The Story of Momentum: From High School Side Hustle to $150M Recycling Marketplace

The Story of Momentum: From High School Side Hustle to $150M Recycling Marketplace

A customer asked a high school kid to power wash some Momentums. That single request became a nine-figure business that’s reshaping how corporate America handles recycling.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Preston Bryant, Founder and CEO of Momentum, shared how a teenage side hustle evolved into a marketplace facilitating over $150 million in annual transactions. This is the story of building a tech company in one of America’s least tech-forward industries.

The Accidental Apprenticeship

Preston’s entry into the recycling industry wasn’t the result of market analysis or strategic planning. It started with manual labor and customer service.

“I started a business in high school power washing driveways and houses,” Preston explains. The business was simple: show up, do the work, get paid. Then came the request that changed everything. “I had a customer come up to me and ask me if I could power wash some Momentums for him.”

Most teenagers would have said no or treated it as a one-off job. Preston saw something else: a wedge into an industry. That single Momentum cleaning job evolved into buying and selling Momentums—a side business Preston ran while studying finance at the University of South Carolina.

The real education happened in the market itself. “I just learned how antiquated the industry was, how much waste there was, and thought there was a massive opportunity to leverage the internet and some software to disintermediate a lot of the transactions,” Preston shares.

But recognizing an opportunity and capitalizing on it required different skills entirely. Preston had market access and industry knowledge. What he didn’t have was credibility, infrastructure, or distribution.

Building Trust Before Building Software

Most tech founders would have gone straight to building a marketplace platform. Preston took a longer, less obvious path: he became a service provider first.

“We started a consulting business helping recycling companies get set up on all these different marketplaces,” Preston says. This wasn’t a distraction from the core vision—it was the foundation that made the vision possible.

By helping recyclers establish digital presences on existing platforms, Momentum achieved three critical things simultaneously. First, they built deep relationships with potential suppliers. Second, they learned exactly what the market needed and what friction points mattered most. Third, they established credibility as people who understood the industry from the inside, not tech outsiders trying to disrupt it.

The consulting work also revealed something crucial: the industry’s problems weren’t just digital. They were physical and operational. You couldn’t software your way out of quality inconsistency, logistics complexity, and trust deficits.

The Infrastructure Play

While other marketplace founders obsessed over network effects and growth loops, Preston built warehouses and processing facilities.

“We built out all the logistics infrastructure, all the processing infrastructure. We have locations in like 30 different states across the country,” Preston explains. This physical footprint seems antithetical to tech company scaling, but it solved the core problem that prevented digital marketplaces from working in recycling: quality and reliability.

Customers buying recyclable materials weren’t just price-sensitive—they were consistency-sensitive. A batch of contaminated recyclables could shut down a processing line. Unreliable suppliers created operational chaos. The industry ran on relationships because relationships meant predictability.

Momentum’s processing facilities didn’t just move materials—they guaranteed quality. The logistics network didn’t just enable faster shipping—it provided supply-side control that purely digital platforms couldn’t match.

This infrastructure became Momentum’s defensible advantage. Competitors could build software. They couldn’t replicate 30 processing facilities and the operational expertise to run them.

Weaponizing Customer Experience

With infrastructure in place, Preston turned to the problem of customer acquisition. His approach: make Momentum so dramatically easier to work with that switching became inevitable.

“We don’t charge for shipping. We just eat all the shipping costs,” Preston reveals. For a business moving physical materials across the country, absorbing shipping seems financially reckless. But the logic is strategic: “If you’re offering net 60 terms and free shipping and really easy online checkout and really good customer service, it’s just really hard for people not to switch.”

The payment terms strategy went even further. “We offer net 120 day payment terms to some of our larger customers,” Preston says. Four months of float—an eternity in working capital terms.

This wasn’t generosity. It was market understanding. “They’re collecting and sorting and baling material. They’re putting it into an intermodal container or into the back of a truck, shipping it to us. That’s like a 60 day process. And then once we get it, we have to process it, we have to sort it, we have to sell it. That’s another 30 to 60 days.”

By aligning payment terms with actual customer cash conversion cycles rather than standard invoice processing timelines, Momentum removed a major friction point that competitors wouldn’t touch. The cost of extended terms became customer acquisition cost with better unit economics than traditional marketing.

The Content Strategy Nobody Expected

Momentum’s approach to marketing defied conventional B2B playbooks. No demand generation campaigns. No elaborate lead nurture sequences. No product comparison content.

“We have one person that works on content full time,” Preston explains. “He’s really focused on anything and everything sustainability and ESG related.”

The content doesn’t pitch Momentum directly. It builds authority in the categories that drive customer decisions—sustainability reporting, ESG compliance, waste reduction mandates. “He’s creating content that sits at the intersection of what people care about with ESG and sustainability, but like tangentially introduces Momentum as a mechanism to help them achieve those outcomes,” Preston shares.

This works because Momentum’s buyers aren’t searching for recycling solutions. They’re navigating corporate sustainability goals and regulatory requirements. By becoming the authority in these adjacent categories, Momentum becomes the obvious answer when companies finally need to execute on their commitments.

Collapsing the Traditional Sales Model

As Momentum scaled, Preston made another unconventional choice: he refused to separate sales from account management.

“Our account managers are also our salespeople,” Preston notes. “They’re really incentivized on net new revenue.” There’s no handoff from acquisition to retention, no organizational seam for customers to navigate.

This creates powerful alignment: account managers can’t abandon implementation because poor onboarding kills expansion revenue. Great service drives natural growth. The incentives match the customer experience.

The model works because Preston made the product genuinely self-service. “We really try to make our product easy to use, easy to onboard,” he emphasizes. When products don’t require extensive implementation support, combined sales-success roles outperform specialized teams.

The Future: Beyond Transactions

Preston’s vision for Momentum extends far beyond marketplace transactions. The company is positioned to become infrastructure for corporate sustainability.

“We want to expand into more material streams,” Preston shares. The recycling marketplace is just the beginning. As companies face increasing pressure on sustainability and ESG reporting, they need integrated solutions—not just vendors.

Momentum’s physical infrastructure, supplier relationships, and data from $150 million in transactions create advantages that compound. Each new material stream leverages existing capabilities. Each new customer adds data that improves the entire platform.

The endgame isn’t just facilitating recycling transactions—it’s becoming the operating system for corporate sustainability programs. The infrastructure that seemed like a burden in the early days becomes the moat that makes this vision achievable.

Preston built Momentum by ignoring tech company conventions. While competitors chased software scalability, he built processing facilities. While others optimized for transaction fees, he absorbed shipping costs and extended payment terms. While traditional marketplaces rushed to IPO, he focused on sustainable unit economics and customer experience.

The result is a company that dominates its category not through technological superiority, but through systematic reduction of customer friction. In an industry where incumbents compete on relationships and trust, Preston built a company that’s simply easier to do business with—and scaled that advantage across 30 states.

The high school kid power washing Momentums saw what others missed: opportunity lives in the broken, antiquated industries that tech founders typically ignore. Sometimes the best tech companies are the ones that use technology as infrastructure, not product.