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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Operate on shoestring budgets during hard tech development:
Preston emphasized the importance of being extremely selective with spending during the early stages. He noted, "You need to figure out how to make your dollar go further. You have to be very choosy about the projects and the feedstocks that you're willing to process." Early-stage founders should maintain strict financial discipline while validating their technology.
Find the right commercial application through iteration:
Momentum spent four years exploring different applications before finding product-market fit in battery recycling. Preston shared, "From 2016 to 2020...we tried automation, we tried many different supply partnerships, and none of them really worked out for magnet recycling. But boy, did it take off for the battery recycling piece." Founders should be prepared to pivot their technology to different applications until finding the right market opportunity.
Build strategic partnerships to demonstrate full value chain:
Momentum's partnership with Cerbus Solutions and 6K demonstrated a complete supply chain solution from collection to end product. Preston explained, "We decided okay, that would be a worthwhile, even though this was very custom to one sort of customer, it would show that we could do the whole supply chain." Deep tech founders should consider strategic partnerships that showcase their technology's role in the broader ecosystem.
Navigate the transition from technical founder to scaled leadership:
As the company grew, Preston transitioned from CEO to Executive Chair and CCO roles. He reflected, "It requires different things of you, from being a startup founder to then being an actual manager of people to then being executive chairman...You've got to be willing to change or you'll quickly get swept aside." Founders should prepare themselves mentally for evolving leadership roles as their companies scale.
Leverage accelerator programs for credibility:
Getting into Halliburton Labs during COVID helped attract investor attention. Preston noted, "That was great because they helped us not only build a product, but that name helped attract attention to us from investors." Deep tech founders should seek reputable accelerator programs that can provide both technical validation and investor credibility.
Conversation
Highlights
How Momentum Built a $150M Recycling Business by Ignoring Traditional Sales Playbooks
Most B2B founders obsess over sales process optimization. Preston Bryant took the opposite approach: he built Momentum into a market leader by systematically removing friction from every customer interaction, even when it meant losing money on individual deals.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Preston Bryant, Founder and CEO of Momentum, shared how his recycling marketplace grew to facilitate over $150 million in transactions by rethinking the fundamentals of B2B commerce in an industry stuck decades in the past.
The Accidental Entry into Recycling
Preston’s path into the Momentum and recycling industry wasn’t strategic—it was opportunistic. “I started a business in high school power washing driveways and houses,” Preston explains. “I had a customer come up to me and ask me if I could power wash some Momentums for him.” That single request evolved into a side business buying and selling Momentums, which Preston ran while studying finance at the University of South Carolina.
The real insight came from direct market exposure. “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 says. But understanding the opportunity and executing on it required completely different skill sets.
Building Distribution Before Product
Most tech founders build product first and figure out distribution later. Preston inverted this model entirely. Before writing a single line of code, he spent years building physical infrastructure and market relationships.
“We started a consulting business helping recycling companies get set up on all these different marketplaces,” Preston shares. This wasn’t a pivot or a distraction—it was strategic groundwork. By helping recyclers establish their digital presence, Momentum built deep relationships with suppliers while learning exactly what the market needed.
The physical infrastructure came next. “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 brick-and-mortar foundation gave Momentum something most marketplaces struggle to achieve: supply-side control and quality assurance.
The Friction Removal Framework
Where most B2B marketplaces focus on transaction volume, Preston obsessed over transaction friction. His approach was methodical: identify every point where customers had to think, decide, or wait—then eliminate it.
“We don’t charge for shipping. We just eat all the shipping costs,” Preston reveals. For a business moving physical products across the country, this seems financially reckless. But the strategic logic is sound: “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 goes even further. “We offer net 120 day payment terms to some of our larger customers,” Preston says. That’s four months of float—an eternity in working capital terms. But it solves a critical customer problem: “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.”
The Inbound Motion That Actually Works
Preston’s approach to inbound marketing diverges sharply from conventional SaaS playbooks. There’s no lead magnet strategy, no elaborate nurture sequences, no content calendar optimized for search volume.
“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 isn’t designed to drive immediate conversions—it’s designed to build category authority.
The key insight: in B2B recycling, buyers aren’t Googling for solutions. They’re navigating complex organizational priorities around sustainability and compliance. “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 says.
Enterprise Sales Without Enterprise Friction
Most companies moving upmarket add process, gatekeepers, and complexity. Momentum did the opposite. “We really try to make our product easy to use, easy to onboard,” Preston emphasizes. The self-service elements remain even for six-figure deals.
The sales team structure reflects this philosophy. “Our account managers are also our salespeople,” Preston notes. There’s no handoff from sales to success, no organizational seams for customers to fall through. One person owns the relationship from first contact through ongoing expansion.
This approach creates natural efficiency. Account managers aren’t just farming existing relationships—they’re actively driving new revenue. “They’re really incentivized on net new revenue,” Preston explains. The commission structure rewards growth, whether it comes from new logos or existing account expansion.
The Contrarian Approach to Market Positioning
Perhaps Preston’s most counterintuitive move: positioning Momentum as a recycling company first, marketplace second. “We don’t really position ourselves necessarily as a marketplace,” Preston says. “We’re a recycling company that buys recyclables from corporate America.”
This framing completely changes the competitive dynamics. Instead of competing against other marketplaces on fee structure and liquidity, Momentum competes against traditional recyclers on service quality and ease of doing business—battles where their technology creates insurmountable advantages.
What Sophisticated Founders Can Learn
Preston’s GTM strategy reveals several principles that transfer across industries:
First, distribution infrastructure beats product features in markets where transactions are high-friction. Momentum’s logistics network and payment terms create more defensibility than any software feature could.
Second, removing customer-side friction justifies absorbing supplier-side costs. The free shipping and extended terms that seem expensive are actually customer acquisition costs with better unit economics than traditional marketing.
Third, self-service and high-touch aren’t opposite ends of a spectrum—they’re complementary motions that can coexist in the same organization when properly structured.
The recycling industry might seem distant from typical SaaS businesses, but Preston’s approach to building Momentum offers a masterclass in finding asymmetric advantages. While competitors optimized for margin on individual transactions, he optimized for ease of doing business across the entire customer journey. The result: a market leadership position built not on technological superiority, but on systematic friction removal.
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