How to Build a Product with 10 Customers and a Boring Tech Stack

Transcript

Any product kind of goes through a few phases. First one is like selling on vision. The next one is really selling on a presentation. The pilot program was somewhere between those two. We went to people and we said, for 3 months we will do X — in this case, help you submit a report to a requesting body. In real time we were basically building software and answering the questions that they had around how to measure their Scope 1 emissions or their Scope 2 emissions, completely informed by this first cohort.

As a startup you have so few resources and you really can't afford to spend spare calories trying to pursue unknown return on investment. Experimenting with powerful new databases, in my opinion, is a luxury for people who have more time and money to burn. It's important to pick boring technology.

Hi, my name is Saleh. I'm the CEO of Gravity, an industrial decarbonization platform. We help people manage their carbon and manage their energy. Gravity is tackling climate change in a scalable way and then identify, plan and execute real world projects to reduce those things. Last year was our second year in existence and we grew about four times and this year we're on track to about 3 to 3.5x again, which is really exciting.

In college I started off by studying physics. I ended up graduating with a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. Computer science to me was the application of math in software while physics was the application of math to the physical world. And I would say that was kind of the beginning of marrying atoms and bits for me.

So fresh out of college I went to a company called Salesforce. I landed as a software engineer there on a team called the IoT Cloud. I fell in love with it but my favorite times were when we were building prototypes and we actually had the physical products in our hands. And so I knew that I wanted to get closer to it, and so in leaving Salesforce I looked to a company called Samsara — one of the most incredible sales machines and go-to-market machines — and I joined them to spearhead a product line they called Safety. Safety was expanding beyond fuel efficiency and GPS tracking and a number of other classical telematics offerings into dash cameras and safety monitoring.

In leaving Samsara I joined an industrial venture capital firm called Eclipse, joined them as an entrepreneur in residence, incubating a number of different ideas. But the thesis that I really started to obsess over was one that centered around the groundswell in both actions and technologies that energy intensive companies could take that were carbon reductive but also incredibly aligned to competitive business metrics. And so there was a lot of opportunity for them to take action that was aligned to climate. What really itched me though was that increasingly these entities were being pressured to disclose or even lambasted for being carbon intensive by a lot of people who were eagerly pushing forward the climate agenda. They had this incredible opportunity to participate and weren't doing so.

I had known Saleh socially for several years. He was always somebody that I had wanted to start a company with. And then in late 2021 he called me from a very crowded hostel in Glasgow. He was out there for COP 26, the climate conference. He told me about how he had been an entrepreneur in residence at Eclipse Ventures and at Eclipse he had been incubating a thesis about pragmatic decarbonization. He walked me through his thesis and it was like getting struck with a bolt of lightning. I knew that if I didn't leave to pursue this opportunity with him I would probably come to regret it.

I learned how to code when I was seven. Around senior year of high school, I interned at a company called Ibotta, which is B2C, a consumer couponing application. And it was 20 people in the basement of a firehouse in Denver. That was the summer that Ibotta hit a million users and it was just intoxicating seeing us build something, put it out there, watching it grow in real time. And then I went to college for a year. I actually dropped out of college after freshman year. I think because I had such a good experience at Ibotta, when my friend called me and said, "Hey, I want to drop out of Stanford and start an analytics company," I said, "That sounds awesome."

So both my parents are educators and I remember talking to them and saying, "Hey, I have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to move to California and work on this company." And my mom said, "You're 19, what do you know about once-in-a-lifetime opportunities?" — which I think is a very fair point.

The company that I joined after freshman year of college was called ClearGraph. ClearGraph was an analytics company. So we built a natural language search tool, kind of like Siri but for structured data. Worked at that company for several years and got an acquisition offer from Tableau. So we sold that company to Tableau in 2017 and then I stayed there for a couple years.

One thing I learned was that it's very important to niche down for a target customer. At ClearGraph, I think one of the challenges we had was the long-term ambition was to make data accessible to all manner of business users who couldn't currently access it. But because of how broad that ambition was, we ended up building a product that was quite horizontal. It wasn't specialized in the ways that it needed to be specialized and because it was trying to be everything to everybody it ended up having a lot of trouble adding value whatsoever. And so if I could go back I would have niched down earlier for ClearGraph.

We also learned a lot about the right way to build software at an early stage company. We made some decisions that really slowed us down, like splitting the codebase into microservices and that sort of thing. And having the learnings from ClearGraph definitely influenced the way that we operate engineering and product here at Gravity.

Gravity was born out of the thesis that a lot of this growing pressure that energy or carbon intensive companies were feeling to disclose or participate in the climate transition was rooted in software not being built to make that process easier, and business dots not being connected to make that more attractive. There's got to be some missing link.

The math for counting carbon is actually not that complicated. You take something — like kilowatt-hours of electricity — you multiply that by a number called an emission factor, and you wind up with an estimate of the carbon that you emitted. That's kind of the core of any carbon counting product. But the art of building a good carbon counting product actually has mostly to do with the inputs and the outputs. How do you get the right data in from the myriad sources throughout a business, throughout a business's supply chain, where it needs to come from? How do you output it and report it in the format that is useful, that lets a business accomplish its goals?

We built the first version of the product really fast. We were in the market within a month or two of getting going. We've been generating revenue from about that time as well. And I think that has done really well for us because more important than the early revenue has been the feedback and the real world customer pain.