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11 Climate Tech Founders
Product-Market Fit Lessons
Calculate TAM Before Committing to a Channel or Customer Segment
Greenly landed an early contract with a major European bank, which looked like real validation. But Alexis didn’t let the excitement of a big name customer override the math. “I think we’re very lucky because we just met the team that was already working on it, and so we actually started trying to push this to more banks, thinking it was going to be easy, but in fact it was hard.” Rather than keep pushing, he ran the numbers: “Let’s just do a back of the envelope computation. You know, there are only so many banks, and this contract has a certain size. So maybe it’s a 50 or 100 million total addressable market.” That ceiling was the signal to move on. Early traction in the wrong segment can feel like PMF. TAM math cuts through it fast.
Run Two Separate Diligence Checks Before Committing to Deep Tech
When commercializing deep technology, founders often treat scientific credibility as proof of market need. Chris Tolles, CEO of Yard Stick PBC, ran a deliberate two-step diligence process before committing to the business. First, he assessed whether the underlying science was actually ready: “Scientists that are keen on commercialization invariably overstate its maturity. They invariably underestimate how much more work it’ll take to come to market.” Second, he independently verified whether real demand existed for the problem the technology solved. He warned that scientists are “usually right about some aspects of what they believe about the outside world” but that “why is again rarely as simple as they think it is.” Only after completing both steps did he have confidence to proceed: “the two pieces for me are to figure out whether it’s actually ready and then figure out whether there’s actually demand.”
Validate Market Problems by Tracing Where the Money Already Flows
Before committing to a market, Antoine ran a simple test: follow the money. Talking to customers revealed a clear signal that the problem was real. “The best evidence is how does the money flow work? And today people pay to get rid of a battery. So it was clear that there is a real problem.” When a customer is already spending money to make a problem disappear, you don’t need to convince them the problem exists. For founders in early validation mode, the direction of existing spend is one of the most reliable indicators that a market is worth entering.
Track How the Market Is Maturing, Then Time Your Push Accordingly
Kai observed a meaningful shift in how prospects received ACCURE’s pitch over time, and he connected it directly to changes in the market rather than changes in the sales approach. As he described it, “right now, most of the relevant companies, most potential customers know about battery analytics. Three or four years ago they didn’t. And I believe that we are a part of this education of the market.” The underlying dynamic was that customers were catching up to a problem ACCURE had identified years earlier: “as companies like automotive companies or grid operators that also have batteries in their systems, now as they get more mature, more and more run into the problems that we’re solving.” The result was a measurable shift in buyer receptivity: “the market is now more and more experiencing the pain that we as a company are solving, and they’re much more open to solutions.” Founders in emerging categories should monitor market maturity as closely as they monitor pipeline, because the timing of when buyers feel the pain determines how hard the sale actually is.
Treat Unsolicited Sharing as a Product-Market Fit Signal
Quentin noticed something unexpected after closing their first customer: the manually produced reports were being forwarded well beyond the people who had paid for them. “People were sharing these word documents amongst themselves,” he said. “Even non subscribers were getting them. And it was so frustrating. How dare everybody see this thing without subscribing. But it was the best marketing tool ever because, you know, this thing actually went viral.” The forwarding behavior was confirmed by inbound calls from organizations that had never been contacted. “Nobody had ever done this before. Nobody had ever published how much money everybody else was making. It was getting calls from people, from big utilities saying we like transparency, but not this much transparency.” Quentin connected that response directly to demand: “This thing really took off and I’m really glad that people were forwarding it.”
Embed Early Customers in the Build Process to Validate Market Fit
Allison Wolff’s approach to validating product-market fit was to put the product in front of target customers before it was finished and build the rest alongside them. She described the process directly: “We really co designed the system with them as they were going through a risk management workflow. We built it side by side with them, and then they became our earliest and biggest paying customers once they saw the potential of the system to help do what they needed to do.” The willingness of those same customers to pay was the validation signal. Underpinning that approach was a conviction she carried from her career in Silicon Valley: “You have to show people what’s possible.” Getting a working product into a real, high-stakes environment early gave prospects something concrete to react to, which compressed the gap between interest and commitment.
Watch Your Users Closely to Find the Problem Worth Solving
Manik noticed that users of his first product were checking temperatures four to eight times a day with a tablet instead of a clipboard, and the pattern troubled him. “While that sounds good, it turns out that we were actually making work harder.” The product wasn’t eliminating the burden, it was digitizing it. “We were requiring people to do stuff at a certain time with timestamps and geolocation and photo uploads, and weren’t really making their life easier. They still had to check it manually four to eight times a day, just with a tablet as opposed to a clipboard.” That friction in the usage data pointed directly to the next problem worth solving: “that got us thinking about automation and sensors.” The failing product didn’t signal defeat. It surfaced the real opportunity.
Talk to Hundreds of Customers Before Committing to a Solution
Edward Chiang, co-founder and CEO of Moment Energy, ran direct customer conversations before building anything. His approach was straightforward: “We did the classic startup founder thing which is you have to talk to hundreds of customers and make sure and really just determine what is the problem statement there.” Those conversations produced a specific, quantified finding. Across more than 50 EV owners, he heard the same thing: “I just went to my local recycler. We actually have to spend $4,000 to recycle again.” That number, surfaced through direct conversations rather than desk research, grounded the entire business direction in a real and painful market problem.
Separate Slow Traction From a Weak Product When Building a New Category
Javier Marti, CEO and Founder of Divirod, was direct about a trap many disruptive founders fall into: misreading slow adoption as a product failure. His view was that in genuinely new categories, slow traction is structural. As he put it, “introducing a product in the market which is as disruptive as we are introducing it is actually making the whole traction slower than everybody would like to.” The market isn’t moving slowly because the product is wrong — it’s moving slowly because buyers are still working out how to think about the problem. Javier’s framing was plain: “The market is slow. If you’re in the disruptive market, it’s even slower. And if you’re honest to yourself that you always want things to go faster, the reality is that they go at the pace that the market is accepting it.” The strategic implication is that founders in nascent categories need to calibrate their expectations accordingly and resist the urge to pivot a sound product just because the market hasn’t caught up yet.
Take Unexpected Data Anomalies Back to Your Customer
Marc Borrett found his core product direction not through planned research but through an engineering anomaly his team refused to ignore. While working on a different problem entirely, the team noticed something unexpected in their data: “We found that our signal didn’t travel and get received by each of the measurement or receiver devices as they were then at exactly the same time. And that bothered our engineers.” Rather than dismissing the finding, they investigated what was causing it and brought the discovery back to their customer. “Went back to the grid operator, and we said, look, we could turn this on its head and we could measure stability in real time. Would that be of interest? And that was really where we actually got started with measuring grid stability.” The takeaway for operators is simple: when your data surfaces something unexpected, take it to a customer before you decide whether it matters.
Ask Customers to Rank Features Before You Decide What to Ship
Gary Ong was sitting on a product with multiple valuable capabilities and no clear path to commercialization. The breakthrough came when he reframed the conversation with customers: “if I think of this as software instead of hardware for a minute and consider all these things as feature sets, which one is the most important for you?” The answer was immediate and decisive. “Very quickly you arrive, like, from the 80/20 rule, everyone cared about gas permeability or gas blocking ability and didn’t care about anything else.” That single input gave him permission to cut everything else. As he put it, “you don’t actually want to commercialize a swiss army knife if you can help it. Ideally, you want to commercialize one of the things in the swiss army knife to really solve a problem that your customer really wants.” For founders stalled by a product that does too much, the ranking exercise is the fastest path to clarity.