Akhila Kosaraju

PS. This is what we help with. We help climate tech companies clarify their positioning and make it visible across every touchpoint. If yours feels fuzzy or inconsistent, DM me. Let's talk.

Positioning lives in your website, your decks, your one-pagers, your marketing collaterals, and your sales conversations. It needs to be consistent across all of them.

Which means positioning isn't a one time exercise.
It's maintenance.

The market is constantly updating who it references first.

If you're not actively reinforcing your position, someone else is filling that space.

The trap most companies fall into is positioning on technical superiority alone.

But that only works if your audience can actually evaluate technical superiority. Most can't.

They're pattern matching. They're comparing you to whoever else showed up that week.

3/ Position on stage and specificity
Early stage? Own that you're early, but show traction and vision.
Don't pretend to be bigger than you are.

Post-pilot? Lead with proof and specifics.
Scaling? Position as the safe choice with the track record to back it.

2/ Position against the status quo
You don't always need a direct competitor.
Sometimes the competition is "doing nothing" or "the way things have always been done".

Articulating why that's no longer acceptable can be more powerful than comparing yourself to another startup.

1/ Position on the problem, not the technology
Most climate tech companies lead with what they've built.
But buyers and investors don't care about the technology in isolation.

They care about the problem it solves and whether you understand that problem better than anyone else.

The person evaluating your company might have seen three pitches that morning that sound a lot like yours.

So how do you position well in a space like this?

A few approaches that work:

You're not positioned in isolation.

You're positioned against whoever else is showing up in the same conversations, the same RFPs, or even the same investor meetings.

And in climate tech, this gets complicated fast.

Categories are blurry.
The market is still forming.

Positioning is one of those words everyone in climate uses but few actually define.
Here's what it actually means:

Positioning is how your company sits in the market relative to everyone else.

It's the answer to "why you and not them?"

The key word is relative.

18. The ClimateTech Podcast by UNEP
Host: UNEP Copenhagen Climate Centre

These voices shape how climate solutions get funded, built and adopted.

Some are dropping episodes weekly, others are archives worth mining.

But their work is accelerating the transition we need.

PS: What would you add?

13. Climate Tech Cocktails
Host: Matthew Myers

14. Supercool
Host: Josh Dorfman

15. Shades of Life (yes, I hopped on the mic)
Host: Ingrid Lung (@PlanetVIPs on YouTube)

16. Reversing Climate Change
Host: Ross Kenyon

17. CleanTechnica Cleantech Talk
Hosts: Zachary Shahan

8. Less Talk, More Action (caught my episode?)
Hosts: Joel Cesare & Owen Barrett

9. Green New Perspective
Host: Dunya Jovanović

10. Climate Rising
Host: Mike Toffel

11. The Keep Cool Podcast
Host: Nick van Osdol

12. Watt It Takes
Host: Emily Kirsch

3. Inevitable
Host: Cody Simms

4. CleanTechies Podcast
Hosts: Somil Aggarwal & Silas Mähner 🌎🔍

5. Invested in Climate
Host: Jason Rissman

6. Volts
Host: david roberts

7. Hardware to Save a Planet
Host: Dylan Garrett

If you want to stay ahead in climate tech in 2026
Save these 18 climate podcasts:

Thread🧵

1. Climate CEOs
Host: Chris Wedding ⚡

2. Catalyst
Host: Shayle Kann

PS. If you want a thought partner on this exercise, or help turning the insights into messaging, visuals, and a website that actually converts, let's talk.

Most marketers skip this because they think they already know.

They don't.

Your customer's journey is full of details your assumptions will never catch.

When you do this, something shifts:

You stop guessing what matters to them.
You start using their language, not yours.
You see friction points you didn't know existed.

Then map exactly what you heard.

Their journey. End to end.

From the moment they realized they had a problem to the point where they'd call it solved.

Now look at that map and find exactly where your solution fits in.

→ What does success actually look like for your team?
→ What does your day look like when this problem is at its worst?
→ What pressure are you under that your vendors don't see?
→ What would change for you personally if this was solved?

→ What moment made you realize you needed to solve this?
→ What have you tried before that didn't work?
→ Who else needs to sign off before a decision gets made?
→ Where in the process do things slow down or stall?

Get on a call with a prospect (yes, you might need to incentivize them, but it’s worth it) and ask them to walk you through how they're solving the problem today.

If you're a marketer in the climate tech space, positioning is one of the hardest things to get right.

Here's one ridiculously simple exercise to make it 10x easier:

Maybe the real problem isn't which camp is right.

Maybe it's that we've been having an argument that was designed for us 20 years ago... and we're still stuck in it.

What do you think?

Maybe it was getting us to argue with each other instead of organizing together.

I don't have the answer here.

But I'm pretty sure neither camp does either.

And I've watched Camp 1 burn out from the weight of believing their individual choices could somehow offset an entire industrial system designed against them.

Both camps are stuck.

Maybe that's the point.

Maybe the oil company's real victory wasn't convincing us to track our footprints.

So Camp 2 has a point. Maybe a devastating one.

But I've also watched Camp 2 use "systemic change" as permission to do absolutely nothing personally.

To sneer at anyone who brings a reusable bag.

To wait for governments and corporations to fix everything while they... watch.

It was part of a $100 million campaign to rebrand as climate-friendly while changing almost nothing about the business.

It worked.
Spectacularly.

While a handful of companies were responsible for the majority of global emissions, we were all busy feeling guilty about our Tuesday lunch.

And I keep watching these two groups talk past each other.

Here's what's been nagging at me...

The whole concept of your "personal carbon footprint" was popularized by an oil company in 2004.

"Just recycle more."
"Just eat less meat."
"Just offset your flights."
"Just make better choices."

Camp 2 fires back:

"Individual action is a distraction."
"We need better energy systems."
"We need better urban design."
"We need better capital allocation."
"We need better policy."