CleanTech Businesses: Keeping It Simple

A gentleman contacted me yesterday in an attempt to raise investment capital for a business that itself is a concatenation of seven different cleantech business concepts.  I thought I’d publish my response, even if it may appear obvious:

My advice is that you make this much easier to digest and raise more investor confidence by focusing on something that has a high probability of success.  That means rethinking you strategy of combining seven different businesses into one. 

I would just take the one that’s most compelling and run with it.   By that I mean, choose the concept that contains the maximum number of ingredients that make a cleantech business attractive to investors:

• IP protection or some other barrier to entry

• Little or no technical risk

• No huge hurdles associated with permitting or other legal matters

• Large available market

• Competitive differentiation in an arena of clear demand from an identifiable constituency, i.e., where it’s obvious that your solution provides real value to a specific market segment

• Leader (you) who is a demonstrable thought leader in that arena and has created a team of proven players.

Good luck.  – Craig