumption, plus the fact that our unit is more efficient from a fundamental standpoint,” Daniel notes.

This wasn’t the biggest market segment. It was the segment where their technology created the most dramatic impact, making the value proposition undeniable.

The lesson: Pick the entry point where your advantage is most obvious, not where the market is biggest. Proof points matter more than total addressable market in early stages.

Lesson 6: Create Experience That Makes Competition Irrelevant

Daniel understands B2B buying decisions aren’t purely rational. Blue Frontier controls humidity and temperature independently—something conventional air conditioning can’t do. “It just so happens that humidity control is more important to your comfort than temperature control,” Daniel reveals.

The result? “No longer you have to wear a sweater when you walk into your office in the summer. No longer are you cold and sweaty at the same time,” Daniel promises. This creates visceral differentiation—once customers experience it, conventional air conditioning feels broken.

The lesson: In mature markets, create experiences that make the old way feel unacceptable. Specifications matter less than moments customers can’t unsee.

Lesson 7: Design for Distribution Channel Evolution

Daniel’s long-term vision reveals sophisticated thinking about go-to-market strategy. He sees utilities, not installers or building owners, as the ultimate distribution channel. “Because air conditioning is the thing that sizes the entire infrastructure of the utility, it is very convenient for a utility to become involved in the provision of advanced energy, storing air conditioning into the market,” he explains.

This isn’t about current market dynamics—it’s about where economics inevitably lead. “It will better for utility to become a hero of their community by providing people with the capacity to escape increasing temperatures with advanced air conditioning while at the same time making money off of it,” Daniel predicts.

The lesson: Your initial GTM strategy should anticipate how market structure will evolve. Build technology and partnerships that align with future distribution channels, not just current ones.

The Pattern Behind the Tactics

Blue Frontier’s GTM strategy reveals a consistent pattern: identify where conventional approaches are fundamentally limited by physics or economics, build technology that eliminates those limitations, then enter at points where the advantage is undeniable. They didn’t just make a better air conditioner—they made one that enables business models impossible with existing technology.

For hardware founders, the message is clear: patient capital deployment, dramatic technical advantage, and strategic market entry trump speed to market. The physics won’t bend to your timeline, but get them right and the market will bend to your technology.