4. One Story, Many Audiences: Strategic Stakeholder Communication / A Case Study of Klim with Nina Mannheimer

Scaling Nerds | Communications, PR and Storytelling for Startup Founders (prev. Red To Green)

If your startup needs to speak to very different audiences — investors, corporates, consumers — this episode lays out why that skill matters more than most founders think.

How you explain your work changes depending on who’s in front of you, and that can decide whether people actually understand what you do. If you’re selling cookies, fine. If you’re building a complex solution to a complex problem, communication becomes core to the product.

In this episode, you’ll hear from Nina Mannheim, previously the co-founder and CPO of Klim. Klim started back in 2019 in Berlin, when “regenerative agriculture” was still a barely known term. The team had to figure out how to make a complicated topic land with groups who had completely different levels of context and completely different interests. Not easy — but they still managed to raise a 22M Series A in 2024.

What Klim learned applies far beyond agriculture.

00:00 – Why stakeholder communication matters
00:42 – Klim’s origin and early challenges
02:23 – Business model and stakeholder map
03:41 – Why consumers still mattered
06:26 – Building credibility as a tiny startup
09:07 – Which stakeholder group was hardest
12:20 – Early communication mistakes with farmers
23:45 – Tailoring communication for investors

Links

Connect with Steve Molino:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninamannheimer/

Check out Klim

https://www.klim.eco/

Connect with the host:

⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/schmidt-marina/⁠⁠

[email protected]