TCC #46: A stroll down memory lane
Yep, it's a TCH wrapped
It’s 7:26 pm on a Friday. I’ve just finished the mad dash that is errands, making dinner, eating dinner, cleaning up, and toddler bedtime routines. Now I’m here in my tidy living room with my cutie pie Christmas tree and my chai-spiced rooibos with a dash of milk and honey. It’s snowing. No complaints.
Seeing as this will serve as the last TCC newsletter of 2024 (we’re taking next week off! you should too!), I thought it a good time for some reflection. A Climate Hub wrapped, if you will.
This is mostly for my own documentation purposes, but maybe something here will be interesting to someone — I know I love reading about others’ journeys.
Here we go!
For those who don’t know, Amelia and I have individually been writing in the climate tech niche for 4+ years — but The Climate Hub is still in its infancy. It’s easy for me to forget that because, as Amelia will attest, though we signed our first contracts in August it feels like we’ve been doing this for 30 years.
Let’s take it back to the beginning, shall we?
The Climate Hub (TCH) milestones :)
Amelia and I met through LinkedIn and hit it off in a virtual coffee date in the last month of 2022. (Now we share a bank account — crazy world, right?)
In August of 2023 we reconnected and started to talk about “starting some kind of joint publication/marketing/thing.” That’s how the State of Climate Tech Marketing 2024 report was born. (Published in January of this year.)
The report was a success! We loved working together and wanted to keep the ball rolling. Cue the first rendition of this newsletter: Climate Tech Marketer. (Launched in February of this year.)
Continued to love working together. Had a lot of “what’s next?” conversations. Decided to go officially official with The Climate Hub in July.
Our Q3 goal was to sign one client. We signed four in a matter of weeks and started our first official contracts in August. (Immediately after this happens, the power in my city goes out for an entire week (!!) and Amelia holds down the Climate Hub fort like a boss 🫶)
We also launched V1 of our website during those weeks. Woof. (And briefly became LinkedIn’s resident climate fairies 🧚, but like all startups, rebranded 9 days later.)
After a start that was better than we could have planned for, we plateaued — Q4 had a (very) quiet beginning.
But we did kick the quarter off with our first official offsite! Amelia came to Cleveland and we did a looooot of strategizing.
And of course, a brand photoshoot:
We walked away from our offsite with a ton of new plans. Sustainability reporting being one of them. (We’re both working toward our FSA level 1 credential currently 🤓📚)
Near the end of October, we paid for a consulting call with someone who gave us a ton of advice about growth and scaling. We walked away with a huge to-do list.
We were already in the process of redoing the website, but that call put some urgency into it. We soon launched V2 — which reflects our new target audience split: we’re still working with climate tech, but we’ve added corporate sustainability into the mix.
and isn’t it beautiful 🥲 Decided to undertake a beast of a project (that, naturally, we initially planned to be small) — we’re really excited to get it out into the world. Stay tuned in 2025!
Around this same time we rebranded Climate Tech Marketer to The Climate Communicator (TCC). We’re having a lot more fun with it now.
We’ve also revamped our decks, updated our tech stack, hired a research and writing assistant, and have added a designer to the team. Oh, and we signed a dream client!
Annnnnd… drumroll… as of this writing, we have finally ended our freelance contracts and will be making our full-time income from The Climate Hub as of the New Year (!!). (Did I mention that through all of this, we’d kept our freelance clients? I won’t speak for Amelia, but for me, that worked out to be a lot of night and weekend work.)
It’s been a year that’s felt like multiple. It’s been so much work — and it’s been so much fun. We’re looking into Q1 with a full client roster and after writing this all out I’m feeling very proud of us :)
No real insights for you today other than — building something of your own is worth the nights and weekends. I hope everyone has a restful break. We’ll be back with your regularly programmed climate and sustainability communications content in January.