14d • Projects and Experiments
20 Things Every Clean Tech Founder Should Know
As with any startup, it starts with an idea. There you are, sitting on the couch, or in a local pub, or maybe at a job you don’t care for. Or it’s a job you love, but you see an opportunity for growth. Or an opportunity to change an industry. Maybe even the world.
You start bouncing the idea off friends, family, coworkers, colleagues. Pretty quickly, you’ll notice that people tend to fall into two camps. The first camp is the naysayers. These are the people convinced the solution you came up with already exists, or that the solution is so obvious that someone must have already thought of it. Maybe they have. Maybe they haven’t.
You decide the idea needs more research. You open your laptop or tablet and start searching for anything that resembles what you’re thinking. Something that proves you’re not unique. Something that confirms you’re completely unoriginal. After a day or two of searching, you realize there’s a good chance no one has come up with it. You might actually be standing alone with this idea. Congratulations. You’ve completed the easy part.
Fun fact: Charles Duell, the Commissioner of the United States Patent Office, was long cited as saying he wanted to shut the Patent Office down because everything had already been invented. The truth is, he never said that. There’s no historical record, no speech, letter, or memo that supports the quote. In fact, Duell argued the opposite, publicly emphasizing that invention was accelerating and that future breakthroughs would surpass anything yet imagined. Patent filings were rising rapidly during his tenure, and officials were focused on expanding capacity, not closing shop. The line itself appears to be a later joke that hardened into “history” through repetition. It survived because it’s tidy, ironic, and flattering to modern sensibilities, not because it’s true.
So now you have your idea. You’ve decided it’s unique enough to pursue. You’ve even Googled patents to see if you can protect it, and it looks like you’re in the clear. Now you’re asking, “What’s next?” Here are a few high-leverage, quick tips to follow if you decide you want to try to bring your invention or idea into reality.
Here are the top 20 things they won’t teach you in any accelerator start-up group
- Figure out who actually feels the pain, not who talks about the pain. In cleantech, the loudest advocates are often not the buyers. The buyer is usually the person who gets yelled at when something breaks or costs more than budgeted.
- Map who owns the problem versus who signs the check. These are rarely the same person. If you don’t understand the internal politics of that gap early, you’ll misread every sales signal you get.
- Assume your first customers are buying risk management, not climate impact. Carbon reduction is the permission slip. Reliability, compliance, uptime, or cost avoidance is the real transaction.
- Spend time in mechanical rooms, not pitch decks. Cleantech products live or die in basements, rooftops, utility corridors, and industrial yards. If you haven’t stood there, smelled it, and watched someone work around existing equipment, you’re guessing.
- Learn what installers hate. Installers can quietly kill your product. If it adds an hour, requires a special tool, or creates liability, they will steer customers away without ever telling you.
- Understand who gets blamed when your system fails. It probably won’t be you. It’ll be the facility manager, the engineering, procurement, and construction contractor, or the operator. Design so they don’t feel exposed by choosing you.
- Read the incentive rules like a lawyer, not like a founder. Most cleantech incentives fail in practice because of timing, documentation, or eligibility details that don’t show up in the headline numbers.
- Track cash timing before you track margins. A profitable project that pays you 180 days after commissioning can still kill the company. Cleantech cash cycles are brutal and non-obvious.
- Assume pilots cost more than you think and convert less often than promised. Pilots are often political theater. Design them so they still pay you in learning or credibility even if they never scale.
- Learn how your product gets insured. If insurers don’t understand it, your customer may not be allowed to install it, regardless of how good it is.
- Find the quiet gatekeepers. Code officials, utility engineers, safety managers, and procurement reviewers matter more than executives in the early days.
- Design for the second installation, not the first. The first one can be heroic. The second is where friction shows up. The tenth is where businesses are made or broken.
- Assume supply chains will fail you at least once. Single-source components feel fine until they aren’t. Cleantech hardware does not get priority treatment during shortages.
- Be realistic about who owns operations and maintenance. If you don’t define this clearly, you’ll end up owning it by default, whether you want to or not.
- Know what happens at end of life. Decommissioning, disposal, or recycling obligations can come back years later, and someone will ask who’s responsible.
- Learn how your product shows up on a balance sheet. capital expenditure versus operating expense treatment can determine whether a deal happens at all, independent of performance.
- Take whatever time you think it’s going to take and quadruple it. Cleantech timelines get eaten by permitting, utility reviews, procurement cycles, site access, shipping delays, and the simple fact that your customer has a day job. Your project isn’t their whole life.
- Watch for the moment when you stop being novel and start being annoying. Early curiosity turns into skepticism fast. You need answers, references, and data ready before that shift happens.
- Protect your own time as a system constraint. In early cleantech companies, the founder often becomes the bottleneck without realizing it. If every deal needs you, growth is capped.
- Accept that credibility accumulates unevenly. One respected customer can matter more than ten logos no one recognizes. Choose early wins for signalling value, not just revenue.
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20 Things Every Clean Tech Founder Should Know
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