Persefoni’s Playbook: How to Educate the Market When No One Knows They Need Your Product Yet

Most founders wait for market demand to emerge. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Persefoni’s founder Kentaro Kawamori revealed a different approach: anticipating demand before regulations made carbon accounting mandatory, then educating the market to create it.

Reading the Market Before It Forms The genesis of Persefoni’s market education strategy came from Kentaro’s experience at Chesapeake Energy. “We started seeing the early signs of the market pressures and the macro creating a category and creating a market here,” he explains. “That was when this shifted from being an environmental agenda and a pollution oriented agenda only to investors perking up and saying our stakeholders care about this topic.”

But there was a catch. The market was still using outdated tools. “Even to this day, the vast majority of companies do that with spreadsheets, which one is of course phenomenally inefficient, but two is quite concerning if you think about that from a data accuracy and reliability and trust perspective,” Kentaro notes.

Building the Education Engine Instead of waiting for the market to mature, Persefoni took an active role in shaping it. Their thesis was clear: “We would see carbon footprint disclosure requests become a securities regulator and financial regulator mandated disclosure agenda item,” Kentaro recalls.

This insight led to their first strategic decision: choosing investors who could contribute to market education rather than requiring education themselves. “The last thing I want to do as a Founder and CEO is spend my time educating my investors on where the market’s heading. I want my investors to be able to help educate me,” Kentaro emphasizes.

Translating Complexity into Clarity The key challenge wasn’t just building the technology—it was making it accessible. “How do you make the complex simple?” Kentaro asks. “Boy, there is nothing harder than making something complex at least seem simple, because you generally can’t make it simple, but you have to make it seem simple for the user.”

Their solution? Anchor the new in the familiar. “Think of that very similar to what financial accounting does. It takes in a wide variety of data sources… Same exact concept for carbon accounting,” Kentaro explains. This analogy helped prospects understand the value proposition through a framework they already knew.

Meeting the Market Where It Is Perhaps the most crucial insight from Persefoni’s approach was understanding that early-market customers often don’t know what they need. “When you’re in the early part of a hype cycle, the customer base and the market are saying a whole lot of things, but they don’t even know what they’re asking for most of the time,” Kentaro observes.

This reality shaped their entire go-to-market strategy. Rather than simply responding to stated needs, Persefoni focused on helping customers understand the broader context of carbon accounting and its growing importance in corporate strategy.

The results speak for themselves. Persefoni grew from about a dozen customers at the beginning of 2022 to over 200 by early 2023, validating their approach to market education and category creation.

For B2B founders building in nascent markets, Persefoni’s experience offers a valuable lesson: sometimes the biggest opportunity lies not in waiting for market demand to materialize, but in actively shaping how the market understands and values your solution. The key is being “phenomenally right” about your market timing and having the conviction to educate rather than just respond to existing demand.