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18 Climate Tech Founders
GTM Motion Lessons
Turn Compliance Complexity Into a Sales Conversation
When Matt LeDucq and his team at Forum Mobility go to market, they lead with the regulatory clock already ticking on their prospects. California’s Air Resource Board mandates a specific set of requirements: “In order to enter a port, your truck, starting this year, needs to be a model engine, 2013 or older. You need to have less than 800,000 miles on it. And if your truck leaves the registry, which is managed by the air resource board, it must be replaced by a zero emission truck.” Rather than pitching the merits of clean technology, the sales team identifies fleets with expiring trucks and frames the conversation around what compliance actually requires of a small operator. The pitch is direct: “We can go to a customer and say, your fleet has a good chunk of expiring trucks. Do you want to deal with that yourself and go get a personal loan and understand what low carbon fuel standard credits are and how to apply for grants? Or do you just want to come over and use our service down the road from you?” Matt said this approach made the sales motion straightforward: “That’s been the go to market strategy. It’s pretty simple when you talk to a trucker, and it’s been received extremely well.” The insight is that when regulation creates a mandatory transition, the sales job is not to generate urgency but to position your offering as the simpler path through a process the buyer already has to navigate.
Target Verticals Where Pressure Exists But Laggards Remain
Alexis Normand didn’t try to manufacture demand from scratch. Instead, Greenly looked for verticals where competitive pressure was already building from the top down, then targeted the companies inside those verticals that hadn’t yet moved. “What we did is of course we looked into the verticals where that pressure already existed and then went to see the companies that hadn’t done anything because they didn’t have the money for consultants basically.” The logic was simple: those laggards weren’t resistant to the category, they were just unserved. Alexis explained exactly how the pressure dynamic worked in practice: “If no one in your industry is doing it, then you can probably still sign your contract. Without doing it. But as soon as one of your competitors starts to say, hey, I also sell these packaging goods or you know, these bars of steel, except I compute the footprint and I’m the same price but I’m more sustainable, then this guy wins the deal.” Once a competitor moves, the rest of the vertical has a business reason to act, not just a moral one. That’s the moment Greenly showed up.
Design Your Sales Motion Around Progressive Risk Reduction
In complex, long-cycle categories, the traditional notion of a sales cycle with a defined close date does not apply. Matt Loszak, CEO and Co-Founder of Aalo Atomics, described a GTM motion built around progressive commitment rather than a transaction. “The go to market, essentially is go out and talk to a ton of potential customers, see what they’re interested in, help define the product with them, help define the business model with them, go through those gestations.” From there, commitment deepens incrementally: “Throughout the course of a year or two, you kind of move towards talking to a bunch who maybe don’t want to buy a product. And then as you continue to de-risk the technology, that document gets more and more specific.” The contrast with software is deliberate. As Matt put it, “It’s not a B2B SaaS company like my last company, or something like a hardware startup for example Apple, where you’re making a small product that you can prototype quickly and sell quickly and then iterate from there.” The implication for any founder in a high-complexity category is to stop optimizing for speed to close and start optimizing for depth of customer relationship at each stage of risk reduction.
Turn Potential Competitors Into Customers and Advocates
Scott Graybeal made a deliberate call early on to position Caelux as a technology provider to existing manufacturers rather than a direct competitor. His reasoning was explicit: “Didn’t want to run a startup solar panel company because that’s a very long on ramp to success.” Instead, the motion was to make incumbents’ products better and let market gravity do the rest. “The way to go and get this technology in the market embedded to the extent that it needed to be was to work with solar module companies, make their products better, and then we would have cheerleaders as opposed to competitors.” The result was a customer base drawn from the top of the existing industry: “Stand on the shoulders of these giants and not try to fight them. And that’s exactly what we’ve done. So we’ve been able to work with some of the top leading best solar PV companies in the world that we consider customers.”
End Customer Relationships That Pull You From Your Core ICP
Early-stage founders routinely rationalize off-target customers as minor exceptions, but Kai watched this pattern destroy focus across the companies he observed. ACCURE made the deliberate decision to end contracts with customers whose needs were pulling the product in the wrong direction, telling them directly: “we love working with you, but it’s just not, we don’t want to go where you would need us to be to serve you best. Let’s not extend this contract.” The compounding reward for holding the line was significant. As Kai explained, “once you’ve built your vision of the product and it really helps a certain group of customers, that group of customers will come to you, and all of a sudden you’ve got all these economies of scale. You’ve got happy customers that are all equal. So if one comes up with a product idea like a new feature, you can roll it out to everyone else.” His advice to other founders was direct: “focus on something really small and dedicate your time to it and make the difficult decision to say no, even if someone’s willing to give you money.”
Rebuild Your Brand and Sales Motion Together When Moving Upmarket
When Quentin decided to pursue enterprise customers, he treated it as two problems that had to be solved simultaneously. On the brand side, the directive was clear: “we need to look more like Bloomberg rather than a friendly dog food company.” That meant investing in data infrastructure, security, and a full rebrand to present as “a serious, professional, secure, premium enterprise product.” On the GTM side, the existing motion stopped working. “Our go to market had to change, as well,” he said. “We found that the sales process was a lot more top-down in enterprise sales than what we’d known until then, which is inbound marketing, signing up people on a free plan, and working bottoms up.” The shift required building an account-based marketing capability from scratch, and Quentin was candid that the learning curve was steep: “I actually don’t think we’ve got it right yet.”
Choose Market Segments Where Price Alone Does Not Win
Edward Chiang, co-founder and CEO of Moment Energy, made a deliberate choice to avoid the utility-scale market despite being cost-competitive in it. His reasoning was straightforward: “At utility scale, when you’re doing, 40 football fields worth of batteries, it’s whoever is cheapest wins.” Even with a 30% cost advantage over Chinese competitors, he did not want price to be the primary purchase driver. As he put it, “We want customers to buy us because we actually have a chemical advantage as well as a cost advantage.” Instead, Moment Energy focused on commercial and industrial customers, “mainly because we see it less of a fight to the bottom.” The segment choice protected their ability to compete on performance, not just economics, and built customer relationships grounded in differentiated value rather than the lowest bid.
Screen Prospects for Cultural Alignment Before Any Outreach
Not every prospect in your addressable market is worth pursuing at the same time. Stefanie Gerhart, co-founder and CCO of ecoLocked, built a pre-qualification step into her outreach process before a single conversation started. “We right away focus basically on subsections of that market. We look for customers who are already marketing their material as environmentally, less harmful, sustainable.” She added a second filter on top of that: “We checked that they had either partnered with startups before or they have done some innovative approach within their own operations. And these were the people we then reached out to more and really went into conversations with.” By the time her team picked up the phone, they were talking to buyers who were already predisposed to say yes; which meant less time educating skeptics and more time closing the right accounts.
Give Prospects a Live Reference Site Before Closing the Deal
In high-stakes B2B sales, a deck rarely closes a skeptical buyer. Antoine built an operational facility specifically so prospects could witness the solution working on their own products before committing. “We’re not a paper startup, so that’s why we built our own facility in Germany. So customers come, they do a bigger pilot project with us before they visit us, so that they can really see their own batteries being processed.” The experience of seeing it in person changed the nature of the conversation entirely. As Antoine put it, “the look, smell, and feel that changes the topic. From a classical SaaS business.” For founders selling complex, physical, or unfamiliar solutions, letting the prospect experience the product in a real environment does what no pitch can.
Let Customers Rank Features Before You Commit to a Roadmap
When Gary Ong’s original product stalled, he went back to customers with a direct question: “if I think of this as software instead of hardware for a minute and consider all these things as feature sets, which one is the most important for you?” The answer came back fast and clear. “Very quickly you arrive, like, from the 80/20 rule, everyone cared about gas permeability or gas blocking ability and didn’t care about anything else.” That single input reshaped everything. “Once we narrowed it down, the product timeline and commercialization plan became a lot simpler. And basically, you’re just addressing that number one customer pain point, acknowledging that after you’re done doing that, you’ll come back and kind of add feature sets to the technology. But for now, do that one first. And once we made that pivot, we were able to ship materials six months later.” For operators building complex products, the lesson is straightforward: customers will tell you what to cut if you ask them directly.
Pursue Anchor Customers Who Are Sticky, Even When Investors Hesitate
Selling to government customers made Vibrant Planet’s fundraising harder, but Allison Wolff held the course because of what those contracts represented on the other side of the deal. She was clear-eyed about the tradeoff: “Government contracts scare a lot of investors, although the investors that get it also understand once you land them, they are very big, sticky customers.” The bet was that establishing deep coverage with large, entrenched buyers would create a foundation for commercial expansion rather than constraining it. That thesis played out. As Allison put it: “Now that we’ve known that kind of coverage, we have really strong commercial plays coming as well. Now it gets really interesting. So the bet paid off.” The broader principle is that slow, sticky customers in hard-to-enter markets can serve as a GTM wedge, not a ceiling, if the commercial opportunity on the other side is real.
Build Pipeline Wide Enough to Absorb Long Sales Cycles
When your sales cycle stretches beyond a year, the only lever you actually control is how many conversations you have running in parallel. Joselyn Lai, CEO of Bedrock Energy, faced this directly selling into real estate, where “it may take over a year from starting a conversation with somebody to really being able to start construction and sometimes even longer.” Her response was not to try to compress the timeline but to engineer around it at the pipeline level. “In order to manage these long sales cycles, we have to build a pipeline that is really long term and really just gets a lot of excitement across many potential customers so that we are building a pipeline that can start to unlock over time and we can serve it as we scale up over the next few years.” The implication for any founder selling into industries with long procurement or construction cycles is that pipeline volume is your buffer. If you optimize only for near-term closes, you starve the business a year from now.
Treat Slow Market Periods as Customer Research Sprints
When Crux launched, the market they were entering wasn’t open yet. Regulatory guidance hadn’t been released, which meant no one was transacting. Rather than waiting, Allen used that window deliberately. “It was this very unique moment in building, where we could lay a lot of foundation, do a lot of customer research upfront, and start to build some of the infrastructure and foundations that we’d need.” They were actively talking to potential customers the entire time, even while “no one in this market was transacting because it was that new and guidance hadn’t come out.” When the market finally opened, Crux was ready: “The market really opened up over the course of mid to late Q3 of last year into Q4, and from there, it just exploded.”
Concentrate Your GTM Resources on Making Partners Successful
For small GTM teams, where you spend your time is a strategic decision. Adrienne Pierce identified opportunity cost as the central risk most founders overlook. “For small organizations, I think the biggest cost is opportunity cost. So if I’m spending my time chasing leads and doing lead gen and that’s where my resources are going. It may be at the behest of something that’s more productive.” Her answer was to direct that time toward the partners already in the fold. “Focusing on our client partners and helping them be successful. That has been hugely important.” When your motion depends on partners to reach end customers, their success is your pipeline.
Accept the Math and Talk to Hundreds of Prospects to Find Early Adopters
In a nascent category, there is no optimized funnel that changes the underlying conversion reality. Javier Marti, CEO and Founder of Divirod, was blunt about what early customer acquisition actually looks like: “It’s a tedious process to find early adopters, but there’s always one early adopter, every hundred people that you talk to. So you start with those that believe.” No channel strategy shortcuts that ratio. As Javier put it, “It’s a little bit of perseverance, it’s a little bit of luck, it’s a little bit of being there at the right time with the right person, in the right moment.” His conclusion was equally plain: “There’s no magical recipe to find early adopters, otherwise everybody would look for it.” For founders in disruptive markets, the insight is less about finding a better channel and more about accepting the volume requirement and building the stamina to work through it.
Filter Prospects by Their Willingness to Work at Your Current Stage
Stwart Peña Feliz built a qualification filter into MacroCycle’s sales motion based on a signal most founders ignore: how a prospect responds to your current scale. “We have received the feedback multiple times of letting us know once you’re at scale,” he said, “and unfortunately those are not the best partners that we can be operating with.” Any brand that sent that signal was disqualified. The ones worth pursuing were the ones willing to iterate alongside the company at the startup stage, what Stewart described as partners who would “get dirty with us at the small scale.” To find them, the team leaned on warm referrals: “Fortunately we’ve been able to leverage previous customers and investors to be able to basically find the right brands that can work with us.”
Match Your Demand Generation Pace to Your Fulfillment Capacity
Generating demand faster than you can fulfill it creates two problems, not one. Kathy Hannun learned this the hard way after successfully validating that customers would buy. “One challenge of the business was that we would put a lot of effort into demand generation. But then it was actually very hard to fulfill, like to get enough drills to get enough installers. It’s not so easy to actually meet the demand once you have the demand, especially if it’s changing quickly.” The backlog that followed hurt the customer experience. But the opposite swing was just as damaging: “When we hit patches where demand slowed more quickly than we expected, now you have all this excess capacity and you’re losing money.” For any business where delivery requires physical capacity, headcount, or specialized resources, demand generation and fulfillment capacity have to be planned together.
Structure Your Pricing to Make ROI Immediate
When prospects pushed back, Manik found the objection was rarely about the technology itself. “The biggest pushback is prioritization,” he said, noting that the core challenge was convincing buyers to act now rather than later. To solve this, the company eliminated every form of upfront cost from the buying decision. “Because we sell our products on a SaaS basis, subscription basis, we don’t charge for hardware or installation. So there’s no upfront investment. It’s not like we’re charging a huge upfront fee, which means that customers are generally ROI positive immediately.” The deployment model reinforced the same principle: “Our typical onboarding in store is less than 20 minutes. It’s an entirely do it yourself offering.” By removing capital risk and time-to-value friction at the same time, the company converted a prioritization objection into an easy yes.