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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
10 Climate Tech Founders
Category Creation Lessons
Commit Fully to Your Market Timing Thesis From Day One
When building in a new category, the founding thesis either holds or it doesn’t. Kentaro made that explicit from his very first investor conversation. “It was in the very first pitch that I did to my very first investors. I said we were either going to be phenomenally right or were going to be phenomenally wrong on this market timing. There’s not going to be a whole lot in between.” That binary framing wasn’t just a pitch device. It defined how Persefoni operated from the start, committing fully to category education and market development rather than hedging toward an easier near-term story. Four years in, that conviction proved durable. “When I look at how close our founding thesis was to now we just started year four of our business, it is remarkable how little that’s changed. Our thesis has remained remarkably the same, which has always been predicated around this category creation moment.” Half-conviction produces half-measures. Decide early that you are right, build accordingly, and resist the temptation to hedge toward a safer story just because the market has not caught up yet.
Replace Category Explanations With Before-and-After Business Cases
Selling a genuinely new category creates a predictable problem: buyers keep asking what you are instead of whether they need you. Jan-Willem described the pattern clearly: “going into companies that require a bit of education. That sometimes leads to somewhat awkward questions like why do we need this layer in between? How does this fit in the ecosystem? This is new. So what are you then? A, B or C and you’re none of it.” His response was to stop trying to answer the category question and redirect the conversation entirely: “we just focus on the value.” In practice that meant showing buyers a direct comparison: “we just show what happens if you continue to operate like you do today. And then let us show what happens when you plug in vivo and what that means in terms of your customer lifetime value.” When the category is unfamiliar, a concrete business case does more work than any category narrative.
Give the Problem Your Category Solves a Name the Market Can Adopt
Javier Marti coined the term “water data scarcity” to describe the problem his company addressed and introduced it publicly at COP28, giving the market a specific phrase to attach to a problem that previously had no shared label. As he explained, “We also realize that there is a problem with water data scarcity. That’s a word that I coined when I went to COP28 for my invited talk last year.” The data behind the term made the problem concrete: “If you look at the map of the United States, you see about 12,000, 17,000 at most data points or locations where we’re collecting data about water, you realize that’s not enough coverage.” Name the problem before you name the solution. A term the market can repeat gives buyers a way to describe what they are experiencing, gives analysts a handle to write about it, and gives your category a center of gravity that did not exist before you showed up.
Publish Market Performance Data to Define a Category Around Your Insight
Quentin and his team created their category not by naming it first but by doing something the market had never seen. “We decided that rather than trade power through all these batteries, we were going to tell the market and publish to the market how much money they were all making,” he said. “And if we can build those benchmarks, all these different batteries, and wind farms and solar farms, those benchmarks can be used by insurers or asset owners or banks or lenders to transact with these things.” The market response confirmed they had landed on something genuinely new. “Nobody had ever done this before. Nobody had ever published how much money everybody else was making. It was getting calls from people, from big utilities saying we like transparency, but not this much transparency.” Quentin was candid that the category insight came from desperation as much as strategy: “We actually created this. But to be honest, the aha moment was very different to the one that we got when we were basically at the end of the line.”
Frame the Status Quo as the Competitor When Creating a Category
Antoine framed his competitive landscape in a way that most founders miss. When you are creating a new category, there is rarely a direct competitor to position against. “I think mostly we’re really creating a new category. And the classical thing that comes up with a new category is that you really need to be substantially better to change the pattern of how people work.” The real obstacle is inertia. “I think that our biggest competitor today is the status quo. Just throwing a battery to the shredder and bringing away the organics and not being able to really reuse and economically recycle clean value streams.” Your buyer has a way of doing things that works well enough, costs something they have already budgeted for, and carries no implementation risk. Getting them to move means making the cost of staying put feel larger than the cost of switching. That requires a substantially better outcome, and a pitch that makes the pain of the status quo visible and specific enough that the buyer feels it.
Position Your Category Around the Barriers You Remove
The most credible way to define a new category is to name the specific friction that has prevented an existing solution from scaling, then position your company as the one removing it. Joselyn applied this directly: “we don’t have the hubris of saying, oh, we’re actually inventing geothermal direct use. We’re here to say it is not a scalable asset category because costs haven’t come down, because adoption barriers haven’t come down, risk hasn’t been solved for, and bankability and finance ability hasn’t been solved for.” She then used solar as the reference point for what a mature category looks like: “20 years ago, solar was not anything more than a novelty, but now it is an industry into which you have so many small businesses, big businesses, you have financial products, you have insurance products. It is a category because so much scale has happened and so many other businesses can be built on top of it.” That framing does two things at once: it tells the market exactly what problem you are solving, and it gives buyers and investors a concrete picture of where the category is headed.
Anchor Your Category to the Problem You Solve, Not the Technology You Built
Khaled Hassounah framed Ample’s market category around the underlying problem rather than the technology delivering the solution. When the market defaults to a single solution type, he argued, the category label becomes artificially narrow: “when you say energy for electric cars, people often just simply think charger.” His framing expanded the category by drawing an analogy to how energy delivery already works in other contexts: “I think of our space as energy delivery in the same way that you think of gas, diesel and maybe hydrogen in the same way as energy delivery for kind of ICE or similar engines.” That move positioned Ample as one valid answer to a bigger problem rather than a challenger to an existing solution, which is a fundamentally different competitive posture. “In our case, it’s energy delivery for electric cars, and we’re just one potential solution for how that problem can be solved.”
Define Your Category Early and Own the Language Around It
Manik made a deliberate choice to name the space the company was entering before anyone else did. “That’s exactly the intent, is to create a category around cooling intelligence. First time anyone’s ever asked me that. But that was the intent. When we announced the cooling intelligence platform was to kind of build a new space.” He was candid that formal category creation investment had not yet followed the naming decision: “we don’t have kind of a formal marketing budget around that, around category creation, but we are trying to position ourselves in a growing ecosystem around the built environment transformation thesis, and we see opportunities there.” The act of naming came first, at the founder level, as a positioning decision made before the marketing infrastructure was in place to support it.
Sell the Problem Before You Sell the Solution in New Categories
When there is no existing budget line, no existing vendor comparison, and no existing vocabulary for what you do, the first GTM challenge is market education. Marc Borrett described this directly: “We are having to create, in some cases, an entirely new category. So when we talk about measuring the grid, actually, we’re talking about measuring a particular phenomena that has never been measured before.” The category emerged from an accidental discovery, not a planned market entry: “We only arrived at that, really by accident.” Before any commercial conversation could happen, buyers had to understand why their existing approach was breaking down: “The toolkit that exists is based on the old world, where everything is entirely stable, so very little is measured, but lots of things are modeled. And now, as this transition takes hold, those models are no longer keeping up with the reality of how the power system is behaving.” The GTM motion started with making the problem visible, because no buyer spends on a solution to a problem they have not yet recognized.
Build Your Market Size Case Around the Ecosystems You Enable
When you are creating a category, there is no existing market to point to, and trying to size something that doesn’t yet exist rarely convinces anyone. “No one has quantified the market size of soil carbon measurement very well. Because of that, we focus a lot of our economic kind of business case building on the potential of what our customers are doing and that we are an enabler.” Instead of estimating direct demand, he built the business case from the bottom up through adjacent markets: “We bottomed up it not so much in terms of like how many farmers want to do this every year, but instead, if there’s demand for soil carbon offsets, what does that mean for demand for our services?” For founders in emerging categories, size the ecosystems your product unlocks. Buyers and investors can evaluate a market they already understand. They cannot evaluate one that does not exist yet.