5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building in an Emerging Climate Tech Market
When you’re building a product that’s ahead of market demand, traditional growth playbooks often fall short. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Javier Marti shared candid insights about bringing a disruptive water risk data platform to market. His experiences offer valuable lessons for founders navigating similar challenges in emerging markets.
- Make Complex Innovation Accessible Through Familiar Analogies
The first challenge in any new market is helping potential customers understand what you’re building. Javier’s approach? Create instant understanding through careful analogy: “I’m building the Google Maps of water.” This simple comparison achieves two things – it makes a complex technology relatable and highlights the current gap in the market. As he explains, “everybody understand what the Google Maps is, and we all understand how traffic is affecting our ability to go from a to b.”
- Embrace Strategic Market Positioning
Rather than trying to compete head-on with established players, Javier’s company carved out a unique position between two existing market segments. “On one hand, we have competition from sensor companies… And on the other hand, we’re sitting in front of all the people that are actually consuming data for risk models.” This strategic positioning helps define clear value propositions and partnership opportunities.
- Use Partnerships as a Growth Accelerator
For startups in emerging markets, strategic partnerships can provide both technical foundation and market credibility. Javier emphasizes that founders should “work on your partnerships, surround yourselves and your company with partners who can help you understand how to get to the ultimate market adoption.” This approach has helped his company secure partnerships with major players like “Dosha Telecom, which is the number nine brand in the world at the moment, according to Forbes.”
- Accept and Plan for Slow Market Development
Perhaps the most valuable insight is Javier’s candid assessment of market timing: “The traction is sort of slow.” But rather than seeing this as a failure, he frames it as an inherent characteristic of disruptive innovation: “when you look at traction in a field which is extremely destructive, where market is still like, yes, we know that there is climate change that is risk associated to the water. We don’t know how to tackle that at large.”
- Find Early Adopters Through Persistence
Finding early adopters in an emerging market requires both persistence and pattern recognition. As Javier notes, “It’s a tedious process to find early adopters, but there’s always one early adopter, every hundred people that you talk to.” Often, these early adopters come from a place of frustration with existing solutions: “we tried everything, we tried this, we tried that, and then it was stumbling to the road and what you’re offering. This actually makes sense.”
For founders building in emerging markets, these lessons highlight a crucial truth: success isn’t just about having innovative technology – it’s about carefully orchestrating market development alongside product development. As Javier puts it, “The future is there, that exists. The reality today is that we are still working towards that future.”
The key is maintaining a delicate balance between vision and market reality. While you need to be far enough ahead to capture the opportunity, you also need the patience and strategic approach to help the market catch up to your vision. This might mean slower initial traction than you’d like, but as long as you’re laying the groundwork through strategic partnerships, clear positioning, and persistent early adopter acquisition, you’re building toward long-term success.