Launching a commercial strategy from the beginning

In month one of working with a startup at Founders Factory, we almost always start with who the customer actually is inside a specific organisation, and what would have to be true for them to say yes to a new product or service. It's closer to a mapping exercise than a pitch. By the end of the programme, that map should have names on it with people the founder has actually spoken to. The commercial conversation has usually shifted from ‘who might buy this’ to ‘what would this specific buyer need to see before they sign anything.’

In heavy industry, ‘ready’ is a moving target set by the buyer. Founders who wait to be ready before talking to customers usually find out too late that ‘ready’ means something different to the person writing the cheque. 

If a founder has a strong lab result and zero commercial conversations, we tell them to find three people who'd actually have to approve a purchase, inside three different organisations with different roles, and ask a series of structured questions on what would have to be in place for them to take a new product or service seriously. A general direction of travel should lie in where answers overlap and contradict. Overlap is the spec to build toward while contradiction usually means the founder's targeting the wrong buyer, or the product needs to satisfy two different bars at once.

Future Industries Partnership alum GeoAgni has taken a two pronged approach. While pitching their geothermal energy wells to data centres and grids around South East Asia they have been operating as a drilling service simultaneously to generate revenue and show proof of concept to investors. As founder Mongkhol Jandakaew tells us: 

“You need real money before you have any revenue at all, and that is the defining challenge of climate tech as a category. Our answer has been to run two businesses in parallel: exploration and drilling services generate income now, while we raise capital for the asset-owning business we want to become. It can be slow but it's how you survive long enough to get there.”

Expectations around product

Expectations around product vary depending on what commercial stage a founder is at and the particular customer team they’re talking to. 

Future Industry Partnership members come to us at Technical Readiness Level 4. When pitching at TRL-4, you have something concrete, components validated together in a lab setting. The pitch is about demonstrating that the core technology works under controlled conditions, being honest about what ‘controlled’ leaves out, and laying out what it will take to prove the same thing holds in a real operating environment. At TRL-7, you're selling operational reliability, the pitch has to answer 'will this work on my site, on my timeline, without taking up capacity?' Founders who use the TRL-4 pitch at TRL-7 conversations come across as underprepared. Founders who use the TRL-7 pitch at TRL-4 come across as overselling.

Founders who handle the transition in readiness well are precise about where they are, they'll tell us unprompted "we're at TRL-6, this is what that means, this is what's still unproven." That precision builds trust with a conservative industrial buyer faster than confidence does.

It’s also worth differentiating between the individuals within the organisation. Innovation teams procure much earlier stage technology, irrespective of whether it answers all their needs. A remote pilot just needs to show the process works on real material. An onsite pilot deployment needs to prove the new product won't disrupt the customer’s existing operation. The demo has to show it works inside safety protocols, maintenance schedule and their existing equipment stack. A much higher bar and a different set of stakeholders signing off.

For this reason it’s worth phasing product and commercial strategy for the stage of the company and the type of customer being sold to. This is why POCs and pilots are so important, define pilot success criteria and quantify the expected outcomes and benefits to the customer.

It’s also worth noting that the capital stack is more diverse in heavy industry climate tech than in any other industry when we talk about funding. It’s not just selling equity. Project finance, infrastructure debt, JVs or SPVs, equipment leasing, non-dilutive grants are all available to founders. So on the ‘investor side’ it’s worth considering what the money is for and tailoring messaging to that avenue. 

Validation is a two-way street

The cleanest version of customer validation and funding stage being in sync is a founder who has a signed Letter of Intent in hand before they’ve opened their pre-seed round. The investor conversation becomes about delivering on a customer commitment that already exists, rather than on a market the founders believe is there. 

Founders who have real traction are specific about their customer engagement. And to be specific, agreements need to have been made. If a founder can say a plant manager has approved a site trial for Q3, then they’ve made real ground. If a founder can only tell us they’re in conversations with a major cement producer, then it’s clear they’re operating in the hypothetical. 

Validation and funding stages can fall out of sync in both directions. We've seen founders raise a round on a fundraising narrative that outran their actual commercial proof, and then spend the next twelve months trying to retroactively justify the story they told. We've also seen founders sitting on strong trial results who never went back to translate it into the funding conversation. They were heads-down on the next technical milestone and didn't realise they were sitting on their best fundraising asset. 

It’s also worth thinking about the different customer types a founder might work towards.  With a single industrial buyer, the validation loop is slow but straightforward. With two customer types stacked on top of each other, like a farmer and a carbon credit buyer, founders are running two separate trust-building processes at once. Founders in that position often over-invest in validating with the easier customer and under-invest in the harder one, because it feels like progress even when it isn't the constraint. If you build for the harder customer, you’re likely to find solutions for the easier customer in the process and build validation for both. 

Understand what ‘ready’ means 

Everything works in sync. A founder can’t finish building the tech, then find customers, then raise capital in heavy industry, where the valley of death punishes anyone who treats those as separate projects and timelines. The founders who get through it are running all three tracks at once, checking each against the others constantly rather than finishing one before starting the next.

Have a route to commercialisation from the beginning. Not just a GTM slide written for investors but an actual answer to who buys, inside which organisation, and what has to be true for them to say yes. Understand what ‘ready’ means from your customer's point of view. Technical readiness and commercial readiness are not the same clock. A founder who only tracks TRL will misjudge every conversation with a buyer who's actually measuring operational risk or safety sign-off.

Establish what short-term revenue could look like or other commercial opportunities. It doesn't have to be the end-state business. GeoAgni's drilling services alongside its geothermal wells is a model that generates cash and proof of execution now, while the asset the company is really being built around is being financed.

Keep product readiness in tow with pitching level and customer level and nudge conversations forward with customers towards agreements. A named person who has approved the next step is real traction. And every one of those steps, once secured, becomes evidence an investor can actually underwrite.

The Future Industries Partnership helps climate tech startups address the barriers to investment and unlock the opportunities for deploying technology at scale in industrial and built environments across Asia and the Middle East. 

We build the commercial route and the investor narrative as one continuous piece of work, enhancing efforts to secure financing and gain access to an ecosystem of investors and corporations to accelerate the net zero transition in emerging markets.