For years, I’ve talked to founders hell-bent on one thing: doing the whole ‘visibility thing’ themselves.
Can’t blame them. Not everyone has the budget to hire expert help. And many, including myself, are quite stubborn and want to see if they can DIY everything (did I tell ya I vibe coded my own website as a result?).
But if you’re in climate tech, the reasons behind this stubbornness are of a special flavour.
Why do climate tech founders avoid the visibility game?
Because the industry’s mood makes outside advice hard to trust, and the stakes feel too high to get it wrong.
There’s doom and gloom in climate tech. A sh*t load of greenwashing. And so many walkbacks on Net Zero claims by governments, corporations, and their aunties that it’s easy to lose hope altogether.
In times like these you get hyper-focused on one goal: creating a product so insanely good that every investor, customer, and potential candidate wants to throw themselves onto you.
Think of the hype around working for Tesla before Musk went crazy. I personally would’ve killed to work with a CEO like Lisa Dyson of Air Protein.
THAT is what you’re dreaming of, right?
So you’ve been avoiding visibility because the stakes in your industry feel too high to get it wrong, and the product feels like the only thing that can’t embarrass you.
Well, you’re missing a bigger picture.
I wish the product were enough. Truly do.
But if you don’t own your narrative, someone else will own it for you.
75% of decision-makers say a piece of thought leadership led them to research a product they weren’t even considering, and 9 in 10 say consistent, high-quality thought leadership makes them more receptive to outreach (Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 2024 edition).
Two weeks ago, I brought up Nikola. A prime example of someone much more charismatic and much less competent sucking up everyone’s money, views, and years of attention.
But in 2026, the way people find out about you is way waaaay different. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about your space, LinkedIn is the second most-cited domain in the answer, ahead of Wikipedia and every major news publisher (Semrush, 325,000-prompt study, March 2026).
At the very basic minimum, you need ONE active social platform and ONE email list to start pulling people in.
Last week, a founder showed me exactly what “trying” looks like.
I had the most fascinating conversation with a climate tech founder. Let’s call him Mark.
Mark spent his career selling energy infrastructure across three continents. $10bn+ in deals, always with a large multinational brand behind him. When he sold on their behalf, the brand name carried the momentum in his sales conversations.
Then he went out on his own. No logo behind him this time.
The last time Mark had to build visibility from scratch, it took him 18 months to crack. He can’t afford another 18 months now. And visibility is literally my day job: that number is not his fault. That’s what DIY costs.
So Mark tried. Articles, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos. Cringing through most of it (filming, in his words, was a massive pain), convinced he was doing a terrible job.
How do you know if your content is actually working?
Mark was sitting on three goldmine opportunities and couldn’t see a single one.
First, he wrote a niche breakdown of another company in his space. 10k+ impressions, two sales calls.
Second, he left one thoughtful comment under a VC’s post. That single comment pulled 1,000+ impressions and landed him a meeting with a founder in London.
And lastly, he wrote a long article breaking down his corner of the energy world. Conversations followed.
Look at that again. Three different formats, three different rooms, and every single one of them ended in a business conversation.
Luck doesn’t repeat itself that neatly. A pattern does.
You know what his problem was?
He thought he was doing a terrible job.
Three wins were staring at him, and all he saw was the cringe.
I told him to double down on all three. More comments under VCs’ content, more articles, more company breakdowns.
Mark is someone I like to call a “Hesitant But Active” founder. He tried, got pretty anxious, dismissed his own wins. But he got them!
What is the Investable Founder System?
The Investable Founder System is the expanded, deliberate version of what Mark did by accident: four phases, run in order. His version was scattered across months, with weeks-long gaps of silence. The system runs the same moves on purpose.
Phase 1: Build your foundation. Your personal LinkedIn or Substack. Start sharing your thinking and testing which ideas land.
Phase 2: Focus on recognition. The one everyone skips, the hardest, and the one that brings the most inbound in your first 12 months. Think low-stakes public speaking, like podcast interviews. Among senior executives who listen to podcasts monthly, 83% tuned in within the past week, and they over-index on business and tech shows (Signal Hill Insights, 2024).
Phase 3: Double down on expansion. Take the ideas you’ve already tested and know work, and expand them into long-form. LinkedIn articles, Substack, a company blog, YouTube.
Phase 4: Totally dominate your category by becoming a book author. Yep, you heard me right. It’s near impossible to ignore your pretty face entering the room when everyone in it knows you’re a published author. In a 2024 study of 350+ business-book authors, the payoff came through speaking and consulting far more than book sales, and 89% said writing the book was a good idea (Business Book ROI Study, 2024).
Why does the order matter?
Because each phase builds the audience the next one needs.
Skip straight to the book? Sure, but who’s gonna read it? You have no audience yet. Or jump straight to podcasts? Well, if someone LOVES your interview, they’ll want to check out your LinkedIn. Which would be embarrassing, because it’s empty and your photo is 5 years old, right?
Point is, the order of things matters.
And this is the hill I’m willing to die on.
So. What would happen if you tried?
Someone is going to own your narrative either way. It might as well be you.
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I write one of these every Thursday: a short strategic essay on going from invisible to investable as a climate tech founder. The next one lands a week before it shows up anywhere else. Read it first, free: Climate Visibility Lab on Substack.