If you’re a founder in the energy resilience space and you’re looking to win new customers, raise money, bring on partners, or hire, thought leadership can help get you there.
How? It helps you build trust with your audience by…
- Establishing your authority as a knowledgeable, thoughtful participant in your industry.
- Demonstrating your momentum as you share stories of problems you’ve solved.
- Showcasing your network by telling stories that involve other people.
But what does that look like in the greentech space? And how do you get up and running? Try this quick-start guide, built from our work with startups and scale-ups in the climate tech / greentech / cleantech / energy resilience industry.
1. Share your take on the news.
Climate change is a permanent crisis and will be for our lifetimes. Greentech is on the frontlines of easing that crisis and changing the course of human history such that our kids and grandkids have a different narrative. That means there's always something in the news to engage with – and always something for you to weigh in on (Figure 1).
Figure 1: What is thought leadership?
For best results, default to your personal brand rather than your company brand. Why?
For one, people prefer to engage with other people rather than businesses. For another: as an individual, you can just post stuff. You don’t have to hold it for approval. Approvals are a great way to kill a thought leadership practice because they slow everything down.
So where should you be sharing these thoughts? Wherever your audience is.
That might be…
- Social media.
- Newsletters (your own or popular ones in your industry).
- Podcasts (ditto above).
- Trade publications (here are some strategies for pitching them).
By regularly getting your thoughts out there, you’ll be able to connect with more people doing similar work, which can lead to valuable introductions down the road. Regular news commentary may also lead to media folks reaching out for your comment, which can then further increase your reach.
2. Engage with your peers.
The great (and terrible) thing about climate change is that we’re all in it together. That means every other greentech startup out there is your ally (and mine!). Get to know the work of other thought leaders in the space. Comment. Share. Celebrate. Add your two cents.
This increases your visibility and network while also making you part of the important conversations already happening.
Done consistently over time, this engagement gets your name and your brand in front of more people, which increases your surface area of luck. That is, it may not lead directly to media placements or customers or funding, but it increases the odds that you’ll be in a position to comment / sell / pitch / get an introduction.
3. Be human.
If you’re a greentech founder, you’re probably also embracing certain climate-friendly lifestyle choices outside of work. Do you cycle? Take public transit? Avoid meat? Compost? Garden? Plant native seeds? Avoid long-distance planes? Canvass for green candidates? Mend your clothes? Repair instead of replacing home appliances?
Whatever you’re doing as an individual that aligns with your company’s mission, document it. Share selfies or photos of your harvest. Add your commentary (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Like this. And hey, if you want a referral for a great residential or commercial compost company in the Chicago area, let me know!
It’s easy to talk yourself out of this as either virtue signaling or not related to your core message, but human stories sell. Over and over again, we see funding announcements of rounds that aren’t all that big – for startups with an interesting story.
So be your weird, wonderful, unique self. That’s part of what will make your business successful and it’s part of the story reporters and others will want to tell about you.
4. Have a long-term strategy and commit to it.
All of the above can help you become a thought leader, which can help you get on the radar of people who can help you grow your business and achieve your mission.
Done wrong, though, it might also hurt.
That’s where a long-term strategy comes into play. Before you start posting and commenting and sharing, have a conversation with your trusted advisors about where and how it would be most beneficial for you to show up as a thought leader. Sketch some general guidelines for your engagement: whether you’ll comment directly on policy decisions, for example, or keep your comments tied to the technology you’re developing.
Brand guidelines can be helpful here, too: a few guiding values (“sustainable energy choices for all” or “transparency in supply chains” or “prefer US-made components,” for example) can help you decide when and where to weigh in and what and how to do so.
5. Focus on your experience
I was doing a session on thought leadership this week with the current cohort of Resurgence, a green energy tech accelerator out of the University of Chicago’s Polsky School of Business, and a great question came up:
What if I’m not experienced enough to be a thought leader yet?
I get it: there's always more to learn. Maybe you don’t feel comfortable positioning yourself as a success until you’ve reached some arbitrary milestone.
But here’s the reality: there will always be another milestone ahead of you. If you wait until you’ve “really” arrived, you’ll never get there.
What's more, investing in thought leadership now can help you reach your milestones faster.
When in doubt, focus your thought leadership on your experience. A few prompts that make for great LinkedIn posts:
- What's the most common question you answer about your startup?
- What's the most interesting / boring problem you solved this week?
- What do media reports often get wrong about your industry / technology?
- What questions did you get in your last investor conversation?
- What last lit up your audience’s eyes?
- Write about a recent challenge you overcame. Aim for something small, concrete, illustrative of the kinds of problem your startup solves, and illustrative of the kinds of things you’re good at.
I did this a few weeks ago (using prompt #2 – most boring problem) and ended up hitting a nerve. Since then, I’ve seen much higher engagement on my posts, which tend to do the things on this list.
To be clear: this hasn’t translated to dollars for Propllr, but it sure does boost our credibility when we make content marketing recommendations to clients.
Figure 3: I guess a lot of people care about “to be” verbs
6. Think puzzle pieces, not masterpieces.
Maybe the scariest thing about thought leadership is that you’ll never get your full, perfectly nuanced perspective into a single piece. And because most thought leadership will happen on the internet, someone will wiggle into your mentions with a bad-faith read on what you said and try to stir up you know what (ask me how I know).
That doesn’t feel good. In fact, it might feel so unpleasant that you want to delete everything you’ve ever published and call off the mission.
But if you’re trying to raise your own profile or your company’s to secure funding, attract top-notch employees, or bring more customers into your orbit, it’s worth being out there.
Try this reframe: if you’re drawing trolls, that means you’re getting out there. You’re doing it! It also means you’re saying something that’s interesting enough to argue with. Another win.
If the criticism is worth engaging with, do it – you’ll end up sharpening your perspective and framing in the process. If it’s not, just ignore it. Trolls, as they say, are going to troll.
7. Aim for dialog, not combat.
I asked Gabriel Vanloozen, a greentech VC at Powerhouse Ventures, about what VCs look for from thought leadership. He said that, while it’s rare for a VC to discover a startup via their thought leadership, strong thought leadership can help during the diligence process.
He noted that pieces make a positive impression when they’re…
- Succinct (readable in five minutes or less).
- Professionally written.
- Backed by data.
- Not designed to stir up engagement on LinkedIn.
- Highlights your value proposition.
In other words: aim to meaningfully engage with your community, and the downside risks are low.
8. Update your settings for maximum impact
Now it’s time to learn from my mistakes.
Before you start your thought leadership journey, make sure you’re easy to find and get in touch with. If you have a newsletter, make sure it’s easy to subscribe to. If you don’t have a newsletter but would like to collect emails for when you one day do, make sure it’s easy for people to give you their emails.
On LinkedIn, you’ll want to do three things:
- Create a custom URL.
- Add a tagline.
- Add a custom button.
The custom URL is what people see when they’re visiting your profile page. The default is your name plus a bunch of random characters. There's nothing wrong with this per se, but it looks ugly – and it’s easy to fix!
Go to Settings > Visibility > Edit your public profile > Edit your custom URL (Figure 4). If your name is already taken, consider something like first-last-title-company: brenna-lemieux-founder-company.
Figure 4: Hit the blue pencil icon to create a custom URL for your LinkedIn profile
The tagline is the snippet of text that appears between your name and your location (Figure 5). I figure you have about 11 words here. Longer than that, and it will get cut off.
You can use this space to state your title (founder of your startup, e.g.) or to communicate something about what you do or how you do it. E.g., “Solving x problem for y group.”
Figure 5: Tagline on LinkedIn
Finally, add a custom button or link to your website. Click into your profile and choose “add a custom button.” From there, you can choose from the following (Figure 6):
- Visit my store
- Visit my website
- View my portfolio
- View my blog
- Book an appointment
- View my newsletter
Figure 6: Add a custom button to drive more engagement
I like “Book an appointment” because it suggests a person would want to. Put that idea in people’s heads! Communicate that you are the kind of person people want to book appointments with!
Note that you’ll have to have a scheduling link of some kind (like Calendly) to input.
Take the Leap to Reap the Rewards of Thought Leadership
Look. I have lots of ideas and I HATE posting them in the world because as soon as they’re live I want to change something. But the more stuff you get into the world, you more you realize that you don’t have to cover everything in every piece you publish (see #6).
So get something out there. You can always edit it or pivot or delete it. If you post in good faith, you’ll grow your network and increase your authority. And that’s where things get really interesting.
