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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
15 Climate Tech Founders
Positioning & Messaging Lessons
Build Messaging Around What Your Buyer Is Already Optimizing For
Arvin Ganesan, CEO of Fourth Power, made a deliberate choice to strip climate messaging out of his customer conversations entirely. His buyers, utility companies, operate under a mandate to keep costs low and the grid reliable, and he built his messaging around those two constraints specifically. “When we talk with our customers, we’re not talking about leading with carbon. We’re not talking about all these things that might be very motivating. But we understand our customers so deeply. We talk about how we’re able to make their avoided cost tests when it comes to integrated rate plans easier for storage.” The result is messaging that trades press-worthy language for language that actually moves procurement decisions. As Arvin put it, “that might not be sexy. That might not be a Time Magazine article on best climate technologies, but it really resonates with our customers, and that’s the approach we take.” The principle is simple: your mission motivates you, but your buyer’s constraints motivate them.
Reframe Loaded Category Labels Before Skepticism Takes Hold
Khaled Hassounah found that the moment he used the term “battery swapping” in a room, skepticism hit immediately. “The reason people get that kind of reaction is because they imagine something very specific in their mind that really has almost nothing to do with the approach we’re taking to it.” Rather than defending the label or arguing against the objection, his approach was to shift the conversation toward what made Ample’s approach fundamentally different from what buyers assumed. The result was consistent: “almost invariably, as people really understand why they were doing and how we’re fundamentally changing the way battery swapping operates, we win people over.” The principle here is that when a category label carries baggage, the messaging job is to separate your approach from the mental image the label creates, before the objection has a chance to harden.
Lead With the Strongest Criticism of Your Market
When buyers arrive already skeptical, pretending the criticism doesn’t exist destroys credibility before the conversation starts. Chris Tolles, CEO of Yard Stick PBC, built his messaging strategy around the opposite instinct: “I think we acknowledge the criticism head on is number one. Rather than pretend that’s not there or rather than pretend we have solved it all. I think what we say is these are really high quality criticisms, here are the specific ways that we’re combating it.” He was clear that this wasn’t a defensive posture: “it’s a sincere engagement with the challenges, while also a sincere desire to show that we’re doing great work in sort of knocking those challenges down one by one.” For founders selling into markets with real baggage, naming the problem before the buyer does is what earns the right to be heard.
Anchor Your Pitch to What the Buyer Is Already Paying
Kathy Hannun built Dandelion’s early pitch around a single financial comparison: what the customer was already spending versus what they would spend after switching. “The pitch for geothermal was if you use fuel oil, the amount of money you’re paying for fuel oil every year just to buy the fuel to put in your furnace is probably more than the total cost you would pay for geothermal per year, even if you paid nothing upfront.” The financing structure reinforced that frame: “Homeowners could pay nothing upfront, then have a monthly payment that was actually less than what they were probably paying for fuel oil anyway. And in that case, you’re financially better off to switch to geothermal.” By making the existing spend the baseline, the decision stopped feeling like a purchase and started feeling like a savings. “The pitch actually worked really well, especially with fuel oil customers.”
Position Your Company Around the Problems Your Competitors Failed to Solve
Manik built the company’s competitive positioning on a specific piece of market history: the long trail of failed attempts by prior players. “There are fewer players using either IoT or data science to transform, quote, legacy dumb assets into intelligent dynamic loads. So a lot of that has to do with technology challenges historically.” He was specific about what those failures looked like: “very few people could get commercial traction with generation 1 IoT devices in the cold chain. The generation 1.0 technologies didn’t use data science. They weren’t using real time data to turn things up and down and on and off.” That graveyard of failed solutions became the foundation for the company’s credibility: “because we’re starting with a relatively clean tech stack, we can take advantage of the latest data and data sets. We’re taking advantage of the fact that we’re kind of a newer player in a relatively less crowded corner of what’s otherwise a very large ecosystem.” Competitor failure, mapped clearly, gave buyers a reason to believe this time would be different.
Replace Abstract Claims With Physical, Tangible Comparisons
When your category carries entrenched misconceptions, abstract arguments rarely move people. Matt Loszak, CEO and co-founder of Aalo Atomics, built his messaging around making the invisible viscerally concrete. He described the nuclear waste from an entire lifetime of energy consumption this way: “If your whole life was powered by nuclear energy, all the nuclear waste that you would produce would fit inside of a coke can. So picture something the size of your fist, right?” He scaled that same approach to the industry level: “If you were to take all the nuclear waste from the entire history of us power production, so 50, 60 years let’s say, 300 million people on average in that timeframe, 20% of their electricity, all that nuclear waste, which again, is portrayed as a huge issue that would all fit on a football field.” He described this kind of communication as “the storytelling and the kind of counter propaganda that’s been going against nuclear, to kind of reveal the facts and to tell people, look, nuclear waste is actually not really a problem.” The principle applies to any founder selling something the market has pre-judged: find the physical comparison that makes the real scale impossible to argue with.
Lead With the Buyer's Existing Pain Before Introducing Your Solution
When buyers are stuck in a commoditized market, they already know their problem. Jan built his messaging around that pain rather than the novelty of what he was selling. He described the situation his target buyers faced: “they have lived in a commodity market for a long time. They were just selling the electricity that was generated by coal plants or gas fired plants. And it’s hard to differentiate with that offering.” The consequence was a buyer under real pressure: “competition became quite fierce in a highly commoditized market. And what you see is that customers find it very easy to switch suppliers for their power. Because what’s the difference really between an electron from retailer one versus retailer too?” Only after establishing that shared understanding of the problem did the solution enter the conversation: “creating new products that have stickiness, that have higher margin, that create happy customers and that because of their attractiveness, have a lower customer acquisition cost, that’s really how we come in on the retailer side.”
Separate Your Innovation From the Underlying Proof
When buyers encounter unfamiliar technology, the fastest way to reduce skepticism is to separate what is new from what is already proven. Joselyn Lai, CEO of Bedrock Energy, applied this directly in how she framed her market. Rather than asking buyers to trust something unproven, she grounded her pitch in the track record of the underlying category: “the category of geothermal heating and cooling is really small. It’s really nascent, but it’s actually very long established, we know it works, it’s feasible.” The innovation Bedrock brought was cost and accessibility, not the core technology itself. As Joselyn put it, “geothermal, super well established. It’s an amazing thing. Everybody loves it. Whoever loves it, as long as it’s constructed, loves it for many decades, and it saves them a lot of money for many decades. We are here to say, great, let’s make it affordable.” When you anchor your messaging to something that has already been working for decades, you give buyers a place to stand. The unfamiliar part of what you’re selling becomes a lot easier to accept when it’s sitting on top of something they already trust.
Find the Buyers Your Market Leader's Business Model Excludes
When the dominant player in your market controls who gets access to their product, a whole segment of buyers is left without a viable option. Zak Lefevre, CEO of ChargeLab, built his positioning around exactly that gap. His argument was simple: “When Tesla builds a supercharger, first of all, they pick your site, you don’t pick them. Second of all, they own and operate all the infrastructure. So when you look at businesses like Fleets, where charging is just so core to their business, they can’t wait around for a vendor like Tesla just to pick their sites.” He extended that logic to convenience store operators, making the stakes concrete: “If I run a gas station, I make money on two things. I make it on selling gas, and I make it on selling snacks and candy bars and cigarettes and water and Coke and alcohol concessions. I’m not going to hand over half of my business to somebody else just because we’re making a fuel transition from petrol to electric.” Every market leader’s business model has structural exclusions baked into it. Map those exclusions and you have a precise list of buyers who already know they need something different, have already ruled out the dominant player, and are actively looking for a reason to say yes to you.
Shift Your Messaging to Match the Priorities of the Current Market
Scott Graybeal made a deliberate decision to reframe Caelux’s market narrative as the political environment shifted. Rather than leading with climate change, he repositioned around outcomes that resonated across a broader audience. “The way I frame the conversation today in the US Context is around energy security and resiliency.” The underlying product and value proposition stayed the same; only the emphasis changed. “It’s less of a conversation today about climate change. It’s more a conversation about security and job creation and growth. And so those are two sides of the same coin. I think we can solve for both ends of the political spectrum, really with the same set of solutions.” Your product does not need to change when the market shifts. Your message does. The founders who grow through uncertain environments are the ones who stay close enough to their buyers to know which outcomes matter most right now and lead with those.
Explain Your Product by Referencing Something Everyone Already Understands
When someone asked Javier Marti, CEO and Founder of Divirod, what he did, his answer was a single sentence: “I’m building the Google Maps of water.” The analogy worked because it required no technical explanation. As Javier noted, “Everybody understands what Google Maps is, and we all understand how traffic is affecting our ability to go from a to b and how useful that is to many industries.” From that single reference point, the conversation opened naturally into the problem his company solved. As he described it, “after saying the Google maps of water, the conversation leads into the uncertainty that we have around water events.” The fastest way into a complex message is through something your buyer already understands. Find that reference point first and let the explanation follow from there.
Open Every Sales Conversation on Cost and Performance
Edward Chiang, co-founder and CEO of Moment Energy, made a deliberate choice to keep environmental benefits out of the sales conversation entirely. His position was direct: “We never sell based on sustainability. We don’t try to sell that. We’ve reduced the GHGs through emissions that are generated. When you’re creating a new battery module or cell, we don’t typically sell on that. We just sell on typical cost and power.” Even though the company’s mission is grounded in sustainability, Edward recognized that leading with values requires buyers to share those values, which narrows the field and adds friction. Keeping the message anchored to cost and power performance meant every conversation stayed on financial terms that any buyer could evaluate. Mission matters internally. Lead with the numbers, close the deal, and let the impact speak for itself once they are a customer.
Sell What You Do Operationally Before Selling Why the Category Matters
Matt LeDucq made a deliberate call to keep Forum Mobility’s positioning grounded in operations, not ideology. “We are not in the business of changing people’s minds, and nor do we pitch ourselves as a green technology company. We’re a service provider.” The reasoning was straightforward: their buyers are small trucking operators running low-margin businesses who evaluate vendors on reliability and cost, not environmental conviction. So the pitch stays in that register. “From our perspective, we provide a service. We’re good operators, we’re good builders, we’re good engineers and constructors. We’re good asset managers and all these things that we are there to provide a service.” Matt described the stance as meeting buyers where they already are: “When people decide that this is something that they need to do, whether it’s because that’s where they want their business to go or it’s where their customers want their business to go, we’re a service provider for them.” Buyers evaluate vendors on what they can actually deliver. Lead with your operational credibility, stay in the language your buyer uses to run their business, and let the category argument take care of itself.
Make the Economic Case the Center of Your Messaging
Stwart Peña Feliz learned a hard lesson about sustainability messaging: public pressure on brands does not translate into purchasing decisions. “As much as many brands want to communicate that they care about sustainability, that they want to implement recycled solutions, it will not come at the exchange of cost if you are to charge them more,” he said. “Unless they’re getting penalized for some reason, whether it’s regulation or something else, they will not be implementing recycling solutions.” That insight forced a reframe. The mission stayed the same, but the message shifted to the commercial case: “I realized that the only way we’re going to implement real solutions in the space is by breaking through the cost barrier, which is quite difficult given that this is a commodity space.”
Pressure-Test Your Narrative With Skeptical Outside Audiences
Kai learned the hard way that having the right insights in your head is worthless if you cannot communicate them clearly to someone outside your world. A venture capitalist pulled him aside with a direct assessment: “hey, I really think that there’s something there, but you’re so bad at telling the story. Can we please sit down for 2 hours to fine tune your pitch?” Kai took the feedback, did the work, and the results were immediate: “after we had the fine tune pitch deck, we also sent it out to a few other VCs, and we got positive responses five out of five times, and we got term sheets.” The core problem, as Kai described it, was assuming that what was obvious to him was obvious to everyone else: “I had that all in my head, but I just didn’t think it was necessary to lay it out in detail at first because I thought it was so obvious.” Founders should seek out smart, skeptical audiences early and treat their confusion as a signal to improve.