A common occurrence when you look at your technology – especially when you’re at the seed stage and trying to raise a round of funding – is that you see opportunities to apply it in multiple markets. When I see this – having done it myself – it shows me that there is a lack of a go-to-market strategy in place. Companies can grow into multiple markets, but for many climate tech companies, getting into one market alone is a challenge and a half.

However, I see this as a huge opportunity for any climate tech startup in this position today.

Multiple segments = Goldmine for customer discovery

Should you be in a position where you’re exploring multiple potential applications for your technology and don’t know how to get started – here’s a simple step-by-step process that I’ve used that works exceptionally well.

1. Write down every single market segment and be specific about the customer’s pain point (If it’s a consumer, write names of people who would buy your product and if it’s a business, write companies who would buy your product)
   
   
2. List out at least 5 people/companies you can speak to in each of your market segments listed above
   
   
3. Get on 30-minute calls and try to answer the following 5 questions to test if that market segment has value:
   1. What are the biggest pain points ____________? (Checking how they feel the pain from this problem)
      
      
   2. What’s the hardest thing about ____________? (Checking the severity of this pain point)
      
      
   3. Tell me about the last time you encountered that problem… (Checking frequency of the pain point)
      
      
   4. Why was that hard? (What makes this pain point unmanageable & may share the “$ cost” of that pain point)
      
      
   5. What, if anything, have you done to try to solve the problem? (Are they actually trying to solve this problem?)
      
      
   6. What don’t you love about the solutions you’ve tried? (What your competition falls short on)