In terms of a new technology that you don’t know who your target is, I’m of the opinion that you’d have to be an idiot (pardon my French) to develop a product without a target group in mind. How can you imagine selling something without understanding how it will meet an unmet need? I think a lot of entrepreneurs make this mistake (especially in the Internet company space), and it usually proves a critical mistake. This is especially true in finding an early adopters that can hold up sales until you can scale up to a broader demographic. James, I’m curious both about your techniques as well as the new start up. Do share, even in a paragraph. No blog post necessary if you don’t have time.

Interesting point. What I take away from it is that data for data sake is essentially useless. Unless you understand the ‘why?’ question in the data your searching for a have a hypothesis before you start collecting data, you may reverse engineer conclusions based on correlations. 

Regarding cleantech specific companies, I feel that specific marketing strategies, and what advice you should follow, depend heavily on where you are in the supply chain, who your customer is, etc. 

For consumer products, customers may not know what they want. 

For B2B sales, this is less likely to be true. 

If you’re selling a commodity in a better, faster, cheaper way, marketing may have even less impact. 

I find the hypothesis and data (both metric and anecdote) to be especially useful when you have a new technology and may not know exactly who your customer is, then simply getting any data because a chore and key for customer development. 

Chris 

One change for our definition of cleantech, I wouldn’t focus just on reducing pollution, but also to talk about how cleantech can drive economic growth through lower-polluting energy sources. Framing it in terms of economic growth, at least to me, is immensely important. We’re about creating profit, creating jobs, creating growth through cleantech. That’s how I think about it.