How Camus Energy Found Product-Market Fit in the Conservative Utility Space: 5 GTM Lessons
Selling innovative software to conservative industries often feels like pushing against a brick wall. But in a recent Category Visionaries episode, Camus Energy co-founder Astrid Atkinson revealed how apparent obstacles can become strategic advantages when you’re creating a new category.
- Turn Industry Conservatism Into Opportunity
Conservative industries often present hidden opportunities precisely because they’re resistant to change. As Astrid explains, “any moment when you’re looking at really transformational change in the industry that you’re working within is a really interesting moment for a startup to engage.” While incumbents excel at serving current needs, they often struggle to adapt to fundamental market shifts.
The key is recognizing when industry conservatism creates gaps: “almost all utility software is on prem today. So there’s really not a lot of maturity around like cloud scale technologies or really big data approaches or cloud scale machine learning or AI type approaches.” This technological gap means even industry giants are “starting from nearly as much of a blank slate as we are” when it comes to building next-generation solutions.
- Find Your Blue Ocean
Early advice shaped Camus Energy’s entire go-to-market strategy: “You don’t want to build software that you’re selling to utilities. That’s a bloody ocean… go find a blue ocean space, find a way to do this that doesn’t involve fighting tooth and nail with incumbent vendors.”
Instead of competing directly with established players like Siemens and Schneider Electric, Camus Energy focused on creating an entirely new category: software for managing the transition to what Astrid calls “the two-way, heavily customer involved decarbonized grid of the future.”
- Build an Ecosystem, Not Just a Product
Perhaps most counterintuitive is Astrid’s approach to competition: “Success for us isn’t whether we beat out another fledgling software company, it’s whether we can grow the market enough for all of us to be successful together.”
This collaborative mindset extends to partnerships. As Astrid notes, “I pretty much always say yes, I would like to have a conversation about that because in my mind, success for us isn’t whether we beat out another fledgling software company, it’s whether we can grow the market enough for all of us to be successful together.”
- Target Forward-Thinking Early Adopters
While many warned about utilities being “slow moving, very conservative, very resistant to change,” Camus Energy found success by targeting innovative early adopters. These customers proved surprisingly progressive: “Our current customers are generally early adopters but they are so creative and so dedicated to demonstrating models of dramatic change.”
This focused approach has yielded seven utility-scale customers – significant in an industry where sales cycles are measured in years and individual contracts are substantial.
- Align With Industry Values
Understanding and aligning with core industry values proved crucial. In utilities, Astrid discovered that “the utility industry is very focused on the idea of serving the broadest community… that obligation to do so in an even handed, generalized and universal way is like kind of something close to a sacred duty in their minds.”
This insight helped shape how Camus Energy positioned its solution – not just as innovative technology, but as an enabler of utilities’ fundamental mission to serve their communities.
The broader lesson for founders? Category creation works best during periods of fundamental market transformation. As Astrid puts it, “I don’t think it’s crazy to try to redefine your problem space in a way that lets you tackle something really big and new, but I think that it makes the most sense in contexts where there really is a very big change in the environment that you’re working within.”
In the end, success in conservative industries isn’t about fighting the system – it’s about understanding where the system is already primed for change, then positioning yourself to enable that transformation.