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13 Climate Tech Founders
GTM Channel Lessons
Select Investors Based on Their Access to Your Target Buyers
When Gary Ong set out to raise capital, he treated investor selection as a customer acquisition decision. Rather than optimizing purely for valuation or brand name, he specifically targeted investors who were active on the demand side of his market. “Our investors are Dynamo Ventures, Medieval Mobility, and EPS Shipping. And they’re all folks in the hydrogen demand side, in a sense, that they’re trying to use hydrogen for either logistics, mobility, or shipping.” The intent was explicit: “We ended up with them as investors because we wanted to use them as channels to get us more customers within these space and verticals. So that was a very clear intent of picking these investors.” For founders selling into concentrated markets, the cap table can function as a distribution network if you build it that way from the start.
Treat Relationship Credibility as an Acquisition Channel
When Vibrant Planet went to market, no amount of product demos or inbound campaigns could substitute for trust built over years. Allison Wolff explained what actually drove early customer acquisition: “All of our early customers were deep relationships that either some of my team, or longtime people in government from like EPA and Bureau of Land Management and US Forest Service, where they had deep respect.” The team’s existing credibility inside the agencies they were selling into was the GTM channel. Allison herself had to earn that standing from scratch, describing a process that took years: “I earned that respect coming in as the newbie from, you know, took several years of many conversations to also build that kind of rapport with folks.” She called it “the most relationship driven business I’ve ever experienced.” In trust-driven markets, relationships are not a supporting tactic; they are the channel itself.
Build Your Channel Strategy Around Who Already Has Your Buyer's Trust
When Crux entered a brand-new market, Allen Kramer made a foundational GTM decision early: go through the intermediaries, not around them. He recognized that buyers navigating an unfamiliar asset class would lean on their existing advisors to guide them through it. “A critical early decision was that we wanted to partner very closely with players like banks, tax advisors, major institutional players, that were going to be on the front lines of advising their clients about entering this market.” Rather than treating those advisors as competition or an afterthought, Crux built solutions specifically for them. “One of the critical early decisions we made was to build solutions for those intermediaries that were going to help their clients.” The payoff was tangible: “Being really flexible has helped us drive much more liquidity earlier and also helped drive standardization in a lot of places.”
Replace Direct Sector Outreach With a Partner Channel Model
Trying to serve too many verticals at once is a GTM trap that spreads expertise too thin across all of them. Adrienne Pierce ran into this directly at New Sun Road. “We started with kind of a sector strategy where we’re like, oh, we can do electric vehicles and we can provide electric energy management for them. But what we found was that it’s very hard to be experts in all of these different sectors.” The fix was a structural shift in how the company went to market. “Our sort of go to market has been much more a partnering model and enabling our clients to be successful and bringing value for them.” Rather than owning the full customer relationship across multiple industries, the team focused on making channel partners successful and letting those partners carry the sector-specific expertise.
Sequence Your GTM Channels Before You Scale Them
Alexis Normand built Greenly’s acquisition engine by layering channels in deliberate order rather than launching them all at once. He started with SEO infrastructure, bringing on “a growth manager who basically set up an SEO, you know, framework and freelancers and team and so on, so that we essentially rank on all this stuff.” Only after that did he add outbound: “And then we started hiring SDRs, outbound. I was the only sales person at first.” Channel partnerships with investment funds came later, with “some of them distributed us down the portfolio.” The throughline was doing the work himself before handing it off: “fundamentally it’s building your growth engine and hiring people, but only once you’ve done the job yourself of just nailing the pitch, nailing the demo, just making it work.”
Use Customers to Pull Partners Into Your Ecosystem
When you’re a small startup trying to build an integration partner network, going directly to large manufacturers rarely works. Jan-Willem designed around this constraint deliberately. Rather than approaching big OEMs cold, he sequenced the motion so that contracted customers became the ones making the ask. As he explained, “that would be really hard to do for us as a small, tiny startup to go to these big manufacturers and ask to integrate on our platform.” Once those OEM integrations existed, they became leverage with the next customer: “you then go to the next utility and you say, hey, I have these five OEMs already integrated with my platform.” The flywheel compounded further when OEMs, seeing value being created for their own customers, started making introductions: “Hey, I know a couple of other utilities that we work with. Why don’t I introduce you? And you get there somewhat of a network effect, or at least a channel effect.”
Let Your Early Customers Distribute Your Content for You
Before the product existed, Quentin and his team spent six months selling manually produced PDF and Word document reports to paying customers while building the actual platform in the background. What started as a survival tactic turned into their most powerful early marketing channel. “People were sharing these word documents amongst themselves,” he said. “Even non subscribers were getting them. And it was so frustrating. How dare everybody see this thing without subscribing. But it was the best marketing tool ever because, this thing actually went viral.” The organic forwarding among non-subscribers confirmed real market demand and generated awareness without any paid distribution. “Our distribution channel was email at that time.”
Frame Early Pilots as Mutual Learning Cycles to Remove Sales Pressure
Scott Graybeal, CEO of Caelux, treats small-scale field deployments as a customer acquisition and relationship-building tool, not just a technical validation step. The pitch to prospective customers wasn’t “this is ready” — it was an invitation to learn together. “How would you like the opportunity to get some early cycles of learning on a hybrid tandem module? They’ve said, yes, we want to do that, we want to try some of it out.” The scope was deliberately manageable: “We won’t do a 50 megawatt project, obviously, but, we’ll do 100 kilowatts, 200, 300 kilowatts, enough that it’s meaningful that both of us can learn quite a bit.” What made this work was the explicit agreement upfront about uncertainty. “So as long as you have agreement with your counterparty that things may work, they may not work. If they don’t work great, then we’re going to go ahead and replace it and we’re both going to learn some more.” Framing the pilot as a mutual learning cycle rather than a product demo removed the pressure on both sides and kept the relationship intact regardless of outcome.
Borrow Credibility From Established Partners to Accelerate Trust
When you’re an unknown startup in a complex market, brand awareness doesn’t come cheap — but it can come borrowed. Javier Marti, CEO and Founder of Divirod, made partnerships with large, recognizable companies a deliberate priority in the early stages of building his company. His reasoning was direct: “The best is actually to partner up with somebody who is very much recognizing the public. We have put a lot of effort in creating partnerships of a certain size.” The logic wasn’t purely about co-building or revenue, it was about borrowed credibility. As Javier put it, industry leaders “have an exposure that naturally is going to give you a side exposure that takes you forward.” In practice, this meant securing partnerships with household names like Databricks, Thales, and others. For founders selling a novel product into a skeptical market, association with trusted names lowers the trust barrier before a single sales conversation begins.
Test New Products With Your Existing Customer Base First
When the company launched its new product, Manik skipped the cold market entirely and went straight to customers who already knew and trusted them. “What we were able to do early on was work with existing co-inspect customers, test our new product with them, and what we saw was a lot more pull than push.” The signals that came back were unambiguous: “These early adopters started saying, hey, we’d love this in all our locations. We’d love to recommend this to others. Can we sign up for more sensors per location?” Manik read those responses as proof of a repeatable acquisition path, noting that “those kinds of signals told us that we were solving a problem in a measurable, repeatable way.” Existing customers cut through the noise of early validation and gave the company a faster, cleaner read on whether the new product had legs.
Bring a Physical Product to Conferences to Accelerate Customer Conversations
Stwart Peña Feliz, co-founder and CEO of MacroCycle, found that conferences were his most effective customer acquisition channel, but only when the team showed up with something tangible. “The best way we’ve been able to find customers is through conferences,” he said. “As we attend conferences, we’re able to meet so many of them and if we attend with physical products, they’re able to actually see what we can do and that’s able to get them excited.” The physical product did the selling that a slide deck couldn’t. From there, the conversations shifted from awareness to qualification, with the goal of finding partners actually willing to move at startup speed. As Stewart put it, “the next step is just having those first conversations and starting to determine who are those right partners that can actually work with startups.”
Turn Your Cap Table Into a Distribution Network
When ACCURE expanded into the US, the investor relationship did more than fund the move. Kai explained that their US investor “massively support us with finding our feet in the United States, setting up the entity” and then introduced the person who would become president of North America. The network didn’t stop there. As Kai put it, “if you’ve got contacts to first customers, if you’ve got a person you can rely on as the leader of the subsidiary, and then some introductions just to the general network, that’s like three out of four most important things that kind of fell into our lap with that investment.” The right investor in a new market can compress years of network-building into months.
Anchor Peer Advice to When It Was Earned, Not Just Who Gave It
When Kathy Hannun was figuring out how to market Dandelion to homeowners, she turned to veterans of the solar industry for channel advice. The two products had a similar value proposition, so the playbook seemed transferable. She adopted their recommendations: farmer’s markets, community events, grassroots outreach. The tactics underperformed. When she tested Facebook ads, the results were not close. “We tried those and then quickly realized actually just running ads on Facebook was way more cost effective.” The insight she took away was not that the solar operators gave bad advice, but that their advice was anchored to a different moment in time. “The solar industry kind of came of age before digital ads were such a big deal. And so all the advice I had gotten was a little bit out of date.” Her conclusion: “It’s good to seek advice from people who have done it. But then you really do have to keep that advice in the context of the time, especially when it comes to marketing, because marketing tactics change so quickly.”