Founder-led GTM in a genuinely small market

Tihon (00:00)
All right. Rakesh, super nice to have you on the podcast. I'm so glad to have you here. Welcome.

Rakhesh Martyn (00:07)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to it.

Tihon (00:09)
Mm-hmm. I'm very excited to talk to you actually for two reasons. Like the first reason is you are an energy tech, and I personally see energy transition as a very big thing and a big challenge for humanity. Maybe it's a big word, but yeah, I really think so. Second thing is you're the first founder on my podcast before there have been operators.

Tihon (00:35)
and different practitioners but like super excited to talk to you and to learn your best practices, frameworks, like welcome.

Rakhesh Martyn (00:44)
Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm really excited and I'm honored to be the first founder. I will do my best to be the best founder. We'll see.

Tihon (00:52)
Nice. Amazing, thank

Rakhesh Martyn (00:53)
Yeah.

Tihon (00:54)
you. So could we please start with a small self introduction? Could you please tell a little bit about yourself?

Rakhesh Martyn (01:00)
Yeah, sure. I'm coming to you from Sydney, Australia. Right now it is seven fifteen p.m. I am originally from Sri Lanka. I was born in nineteen eighty-seven in Sri Lanka in Colombo. I grew up there. I went to an international school. so I studied in the British curriculum. my family spoke English mostly at home, so I've been speaking English my whole life. But Sri Lanka has two other native languages which

Rakhesh Martyn (01:24)
I can understand, I can speak, but English is very much my fluent language.

Tihon (01:30)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:31)
and I moved to the UK in 2005, and I say that because people always say, you're from Sri Lanka, but your English is very good. The reason is because I've been speaking English like my entire life.

Tihon (01:38)
Right. Right.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:42)
I moved to the UK in 2005 to go to university. I studied chemical engineering in a small town called Lufborough. people who are familiar with

Rakhesh Martyn (01:52)
Cricket will know Loughbury University because that's where the English Cricket Academy is. and also Team GB in the Olympics trains there. So great sporting facilities. that's

Tihon (02:01)
Nice.

Rakhesh Martyn (02:02)
if anybody knows Loughbury University, that's probably why. I studied chemical engineering. I graduated in 2009 and I worked in petrochemicals for about six years. Then in 2015,

Tihon (02:12)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (02:13)
I randomly actually I had met a girl.

Rakhesh Martyn (02:16)
She lived in London. I didn't live in London. I wanted to be near her. So I left my job and moved to London. And I randomly ended up at an energy startup. And that was my first role in energy. And that was a I won't go into detail now, but that was basically my first energy technology position. and I was a project engineer/slash solutions engineer. that was 2015, November. I

Rakhesh Martyn (02:38)
worked for EDF Energy, which is one of the largest utilities in the world, during my time in the UK. Then in 2017, I moved to Australia and I joined another energy company there. I moved for personal reasons. I have a brother in Melbourne, and my now wife is a doctor. The prospects for doctors in the UK were not great. So we moved here and here we

Tihon (02:59)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (02:59)
are. We've been we've been here ever since. in terms of me as a person,

Rakhesh Martyn (03:04)
I'm very heavily into music. I've been very, you know, a big fan of music my whole life. I'm very, very opinionated opinionated about music. so you know, if you get me onto that topic, it'll it'll take a very long time. I love dogs.

Tihon (03:16)
Bet better not to play

Tihon (03:17)
rap for you, right?

Rakhesh Martyn (03:19)
look, I there there are versions of I

Tihon (03:21)
you like all the jars?

Rakhesh Martyn (03:23)
I I'm I'm into lots of different types of music, but I I

Tihon (03:26)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (03:27)
have a very particular opinion about what constitutes good art. and that's I'm sure most of us who are into

Tihon (03:31)
right. Cool. Love this.

Rakhesh Martyn (03:34)
art have that same opinion, you know. and another another little interesting factoid about me is I used to be a professional stand up comedian. so I

Tihon (03:43)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (03:43)
started out

Rakhesh Martyn (03:44)
In two thousand and eight, I was inspired actually by Flight of the Concords, who you can see up on the wall there. They're a a musical comedy duo from New Zealand. so I started doing musical comedy back in two thousand and eight and then I did stand-up comedy in for a long time. So that's another thing that's kind of interesting about my past. and I love dogs. those two dogs in the painting there are two dogs that I had in the past who are sadly no longer with us. and I I have two dogs now.

Rakhesh Martyn (04:09)
company is named after a dog. It's clearly a part of my personality. that's

Tihon (04:14)
Beautiful.

Rakhesh Martyn (04:15)
kind kind of it. Yeah. Hopefully I've covered

Tihon (04:17)
Wow.

Rakhesh Martyn (04:18)
enough.

Tihon (04:19)
Yeah, yeah. Super nice. Yeah, I can feel your stand-up background because like immediately it's like it's super interesting to listen to you. Yeah, thank you so much for

Rakhesh Martyn (04:29)
I appreciate it.

Tihon (04:30)
yeah, thank you so much for sharing the background. Today actually we want to talk more about GTM. So it's usually like a dry topic, not so interesting for many people. And yeah, if we go into like finite market dynamics and all

Tihon (04:46)
all the things going on there it can be even more boring but I'm pretty sure it's there are ways to make it interesting. So I would love to ask you first about your market. You are in Australian battery management portfolio management market right and this market is like it is very specific. So could you please elaborate a little bit on

Tihon (05:11)
Who are your buyers and how the market like generally looks like?

Rakhesh Martyn (05:15)
Sure. so look, the it might be worth having starting with a little bit of a a quick introduction into the energy industry more broadly, so that you

Tihon (05:23)
Absolutely.

Rakhesh Martyn (05:24)
can work out where we fit in into the overall industry. So

Tihon (05:28)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (05:29)
across the world it is true to say that grids are largely the same, right? And when I say they're largely the same, what I mean is there are generators, very large generators.

Rakhesh Martyn (05:40)
That generate electricity, that electricity goes into a physical grid and it travels towards consumers. So the purpose of electricity, electricity is a common good. You know, of course, sadly, there are certain parts of the world where humans are not connected to the grid. But as an example, one of the markers of human progress that is good to track is how many people are being connected to the electricity grid every day. So if you go to human progress.org, you'll see that, right? So historically.

Rakhesh Martyn (06:07)
Grids were built in such a way that generators would generate and consumers would consume.

Tihon (06:13)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (06:14)
And that is the case in most places. But over time, especially over the last 20 to 25 years, things have changed a little bit, and consumers have become generators as well. So consumers have started to generate their own power. This is what's called distributed energy. And you nowhere has this been more the case on a per capita basis than here in Australia.

Rakhesh Martyn (06:34)
so here in Australia, there are somewhere in the region of I should have looked this up earlier actually. somewhere in the region of well, let me give you a little bit of a fact here. The peak demand of the eastern seaboard of Australia is around 35 gigawatts. And there is around, I believe, 25 to sorry, do you mind if we if I just look this up? Because I'll get flamed in the comments otherwise if I don't know.

Tihon (06:54)
Sure. Sure.

Rakhesh Martyn (06:59)
okay. Sorry, let me let let's let's kind of go back. So in Australia

Tihon (07:03)
Yeah, yeah, sure, of course.

Rakhesh Martyn (07:04)
in Australia the peak demand of the grid is somewhere in the region of thirty to thirty-five gigawatts.

Tihon (07:11)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (07:12)
and around twenty-seven gigawatts of generation comes from rooftop solar in the eastern seaboard of Australia. That is a lot. Right. So that is that is

Tihon (07:18)
Mm. Mm-hmm. That's right.

Rakhesh Martyn (07:22)
the peak.

Rakhesh Martyn (07:23)
That is a peak generation of roof of rooftop solar in the NEM, which is the national electricity market. That's the eastern seaboard of Australia. So everywhere except Northern Territory and Western Australia. And now there's around 4 million homes in Australia that have batteries as well. So you have rooftop solar at about 26 gigawatts, and you have batteries. It's very hard to say exactly how many gigawatts of batteries there are, but in storage terms.

Rakhesh Martyn (07:48)
It's somewhere in the region of 12 to 20 gigawatt hours worth of duration of batteries on the distributed side, which is a ridiculously

Tihon (07:55)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (07:57)
high number. Now, the the market that we operate in is the national electricity market. And it's very much built around it. Used to be generators are generating, it goes from left to right, consumers consume.

Tihon (08:09)
huh. Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (08:10)
and I like to split it up into the physical and the financial. So the physical is the grid that transports the electrons. The financial is the market that takes care of the procurement of electricity. And it's an energy-only market, which means that every five minutes the grid operator, the market operator, is forecasting how much demand there is going to be in the grid. And then generators are are bidding their capacity.

Rakhesh Martyn (08:35)
Into that market, and then the market operator will procure how much electricity they think is needed to satisfy demand, and then the market settles. That happens every five minutes. there are 10 price bands between negative $1,000 and positive $23,200 per megawatt hour. That is a ridiculous spread, right? And every five

Tihon (08:53)
Mm-hmm. That's right.

Rakhesh Martyn (08:55)
minutes it can fluctuate in that way. So

Rakhesh Martyn (08:58)
That's the market that we operate in. It's a commodity market. It's said by some to be the most volatile commodity market in the world. and it's very, very exciting. It's very it's crazy. They call it like the Wild West. so the reason people sorry, go for it, go for it.

Tihon (09:10)
Yeah, probably sorry.

Tihon (09:14)
I wanted to say, yeah, probably more volatile than Bitcoin. Sometimes, right? Just like wow. I I I didn't

Rakhesh Martyn (09:18)
Maybe, maybe, yeah. it's

Tihon (09:22)
know that number, but like from minus one thousand to twenty three thousand plus is just like it's crazy.

Rakhesh Martyn (09:28)
It is it is pretty nuts and it's it's unique in some ways. There are other energy only markets in the world, but it is it is very unusual to have an energy only market. Most developed grids have a combination of an energy market and a capacity market. What that means is that most often, more often than not, you can procure energy.

Rakhesh Martyn (09:49)
But if there is insufficient energy, then you can call upon capacity that is waiting. Because for the most part, the grid is built for around two to three percent of the year when demand is very high. And it's that peak demand that keeps increasing over time. So it's incredibly inefficient to keep building out more grid just for such a small proportion of the year.

Rakhesh Martyn (10:12)
What you would rather do is be smart about how you manage demand. And this is what's called demand side response. And that's where the market that we operate in has come from. So it's like as the demand grows, you can't keep just adding supply. And eventually, even if you have enough supply, the grid might not be big enough to carry it. So you have to do more on the demand side. And that's kind of where we operate within the market. So generally speaking, what is the macro reason why people do this?

Rakhesh Martyn (10:38)
It's a commodity market, it's highly volatile, there's money to be made, right? from a from a thematic standpoint, why do we have renewables and batteries? Simple answer. Again, there's a lot of capital flowing in that direction. And the reason the capital is flowing in that direction is largely it depends. Some people are driven by you know climate-related goals and they want to invest their money into the renewable thematic as a result.

Rakhesh Martyn (11:02)
and batteries are seen to be the like because renewables do this, they are very intermittent.

Tihon (11:08)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (11:09)
and coal and gas are very flat, right? When they're generating, they generate, and when they're not generating, they are gone. But they are reliable, like largely reliable

Tihon (11:15)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes.

Rakhesh Martyn (11:19)
when they're working well. But most of the infrastructure globally from a coal and thermal standpoint is unreliable now because it's quite old. Renewables are intermittent.

Rakhesh Martyn (11:28)
and the reason that batteries have become a really strong technology is because they provide firming. So when there is intermittent nature of generation to firm that out and give you a nice flat profile, that's what the batteries do. Okay. So

Tihon (11:41)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (11:44)
every five minutes in the NEM, the national electricity market, people are having to forecast what the price of electricity is going to be and then try and pick the low periods to charge the battery.

Rakhesh Martyn (11:56)
And the high periods to discharge. So it's an it's an arbitrage, buy low, sell high. Okay.

Tihon (12:01)
Yeah. Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (12:03)
and batteries as a technology class are capable of operating in multiple different markets. Here in Australia, there are how many would I say? There's eight ancillary services markets, continuous ten, eleven, twelve. There's there could be twelve different markets that a battery is eligible for at

Tihon (12:21)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (12:22)
any given time.

Rakhesh Martyn (12:23)
Concurrently. It is

Tihon (12:24)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (12:25)
verging on impossible for a human to make a decision as to how much of their

Tihon (12:28)
That's right.

Rakhesh Martyn (12:29)
capacity to bid into each of those markets, and that's what people need software for. That is the software that Hachiko builds. Okay, so that's kind of how we fit in. in terms of an ecosystem,

Tihon (12:37)
Mason.

Rakhesh Martyn (12:38)
there is a blog on the Hachiko website that's titled Who's Who in the Zoo?

Rakhesh Martyn (12:43)
Which I would recommend anyone that's listening or watching to go and read, because it kind of goes into the detail of who the different ecosystem players are. But effectively,

Tihon (12:50)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (12:50)
there are people who eventually want to build and own battery projects. And these are

Tihon (12:55)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (12:55)
largely people who are backed by institutional asset managers, you know, people like your Brookfield, KKR, private equity funds who want to have a lot of assets under management. and they are building projects for those people. They have certain return.

Rakhesh Martyn (13:09)
Expectations and they will structure and build projects according to whatever the mandate of the fund is. Those are our customers. and our customers, the reason that they need us is because, as I've said, the problem that we solve is quite difficult to solve. And if your job is to build a big portfolio of assets, the difference between that skill set.

Rakhesh Martyn (13:31)
And the skill set required to build a lean and effective software business is very large. and even so, for the for the effective for the software to be lean and effective, you need to be building it for multiple people within the market. If you build software only for your own purpose, then by definition, you aren't building the

Tihon (13:48)
Too expensive. Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (13:49)
software that's best for your use case.

Tihon (13:52)
Yeah, yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (13:53)
those are who our buyers are.

Rakhesh Martyn (13:54)
Now, because these are construction projects, they involve connecting to the electricity grid. There's a lot of different

Tihon (13:59)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (14:00)
parties that are involved in the market and in the project. There's a lot of vendors that sell into this area, but ultimately who they're selling to is the owner of the project. So you have construction contractors, you have grid sort of power system planning, you have development approval, so town planners.

Rakhesh Martyn (14:20)
you have investment bankers who are doing the corporate development side, the deal structuring, you have lawyers, you have consultants who provide some of these services together, and then you have

Tihon (14:29)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (14:29)
traders, and then you have people like us. And then there are people who sell the

Tihon (14:33)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (14:33)
batteries, the inverters, the solar panels, the controllers, all of the equipment that goes onto the site. All of these people typically are individual businesses who are then selling into the project owner.

Rakhesh Martyn (14:44)
Some project owners will look to vertically integrate. And the vertically integrated ones are the ones that have the best operating expenditure because they they kind of absorb as much overhead as they can, but you need to have a big portfolio to make that worthwhile. And it's really hard to

Tihon (15:00)
Absolutely.

Rakhesh Martyn (15:01)
have that at the start. So that's the that's who the buyers are and

Rakhesh Martyn (15:06)
The different players are within the ecosystem that kind of fit into

Tihon (15:08)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (15:09)
it. we will eat we will typically sell directly to the buyer, or there might be a channel

Tihon (15:13)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (15:14)
that brings us into the deal in some way. and we might sell to somebody else because it makes it easier for them to sell to the buyer, to the owner, sorry, of the project.

Tihon (15:23)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (15:25)
in terms of the concentration of the market, here in Australia, the market is pretty concentrated.

Rakhesh Martyn (15:31)
you know, there are not there's there's not a huge number of institutionally backed asset managers and asset developers on the large scale side. But increasingly

Tihon (15:40)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (15:41)
in the commercial and industrial sector and in the residential sector, there is quite a lot of dilution because as you start to build like a consumer facing value proposition, the nature of that value proposition is going to be quite divergent depending on how you approach the consumer.

Rakhesh Martyn (15:56)
but ultimately, because of the nature of the market and the market being where the profits come from, everybody needs a version

Tihon (16:01)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (16:02)
of us.

Tihon (16:02)
Yeah, that's right.

Rakhesh Martyn (16:03)
And in terms of who who makes the call on you know who the buyers really are and who the decision makers are within the within the buyer's organization, there's always a CFO who has an opinion, chief financial officer who has an opinion on

Tihon (16:17)
Right.

Rakhesh Martyn (16:18)
this. But typically there is a team of people or there is one person who is accountable.

Rakhesh Martyn (16:25)
For the portfolio being as profitable as possible. And that's the person

Tihon (16:30)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (16:31)
who ultimately will be our champion. That's the person who comes to us and says, Hey, I need my projects to be profitable and I need your software to do that. that person will then be accountable to the, you know, the development person, the corporate development person, the CFO, the commercial people who are structuring the portfolio.

Rakhesh Martyn (16:50)
And there's usually an investment committee that's made up of multiple parties who will then make the call. But the recommendation is made by that person who is responsible and accountable for the PL, the profit and loss of the business.

Tihon (17:02)
Got it. Thank you so much. sounds very clear. I think even people who are not in energy industry got a very clear picture of the ecosystem. I would love to ask: do you have a minimum minimum capacity of the battery owner?

Tihon (17:21)
to start working with them and what is the rough amount of customers, let's say in Australia, do you have the idea what what's your total market?

Rakhesh Martyn (17:31)
That's a good question. And before I answer that, I will say that it's highly unlikely that we will only ever be an Australian business throughout our life. like

Tihon (17:39)
Uh-huh. Totally. Absolutely.

Rakhesh Martyn (17:42)
I said, I'm only 39 years old. I have a lot of energy left. So I'll almost definitely be taking this thing abroad over the next few years. the minimum size of a single battery is quite small. You know, like I said, we've we have been lucky to have come from

Rakhesh Martyn (17:57)
A background of, I mean, I've been in the energy industry for 11 years at this point. And distributed energy, flexibility, they it's called flexibility, being flexible with your with how you interact with the grid. That is the concept that batteries monetize, right? And flexibility is flexibility

Tihon (18:11)
Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

Rakhesh Martyn (18:14)
exists across the whole size spectrum here in you know, when it comes to when it comes to the grid. I've been doing flexibility for 11 years, but flexibility as a concept is only about

Rakhesh Martyn (18:24)
twenty to twenty five years old. So I am I am like a relative veteran when it comes to this area of the market that we operate in. And what that has meant is we've been able to build a product that is pretty ruthlessly efficient in the way that we have allocated our capital and the speed at which we are built and so on. And what that has meant is we're able to address systems of any size and we have the necessary expertise

Tihon (18:47)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (18:48)
at each level.

Rakhesh Martyn (18:49)
If you're dealing, you can segment the market in four different ways. You can have the residential market, that's consumers. You have the commercial

Tihon (18:55)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (18:56)
and industrial market that is also consumers. Then you have small grid scale batteries. These are distributed,

Tihon (19:03)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (19:04)
these are operated by what are called IPPs, independent power producers.

Tihon (19:10)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (19:11)
IPPs ultimately have built projects purely to generate

Rakhesh Martyn (19:14)
electricity and generate revenue, right? Whereas you have the

Tihon (19:18)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (19:19)
alternative would be to have a consumer on site that is consuming the power that comes out of the system. So there are

Tihon (19:24)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (19:25)
two types of IPP. There are IPPs who are building lots and lots of small projects, and you have

Tihon (19:30)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (19:31)
IPPs who are building a smaller number of large projects. So those are your four categories. We can do things for all four. So the

Rakhesh Martyn (19:39)
Theoretically, we can do things for all four. You know, the the go to market for each of those will vary. but theoretically, the product is capable of of servicing all four of those areas. The smallest battery on our platform is a five kilowatt, twenty six kilowatt hour battery. It's about ten feet in that direction. It's in my house. and the largest

Tihon (19:58)
Nice.

Rakhesh Martyn (19:58)
battery on our platform currently is a five megawatt, twenty megawatt hour system.

Rakhesh Martyn (20:04)
and that's a combination of battery and solar. So it's quite big. It's a thousand times bigger than the one on my house. so that's the that's the kind of range. In terms of a minimum number of systems or a minimum size for a customer, we are B2B. We're not B2C. So we sell to businesses,

Tihon (20:21)
Absolutely.

Rakhesh Martyn (20:21)
which means that I would want a customer who can pay us at least a thousand Australian dollars a month.

Rakhesh Martyn (20:27)
ideally much, much more than that. You know, my our ideal customer profile is somebody who's gonna be paying us two hundred and fifty thousand Australian dollars a year. Right? That's the kind of

Tihon (20:37)
Something like utility

Tihon (20:38)
scale.

Rakhesh Martyn (20:39)
Look, it doesn't have to be utility scale. It could it could

Tihon (20:40)
Kind of almost. Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (20:42)
be a portfolio of of commercial and industrial systems.

Tihon (20:44)
Yeah, that's right. That's

Tihon (20:45)
right. Like small as as you've mentioned, like small batteries somewhere, and then with software, probably even more value comes there exactly when you're managing small like couple megawatt systems but like thirty in one portfolio, right? 'Cause then you are managing more complex system and like humanly impossible without software, right?

Rakhesh Martyn (21:06)
Yeah. It becomes

Rakhesh Martyn (21:08)
it becomes very difficult. Like I was talking to a customer of ours today who has currently got five batteries with us and he wants

Tihon (21:14)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (21:15)
to do five to ten every month. And he's at

Tihon (21:17)
huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (21:18)
a point now where he can't be bothered to go and look for somebody else. He's having a good experience with us and it's just too complicated

Tihon (21:23)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (21:24)
for him to think about switching. So he will just keep bringing

Tihon (21:27)
Mm-hmm. That's right.

Rakhesh Martyn (21:28)
batteries to us and we'll take care of it.

Rakhesh Martyn (21:30)
Next time he might go, I want to work with a different battery manufacturer. Is that okay? And I'll say, sure. Right? For us, a battery is a battery. The purpose of our product is to absorb that complexity away. So the customer,

Tihon (21:41)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (21:41)
what I always say to my customers is if your financial model tells you to build a project, build the project. Don't worry about where it is, how big it is, who the manufacturer is, what the network tariff says. Don't care about any of that. That's my problem.

Rakhesh Martyn (21:55)
You go and build your project and we'll make as much money as possible from it. The complexity from site to site, that's ours to absorb.

Tihon (22:02)
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Yeah, I got it. Also, I wanted to huh. Sorry. Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (22:05)
On sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, I forgot. One question you did ask was about the number of customers.

Rakhesh Martyn (22:12)
so in Australia there's again, like I said, there's different categories. And within those four categories, I break them down into two major categories. and that is people who own the battery. So they deploy the

Tihon (22:27)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (22:27)
capital and they are the owner of the asset.

Rakhesh Martyn (22:29)
And then people who operate the battery on behalf of the owner.

Tihon (22:33)
Mm-hmm, right?

Rakhesh Martyn (22:34)
Both of

Rakhesh Martyn (22:34)
those people can be our customers. Because if you're a contractor who has sold the battery and built the project, you receive like an operations and maintenance contract, and you really want that. You want that trailing revenue. And in and in order for you to demonstrate value to the owner of the project, you have to use our software. Because without our software, you can't operate it. So those are the two types. And I would say that the

Rakhesh Martyn (22:59)
The second category, which is the people who operate on behalf of the owner, all of them want to eventually become asset owners. Everyone wants to be an asset owner because you can develop significant enterprise value within your business if you have a platform style business where you are originating projects, you are constructing them, and then you are operating them and you have an equity stake in the eventual operating asset. So that's where they want to get to, but not everybody is there yet.

Rakhesh Martyn (23:24)
On the asset owner's side, I would say there's a very small number of accounts. There is fewer than 100 in Australia, but each of those accounts is highly valuable. So that's kind of the current

Tihon (23:34)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (23:35)
state. Today, on the 10th of September 2026, that is the current state. The second category

Tihon (23:40)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (23:41)
is more like in the hundreds. Between

Tihon (23:43)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (23:43)
300 and 600 companies out there.

Rakhesh Martyn (23:46)
Who are jostling to become like that, there's quite a lot of consolidation that happens in energy because ultimately

Tihon (23:53)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (23:53)
the most valuable thing is pipeline. If you can demonstrate that you can originate projects and originate customers and acquire customers, then the larger players are very, very interested in that. And then they will try and acquire you. So that's kind of the cycle that deals go through.

Rakhesh Martyn (24:09)
And today, for example, data centers are going through that that kind of cycle. You know, back in the

Tihon (24:15)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (24:15)
day it used to be about solar and battery projects. Now it's about who can find the best land for a data center project and then try and sell it to somebody else, having done as much development as possible, but not too much, because the development is expensive. That's the kind of cycle that that things go through. Globally, there are many, many.

Rakhesh Martyn (24:33)
Potential customers, of course.

Tihon (24:35)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is exactly the point I wanted to discuss also a little bit, because usually big temp, total addressable market, is very attractive for investors, right? Because there is like unicorn potential and all these things. So like VC math works like and and people just like want to invest. Otherwise, if it's like let's say investors see like ten million or like

Tihon (25:02)
may it maybe even 100 million potential, then it's not so attractive, right? But there is other part of it because when you have small market, it's I mean like all the things you've mentioned about the market, like everyone kind of knows everyone there, right? It's it's very small. it's hard to penetrate it from

Tihon (25:25)
the outside like if outsider comes in and say okay let's let's build a software that will manage portfolio batteries or or like do a similar type of thing it would be super hard so there is also very big upside here right to be to be in exactly this concentrated heavily

Tihon (25:49)
relationship market and there is a possibility to scale later to a different geography.

Rakhesh Martyn (25:53)
Yeah, look, the topic of market size is so interesting, because

Tihon (25:57)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (25:58)
every the the majority of the rejections I have had from investors over the last two years, and there have been many, have been on the topic of market size. They think that the market's too small. But the really interesting thing is, I mean, we are truly a cat we're in a category defining moment right now.

Rakhesh Martyn (26:16)
A category creating moment. So the

Tihon (26:16)
Exactly. Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (26:18)
thing that the thing that really that I love about our existing investors is that they understand that the market size today is not the market size of the future. And the market

Tihon (26:28)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (26:29)
size of the future is going to be created by what we do today. So you've got to be you've got to be able to create that extra value and that creates a new market, which then people flood into. There's a book called Play Bigger.

Rakhesh Martyn (26:42)
Which is really interesting on the topic of category creation, which I read last year. And that's all about at the very beginning, a concept doesn't even exist. And then a category-defining

Tihon (26:51)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (26:53)
company comes along and builds the category, and they educate

Tihon (26:55)
Yeah. Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (26:57)
the market. They are also the first to not the first necessarily, like Peter Thiel in Zero to One talks about having the last mover advantage, but the

Tihon (27:06)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (27:07)
category defining

Rakhesh Martyn (27:08)
business is then the one that owns eighty percent of the economics, if not more.

Tihon (27:12)
W yeah,

Tihon (27:13)
winner takes it all. Yeah, that's exactly the

Rakhesh Martyn (27:15)
Yes.

Tihon (27:16)
situation there.

Rakhesh Martyn (27:17)
So we we are like what we're doing, and I won't give away all of our secrets, but what we're doing is building building this concept in a way that creates new categories of businesses. and one of those new categories of businesses is going to be us. And that then creates TAM that doesn't even exist today. And from my perspective

Tihon (27:35)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (27:35)
as a founder, one of the lessons that I've had to learn, and I can't say that I've learned it perfectly.

Rakhesh Martyn (27:40)
Is how do I tell that story to investors? and to

Tihon (27:44)
Mm-hmm. Right. It's tough.

Rakhesh Martyn (27:46)
be to be honest, the best ones are the ones who listen to me and go, Man, you look you sound like you're gonna solve this problem. I don't even know how to define the problem,

Tihon (27:55)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (27:56)
but you sound like you're the guy that's gonna solve it, and those are the investors that wanna invest.

Tihon (28:00)
Yeah, cool. Love this.

Tihon (28:02)
Amazing. All right. But yeah, we almost covered just like a tiny bit of the topic I wanted us to go into, but like it's it's a super necessary pre-discussion because yeah, now our listeners can understand more properly what market we are talking about and what are all the nuances. So and now I think we are ready to go through probably through a real deal. If you could

Rakhesh Martyn (28:28)
Mm-hmm.

Tihon (28:29)
Guide me through it, Rakesh. So maybe you have an example from the beginning to start how it like worked in terms of selling and in terms of marketing. What was the source of the opportunity? who was the champion in the deal? if like w what is the buy-in group, buying committee you're dealing with, and maybe like what were the

Tihon (28:54)
obstacles or objections along the way and why in the end they choose you.

Rakhesh Martyn (29:01)
Well there are

Tihon (29:02)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (29:03)
I I'm in the grateful position to be able to

Tihon (29:06)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (29:06)
have lots of deals to choose from that that we have won.

Tihon (29:10)
Nice.

Rakhesh Martyn (29:10)
but I will pick one. I haven't really talked about this one much before, so I'll talk about this one. I think it's really interesting. this is a a a consortium. Well, it's not a consortium actually, it's an organization that owns a

Tihon (29:23)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (29:23)
lot of land.

Rakhesh Martyn (29:24)
They have rights to a lot of land across Australia and they want to build renewable energy projects that are going to last a very, very long time. Now, typically, when you build a big solar and battery project, it's gonna last 20 years plus. Right? The land option, the lease option on land is usually at least 30 years. The solar panels last up to 30 years, the battery might last 15, and then you repower and build another one. Okay.

Rakhesh Martyn (29:50)
So

Tihon (29:50)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (29:51)
that's how long people are in this for. It's a generational business rather than I'm gonna tick and flick, as they say, and then go and sell it to the highest bidder. so this particular deal, that's the end customer, is that landowner, and they want to build all of these projects and they wanna they wanna do it at scale. And there's lots of institutional investors who are gonna put capital in. But the

Tihon (30:11)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (30:11)
starting team was very, very small. So they

Tihon (30:15)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (30:15)
had a number of

Rakhesh Martyn (30:16)
Consultants working with them. One of the consultants was working in a capacity that's referred to as the owner's engineer. So when you are owning a project, you are working with, like I said, the consult, the construction contractor, the town planner, the people who are selling you equipment. There's so many different people you have to engage with. An owner's engineer is your trusted advisor in that process. They will help you

Tihon (30:40)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (30:40)
source proposals from the right people.

Rakhesh Martyn (30:43)
They will help you to define an RFP, a request for proposal. They will help

Tihon (30:47)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (30:47)
you to write it. And then they will send it out to the right people. They will help you to evaluate the responses. And they will help you to make the right decision. So that's the

Tihon (30:54)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (30:55)
the owner's engineer is the one that contacted us. Now the reason they contacted us is yes. The reason

Tihon (30:59)
Mm-hmm. It was inbound. Yeah. well. Okay.

Rakhesh Martyn (31:04)
that they contacted us, this is gonna be hilarious, is they had read our blogs.

Rakhesh Martyn (31:09)
Right? They had read our blogs because I

Tihon (31:10)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (31:13)
from the very beginning I have committed very strongly to trying to educate the market as much as possible. I do this for two reasons. One is because I like it, two is because selfishly I can't be bothered to answer the same question over and over again. And because this market is so

Tihon (31:27)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (31:29)
complicated, people are always coming to me to try and learn. People like me. I'm not the only one.

Rakhesh Martyn (31:35)
People are always coming to people like me and going, hey, I don't get it. Can you explain it to me, please? And they don't want to pay

Tihon (31:40)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (31:40)
a consultant. And they know that they'll come to me and ask me a question. And if I'm not a consultant, I'll just tell them it won't cost me any money. and I know that that's the nature of the market that we're in. So I decided to write these blogs. Now, the part of the market that we operate in, the flexibility market, is very new. Like I said, it's you know, it started out as a concept in the US in 1999 or thereabouts.

Rakhesh Martyn (32:01)
And it's been here in Australia for not very long, and there's not been very many businesses that are doing it. So there was a particular challenge that had to be solved as part of the connection process for these batteries. And the owner's engineer had no practical experience in that area. So they read one of our blogs appeared on their radar. They read the blog and they went, Hey, I reckon this guy can answer the question. So I got an inquiry through our website.

Rakhesh Martyn (32:25)
Saying, hi, I'm so and so from this consultancy. I am working with a client who is building these types of projects, but they're facing this challenge in the connection process. How would it work in the market when we connect? So I called the guy up and I answered his question. And he said, that's really interesting. Can you send me your capability statement? And I sent it to him. And then he sent us forward alongside two competitors.

Rakhesh Martyn (32:50)
but here's the best part. He asked me which competitors to include. So I t I told him two businesses.

Tihon (32:56)
Cool, wow.

Rakhesh Martyn (32:58)
I told him two businesses who are legitimate competitors of ours, but I knew that we would have no issue competing with them. Right? So he sent he sent us forward. and that basically has been it since then. They looked at our capability, they looked at what we were doing, and

Rakhesh Martyn (33:14)
Don't get me wrong, we had to compete very well on price. Like we couldn't we couldn't take the piss on price. We couldn't just charge ridiculous dollars. It still has to be reasonable. But as long as it's reasonable, they look at us and they go, This is the kind of partner we need in our projects. It's not just the software. We need somebody who understands this market deeply because as it evolves, their contribution is going to be huge. And that's why we won. It's been a very long sales cycle. The first

Rakhesh Martyn (33:39)
Contact was back in probably December and today it is September the tenth. and we only just got the contract through. But I have known since May that we were gonna win.

Tihon (33:49)
yeah, I would say it's still quite quickly 'cause usually like as I know, this type of projects can last like the sales party can last for a year or one and a half years, something like that. So eight, nine months I I would say it's it's quite good.

Rakhesh Martyn (34:01)
Look, yeah, it's it it

Rakhesh Martyn (34:05)
can it can be a long time between first meeting and first revenue, but I was able to structure the deal in in a way that I created a compelling reason for them to sign. and I was able to create value in their project process before the site even goes live. That's something

Tihon (34:21)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (34:22)
that our product is able to do. There's value that it can deliver to you.

Rakhesh Martyn (34:26)
before you have even started using the operating software.

Tihon (34:30)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (34:30)
And I was able to show them that if they were able to sign up early, they would get access to that additional value. Which, you know, in a founder-led sales motion includes access to me. And that's what you've got to do in an early stage business. You know, you've got to find ways to create this type of compelling event so that a a person makes a commitment early.

Rakhesh Martyn (34:50)
In this industry, everyone wants to make a commitment, but nobody wants to make the commitment. Both of those things are true at the same time, right? So you so you have to get

Tihon (34:56)
Hm. Right. Yes. Catch twenty two. Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (35:00)
them to put their money where their mouth is. Eventually you just say, Hey man, you said you wanted to work with me. Well, you're gonna have to make a commitment, or else I'm gonna stop picking up the phone. and and

Tihon (35:09)
Ha ha ha.

Rakhesh Martyn (35:11)
knowing knowing when to say that at the appropriate time in the deal cycle.

Rakhesh Martyn (35:15)
That's a real skill. I can't say that I've mastered it, but every now and then I get it right. and that's something that I was that I was able to do here. But I would say ultimately why we won is we went beyond just the software. We demonstrated a very thorough and deep understanding of the entire process that the software plugs into.

Tihon (35:33)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (35:36)
And from the customer's perspective, they went, gosh, this.

Rakhesh Martyn (35:39)
This outfit really gets it. And they're not just tech people. They are industry people and

Tihon (35:41)
Yeah. Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (35:44)
that's who we need.

Tihon (35:45)
Amazing. I love this example. And actually, like recently, just like a week ago, I've been talking to a founder who had a very, very similar source of leads and clients. So they also write a blog. They are in solar and like

Rakhesh Martyn (36:01)
Mm-hmm.

Tihon (36:01)
solar design for utility scale. And they write a technical blog, and their champions and power users at the same time are exactly the engineers. And when you do

Tihon (36:13)
really in a genuine and useful way, not kind of marketing materials, but go really deep in in the things and explain.

Rakhesh Martyn (36:22)
Yeah.

Tihon (36:22)
Guys, this this works this way. it it brings it brings clients. So I I just love this example. And another thing I want to emphasize on is like it goes hand in hand with consultancy, right? So as you mentioned, like huge part of the deal you you've been

Tihon (36:39)
Like given given even even more like much more than the software itself, much more than the f a future project, but like bigger vision for them probably on a strategy as well. So this this is this I find extremely the case, in when we talk about finite markets, is it's like energy tech or any other industry almost like consultancy is a huge part and almost

Tihon (37:07)
al almost unavoidable from from the software.

Rakhesh Martyn (37:10)
Yeah, absolutely. And it's I don't know if you're familiar with David Heinemeier Hansen, the co-founder of Thirty Seven Signals. Basecamp is DHH. He's

Tihon (37:17)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (37:20)
a bit of a legend in software development. I only know him know about him because of one of the engineers in in the Hachiko team, a guy called Gary, absolutely loves him. and he told me about the guy and I looked him up. And what I often say is I love it when I

Rakhesh Martyn (37:32)
come across people who are who say things that I agree with, right? And one of the things that one of the things that DHH says

Tihon (37:37)
Right.

Rakhesh Martyn (37:39)
is you have to outteach your competition. So when you

Tihon (37:43)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (37:44)
are when you are building a business, if you want to build a generational business, you outteach the market. You outteach your competition. And I don't write the blogs because DHH said it. I do it because

Tihon (37:56)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (37:57)
I want to, right?

Rakhesh Martyn (37:58)
But ultimately, the

Tihon (37:58)
Wow, that that's the best situation.

Rakhesh Martyn (38:01)
way that we get get the name out there is we show that we're trying to level the market up. We're not just trying to

Tihon (38:07)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (38:08)
play in the market, we're trying to make the market better. And again, I don't do the blogs to achieve that outcome. It's just that I like to do the blogs, and as a result, the market is leveling up and customers gravitate towards businesses like that.

Tihon (38:23)
Wow, that's amazing. yeah, and it's it's usually exactly the winning case when the situation is like this when you are genuinely interested in in solving this problem and in writing this type of blogs 'cause I know some founders who actually hate this and who would like never write a blog and go into technical details because they're more, you know, like

Tihon (38:47)
in into other scenes which are also super super useful. But yeah, it's it's a rare combination, I would say.

Rakhesh Martyn (38:51)
Right.

Tihon (38:52)
Yeah. All right. Another thing, and we are naturally transitioning into it, about go-to-market in general for Hachiko. How would you or Rakesh could like say what in general like works for you in terms of channels and go to market motion and what

Tihon (39:14)
What what what you would not bat on anymore?

Rakhesh Martyn (39:17)
Sure. Just before I answer that, there

Tihon (39:19)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (39:20)
was question three which you have skipped over. Was that on purpose?

Tihon (39:23)
That's right. yeah, because just I thought we are naturally going into into this part, so I I've I've put it before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. huh. Sure.

Rakhesh Martyn (39:28)
Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. That's okay. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. Sorry. Okay, so in terms

Rakhesh Martyn (39:34)
of go-to-market motion and channels, yeah, it's founder-led sales at this point. You know, product-led sales doesn't really work in an industry like energy for what we do. in some cases

Tihon (39:45)
Absolutely.

Rakhesh Martyn (39:46)
it can, but you need to have that trust and credibility from the product.

Rakhesh Martyn (39:51)
And having the ability to build enough product before you have that trust and credibility is just incredibly rare. So people people make their decision usually in some cases twelve months before they have to use the software. But they need to

Tihon (40:04)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (40:05)
know who they're gonna work with before they start building their project. So founder lead, it's all founder lead at the moment. And like I said earlier, you know, the

Rakhesh Martyn (40:14)
Early signature of the contract means you get access to me. That's a real hook for some people, right? So that's that's really what works well. In terms of channels, I mean, for lead generation and things like that, we get a lot of referrals, which is beautiful.

Tihon (40:27)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (40:28)
And it's from other people in the project ecosystem who would benefit from us being involved.

Tihon (40:35)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (40:35)
because really this market is all about relationships and credibility and the

Rakhesh Martyn (40:39)
Same is true of energy everywhere in the world, right? Everywhere you go, it's all about who you know, how you can how you can demystify the market for the people that are operating in it. So if you can go in there and make it easier, I I'm lucky in that I have developed a reputation over the years that I can't walk past a fire without trying to put it out. So people enjoy people that I've

Tihon (41:00)
Ha ha.

Rakhesh Martyn (41:01)
worked with in the past enjoy having me around.

Rakhesh Martyn (41:04)
Because they know that I have the outcome in mind. You know, so it's good to have me involved. And I've been lucky that people have brought me into projects as a result of that. but we get, you know, distribution channels through consultants in the market, through the construction contractors, through the energy retailers, the people who are actually facing the market, they want our software to be used because they know that we're a credible party. So if a battery is operating

Tihon (41:28)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (41:29)
and they're the ones

Rakhesh Martyn (41:30)
That take on the market risk, they feel much more comfortable if we are involved. So that's kind

Tihon (41:34)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (41:35)
of you know one of the main channels at this point. And we're only just over two years old. So I'm more than comfortable

Tihon (41:41)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (41:41)
for those channels to be the reasons why we get through. But a lot of our audience and a lot of our kind of eventual customers, they live on LinkedIn. and increasingly

Rakhesh Martyn (41:53)
They are using things like ChatGPT and Claude to try and find businesses like us. So that is also, you know, a bit of work that we do to try and get our brand out there. But I'm

Tihon (42:04)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (42:05)
a very pragmatic person. I'm all about the building blocks to get us to the big house, right? I'm not gonna try and on day one get a perfect answer engine optimization engine working. Because what's the point? You know, if you spend all of your time

Rakhesh Martyn (42:18)
building that and then nobody knows who you are because you've never gone out there to talk to them, you've wasted your time. So I go to a lot of conferences. I, you know, we host our own events. And all of these are built around educating the market in some way. Because, you know, if you have an interesting conversation about a topic that's really complicated, people want to learn, they come along and then they talk to you naturally and then they want to buy your stuff. So that's kind of how

Tihon (42:41)
huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (42:41)
that's kind of how we are

Tihon (42:42)
Good. So uh-huh, sorry. Sorry, please please go ahead. No no, I just just want one sorry sorry. Please, please, please.

Rakhesh Martyn (42:43)
In terms of things that I wouldn't sorry, you go for it. You go for it. Yeah, in in terms of things Yeah, th it's all right. In terms of things

Rakhesh Martyn (42:53)
that I wouldn't bet on,

Rakhesh Martyn (42:55)
Yeah, look, I think that right now, the conventional kind of AI driven sales funnel, and I call it conventional because so many people are doing it, I really in in a concentrated market, I really don't think it works very well. And I have some investors, for example, putting pressure on me in some cases saying, Why aren't you using an AI S D R or

Rakhesh Martyn (43:18)
that's a sales development representative and that kind of thing. And I kind of go,

Tihon (43:19)
my god, no. No.

Rakhesh Martyn (43:23)
well look, if an automated message landed in the inbox of somebody that I talk to all the time, I would look like an idiot.

Tihon (43:30)
Absolutely. And it will cost much more at the end of the day.

Rakhesh Martyn (43:33)
Yeah, so it's

Rakhesh Martyn (43:34)
I don't think that it's gonna work. Now globally, potentially if we're trying to, you know, reach new markets and we're trying to get people to learn about who we are, maybe. But to be honest, we have the benefit here in Australia of being, as they say, on the sharp tip of the spear. We are doing all

Tihon (43:52)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (43:52)
of the hard things, and everyone across the world is looking at us

Rakhesh Martyn (43:56)
To work out how to deal with integration of renewables into a grid, how to deal with lots of batteries, how to deal with lots of batteries on the consumer side, on the demand side. So if you're doing well in a market like Australia, people across the world will look at us and go, Who who achieved success in Australia? Go talk to them. And that's that's a fortunate position to be in. so I'm not being complacent and saying that's what's going to work for us. Of course, you have to work hard.

Rakhesh Martyn (44:21)
But I'm very much a fan of do the basics well. You know, like they say in God, I've forgotten what the name of the film is. If you build it, they will come. I can't remember the name of the film now. It's escaped me. But that's very much the I think it's called Field of Dreams. Film film fans are gonna be flaming me in the comments right now. But Yeah, you build build a great business and demonstrate that you can do the basics well and that you can create

Rakhesh Martyn (44:45)
you know, crazy value. and that you know what you're talking about and then people will come to you.

Tihon (44:50)
Mm-hmm. Cool. So just to quickly recap, what works for you? Partnerships, referrals, then conferences, then LinkedIn sort leadership. And number five, I forgot

Rakhesh Martyn (45:01)
Well, there was the

Rakhesh Martyn (45:02)
the Chat GPT and Claude, you know, that kind of searching. You're trying trying to get things that work there also.

Tihon (45:09)
Sale

Tihon (45:09)
and Sale and IL like search search on mm, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (45:13)
Yeah, SEO and AEO. Yeah. But to be honest, to

Rakhesh Martyn (45:16)
be honest, the the best the best way that we have been successful is either

Tihon (45:21)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (45:21)
direct relationships with the buyers or we are referred by somebody that the buyer trusts implicitly.

Tihon (45:27)
Yeah. Absolutely. Cool. Yeah. this sounds very, very familiar to me and like most founders actually I talk to from finite market mention this set of things. Also, some in slightly later stages usually use some type of ABM ads, means like ultra targeted ads when you go for this particular amount of

Tihon (45:51)
Clients you have build a list and then target only to them with type of educational content because your organic content not always reaching them. So you make sure that your best content reaches them and then they get educated. But it's not it's not type of, you know, buy it now type of ads offers because it it will just like burn trust instead. Cool.

Rakhesh Martyn (46:12)
Hundred percent.

Tihon (46:13)
Love this. Yeah, what another topic.

Tihon (46:16)
we've just touched recently about reputation, relationships and referrals. So it's kind of it it sounds like it's like almost everything, right? Almost everything that matters who you know, who refers you and type of relations and reputation you build over over the years.

Rakhesh Martyn (46:39)
Yeah, look, it's it's it's possible to come in to the energy industry with no energy experience and be successful. But it

Tihon (46:46)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (46:46)
is it is much harder than if you have a demonstrated kind of track record in the market. having said that, it's not it's not a slam dunk. So reputation

Tihon (46:57)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (46:58)
and relationships and referrals, absolutely

Rakhesh Martyn (47:01)
make a huge difference. But you still have to do the basics. Like at the very beginning, I came along and I said, hey guys, I'm gonna build a software business. And people looked at me and they went, Well that sounds great, but you haven't written code in about 20 years. So they wouldn't sign a contract with us just because I was behind it. They still needed to

Tihon (47:17)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (47:21)
know. They still needed to know that this was gonna work, right?

Rakhesh Martyn (47:24)
And the classic phrase is nobody wants to be the first, but everyone wants to be the first second. Everybody is waiting around to see who else is going to use it. I don't want to be the first one to use your product because it might not work. And if it doesn't

Tihon (47:37)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (47:37)
work, then my investment committee is not going to be happy with me. And then I lose trust from them. And I don't want to lose my investment committee's trust. So having the product demonstrated in the field somewhere.

Rakhesh Martyn (47:49)
is so important. And that for me was the hardest thing to get through was finding that first customer who would give us that first project so that I could demonstrate it. Don't get me wrong, people still have reasons to say no. You know, it's like, it isn't working on a battery. I get it working on a battery. They go, that battery is quite small. It's not working on a battery of my size. it's not working on a site with solar. It's not working on a site in this part of Australia. So there's all always a reason.

Rakhesh Martyn (48:17)
But to be honest, my my comedy background really helped me there. Because when I was starting out in stand up, you everyone you always make this mistake of comparing yourself to everybody else and thinking, okay, well, if I do what those other people have done, then I will get there. But there's always a

Tihon (48:31)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (48:33)
reason why you fail. And eventually you learn that the only person you should be competing with is yourself. And that has really helped me.

Rakhesh Martyn (48:41)
With this business, because I just had to focus on doing the right things for ourselves. And the the success will come. Do the basics well, the success will come. Become undeniable, right? Like if you can can look in the mirror and say with certainty that you did absolutely everything right, you did absolutely everything you could, and you still are failing, then potentially you can find out what is it in your external environment that's causing it.

Rakhesh Martyn (49:07)
But before you have taken care of everything inside your own house, you shouldn't be doing that. And that's why I just thought, okay, well, raising capital and facing rejections doesn't matter. I just have to keep going. Keep doing the basics well and we'll get there. so yes, reputation relationships and referrals of course make a huge difference. But buyers are very sophisticated. They are very savvy and they still know that you have to be able to do the basics well for them to be able to put you forward.

Rakhesh Martyn (49:34)
Once you have done the basics, they will back you to the hilt. So I have a customer here that I was talking to earlier today, and I'm trying to go to the next level inside his account. And he said, Look here, man, there are certain things you haven't done yet, and you haven't shown it in the field. I can't take it to my investment committee

Tihon (49:52)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (49:53)
until you've done that. It's impossible. They'll laugh me out of the room.

Rakhesh Martyn (49:56)
But after

Tihon (49:56)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (49:56)
you've done it, you call me straight away.

Rakhesh Martyn (49:59)
And then and then we've got it. And that's

Tihon (50:00)
Yeah, yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (50:00)
been that's been the case this whole time, so I just have to keep doing that.

Tihon (50:04)
Well, love your principles and the attitude here.

Rakhesh Martyn (50:06)
Thank you.

Tihon (50:07)
Cool. So yeah. So it like it really hurts. Seems like it's really hurts sometime to be in this small buyer's pool, 'cause like the risk is i risk is extremely high. If you if you f fucked up once, then just like reputation travels, then like it's a big problem, right? So how do you

Rakhesh Martyn (50:31)
Thirdly.

Tihon (50:31)
Yeah, how how do you deal with that? Do you have some principles behind that? And approaches.

Rakhesh Martyn (50:36)
Look, this

Rakhesh Martyn (50:37)
is this is such a such a difficult part of what we do. because

Tihon (50:42)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (50:43)
when you when things are going well, you feel very excited because each account is large, but equally the risk of losing it is greater. So it can be really, really difficult. My in terms of like yeah, I you know, the the proportion of our revenue that comes from a single customer.

Rakhesh Martyn (51:02)
is generally quite high. you know, we have a small number of accounts that makes up the totality of our revenue. So that is especially true for us today because we're still relatively new. So that's

Tihon (51:11)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (51:11)
the that's that's what really hurts is that concentration risk. In terms of how we deal with that and the principles behind it, it goes back to what I just said.

Rakhesh Martyn (51:22)
You just have to keep doing the basics well. If you are delivering well for your customers, they are not gonna drop you. And if somebody comes along and says, Hey, I can do this better or I can do it cheaper, typically the first thing that they do is they'll come to you and say, I've been I've been offered this price. How come like or can

Tihon (51:39)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (51:39)
you match it? Right? And so far we have never had a problem where we have been too expensive. So it's

Tihon (51:45)
Never.

Rakhesh Martyn (51:46)
not not so far.

Tihon (51:47)
Wow, cool.

Rakhesh Martyn (51:48)
so it's one of those things that and and by the way, we're not dropping our pants on deals either. Like we are charging we are charging

Tihon (51:55)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (51:56)
an appropriate amount of money, but we have never been

Tihon (51:58)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (51:59)
told that we're our costs are too high, right? So the the way in which I would deal with that though is I I deliver incredible value outside of the software. You know what I what I often say when I'm hiring for a sales person.

Rakhesh Martyn (52:13)
Team at the moment. And what I've said to all of the people, I've I've spoken to a couple of junior people and I'm happy to hire juniors and train them up. But I've said as an aspiration, you want to be the kind of person when they when you open the door and you walk into your customer's office to talk about a project, they look at you and they go, Thank God that person is here. I'm so happy

Tihon (52:33)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (52:34)
they're here. Because now I know that my problems are solved.

Rakhesh Martyn (52:37)
That's what you need to aspire to. And if you

Tihon (52:38)
Mm-hmm. That's right.

Rakhesh Martyn (52:40)
are in if you're in the if you're in the tent, if you're in the project ecosystem for your customer, and you are one of those people who I often say this to I've said this to customers of mine in the past, right? Where I've kind of gone, if you woke up tomorrow and I wasn't involved in this project anymore, how would you feel?

Rakhesh Martyn (52:57)
And that's

Tihon (52:57)
And what do they answer?

Rakhesh Martyn (52:59)
well, I mean, I don't say it to be arrogant, but they often they often like Well, exactly.

Tihon (53:02)
And they're just like

Rakhesh Martyn (53:05)
I mean, there there was one particular customer earlier this year who was just dragging their heels for ages because they they just didn't want to sign the contract because it meant they had to start paying us money. Right? And I what I I just paused and I said, think back to the last two weeks worth of conversations we've had. You have not asked me questions about software once.

Rakhesh Martyn (53:24)
Everything has been about the market. Everything has been about the chaos in the market, the uncertainty in the market, and my perspective on it. I said, Tomorrow I'm not gonna answer the phone. Right? You're gonna have to st I'm running a I'm running a business over here. You're gonna have to start paying me some money. Right? You make a commitment, then I'm with you. But if you don't make a commitment, then I'm just a doormat, right? So if you can be that type of person in your customers' projects.

Rakhesh Martyn (53:48)
that you you demonstrate that you want to understand the domain. You're not the kind of person that's going, nothing to do with me. Right? You're not that kind of person. You're actually there to deliver the outcome with them. That's how you mitigate that concentration risk.

Tihon (54:01)
Mm-hmm. Cool. Amazing. Mm. All right. Another question, Rakesh. I want to ask you about so you've mentioned your founder led right now, but I want to understand how far it goes. Like is it is like the go to market right now completely depends on you or do you delegate s like something?

Tihon (54:25)
Or I use the complete bottleneck right now.

Rakhesh Martyn (54:28)
Yeah, it's it's a blessing and a curse. yes, I am the I'm the I am the only what I often say, we have Mani in our team who helps me out a lot. but before she joined, I was the only person sorry, anything in the company that didn't involve writing code began and ended with me. so that's

Tihon (54:47)
Wow, that's a lot.

Rakhesh Martyn (54:49)
It is a lot. So on the go to market side, yes, I do I do everything at the moment. And I'm starting to delegate bits of it.

Tihon (54:57)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (54:57)
but the but it's it's all me right now. And I'm trying to hire somebody to come in in a customer success capacity because again,

Tihon (55:05)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (55:06)
we're in the grateful position of we've got a lot of customers and they're starting to take up a lot of my time. there are certain customers that I want to hold on to.

Rakhesh Martyn (55:13)
Because every single one of our accounts has the opportunity to land and expand. So every

Rakhesh Martyn (55:18)
account has expansion capability, and I want to be in there making sure that we're accessing it as quickly as possible. There are some accounts that are a little bit simpler. So I want to get a customer success person in to take care of those accounts with my support. And eventually that person

Tihon (55:31)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (55:33)
can take on the bigger accounts and look after the expansion on the bigger accounts also.

Rakhesh Martyn (55:37)
Eventually they can build their own pipeline. These are these things are all possible. in

Tihon (55:41)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (55:42)
terms of something, I mean, I I suppose yeah, that's I think I've answered the question, but there's a little bit more to it. Happy to go in.

Tihon (55:51)
Yeah yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (55:51)
Yeah, look, the what I am the bottleneck, yes. And I would say the only thing truly that the company cannot

Rakhesh Martyn (55:58)
Like the GTM motion will not survive without me today. Is the product is still being built. We've built most of it, but it's not fully built yet. So

Tihon (56:08)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (56:09)
naturally, there are going to be customer use cases that we can't deliver today. And the decision making around what we can do and what we can commit to based on what I know the product is capable of and what I know the product will be capable of, that solely rests with me.

Tihon (56:24)
Mm.

Rakhesh Martyn (56:24)
And I and

Rakhesh Martyn (56:25)
I don't mind that because I'm not abusing it either. So I've

Tihon (56:28)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (56:28)
and you know, you could ask any one of the people in my team about this, and I made this comment recently. I said in the last eighteen months, everything, almost everything we have built has been on our terms. That is incredibly unusual. You know, the the trope in software is

Rakhesh Martyn (56:44)
we were building this thing, then this customer came along and then they railroaded us and we had to build this other thing.

Tihon (56:46)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (56:48)
But that happens very rarely here. And that's actually one of the reasons why we got that first customer site that we got last year. The reason we won it was because the customer was reading our newsletter every month and I was talking about the

Tihon (57:01)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (57:02)
bits of the product we were building. And he emailed me and said, Okay, you have been joining the dots in a logical order. So I want to work with you.

Rakhesh Martyn (57:09)
Because I can see that you're building this in a way that makes sense. And that's all about that accountability is mine, right? Like it's a very, it's a very big cross to bear, right? It's a big load to carry. But I'm the founder, right? It's my responsibility, it's my accountability. So I can show the team that the decisions we're making are being rewarded by customers. And as a result,

Rakhesh Martyn (57:32)
When I bring them something new to build, they know that they need to build it. That's not some random request from a customer. It's being built on our turns. That's the bit of the

Tihon (57:39)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (57:40)
GTM notion that is impossible to replace currently. Like you couldn't do it with another person right now. Give us another six months, and then it becomes a little bit easier. But the product will continue to evolve. We go into a new market, a new geography.

Rakhesh Martyn (57:55)
We have to decide what to build by when. We bring in a new customer segment. We have to decide what to build by when. I don't know if you've seen the Ansoft matrix, which is about expansion of companies. So you have the product and you have the market. You then have the same product

Tihon (58:07)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (58:11)
in a new market. You have the new

Tihon (58:12)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (58:13)
product in the same market. And then you have the new product in a new market. Right? So companies expand, your strategic expansion is in one of those quadrants.

Rakhesh Martyn (58:22)
So you have to either sell more of the same stuff in the same place or sell new stuff in the same place or sell the same stuff in a new place or sell new stuff in a new place. And making the decision around which of those we're doing at any point in time begins and ends with me. And over time we would look to build a go to market team that's operating in each of those quadrants.

Tihon (58:44)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, sounds like a lot. Yeah, sounds like completely different tasks and it's gonna be a lot of e even more is coming. But yeah, that's that's that's why there are only a few founders and even less successful founders in the world. It's generally very tough, right? It's it's super tough and sometimes unhumanly tough to be founder and CEO. I want to ask like about the marketing part. You do not delegate

Rakhesh Martyn (59:09)
Mm-hmm.

Tihon (59:10)
any

Tihon (59:11)
you know, like routine work, for example like getting ready for the conferences, like getting, you know, selecting who should we talk with, making account maps and stuff like that. you do it all yourself and just keep in mind, okay, probably I should talk to this guy and you know, all this all this routine job.

Rakhesh Martyn (59:28)
I like I like how you think

Rakhesh Martyn (59:30)
I I like how you think I have an account map. I don't I don't currently make account maps. look, in terms of what I delegate in marketing.

Tihon (59:33)
actually yeah,

Tihon (59:38)
actu actually most early companies don't have it's it's

Rakhesh Martyn (59:42)
No.

Tihon (59:43)
absolutely normal situation.

Rakhesh Martyn (59:44)
Yeah, look, I would I would be asking this the first sales hire that we have, I will get them to make account plans and then we will work together on them because that's how you hold them accountable, right?

Tihon (59:51)
Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Totally.

Rakhesh Martyn (59:56)
in terms of what I delegate in marketing, I get some assistance with writing blogs. So there's a, you know, there's a a person in the industry who I trust and who I know very well. and of the last, you know, few blogs that we've written, that person has written

Rakhesh Martyn (01:00:10)
Most of them has originated most of them. And then I will always edit. and

Tihon (01:00:15)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:00:15)
that works really well because that person also likes to get my input. and then we together we will tweak the final product. But I typically will say, Hey, on this topic, can you please write something? I know you can do it. and then over time that person has also developed an understanding of what our take on various topics is going to be like. So I get assistance there. we have a marketing agency that does our content for us.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:00:36)
So they build, you know, we have a very particular brand. if you go on our website and you read our LinkedIn posts, you will see that there's a particular aesthetic about it.

Tihon (01:00:43)
Yeah. I I love it. I like it.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:00:46)
so that's something that I get support with. And then yeah, Mani helps me with with just the routine stuff. She helps me to build our newsletter, she helps me with some of the Hubspot things that I do. and she generally she's brilliant. Like I just ask her, Hey, can you go do this random thing? And she says sure.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:01:02)
She never says, No, I

Tihon (01:01:04)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:01:04)
don't want to do that. That's boring. That's not my job. She just like does and she wants to learn. so it's yeah, it's great. Like that's but but

Tihon (01:01:12)
Amazing teammate.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:01:13)
ultimately yeah, the origination of those ideas typically still rests with me.

Tihon (01:01:18)
Mm-hmm. Got it, got it. Nice. It's yeah, actually seems like you've just like put in different buckets what you can delegate and get help with. And yeah, it's coming just like from different people and sources. Sounds good

Rakhesh Martyn (01:01:32)
Sure.

Tihon (01:01:32)
and and very and very useful. also I want to ask

Tihon (01:01:38)
lost the question let me see in my notes for one second yeah yes yes rakesh I wanted to ask like what did you misunderstood about the market before building Hachiko what what was you thought something right before starting but but then when you've been building Hachiko and

Tihon (01:02:00)
in the point right now, something probably opened up and you s and you said like wow, I thought it it would be the opposite way. w was it a moment like that and what it was then?

Rakhesh Martyn (01:02:12)
There's a lot. There's a lot. This has not been this has not been a straightforward journey so far.

Tihon (01:02:15)
Ha ha ha.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:02:17)
I would I will say two things. The first thing is I really unders I underestimated the impact of government intervention in policy. If you look at an

Tihon (01:02:25)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:02:27)
energy, because of how much of a politicized thing energy is, it

Tihon (01:02:33)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:02:34)
can have significant impacts and governments are very

Rakhesh Martyn (01:02:36)
motivated to just get involved and they do some really dumb shit. the concept of unintended consequences just does not exist to governments, especially in energy. And

Tihon (01:02:48)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:02:49)
at a crucial time in our business's life, so we started out we started building our product at the beginning of 2025, and it took us about

Rakhesh Martyn (01:02:58)
Sort of six months to get to the point where we had something that could be used in the field. In July 2025, the federal government, and by the way, we were focusing on the commercial and industrial and the small utility scale or the small IPP segment, right? So then

Tihon (01:03:09)
Mm.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:03:14)
in July 2025, the federal government rolled out a new rebate scheme for residential batteries. And that was

Rakhesh Martyn (01:03:21)
certificates that reduced in value at the end of each year. So there was like there was a use by date on these set certificates. So if you want to maximize

Tihon (01:03:30)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:03:31)
the value, you have to do it now. It was a gold rush. So it just diverted everybody's attention towards the residential sector, and all of our customers just froze. And I was just like, right, so just at the point when I'm in a position to get this product into the market to be used, I've just lost.

Tihon (01:03:48)
So disappointing, my God.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:03:48)
I've lost access.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:03:50)
All my all my early adopters are gone. Because what I wanted to do was if you remember what I said earlier, you need to be able to demonstrate the product in the field somewhere before somebody will use it. And

Tihon (01:04:01)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:04:01)
my plan was to try things in the residential market, try things in the small commercial market so that I could get the product working somewhere and then I could show it to the bigger guys. But that plan completely failed because nobody wanted to talk to me.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:04:14)
Everyone was like, nah man, I'm busy. I'm busy going and selling all of these batteries because the government's giving them away for free, essentially. And that really that that ruined that ruined it was really hard. Because at that critical point where I needed the snowball to start getting bigger, there was no snow. and that had a dual impact because it really affected investor confidence.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:04:36)
and it obviously also it demoralized the team a little bit because things weren't happening at

Tihon (01:04:40)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:04:41)
the rate that they were supposed to. So that was one thing. I really

Tihon (01:04:44)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:04:44)
underestimated and and that actually comes back to timing. The the

Tihon (01:04:48)
huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:04:49)
impact of timing, the fact that you can do everything right and just the timing can be wrong for reasons completely outside of your control. Right. And I didn't

Tihon (01:04:56)
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:04:58)
I didn't I didn't under I underestimated the

Rakhesh Martyn (01:05:02)
Scale of the impact that that could have on your business's progress. The second thing

Tihon (01:05:04)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:05:07)
that I really misunderstood was, I don't know how to say this, like how to articulate this, but I'll try my best. Even though people say they're going to do something, it can be really hard for them to do it. So people who say

Tihon (01:05:22)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:05:23)
they want to work with you, even if they say that and they want to.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:05:27)
They might not. And this comes back to what I said earlier about, you know, if the investment committee, if this fails, and I lose the trust of

Tihon (01:05:34)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:05:34)
my investment committee, then they might never trust me again. So I've had people say to me, I want to work with you, but I can't.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:05:42)
And that that is not something I really thought was possible.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:05:46)
and call me naive, but I thought that if I just did everything I said I was gonna do and the person said they wanted to work with me or with us, that they would back us. But there's one particular person, I don't know if they're watching this, they might be able to work out who they are. but they they wanted to work, they they came to they came to meet me last year, and they said, Hey, you're great, you're building a great business, I can't wait to work with you. And then

Rakhesh Martyn (01:06:11)
A month, sorry, a year later, they said, Signed a contract with your competitor. And I said, Why is and I'd been trying to sell to them and we didn't we never even got a seat at the table. And I asked why. And they said the lender for our projects had never heard of you, so you were not a candidate.

Tihon (01:06:30)
Mm. Very frustrating.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:06:31)
I was like, well, what what was

Rakhesh Martyn (01:06:33)
what was your job then? You're meant you're meant to be the champion, right? But to be honest, I get it. Right? This person's on a big salary, they're in a new role, it's too big of a risk. So

Tihon (01:06:45)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:06:46)
I don't I'm not upset at them. But I was I was surprised and I was very disappointed. And that happens, you know, that has happened on a number of occasions.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:06:55)
So I've taken some real gut punches over the last year and a half. But I I did misunderstand that. So for example, if somebody that I trust is building a product and I feel that I can give them a chance, then I will. But I'll test it from first principles, right? To make sure that they're gonna do the right thing. Unfortunately,

Tihon (01:07:10)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:07:13)
not everybody has that risk appetite. And I really misunderstood that about this market.

Tihon (01:07:17)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:07:18)
I thought

Rakhesh Martyn (01:07:18)
the trust, the credibility and doing the right things was gonna be enough. But eventually it's that it's that fear. The fear of being shown

Tihon (01:07:24)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:07:25)
to be wrong is is very, very strong.

Tihon (01:07:28)
Mm-hmm. Right. Absolutely. Yeah, wow. Super nice. I mean, I'm trying to recap all we discussed in the podcast, and it's already a lot. And wow, I love it. probably the last question. we've already touched it a little bit, but I I want to probably your thoughts on that. So

Tihon (01:07:48)
your market is pretty finite. In Australia, okay, there is possibilities to grows to to grow, but at some point they would be probably you'd need to expand to other geography, right? So I want to think out loud what are generally like possibilities to grow. Like first one, for example, you can make the check higher, you can expand existing accounts, grow through them.

Tihon (01:08:14)
go to other segments of the market, go more you know, like s smaller scale batteries and so on so forth, like then another geography, right? So what are your thoughts on that? What is a smart way to grow and what you should probably do first? Or a founder in similar situation as an advice to them.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:08:32)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:08:33)
Sure. Well, if any of our competitors are watching this, you can thank me later. No, it's all right. I don't mind. Anybody anybody

Tihon (01:08:37)
Competitors, please stop it right here.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:08:42)
that's raising capital, you can use these insights and I'm sure I'll I'll benefit

Tihon (01:08:47)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:08:47)
at some point in my life.

Tihon (01:08:49)
Absolutely.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:08:49)
look, there's there's two things here really, right? Like we talked about the Ansoft matrix earlier, which is the the four quadrants, but

Tihon (01:08:57)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm,

Tihon (01:08:58)
mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:08:58)
The way

Rakhesh Martyn (01:08:58)
that I think about growth is yeah, build a great product and build it in a fashion that's easy to transport. so there's from a software architecture standpoint, that's really important. So there's no tight coupling within our platform. it's sort of built in a way that you can it's loosely coupled, right? So that means you can it's very much following the Bezos kind of

Rakhesh Martyn (01:09:19)
manifesto about every interface has to talk to each other. and this is one of the problems I suppose with AWS is it's a very fragmented product, but it's a hugely valuable product.

Tihon (01:09:29)
huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:09:29)
so that's I'm not saying that we're building our product in that way, but what I am saying is when we go to a new market, it's not gonna require a fundamental rewrite of the platform. We know from first principles what the use cases are and what the contributors are

Rakhesh Martyn (01:09:44)
complexity within our platform. So when we go to a new type of market, there are some changes we'll have to make, but it won't be wholesale rewrites. So when I said there were two things, there's actually three. So that's one of them is making sure platform architecture is scalable and

Rakhesh Martyn (01:09:58)
and geographically scalable as well as horizontally scalable. The

Tihon (01:10:01)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:10:02)
second part of this is understanding again from first principles, market design.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:10:08)
So energy market design in different geographies, what are the different components of it? And therefore, what is the correct order in which to scale geographically? One of the biggest mistakes I've seen companies make in the past, and these are companies that I've worked for, is they've just gone to the most attractive market. They haven't thought about what's the best market for me to take my product to. They've just gone, if I want to raise capital, where should I go? And that just is heartbreaking to see.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:10:34)
Right. So everyone always looks at me and says, So when are you gonna go to the US? And my answer is, I don't know, man, probably never. Or that's not that's

Tihon (01:10:43)
Right.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:10:44)
not true. I should never say never, but it's it's not gonna be the second market we go to. That would be a terrible idea. there are so many other

Tihon (01:10:49)
Yeah, yeah, totally.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:10:52)
markets I can think of. I will not name them, but there are so many other markets I can think of that I would rather go to sooner because

Rakhesh Martyn (01:10:59)
Our product will just travel there much more readily. and rather than just I'm gonna pick random numbers, let's say there's 10 parts of our platform. If we go to the US, we would probably have to rewrite eight of them. But if we go to different markets, we might have to rewrite one or two at a time. Eventually we have 20 to 30 different parts of our platform, and then traveling to the US is a lot easier.

Tihon (01:11:19)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:11:19)
Within the US, there's so much diversity as well. There's you know so many different networks.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:11:24)
So many different states, you have a lot of different things to think about. So the geographical growth is very much driven by that. It's product led, really. It's where is the where does the market design lend itself best to iterative

Tihon (01:11:39)
Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:11:40)
development of our product?

Tihon (01:11:42)
Yeah.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:11:43)
so that's one, that's the second thing.

Tihon (01:11:45)
Cool. Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:11:46)
And the third thing I would say in terms of growth is.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:11:49)
If you go back to what I said earlier, the most successful companies are the ones that deliver value alongside the software. So the software is almost an afterthought for some of our customers. They just want us to be involved. And over time, that's gotta be monetized. you know, there's also the portfolio, you know.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:12:12)
Challenges that a lot of our customers face. How can we solve

Tihon (01:12:14)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:12:15)
some of those challenges? In a challenging market, if the price spreads are compressing, what are the things that you can do for your customers to make it so that they can continue to grow their portfolio? How do you do that? I'm not necessarily gonna I have some ideas, but that's how I think about it. I'm very much a systems thinker in that way.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:12:34)
I'm not actually a software person. I just happen to be running

Tihon (01:12:34)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:12:36)
a software business. But I operate in this industry that's very complicated and multifactorial. And the way

Tihon (01:12:42)
Uh-huh.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:12:42)
I think about business is how can I do as many things as possible to create value for our customers? And that's naturally going to lead to growth.

Tihon (01:12:50)
Nice, very nice. Thank you so much, Rakesh. I think it's generally useful for both practitioners in the field and founders who are trying to solve the problems you've been solving initially, after you get investments and get into industry, especially useful for people in energy tech and marketers, practitioners. Thank you so much. Really

Tihon (01:13:16)
appreciate the conversation. I wish you and Hachuka the very best of luck and yeah, I just love your principles and let it let it fly. Let it be very successful.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:13:28)
Thank you so much, Dion. I really

Rakhesh Martyn (01:13:30)
appreciate you yeah. I really appreciate you asking me to be on. I've had a great time. and if if there are any questions that come from this or you you know, we wanna have a follow up conversation, I'm more than happy to do that. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Tihon (01:13:42)
Wow.

Tihon (01:13:43)
Sounds amazing. Sounds amazing. Thank you so much.

Rakhesh Martyn (01:13:46)
Cheers. I'll see you next time.

Tihon (01:13:47)
All

Tihon (01:13:47)
right, cheers. Yeah