5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a Climate Tech Marketplace

5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a Climate Tech Marketplace

Most founders chase trending solutions. Few have the patience to tackle overlooked problems that could reshape entire industries. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ben Christensen of Cambium Carbon shared how he built a marketplace transforming urban wood waste into a billion-dollar opportunity. Here are the key go-to-market lessons from his journey.

1. Look for Overlooked Problems with Massive Impact

While many climate tech startups focus on carbon trading or data platforms, Ben identified a tangible problem hiding in plain sight. “It’s 46 million tons a year in the US. There’s more wood that comes down in our cities every year that’s salvageable than our national forests,” he explains. “It’s a crazy volume of wood that we pay over a billion dollars a year as a country to get rid of.”

The lesson? Don’t just chase trending solutions. Look for overlooked problems where you can create real value. As Ben notes, “There’s a lot of effort into enabling solutions and a gap in actual solutions… there’s a lot of new platforms that are trying to create the market conditions… But there was a real gap in actual solutions that were going to actively be dealing with atoms and not just bits.”

2. Early Rejection Doesn’t Equal Market Rejection

Despite having funding and what seemed like a low-risk opportunity, Ben’s initial pitch to ten close friends ended with everyone walking away. Instead of giving up, he kept pushing until finding the right early supporter: “I then called my best friend from growing up who was just getting back from a fellowship and said, hey, I got this thing. What do you think about coming to work on it? And he was like, yes, sure. Didn’t hesitate.”

3. Build Trust Through Supply Chain Transparency

Rather than competing solely on sustainability credentials, Ben’s team focused on solving fundamental supply chain visibility problems. “One of the biggest challenges within sustainability always is clarity and transparency,” he explains. For large customers like Room and Board, they provide “total transparency, each step of the process, down to every single board that moves through their manufacturing.”

4. Practice Radical Prioritization

Ben’s team operates by a simple but powerful mantra: “Don’t do good things, because we should only be doing great things.” This comes from learning to triage effectively: “We have a tendency as founders… to want to build everything, and there’s great strength in that. I think there’s greater strength in building in a stepwise manner where you’re able to take something that will get you to the next level and see it all the way through.”

5. Build Emotional Resilience Into Your Operating System

Ben observed a common pattern where founders “raise a lot of money, get caught a bit in the hype train, and just get soft and soften their emotional resilience, soften their ability to give to other people, soften their focus, soften their drive, soften their commitment.”

His solution? Ultra running. “You learn about what you are really capable of. You also learn perspective,” he explains. “A lot of it is about creating execution and focus and discipline in the six months leading up to race day… You have to use your time more effectively within your company because you have to get your training in.”

Creating Long-Term Value Through Differentiation

Ben’s ultimate vision extends beyond efficiency gains. “We just live in this world where so many things are optimized to be the same,” he reflects. “We really believe in sort of rethinking that and rethinking the uniqueness of products, the stories behind products.”

For B2B founders building complex marketplaces, these lessons highlight the importance of finding genuine differentiation. Success comes not from chasing trends, but from identifying overlooked problems, maintaining unwavering focus, and building systems that support long-term resilience.

The journey from rejection to building a marketplace that’s reshaping how materials are sourced shows that the biggest opportunities often lie in problems others have dismissed as too difficult or unsexy to solve.