Early Stage Marketing for Climate Tech Founders - Lunch and Learn with Katie Cobb

In high-trust, heavily regulated industries like climate tech, traditional marketing playbooks fail. You aren't selling a standard B2B SaaS tool—you are navigating multi-stakeholder purchasing decisions, complex CapEx evaluations, site reliability tests, grid or supply chain integration, and long sales cycles. The person who tests your technology, the person who holds the budget, and the person who evaluates regulatory risk are rarely the same. Most pre-seed founders fall into the ultimate GTM trap: they build a marketing strategy around a weak understanding of their buyer. Because they haven't yet translated their technology into a commercial case for the specific people who must say yes, their downstream execution collapses. They end up burning precious runway on agencies and paid campaigns that don't convert, or generating generic AI fluff that corporate sustainability leads and industrial VPs tune out instantly. For early-stage companies, marketing is not promotion - it’s discovery. It starts with getting the buyer right—who pays, what they care about, and how to position your offering so you cut through the noise before you spend a single dollar on execution. Stakeholder Mapping: How to map the critical gaps between your User (facility engineer/operator), your Economic Buyer (VP of Ops/CFO/Offtaker), and your Gatekeeper (EHS, regulatory, legal, or grid interconnection). The 3-Stage Marketing Framework: What marketing activities to focus on right now to build your foundation, what to execute alone + free AI, and what must wait until after your next round. The Translation Gap: Why technical founders struggle to write their own commercial positioning—and how to convert gigawatt-hours, carbon tonnage, or efficiency specs into plain-language business cases. The Champion’s Toolkit: The essential 1-page proof assets your internal champion needs to sell you when you’re not in the room so deals don't stall. What You’ll Walk Away With: A completed 1-Page Climate GTM & Asset Architecture Canvas mapping your stakeholders, pipeline friction, and immediate marketing priorities. Who Should Attend: Pre-seed and early seed founders, CEOs, and commercial leads across energy, mobility, circular economy, carbon removal, industrial decarbonization, and deep tech preparing to scale their go-to-market motion. Bring a pen and your current value proposition or pitch (on a laptop, notebook, or phone).