I’ve been writing for a female founder in circular manufacturing for 2+ years now.

And if, gun to my head, you asked me what helped us generate 1.5m impressions, 3x her following, and attract new deals, I’d probably say something like “she’s has extremely strong opinions.”

  • We consistently call out the Aussie government.
  • And the plastics industry for being horrible polluters.
  • And how complacency across the board has cost communities time, money, and health.

To be honest, it’s not like she has much of a choice.

Female founders in general, not even climate, are severely underfunded globally. Men online feel brave enough to insult her intelligence (we get comments like that about once a month). And as a result she has to work 5x as hard her peers.

As a wise person once said:

“That sh*t is tough, man.”

So she HAS to be contrarian. Otherwise, attention will go to some placid-looking guy trying to say the exact same thing, poorly.

And in my experience, becoming more contrarian should be part of your strategy too.

Is being contrarian the same as clickbait?

Not at all.

In fact, when you hear ‘contrarian’, you likely think of ‘clickbait’.

You don’t want to be fake, make empty promises, and be a sellout, right? Well, that’s understandable. We’ve all been conditioned to be allergic to that kind of content.

I like to thank BuzzFeed for that.

In 2013, when it was at its peak, BuzzFeed was all over people’s feeds.

Unfortunately, the types of headlines you’d see would make me cringe if I read them today:

Those are clickbait.

It got so bad that in August 2014 Facebook published a post explaining how it would push "click-baiting" down the feed, and two years later it had to do it again.

And if you’re not aware, clickbait’s definition is a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see.

In other words: the body of the text doesn’t deliver on the title’s promise.

Example #1: A generic, clickbait title and generic main points.

Let’s say I was writing about fundraising and the title was “How to raise your first €1M in Europe as a climate tech startup.”

But then the main points (or headers if you will) end up as:

  • Be relentless in your outreach
  • Have a great investors network
  • Never give up

Absolute dog sh*t of advice.

Incredibly generic. Pure commodity. The type of stuff AI will generate.

In fact, take my Copy-Paste test, and anyone could say this.

By the end of reading this you can’t help but feel scammed.

Example #2: A specific title and tangible main points.

Let’s say the title is the same: “How to raise your first €1M in Europe as a climate tech startup.”

But we recognise that the main points need to be specific, tangible, and objective.

So we write something like:

  • Create a list of 50 hyper-specific investors in your niche, i.e. alt protein
  • Identify 10 most likely events and conferences they go to and introduce yourself (and avoid large 1,000+ people events)
  • Make sure you’re connected to all 50 and their entire teams on LinkedIn
  • Produce one thought leadership LinkedIn post per week addressing the market concerns, showing your behind-the-scenes, and answering potential investor questions
  • Interview other founders who’ve raised €1M in the last 3-5 years

See how specific this is?

Now it feels like a roadmap. Extremely specific, tactical advice that delivers on the promise of the title.

So, naturally you must be wondering “Roman, then what hell does ‘contrarian’ mean?”

Fair enough.

What does contrarian actually mean?

Simply put, it’s a strong opinion.

Think of anything in your industry or life people accept as a norm.

  • For example, you might be an avid coffee drinker. A very common advice is to not drink any caffeine about 10-12h before bed or it disrupts your sleep. But because you care little for what others think you go and drink it at 7pm if you want to. You go against the grain. You’re basically Finnish.
  • Or, in my case, I don’t believe carbon credits companies are part of the climate tech cluster. If anything, it’s mostly greenwashing. And there’s been a ton of research and examples of such companies failing to deliver on their promises while other, more impactful brands, struggle to fundraise. How tf is that okay?

Ideally, you’d back your contrarian opinion by some form of credibility.

If you’re a coffee lover, perhaps you’ve been drinking it at 7pm every day for years and still sleep fine.

If you’re someone like me, you’ve read dozens of research reports and examples of carbon credits companies fail over and over again.

Both are different forms of credibility.

And now that we’ve established what being contrarian DOES and DOES NOT mean, why do that at all? Can’t you just stay neutral and show how cool your work is?

Reason #1: The buyers and investors a strong opinion repels are the ones who would’ve cost you the most three years from now.

Imagine you picked something to rally the industry against.

Let’s say it’s polystyrene packaging and the microplastics pollution as a result of it.

Do you really want an investor or a customer who thinks plastics are actually kinda nice and you’re being hysterical? Those are the types of people who, if sign with you, only do so for profit. They’re incredibly difficult to work with.

And I’d rather have 5 easy to work with clients than 15 who test my nerves every day.

Same goes for your cap table. An investor without your domain expertise, who dislikes how you talk about the problem, is still sitting there in ten years. You're the pilot. When things go wrong, and they will, you don't want a copilot who disagrees with you on everything.

Reason #2: AI took over half of global venture money in 2025, and the one thing it cannot write for you is an opinion you earned.

Of the 20+ early-stage climate founders I spoke to in 2026, most agreed on the same thing: investors are distracted by AI.

They're right.

PitchBook's year-end Venture Monitor puts AI at more than half of global venture deal value in 2025. Climate tech still raised $40.5bn in 2025 by Sightline Climate's count, up 8% on 2024, but across 18% fewer deals, and seed rounds fell 20%. Fewer cheques, bigger cheques.

Take the title from earlier: "How to raise your first €1M in Europe as a climate tech startup."

It’s decent. It’s also a title anyone could write.

Look at the same topic with a contrarian opinion in it:

  • Don't raise your first €1M from VC. Bootstrap instead.
  • 3 reasons Europe is the wrong place to raise your first €1M as a European climate tech startup
  • I've talked to 200 VCs across Europe. None of them understand climate tech.

Each one picks a fight.

And each one only works if you've got the credibility to back it up: you bootstrapped and it worked, you raised outside Europe after Europe said no, you sat through 200 meetings and took notes.

That credibility is the thing an AI can't produce for you.

The machines learned by copying what people already wrote online, so it gives you back the aggregated average of that. There's a word for that, and Merriam-Webster made "slop" its word of the year in December 2025.

And the annoying part is that a bland take doesn't only lose to AI. It also loses to a story an oil company paid for in 2004.

Reason #3: "Carbon footprint" was written by BP's ad agency, so the default climate narrative is already someone else's opinion, and a soft take can’t compete with it.

In 2004, BP put a carbon footprint calculator online.

Type in your commute, your food, your flights, and out came a number that said the climate problem was yours. The campaign came from Ogilvy & Mather, BP's ad agency. Mashable's Mark Kaufman went back through it in 2020 and called it what it was: a way of moving the blame from an oil major onto the person filling the tank.

It worked.

The phrase outlived the campaign.

That type of campaign also had an insane budget. InfluenceMap tracked five oil majors in 2021 and found at least $750 million spent on climate messaging in a single year. Imagine how much of their supply chain they could’ve made more sustainable with that cash.

It cuts the other way too.

If you hear "AI surveillance", most people clench for obvious reasons.

Then look at FireSat. Its first satellite went up in March 2025 as a prototype, and by that summer it had spotted a small roadside fire in Oregon that other satellites missed. It monitors the forests, NOT the people.

Nobody’s really owning that perspective yet.

That AI surveillance can be a good thing. Perhaps the founder of FireSat gets to write it.

But that's the actual situation you're in. You're not just a startup with a product, you're a small part of a much bigger fight against a story someone else wrote and paid to keep telling.

A soft take doesn't sit out that fight. It repeats their story.

So how do you do this without turning into BuzzFeed?

How do you use a contrarian opinion without turning into BuzzFeed?

Before your next post goes out, run it through three questions:

  1. Which accepted norm am I pushing against?
  2. What have I done or seen that earns me this opinion?
  3. Does the body deliver what the title promises?

If you can answer all three in one line each, post it. If one comes up empty, it's either clickbait or a soft take.

Contrarian for reach is picking a fight because fights get clicks. Contrarian for good is refusing to repeat the same thing everyone else does.

And your readers are further along than you think. The European Commission's Eurobarometer from June 2025 found 85% of EU citizens consider climate change a serious problem. They've already agreed, and they feel powerless about it.

A strong opinion from someone building the solution gives them something to stand behind.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help:

1/ Climate Tech Post Vault → these are my 55 most reused LinkedIn post templates that generated 13,321 reactions, 2,187 comments, 999,365 impressions across all of my work.

2/ Book a free visibility audit → I research your digital footprint, show you where you’re invisible, and sketch a 2-year roadmap to fix it: LinkedIn foundation first, then niche media, then long-form, then the outline of a book.

3/ In-House Ghostwriting OS → An all-in-one system for solo marketers and small marketing teams in climate tech companies to create, launch, and grow a system for building their CEO’s personal brand.