Climate Tech Product Show Ep5: Focus on your customer and don't mention the tech - with Mitchell Board

Mitchell Board has been working in Climate Tech - previously Green Tech or Clean Tech - for longer than most. He recently ditched his corporate job to start Katalyst Earth - a regenerative finance company aiming to create "a single click regeneration marketplace" to help consumers and brands access natural capital markets by making these as self-serve as possible.

Mitch shared his experience on:

Conveying what they do and refining their value proposition

How they've dealt with high tech under the hood

How they've identified problems worth solving

How they've iterated their product and plan to grow from early adopters

Here are Mitch's tips and lessons learned:

On conveying what they do and refining their value proposition:

The elevator pitch evolves every day. It's been a continuous learning process that's taught them how to explain it to their different stakeholders (customers, investors, partners, etc)

• Evolve your story through conversations with customers and investors (ie how you say it)
• Continue to evolve it by incorporating feedback and understanding of the problems that you solve (ie what you say)
• Refine it further through repetition at pitch nights and by taking advantage of every opportunity you have to test it. "Put yourself in the situation where you have to explain it"
• Share it with contacts you know and create individualised pitch decks. HUSTLE!

Through this process, they've learned what works, how the message lands and how (and if!) their product solves a customer problem.

Dealing with high tech under the hood:

Initially, Katalyst Earth thought that the technology was quite important, but through conversations with customers, they've realised it's not. "We made a big mistake of focussing on the tech and how great it could be at solving the problems"

Whether it's blockchain or biotech, I've seen this happen a few times with Climate Tech: there is a great deal of pride in the technical achievement behind the product, so the value proposition tends to highlight the product and its features - not the benefits or the customer problems it solves. This makes it less attractive to customers who don't understand or care about the tech behind the scenes.

"It's been a distraction". Here are a few pointers from Mitch

• Bury any reference to the high-tech solution (eg blockchain) behind the scenes. Maybe your investor cares, but your customer doesn't. 
• To avoid getting drawn into conversations about the tech - which may be irrelevant to the customer problem you are solving - keep everything that relates to the tech under the hood.
• Position yourself first and foremost as a climate tech. The backend, high-tech solution should not be what makes you stand out.

On identifying problems worth solving:

My conversation with Mitch was a good reminder that you don't need to look very far to develop a compelling value proposition for your customers. Mitch has built a business around some classic business opportunities:

The basics:

• Improving an existing, manual and clunky process through the use of technology, thus, reducing it's cost.
• Improving the experience for all stakeholders completing this process

The special sauce:

• Creating new ways for consumers and brands to engage with their positive impact
• Opening up and enabling access to previously underserved customer segments

It's easy to get caught up in the hype, the jargon and the technical prowess of the solution behind the scenes, but at the end of the day, you need to solve real customer problems.

How they've iterated their product and plan to grow from early adopters:

You don't need to solve every customer problem on day one. Give yourself permission to address pain points across the customer journey in stages and then stitch these together into a cohesive experience.

To avoid getting wedded to a solution, don't rush to build something. Start with "smoke and mirrors", prototyping, and building the least amount of tech that delivers the most value to your customers. Then test it, learn and refine it.

Many Climate Tech innovations are still on the fringes of the mass market, so targetting an early adopter is the only option you have. Fortunately, they require less education to understand your value proposition.

Furthermore, focussing on improving customer experience can create loyalty, repeat customers and positive NPS; which in turn can lead to these products bleeding out of the early adopters and into mainstream markets through word of mouth.

Focus on your customer: on solving all of their problems, then earning their trust and hopefully spreading the word for you.