Why Crux Built for $80K to $1B+ Transactions Instead of Picking One Segment

Why Crux Built for $80K to $1B+ Transactions Instead of Picking One Segment

Conventional wisdom says pick one ICP and dominate. Crux built for the entire transaction range instead.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Allen Kramer, Co-Founder and COO of Crux, a sustainable finance platform, explained why his company deliberately rejected the standard playbook of picking a single customer segment. The decision wasn’t reckless expansion. It was strategic recognition that emerging markets behave differently than mature ones.

The Range That Shouldn’t Work

On the seller side alone, Crux’s transaction range defies every segmentation principle taught in go-to-market courses. The smallest deal that closed on their platform was $80,000. The largest sellers generate “billions of dollars of credits a year.”

That’s not a narrow ICP. That’s four orders of magnitude spread.

“We have three Personas that we partner with renewable energy developers and manufacturers, people generating credits,” Allen explains. Within just this one persona, deal sizes span from small developers selling six-figure credits “up to very large scale, utility scale players, generating hundreds of millions of dollars of credits, or billions of dollars of credits a year.”

The buyer side shows similar range. “On the buyer side, we have found ranges from family offices that are looking to transact in this market up to the Fortune 100. And we’ve transacted with everyone in between there up to the Fortune 100.”

Add the third persona—intermediaries including banks, tax advisors, and other financial institutions—and Crux operates a three-sided marketplace across massive transaction variance. This violates the first rule of marketplace building: start narrow, then expand.

Why Subsegmentation Fails in New Markets

Allen’s reasoning reveals sophisticated thinking about market maturity. “The market really transacts differently in the very small credits from the mid sized credits and the larger ones, but we cover the full market.”

The key phrase: “the market really transacts differently.” Allen isn’t saying all deals look the same. He’s acknowledging that different transaction sizes need different paths to completion. Some small deals happen direct on the platform. Large deals need intermediary facilitation. Mid-sized transactions might go either way.

In a mature market with established transaction patterns, you’d pick one segment and optimize ruthlessly. Build for small direct deals or large intermediated ones. But transferable tax credits didn’t have established patterns when Crux launched. The Inflation Reduction Act created them as a new asset class. Nobody knew yet which transaction sizes would cluster where or which completion paths would dominate.

Premature segmentation in this environment means betting on transaction patterns before they emerge. If Crux had built only for small direct transactions, they’d miss learning from large intermediated deals. If they’d focused only on Fortune 100 buyers, they’d lack data from family offices.

The Learning Velocity Advantage

Building for the full range creates a data advantage. Every $80,000 transaction teaches Crux something about how small developers think about risk and pricing. Every billion-dollar deal reveals how utility-scale players structure transactions and select counterparties.

This matters because Crux isn’t just facilitating transactions. They’re creating the standards that define how this market functions. “It gives us access to more data to understand what is sort of actually standard for the market and then feed that through into the broader platform that we’re building,” Allen explains.

Market standards in new asset classes don’t emerge from theory. They emerge from aggregating actual transaction data across the full range of participants. The family office buying $500,000 of credits and the Fortune 100 company buying $50 million need different things, but both contribute to understanding what “standard” means for transferable tax credits.

“It helped drive standardization in a lot of places,” Allen notes. That standardization only works if it reflects how the entire market transacts, not just one segment.

The Flexibility as Feature Model

Crux’s architecture reflects their range strategy. “Being really flexible has helped us drive much more liquidity earlier,” Allen explains. “We can support not just buyers and sellers coming directly to the market. That’s a great fit for some types of players, but for others, working with an advisor that may be on our platform is the right strategy for them.”

This flexibility isn’t feature bloat. It’s recognition that different transaction sizes and buyer sophistication levels need different completion paths. A small renewable energy developer with $100,000 in credits might transact directly. A utility-scale player with hundreds of millions in credits likely needs an advisor or bank to structure the deal.

By building both direct marketplace and intermediary-facilitated paths, Crux captures transactions across the range. The alternative—picking one path and one segment—would leave massive portions of the market unserved and create openings for competitors.

When Persona Diversity Drives Network Effects

Traditional marketplace wisdom says focus creates network effects. More buyers attract more sellers, which attract more buyers, creating a flywheel. But this assumes the flywheel spins the same way for all participants.

Crux’s three-sided model with intermediaries creates different network effects. Buyers on the platform attract sellers, but they also attract intermediaries who want access to those buyers for their own clients. Those intermediaries bring additional sellers who weren’t coming direct to the platform. The diversity of personas strengthens the network rather than diluting it.

“We don’t really subsegment down,” Allen says about the seller side. This isn’t lazy ICP work. It’s strategic recognition that in a new market, serving the full range faster reveals patterns that selective focus would miss.

The Corporate Tax Department Reality

Allen’s buyer persona description reveals another reason range matters. “We sell into tax departments at the corporate, sometimes sustainability teams as well, because they’re the ones that are really leading the charge on evaluating if these credits might be a good way for the company to balance both financial imperatives as well as some of their impact objectives.”

Tax departments don’t segment themselves by company size the way sales teams do. A tax director at a family office and a tax VP at a Fortune 100 company face similar evaluation frameworks: Does this transaction make financial sense? How do we assess risk? What’s market pricing?

By serving both, Crux creates benchmarking data that helps both segments. The family office wants to know if their pricing is market-standard. That requires data from deals across all sizes, not just family office transactions.

The Intermediary Wild Card

The third persona—intermediaries—introduces additional range complexity. “I’d say the set of icps there is in some cases wider,” Allen notes about intermediaries. This persona includes tax advisors, banks, and other financial institutions building their own offerings in the transferable tax credit market.

Each intermediary type serves different client bases with different transaction sizes. Tax advisors might work with mid-market companies. Major banks serve Fortune 500 clients. By equipping intermediaries with Crux’s platform, the company captures transaction data and liquidity across all the segments those intermediaries serve.

“There are a lot of different types of players that are building businesses in this space that we can equip with our solution,” Allen explains. This distribution through intermediaries compounds the range strategy. Crux doesn’t just serve wide range directly. They enable intermediaries who expand that range further.

The Market Maturity Timeline

Allen’s range strategy has an expiration date. As the transferable tax credit market matures, transaction patterns will stabilize. Certain transaction sizes will cluster around specific completion paths. Buyer and seller behaviors will become more predictable.

At that point, competitors could enter and focus on specific segments with optimized products. The large utility-scale segment might support a specialized platform. Small direct transactions might commoditize.

But by then, Crux will have several years of data advantage and established relationships across the full market. They’ll understand which segments are most valuable and can choose where to optimize. Or they can maintain the full range position if the data moat stays defensible.

The Principle Behind the Tactic

The deeper lesson from Crux’s approach: segment focus is a tool for mature markets with established patterns, not a universal law for all contexts.

In emerging markets where transaction patterns haven’t stabilized, premature segmentation is pattern-betting before the pattern exists. Building for range creates learning velocity that reveals which segments matter most and how they transact differently.

The risk is building too much complexity too early. The upside is capturing market evolution as it happens rather than guessing which segment to bet on before data exists.

Allen’s willingness to violate conventional ICP wisdom reflects understanding this tradeoff. For Crux, in a market where “an efficient market was not inevitable,” watching how the full range transacts provides the data needed to eventually create that efficiency.

The question for other founders: Is your market mature enough that patterns are established? Or are you building in a space where premature segmentation means missing the data that reveals how the market actually works?