5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Reseed’s Mission-Driven Climate Tech Journey

In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Josh Knauer shared insights from scaling multiple successful companies, including his current venture Reseed. Here are the key go-to-market lessons tech founders can learn from his experience:

1. Find Underserved Markets Through Data Analysis When Josh launched Reseed, he identified a massive market inefficiency: “less than 1%, in fact, it’s 0.03% of carbon credits on the market today come from farming or agriculture in any form.” This insight revealed an opportunity to connect 600 million family farms with carbon credit markets, addressing both climate change and farmer poverty.
2. Build Community-Driven Standards Josh’s first company succeeded by letting customers define product standards before organic certification existed. “We had to build out a set of methodologies that would allow the community to actually define the values and standards that they cared about,” he explains. This same principle now guides Reseed’s approach to carbon credit verification, demonstrating how community input can create trusted marketplace standards.
3. Reject Convention in Fundraising Despite having partnerships with Google and sophisticated AI technology, Josh chose family offices over venture capital. “If you’re doing what everybody else is doing, you’re not doing it. And you have to find an innovative track or tact and set of tactics and strategy for how you’re going to go about raising money,” he advises. This unconventional approach helped maintain mission alignment while securing necessary capital.
4. Target Investors Who Share Your Values Josh approaches fundraising as a two-way interview process. “Anyone can write a check and the same anyones, if they don’t actually believe in your mission, they will end up screwing it up,” he notes. This selective approach has helped Reseed maintain its mission while scaling, proving that founders don’t need to compromise values for growth.
5. Focus on Real Problems Over Technological Complexity While many climate tech companies chase complex solutions, Josh emphasizes practical approaches: “We have literally billions of hands in farmers that can be put to use to solve this problem. They want to do it as extra income, wildly incentivized to actively participate in this market.” This focus on existing communities and practical solutions has helped Reseed scale more effectively than companies pursuing more complex technical approaches.
6. Build Multiple Revenue Streams from Core Data Reseed demonstrates how companies can create various revenue streams from their core data assets. Beyond carbon credits, they’re exploring “supply chain information, think the EU has a deforestation regulation that’s taking the world by storms, so to speak. And so we’re able to certify against that.” This approach creates multiple paths to market from the same fundamental technology.

The future of climate tech may not lie in complicated mechanical solutions but in connecting existing communities with new markets. As Josh puts it, “you’re investing in the thing that’s going to save your life. And that’s a pretty strong argument.” His journey shows how mission-driven companies can scale successfully by staying true to their values while solving real-world problems.