Roughly 30% of climate tech prospects tell me the same thing: “We want to try ghostwriting in-house before outsourcing.”

I get it.

Hiring a ghostwriter feels expensive. Your exec needs LinkedIn presence but has zero time to write. So marketing gets told: “figure it out.”

The problem? Most marketing teams at Series A climate startups aren’t trained for this.

The reality is competing internal priorities

A past client of mine tried going in-house after we worked together for several months.

They had a smart marketing team. Talented people. Great at their jobs.

But in the 11 months since? They’ve published maybe 10 posts total.

When I followed up, the founder admitted they’re struggling. The posts aren’t getting done. The exec has no presence. And the momentum we built? Gone.

This isn’t an isolated case.

Why in-house ghostwriting fails for most teams

Marketing teams can write blog posts. Press releases. Website copy.

But exec LinkedIn is a completely different skill.

You need to sound like the founder, not like marketing. You need to extract ideas without making it homework for the CEO. And you need to write posts that drive business outcomes, not just likes.

And even if your team has the skill, they don’t have the resources.

Marketing teams at Series A climate companies are usually 1-3 people. They’re resource-strapped, juggling ten priorities, and ghostwriting is hard to defend to leadership because the ROI isn’t immediate.

So it gets deprioritized. It sits in internal bureaucracy for months. Nothing gets done.

The irony is that it’s actually cheaper to outsource

The most common objections I hear are cost and lack of CEO time.

But it’s actually cheaper to outsource than to do it in-house.

And as for CEO time? I deal with the same constraint every single day with my clients. Busy founders are the norm, not the exception.

The difference is I’ve spent 3 years and worked with 15 different founders and investors learning how to extract their stories without adding to their workload.

That’s not something a marketing team can figure out overnight while managing everything else.