Cambium Carbon’s Framework for Tackling Unsexy Markets: Lessons for B2B Founders

While most climate tech founders chase carbon trading platforms and data solutions, Ben Christensen found a billion-dollar opportunity in one of the least glamorous places possible: urban wood waste. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, he shared how Cambium Carbon identified and validated this overlooked market.

Looking Beyond the Obvious

Ben’s journey started with a crucial observation about climate tech: “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.”

This insight led him to question his assumptions about where value could be created in climate solutions. Instead of building another platform, he looked for physical problems that weren’t being addressed.

Finding Hidden Value in Plain Sight

The numbers were staggering: “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… We pay over a billion dollars a year as a country to get rid of.” Even more remarkably, this waste represented potentially “$50 billion in value if we captured all that material.”

Validating the Opportunity

Instead of just focusing on the environmental impact, Ben’s team identified three key value propositions:

1. Cost savings for cities currently paying to dispose of wood
2. Revenue opportunities for local processors
3. Sustainable sourcing for large material buyers

“We make it really easy for large national material buyers, think people in the built environment or large product companies to source materials locally and to use waste to value materials,” Ben explains.

Building Trust Through Transparency

Rather than relying solely on sustainability credentials, they focused on solving fundamental supply chain problems. “One of the biggest challenges within sustainability always is clarity and transparency,” Ben notes. Their solution? Technology that tracks “with total transparency, each step of the process, down to every single board.”

The Power of Story and Uniqueness

While most markets optimize for standardization, Ben saw an opportunity in uniqueness: “We just live in this world where so many things are optimized to be the same… We really believe in sort of rethinking that and rethinking the uniqueness of products, the stories behind products.”

This approach helps transform what might be seen as a liability (non-standardized materials) into an asset (unique products with compelling stories).

Framework for Evaluating Unsexy Markets

Ben’s approach offers several key lessons for founders evaluating overlooked opportunities:

1. Look for gaps between enabling solutions and actual solutions
2. Question industry assumptions about waste and value
3. Find ways to turn industry “problems” into unique selling points
4. Focus on solving fundamental business problems, not just sustainability challenges

The Vision Beyond the Market

For Ben, success isn’t just about capturing market share: “Our vision is to make it easy for any large company that uses materials to be able to source them in a way that is carbon smart.” This bigger vision helps attract both customers and talent who want to be part of a larger transformation.

For B2B founders, Cambium Carbon’s journey shows that some of the biggest opportunities lie in markets others have dismissed as too difficult or unsexy. The key is looking beyond surface-level problems to find fundamental inefficiencies that can be transformed into value.

As Ben puts it, “You don’t solve impossible problems without believing in them. And I think as soon as you stop thinking about, okay, what would need to be true in order for us to solve a problem, you stop solving it.”