Why Your Best Idea Is Never Your First One

When we started, we were not GreenMark. We were PropFlow, a platform built to help property managers communicate better with tenants. It was a real idea solving a real problem. But after getting into the market, we realized the industry was too saturated and the return was not there.

So we made a change. That was the first of many.

Following the Money

We pivoted toward tax incentives for property owners. If we could show a return on investment through green upgrades, we had something worth building.

Then we started talking to actual property owners.

What we found was not pleasant, but it was necessary. In a market like State College where supply is low and demand is high, a rental fills itself. Why invest more into something that already works? The incentives were real but the value was not landing. We had to move again.

Finding the Real Problem

Getting deeper into sustainability and ESG networks opened a new door: commercial real estate. CRE owners care about cutting energy costs, staying compliant, and hitting their ESG reporting goals. Same problem as before though. Still about the money.

So our angle became this: what if we aggregated state and federal incentive data and showed property owners exactly what renovations would get them a return? It was starting to come together, but there were still gaps.

We kept digging. That is when we looked closely at LEED itself and the process behind certifying these buildings. What we found was that most of it is completely manual. Excel sheets, fragmented communication between owners, consultants, and engineers. Slow and outdated.

That was it. We found the real problem.

The Lesson

From PropFlow to GreenMark, from residential to commercial, every shift felt like a step backward in the moment. It was not. Each one saved us months of building the wrong thing.

According to research cited by Wisp, 42% of startups fail because they never achieve product-market fit. Customer discovery is how you avoid becoming that statistic. We are living proof of what happens when you keep iterating until the answer shows up.

The idea is never going to be perfect. There will always be something else to uncover. The goal is not to find the final answer. The goal is to keep iterating until you are close enough to build something real.