Startup Spotlight #192: Recoolit
Recoolit's digital technology is solving refrigerant emissions.
Latest F2F Case Study:
I got the chance to speak with Louis Potok, founder and CEO of Recoolit, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.
Potok started his career applying behavioral economics to international development and microfinance, then spent 6 years doing machine learning at tech startups. Eventually, he started thinking about the climate crisis more seriously and looking for a way to get involved. In 2019, Potok picked up Project Drawdown, which said that refrigerant emissions were the number one problem. He had never heard of this before, but he got completely obsessed with this issue and how it was massively neglected. After spending months talking to experts, and having a false start in Cambodia, Potok started Recoolit to solve this enormous problem.
Startup Spotlight: Recoolit
Problem: Every air conditioner on the planet is full of refrigerants, superpotent greenhouse gases 2000x worse than CO2 which cause 6% of all climate change (3GT yearly). Meanwhile, companies want to go carbon-neutral but struggle to find high-quality credits.
Market: The voluntary carbon credit market is at $1B, growing 70% YoY and projected to reach $30B by 2030; the compliance market is already >$200B.
Solution: We provide tools and training to AC technicians in emerging markets to collect used refrigerant, and then we destroy it, permanently preventing its climate impact. Every step of the process is tracked on our app, which then generates carbon credits for the avoided emissions which we sell to US companies.
Team: We have a team of 5 in Indonesia, our first market, building out our logistics and doing business development with local partners. Our software team is global and remote, with the first two hires being in the US and Europe.
Recent Success:
Potok: We’ve done a great job building out and supporting our partnerships in Indonesia. From freelance technicians up to the air conditioning industry and large real estate groups, the Indonesian market was quick to see the climate impact of our approach and the value to their brands of adopting sustainable practices at no additional cost. Some of our partners here have even been eagerly reporting on our pilots up to their global parent companies and pushing us to scale up the pilots faster.
We’ve also developed a great relationship with the Indonesian Ministry of Environment: they’re eager to see us succeed and have helped us move fast in a highly regulated space. As a foreign founder, I’ve been limited in my ability to make hands-on contributions in this area, so most of the credit here is due to our amazing team. Overall, Indonesia can be a challenging place to do business, but we’ve made very solid headway here in a short time.
Recent Struggle:
Potok: Any market with gatekeepers is structurally tough for startups, and the voluntary carbon credit market is no exception. It’s hard to ship and iterate based on user feedback because most buyers require you to go through a lengthy 3rd-party certification process before they’ll even talk to you. And if you’re doing something completely unproven you need one of the certifying bodies to approve a whole new methodology, which is even more expensive and time-consuming. The voluntary market overall is growing at 70% per year, which means that these legacy institutions are really struggling to keep up. In response to this, some buyers have been willing to buy without certification after doing their own research, but that’s still fairly rare.
Founder Advice:
Potok: Maximize your surface area and ask people for help! If you’re working on something inspirational – and you must be, or why would you be doing it? – complete strangers will be drawn to you and be surprisingly generous with their time and energy. Especially people who have been around the startup scene for a while, who recognize that starting a company is hard and founders need every bit of support they can get.
I’ve also relied on meeting regularly with other founders in small-group settings: I’m in two different “mastermind” groups that meet monthly to share updates, exchange advice and just generally share the ups and downs of the experience.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Potok: Here are three founders you should check out next!
David Cutler, Founder of Fortuna Cools: Fortuna Cools turns agricultural waste into high-performance insulation.
Olya Irzak, Founder of Frost Methane: Frost Methane mitigates concentrated methane releases.
Dalton Fouts, Founder of ReturnKey: Return Key is pioneering recommerce in SE Asia.
Enter Your Email Below To Receive Startup Spotlights In Your Inbox Once Per Week:
Who should I profile next? Leave your suggestion in the comments:
Why you should become a paid subscriber to Founder to Founder:
Get connected to elite tech entrepreneurs through in-depth Founder Case Studies
Receive exclusive documents crafted by top founders on how to build your company
Access a growing audience of venture capitalists, product managers, software engineers, and people passionate about technology
Hear real, raw experiences from entrepreneurs that you won’t see anywhere else
Previous F2F Case Studies:
Case Study: Matidor's Sean Huang Builds For The Market, Not Any One Particular Customer
Case Study: Rutter Had To Go Through Two Years Of Pivots Before They Found Success
Case Study: Paces CEO James McWalter Learned To Turn Rejection Into Success Through Curiosity
Case Study: Fintor Relies On Daily User Feedback For Quicker Product Iteration
Case Study: PatchRx CEO Andrew Aertker Warns Of Making Too Many Changes
Previous Startup Spotlights:
Startup Spotlight #191: Matidor - Matidor is a YC backed project management software on a live map.
Startup Spotlight #190: ScribeUp - ScribeUp is the world’s first consumer wallet & payment rail for your digital subscription services.
Startup Spotlight #189: Paces - Paces derisks the development and operation of your green infrastructure project.
Startup Spotlight #188: Renoon - Renoon empowers brands and consumers to have a digital conversation on the topic through the world's first app that combines the offering from hundreds of websites at once and verifies sustainability.
Startup Spotlight #187: Zette - Zette is on a mission to make high-quality content accessible to all.
Startup Spotlight #186: Debbie - Debbie is building a unique debt-freedom financial product for borrowers, by borrowers.
Startup Spotlight #185: Dog is Human - Dog is Human makes cleaner, better pet health products by combining human-grade ingredients with veterinary research.
Startup Spotlight #184: OfficeTogether - OfficeTogether is a workplace collaboration platform purpose-built for the hybrid office
If you enjoyed this article, feel free to check out my other work on LinkedIn. Follow me on Twitter @fredsoda, on Medium @fredsoda, and on Instagram @fred_soda.