With a team that has grown to around 10 people, they built a software service that lets businesses calculate carbon footprints using data they may have already gathered to ensure their compliance with environmental regulations.
Cold Climate founders Dan Lindquist, left, and Eric Dayton (© Liz Banfield)
Dayton said that wasn’t his first plan for Cold. Initially, he approached customers offering to serve more like a consultant: Cold would measure a business’ carbon footprint, then make suggestions of how to do things better.
“We got our first couple of customers that way, but it wasn’t really clicking,” Dayton said. “We realized by not making this about sustainability for sustainability’s sake, although I certainly believe in that, we could appeal to a much greater number of customers if we made it about sustainability compliance.”
An outside adviser reminded Dayton and Lindquist that businesses don’t buy vitamins, they buy painkillers. He told them to concentrate on solving the pain that businesses face.
“There’s a huge amount of data they are required to collect and organize and then use for this reporting,” Dayton said. “That’s a big headache. We can be a painkiller there.”
For example, firms around the country are now scrambling to comply with a new California law that prohibits the presence of PFAS, or forever chemicals, in fabrics. Many states, including Minnesota, are banning the intentional addition of PFAS chemicals in products, but California has gone a step further to set limits on the organic presence of fluorine. “That creates a huge data collection and reporting challenge,” Dayton said.