Why is PowerMarket Successful?

PowerMarket is on a winning streak lately. We celebrated 1GW of community solar under management in June 2025 and are already over 1.5GW just 9 months later. Important multinational IPPs are migrating portfolios to us. Head count is up 30% yoy and top-line gross revenue grew by 50% in 2025. With all the great news, I thought it might be a good moment to share what the contributing elements to our success have been, including what I consider to be our secret sauce.

Team
It’s hard to say that the success of any company isn’t directly tied to its team, after all they’re the ones representing the company and doing the work. The more talented the team, the better the results, and if those rewards accrue back to the team, you’ll have a virtuous cycle that enables a results driven culture and great employee retention. Culture can be difficult to measure quantifiably, but employee tenure functions as a good proxy and is an area where PowerMarket excels. Although their titles may change, year after year you’ll see the same faces at the company, and there are more than a handful of employees who have been with us since nearly day one. Being located in New York helps too. The city attracts the best and the brightest looking to make their mark — something that helps with hiring broadly. While I’m incredibly proud of the team and culture we’ve built, and it’s hard to say this, I don’t think it’s the primary reason for our success.

Strategy
They say culture eats strategy for lunch, but that doesn’t mean you can’t also have a great strategy. Having been in business for over 10 years, PowerMarket has seen a lot of clean energy startup fads come and go.

• While fighting tooth and nail to secure a measly $250k convertible note (and never succeeding), I remember practically overnight my Greentech Media feed being filled with dozens of clean energy startups raising tens of millions of dollars using something called Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). Apparently all you needed was a whitepaper and a business model built on the “blockchain.” No product, customers, or revenue needed!


• The game-changing Brooklyn Microgrid was next. I signed up to be a prosumer, downloaded their app, but was never able to join. I tried my best to understand how the microgrid actually functioned, but couldn’t figure it out, nor could I understand why there were hundreds or even thousands of articles being written about it. Although I lived in Brooklyn at the time, maybe my jeans just weren’t skinny enough for the microgrid.


• Carbon Offsets. I’ve clocked over 25 years in the energy industry and every time carbon offset start-ups arrive on the scene, I know our industry has gotten a little ahead of its skis. Although I love the promise of offsets and commend people trying to stop runaway capitalism from destroying yet more land, I’m glad that as a company we’ve steered clear of them.


• Artificial Intelligence is another one. We’ll use the heck out of it to improve our internal productivity, and I do think it can be useful in some areas of our business like customer support. However, I wouldn’t hold your breath for a “PowerMarket AI Co-pilot” product being rolled out anytime soon.

Thankfully, we never chased any of these, or the many other trendy startup crazes that came across our radar over the past decade. I started the company to solve the problem I saw while working as a clean energy program manager at a major utility. As a career software engineer, suddenly working as a program manager I didn’t think it would be impossible to build a software platform to do the marketing, enrollment, management, billing, reporting, and customer support of the clean energy programs we ran at the utility. PowerMarket was born from that vision, and we haven’t deviated even slightly from it since then. Obviously we are a Community Solar company, and while we are hyper-focused on being the best at that, we’re also excited to offer some new products and services through our Clean Energy Delivery software platform soon.

Technology
I’m an average leader and a mediocre salesperson, but a very talented and experienced software engineer – so it would stand to reason that our Clean Energy Delivery software platform has been a critical element to our success. At PowerMarket, we solve the same program management challenges I saw at the utility by running the marketing, enrollment, reporting, billing, support, and customer experience on a single source-of-truth software platform using real-time data. That might sound like an easy thing to build, but we’ve had four very talented software engineers working on it full-time for 10 years, and even more difficult has been convincing our various teams to use it when, at times, there have been better standalone tools available out there in the cloud. That said and all told, aligning all our business functions on one platform has created countless operational efficiencies, and it is an important reason for our success, but I’d argue there’s something that trumps it.

Finance
If I had to single out one reason for our company’s success, I would have to say that it is how our company is financed and in particular, the fact that we never took on venture or external capital. Looking back over the past 10 years, this fact created the perfect free-market conditions that allowed us to excel. We could tune out the noise, didn’t have anyone demanding 10x returns, and could simply listen to what the market was telling us and provide as much value to clients and customers as we possibly could. That’s it. Listen to your market and provide value. That’s the recipe for success.

And it’s not like we didn’t try to raise external funding. In the first year and half of the company, I approached close to 100 venture capital, angel investor, and family offices but all those no’s and rejections turned out to be blessings in disguise that translated into the following realities.

• We were able to follow the market and, in particular, the pace of the market. We kept our ear to the tracks, our heads down, and delivered value that translated into revenue. To be honest, it was exhilarating and created an eat-what-you-kill mentality that continues to persist within the company today.


• The invisible hand of how and where to provide value meant that everyone within the company implicitly knew what to do and how vigorously to pursue it. Because the team knew both compensation and the value of their company stock was directly tied to their work product and effort, there wasn’t much management and oversight needed. Everyone just knew to execute.


• Success was dependent, not on milestones and artificial metrics that would allow for the next round of funding, but on winning the next deal. Community Solar was slow out of the gate, and we were able to follow the natural pace of the market.

Conclusion
The results of the elements outlined above, and that we’ve built the company around, speak for themselves. In addition to the 2025 growth, our company has been profitable every year except 2017, when we lost around $15,000. Margins have always been healthy and every year we either meet or exceed the Rule of 40, meaning the sum of net profit margin as a % + yoy gross revenue % growth equals at least 40%.

Every startup journey is distinct in its own way. What worked for us might not work for the next company, but listening to the market and providing value are great places to start. If you can couple that with a great team and technology, while avoiding the trendy distractions that pop up in every industry — in my opinion, you’ll be on the path to success.