6 Go-to-Market Lessons from PRTI’s Industrial Innovation Journey

Sometimes the most significant opportunities in tech aren’t about creating new markets, but about transforming existing ones through methodical innovation. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, PRTI’s Chris Hare shared insights from their journey revolutionizing tire recycling, offering valuable lessons for founders tackling complex industrial challenges.

1. Look for Opportunities in Plain Sight

The best opportunities often hide in plain sight, masquerading as “solved” problems. As Chris explains, “The cornerstone of most innovations is it’s almost too obvious. If somebody says to you, ‘well, of course somebody’s already solved that’ and no one has, that’s an opportunity.” This insight led PRTI to tackle tire waste, a problem generating over 300 million waste tires annually in the US alone.

2. Build for Institutional Scale from Day One

When tackling massive industrial problems, founders must build with institutional requirements in mind from the start. “Solving this problem is massive, and the problem is massive. Therefore, the solution has to be massive, which typically means that there’s a lot of money involved,” Chris notes. “You can’t go to the local coffee shop and keep going chatting with folks and get enough money to build this business on a global scale.”

3. Develop Dynamic, Authentic Narrative Alignment

Rather than enforcing rigid messaging, successful scale requires building authentic narrative alignment across the organization. “We have a slide deck and we have scripts and we have words we use that we change every day because the story changes and the landscape changes every day,” Chris shares. This dynamic approach ensures relevance while maintaining authenticity.

The key is creating natural alignment through immersion rather than dictation. “We spend a lot of time together, face to face, which means it’s not just speaking the script or speaking the narrative. It’s also osmosis. We’re hearing each other’s conversations and we kind of course correct each other,” Chris explains.

4. Prioritize Validation Over Speed

While many startups rush to market, PRTI’s experience shows the value of thorough validation in complex industries. “We’ve worked very hard for the last seven, eight years to take this technology from an infancy position right to a point where we’ve run it nearly 10,000 times, where we’ve processed 50 million pounds of tires, where we’ve run it for literally over 100,000 operating hours,” Chris notes.

This methodical approach revealed crucial insights about automation. “When you’re taking a manual process, you maybe don’t understand everything that the process does or what you are really seeing or hearing from the process. When you turn that into lines of code, you have to understand everything.”

5. Build Trust Through Radical Transparency

For companies tackling complex industrial challenges, building trust requires consistent, honest communication with all stakeholders. “If you tell the truth, you never have to remember what you told,” Chris shares, advocating for “open communication with our investors… Speak frankly. Speak openly and honestly. And if you’re having a bad day, say you’re having a bad day and say why.”

This transparency extends to facility tours and stakeholder interactions. “We let investors or partners or the government members that might be visiting speak with our staff pretty much at will,” Chris notes. This open approach builds credibility when visitors hear consistent messages delivered naturally by different team members.

6. Embrace Course Corrections

Perhaps most importantly, PRTI’s journey highlights the importance of being willing to step back and rebuild fundamental components when necessary. When they discovered their initial automation wasn’t performing as needed, they made the difficult decision to invest another year in refinement. As Chris explains, “We had automated the process and it still wasn’t performing the way we wanted it to, which meant that we hadn’t automated it the right way yet.”

Looking ahead, PRTI aims to expand their impact through strategic growth and partnerships. “I would like our technology and our company to have much broader reach in the next five years,” Chris shares. Their journey offers valuable lessons for founders tackling industrial innovation, demonstrating how methodical execution, authentic communication, and institutional-grade operations can transform legacy industries through technology.