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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
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Highlights
How ChargerHelp! Is Building an Industry While Building a Company
Sometimes the biggest opportunities require building more than just a product. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, ChargerHelp! founder Kameale Terry revealed how her company’s path to success required simultaneously building a product, creating a workforce, and shaping industry regulations.
The stakes are significant. With 30-40% of EV charging infrastructure currently inoperable, the challenge extends far beyond simple maintenance. “Charging stations are computers,” Kameale explains. “They are what we call IoT assets… For fast chargers, there are many different, what we call handshakes, which essentially interoperability of software that has to properly work in order for one charging event to happen.”
But when ChargerHelp! began tackling this problem in January 2020, they encountered a fundamental challenge: the workforce needed to maintain this infrastructure didn’t exist. Rather than viewing this as an obstacle, they saw it as an opportunity to shape an emerging industry.
Creating an Industry Standard
Instead of following the conventional startup playbook of focusing solely on product development, ChargerHelp! took a more comprehensive approach. “Prior to our company starting, there was no job title called EVSE technician. We actually created that job title with the Department of Labor,” Kameale notes.
This workforce development initiative culminated in a partnership with SAE International to create the industry’s first EVSE technician certification program, recently highlighted in a White House press release. The strategic value of this move becomes clear when Kameale explains their long-term vision: “We’re a technology company, we’re not a service company. We had to hire field service technicians and train them on their own because that labor force did not exist.”
Regulatory Strategy as a Core Competency
Perhaps most striking was ChargerHelp!’s decision to make government relations their first hire. When other startups might have prioritized engineering or sales roles, they recognized the fundamental role of regulation in their industry’s development.
“In climate, you will get squashed by laws in climate tech. So you have to be prepared for that,” Kameale explains. This early investment in regulatory engagement paid off. The company successfully co-sponsored California’s EV Charging Reliability Act and advocated for a 97% uptime requirement in federal funding guidelines.
Evolution of Market Education
ChargerHelp!’s approach to market education reveals sophisticated strategic thinking about how markets mature. “In the beginning, I had to spend a lot of time showing the industry that the stations didn’t work,” Kameale reflects. “Now our next kind of messaging strategy is like, okay, now that you know that it doesn’t work, here are the complexities. And then two, once again, here’s how we can be helpers in solving it.”
This evolution in messaging maps perfectly to their journey toward product-market fit. “I think we’re just at the cusp of it right now. Like, strong product market fit,” Kameale observes. “In the beginning, the customers that were experiencing the most pain understood our product… But a lot of folks wasn’t experiencing tremendous pain yet.”
Data as a Competitive Moat
With 18,000 field service interactions across 17 states, ChargerHelp! has built the largest dataset of its kind in the U.S. This data advantage isn’t just about improving their current offerings – it’s about shaping the future of the industry. As regulatory requirements around uptime become more stringent, their deep understanding of failure modes and maintenance patterns becomes increasingly valuable.
The company’s strategic foresight in collecting and leveraging this data is creating natural barriers to entry. While competitors now discuss the problems ChargerHelp! highlighted a year ago, they’ve moved on to more sophisticated conversations about system interoperability and predictive maintenance.
For founders building in emerging categories, ChargerHelp!’s journey offers valuable lessons about the importance of thinking beyond product development. Success often requires building the infrastructure – whether workforce, regulatory, or data – that enables your product to thrive. As Kameale demonstrates, these additional challenges, when approached strategically, can become powerful competitive advantages.
Actionable
Takeaways
Build Relationships with Incubators and Industry Associations:
ChargerHelp!'s early connections with organizations like the LA Clean Tech Incubator played a crucial role in its development. B2B tech founders should actively seek partnerships and collaborations with incubators and industry associations to accelerate growth and gain credibility.
Educate Your Market to Create Demand:
ChargerHelp! had to educate its market about the problems with EV charging stations before it could sell its solution. Founders should consider an education-first approach to marketing, especially in new or emerging markets, to build awareness and create demand.
Data-Driven Product Development and Positioning:
Utilizing data to understand and predict industry challenges can position your company as a leader in solving those problems. ChargerHelp!'s focus on collecting service data and using predictive analytics has been key to their success and can serve as a model for leveraging data to inform product development and market positioning.
Prepare for Scaling Challenges:
As your company grows, transitioning from founder-led sales and being deeply involved in every deal can be challenging. Establishing strong teams and processes early on can ease this transition and allow founders to focus on strategic growth and product development.
Pursue Legislative Advocacy to Shape Your Industry:
ChargerHelp!'s active role in co-sponsoring bills and advocating for industry standards highlights the potential impact of legislative advocacy. Founders should consider how engaging with legislative processes could benefit their company and industry as a whole, potentially unlocking new opportunities and shaping the market environment.
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