How a Climate Tech Startup Closed 5+ Enterprise Deals Before Even Launching

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TL;DR

• This is the first post in a new series where I examine how startups are able to build something great. These posts aren’t sponsored and the company doesn’t pay for the coverage.
• Remora Carbon signed multiple enterprise customers in its first year of existence and didn’t do anything truly unique with its sales process. Instead, it built a shared incentive revenue model, chose its first customers carefully, and attacked the global problem of climate change.
• Other startups can emulate their success by going after truly difficult problems (e.g. quit building boring productivity and workflow software).

I’ve been wanting to write more startup pieces for a long time but they are incredibly difficult to create good analysis around. The data is essentially non-existent, the narratives are constantly shifting, and you are forced into a bull case because it feels kinda bad to have a bear case on a fledgling company.  People usually get around this dilemma by offering sponsored posts. CEOs will pay money for in-depth PR and in return, the writer gets access to their data (and a fat check). This isn’t something I’m interested in right now. The trust you, my readers, have in me as an independent analyst is sacred and I don’t want to do anything to violate that. 

That being said, I still want to write about my first love in life (startups). The Every team and I have been noodling on how to do this right and I think we may have it. Today is my first post in a series where I analyze what makes startups successful. These posts are not sponsored and I promise no particular angle to executives. They give me access to their data and in return, they get free coverage to 17k+ of the handsomest readers on the internet. Plus they get the whole value of Evan’s brain thinking real hard about your business and offering help with stuff too. Thank you to the initial batch that will be coming out over the next 6 months. I appreciate you trusting me with your story. 

Most startups are almost dead. There is a large swath of things that can kill you—Google could poach your engineers, funding may dry up, a founder might decide to do something illegal—the list is essentially infinite. One of the most obvious (and painful) existential threats is that no one will buy your product. If you are selling something to large companies that is highly technical, this threat is much larger. It is just hard to close these kinds of deals. 

The response by most companies facing the “big and heavy product” problem has been to run away from it. Product Led Growth, Freemium Pricing—all of these tactics are used because they make the barrier to initial purchase that much lower. Software, with its infinite malleability and free, instantaneous distribution, is the king of this. And good for those companies! I love easy sales motions that make a lot of money. But we can’t grow crops or solve climate change or dramatically improve the world if all companies stick to what’s easy (e.g. software). It requires atoms, gritty real-world technology, and complex sales processes to change things. 

The question is: how can startups actually execute those kinds of ideas? How can you avoid getting bogged down in corporate bureaucracy when selling new technology?