Roman Pikalenko 🇺🇦🦩

Turning Impact Leaders into Authority Figures Through Powerful Stories | Ghostwriting LinkedIn & Educational Email Courses ✍️📚

Climate tech founders are building world-changing solutions.

But most of them are invisible online.

Meanwhile, fossil fuel lobbyists have near-infinite marketing budgets. Greenwashers dominate the conversation. Climate deniers spread misinformation to millions.

The people actually solving the problem? They're too busy building to talk about it.

That's where I come in.

As a climate tech ghostwriter, I build LinkedIn thought leadership for Series A+ climate tech CEOs and founders — helping them take control of the narrative and build visibility that compounds.

Here's how it works:

→ 6-12 month projects built on weekly or bi-weekly interviews
→ I extract your expertise and turn it into content that sounds like you
→ Full strategy, content planning, and profile optimization included
→ Continuous improvement baked in (that's what Kaizen means)

I'm not an agency with 47 writers and a sales team. I'm a solo operator with a limited client roster, which means you work directly with me — every interview, every post, every edit.
Results my clients have seen:

→ Inbound leads and investor connection requests
→ Podcast invitations and speaking opportunities
→ Top talent reaching out directly
→ Measurable traffic to demos, books, and qualification surveys

I've worked with 20+ climate leaders across 4 continents, including 3 LinkedIn Top Voices and a Forbes 30 Under 30 founder. Collectively, my clients have raised $200M+.

I've ghostwritten 1,000+ posts and have been running Kaizen for almost 3 years.

If you're looking to take control of your narrative and start building your visibility, DM me "climate" and I'm happy to talk more.

Growth Marketer

~ Running company social media marketing operations
~ Running paid ad campaigns on social and Google Ads
~ Inbound and content marketing

I posted about wanting to go back to study 4 weeks ago.

37 comments. DMs I wasn't expecting.

People sharing their own "I went back to school mid-career" stories.

Here's where things are at:

→ I started with Aalto's Open Uni
→ My first course is on M.E.T.A.LS. (or Metallurgical Engineering and Technical Analysis of Lifecycle and Sustainability)
→ One hour a day after work, before bed + weekends

It's humbling.

I haven't done anything close to formal studying in 9+ years.

And the 18-year-olds in the same course are probably better at it than I am.

But I'm also more motivated than I've ever been.

Back in high school, I'd scoff at nerds doing physics.

(not that I was a cool kid or anything)

Now, I want to actually understand the science behind what I write about every day.

And then maybe apply it to something else 👀

—

A small update for the people who asked.

The experiment continues.

PS. If you've done full-time work + full-time studying — drop your best tip below. Seriously.

Roman Pikalenko 🇺🇦🍉

I turn $10M+ Series A climate tech founders & execs into LinkedIn thought leaders to attract capital & talent | Helped 3x LinkedIn Top Voices & 10+ climate tech founders | Obsessed with solar right now ☀️

The fastest way to build authority in a new climate niche:

Stop talking about yourself.

Almost a year ago, I started highlighting a climate tech founder every Monday.

Not the famous ones. Not the people raising $200M or working with Bill Gates. Lesser-known founders doing exceptional work that most people hadn't heard of yet.

I called it Climate Founder Mondays.

At first, I just thought these founders deserved more attention. And I wanted to be more embedded in the world I was writing for.

38 founders later:

The quality of who's engaging with my content changed. Climate tech founders, VCs, senior execs started showing up in my comments and DMs. New conversations started. Clients came from spaces I hadn't even been targeting.

Here's why it worked — and why a content series might be the most underrated move on LinkedIn:

1/ It builds credibility without you having to claim it.

When you consistently highlight what's worth paying attention to in your ecosystem, your audience starts to see you as someone with their finger on the pulse.

I had almost no track record in climate tech when I started. A year of Monday posts helped change that.

2/ Every post reaches an audience you'd never get to otherwise.

Before each post, I connect with the founder I'm featuring. After it goes live, I send one message:

"Hey, wrote a post about your work. Hope you like it."

About 2 out of 3 posts get reshared by someone from that founder's community — people who had never heard of me before.

One post about Liz Dennett, CEO of Endolith, brought roughly 20-30 chemical engineers and sustainable mining specialists into my orbit in a single week.

3/ It makes consistency effortless.

A content series kills the blank page problem at least once a week. The format is already decided.

You pick the who or the what and follow the structure. After a few weeks, it becomes a habit.

The research becomes interesting. The writing becomes almost secondary.

—

This approach is built on 'borrowed credibility' concept.

3 things to avoid if you try this approach:

First, make sure you still show your own credibility in other posts. Your journey, behind-the-scenes, other proof of progress. Takes both to become the category leader.

Second, don't share the same viral videos everyone else is sharing on LinkedIn. I can't tell you how many people have posted about Notpla, for example, 2-3 times in the last 3 months.

Third, keep it within your niche. If you're a solar founder, maybe don't highlight vertical farming. Tempting, I know.

—

If you were to start a content series like this, what would it be?

Would love to know.

Roman Pikalenko

I named my business Kaizen.

Most people assume it's a clever brand name.

It's actually more of a personal commitment.

Kaizen (改善) is a Japanese concept: continuous, incremental improvement — as a way of life, but also a strategy.

I started using it as a business principle in 2023.

3 years in, it's still the most useful framework I've found.

In practice, it means:

→ Every client's content gets measurably better over 12 months. I'm constantly refining.

→ My internal processes become more efficient. I've recently been working only 5 days a week, yet I have more clients than ever.

→ I'm always upskilling and building. Could be sales practice, a new vertical, or adding email to my strategy.

The problem with LinkedIn is that most people are chasing the spike.

The viral post. The big announcement.

But true visibility doesn't work that way.

It builds quietly. Over months.

Till one day you look up and realize you're the person people think of first.

—

Does your brand name hold a deeper meaning you haven't shared?

Last Friday, I spoke at Climate Drift's Thought Leadership for Humans program.

The Q&A after was fire. Here are 6 questions I got from people in climate (and my honest answers):

Q1: Will AI replace ghostwriters?

Think of AI like Photoshop was for graphic designers. It's a tool, not a replacement. My job isn't writing posts — it's building your presence, course-correcting when things go sideways, and extracting stories you didn't know you had. AI can't do that. If anything, AI raised my client cap from 5 to 7.

Q2: LinkedIn reach is dropping. Should I even bother?

The reach is declining because LinkedIn is going the Facebook route — incentivizing people to pay for distribution that used to be free. But you don't need 50,000 impressions per post. You need the right 50 people to see your post and start a conversation. Focus on profile views, # of conversations started, or revenue as the right metrics.

Q3: Should I start with LinkedIn or an email newsletter?

LinkedIn is your distribution channel. Email is your middle channel. If you start a newsletter without an audience, you'll need to drive traffic from somewhere anyway. Start on LinkedIn. Build the list from there. Then email becomes your insurance policy when the algorithm gets worse.

Q4: I have multiple goals — speaking, advising, growing my business. How do I choose?

You can't pursue them all at once. Something always has to give. For example, if you want to speak and advise? Podcasts are a stepping stone — you build credibility for advising while getting reps as a speaker, without traveling.

Q5: Should I expand to Twitter or Bluesky?

Only if you've maxed out your current platform. Take your 20-50 best-performing posts from LinkedIn and use them as your starter library on the new platform. If you don't have that library yet, you haven't finished building your foundation.

Q6: How do I build an audience in a niche I'm new to?

Borrowed credibility. Highlight people already in the space. I do this every Monday — I pick a lesser-known climate tech founder and tell their story. Tag them. Connect beforehand. 2 out of 3 times, their network engages and a chunk of them follow you. You're borrowing their audience by giving them recognition.

—

These questions came from a variety of people:

Small business owners
Heads of startup incubator programs
Jobseekers
Climate scientists

If you're in climate and want to start building your LinkedIn presence but don't know where to begin, follow me. I share stuff like this regularly.

What question would you add to this list?

PS. Huge thanks to Katie Gilbert and Marco Morawec, for inviting me as a speaker once again 🙏

They've been best friends since 9th grade.

One left her corporate career at P&G. The other dropped out of medical school.

Today, they're backed by Y Combinator and building the world's first polyester alternative made from food waste.

Meet Myra Arshad and Avneet Ghotra, co-founders of ALT TEX.

Myra grew up watching her mother run a cut-and-sew business she'd built from scratch after immigrating from Pakistan.

That put Myra inside the fashion industry's dirty secret:

60% of all clothing contains polyester.

A petroleum-derived material responsible for 35% of all ocean microplastics that never biodegrades.

Meanwhile, her best friend Avneet was at U of T studying environmental science and biochemistry.

She cared deeply about the problem.

She just didn't know yet that Myra had the missing piece.

In 2019, Myra called Avneet with a plan.

"Come to my kitchen. Let's figure this out."

Avneet left medical school. Myra left P&G.

They started experimenting with discarded apples, banana peels, rotten tomatoes — whatever post-industrial food waste they could get their hands on.

Their breakthrough?

A patent-pending fermentation process that converts food waste into biodegradable biofibre that works with existing polyester supply chains.

No factory overhaul required.

Each shirt made from ALT TEX fabric:

→ Diverts 1 kg of food waste from landfill 
→ Avoids 9 kg of carbon emissions 
→ Prevents 4 g of microplastics from entering the ocean 
→ Is 70% stronger than cotton

But turning a kitchen experiment into a commercial fabric isn't exactly easy.

They had to convince university professors to validate their findings, secure government grants, and navigate deep-tech materials science.

The persistence paid off.

Today, ALT TEX has:

→ Been backed by Y Combinator
→ Raised $2.3M USD in funding 
→ Secured $1M in pilot LOIs 
→ Won U of T's Adams Sustainability Prize 
→ Won H&M Foundation's Global Change Award (€200,000) 
→ Grown to a team of 10 in Toronto

Myra on the scale of the opportunity:

"We're not trying to make a niche Canadian company — this can be a $4 or $5 billion company within the next 10 years."

And if replacing polyester sounds ambitious — remember it's a $104B industry.

And it all started in a kitchen.

—

Would you swap your polyester for fabric made from food waste?

—

I plan to share more stories of exceptional climate leaders like Myra and Avneet every Monday for #ClimateFounderMondays

Follow me by clicking the bell icon on my profile to be the first notified about it next week 🔔

A founder told me last week:

"I've been thinking about LinkedIn for 2 years. Just haven't started."

I asked what was holding her back.

"I don't know what to say."

It's always interesting to me. In her case, she'd spent 8 years building something the world can't afford to ignore.

100s of customer calls. Investor decks. Team offsites.

She had opinions, stories, and proof — everywhere.

Her problem wasn't the lack of copywriting knowledge.

She had an idea capture problem.

Struggling to extract what's already there.

That's my whole job as a climate tech ghostwriter btw:

→ A 30-60-minute call every week
→ A few good questions
→ And 3+ years of experience on how to turn founder-speak into something people actually stop to read

Trust me when I say this:

The ideas are never the problem.

—

What's your relationship with LinkedIn right now?

This wasn’t on my 2026 bucket list, but...

…I just took my first step towards my STEM degree!

I’m now officially a student at Aalto Open University. And I decided to start with a course that would’ve given me a headache 5 years ago:

Metallurgical Engineering and Technical Analysis of Lifecycle and Sustainability.

Or M.E.T.A.L.S. for short.

(gotta love the creative name)

I picked it for a few reasons:

- It’s 100% self-faced and online
- It’s 5 CTS (I need 45 to qualify for a bachelors)
- I have time till end of June to submit the assignments
- And metals are kinda cool (idk where this is coming from)

I’ve put aside about 5h/week as a start for this.

Will keep you updated on how it goes!

PS. Should I start a BTS series covering everything I learn?

A climate investor once told me something I haven't stopped thinking about.

She sees 300+ inbound decks a year.

Before any meeting, she does one thing: she Googles the founder.

Not the company. The founder.

She's not looking for awards or press features.

They're important, but they don't tell her much about the person.

She's looking for proof that this person understands the problem they're solving — and can articulate why NOW is the moment.

That's it.

A few questions she goes through:

→ Do they have a point of view?
→ Can they explain their sector without buzzwords?
→ Do they engage with what's happening in the space — or just announce their own milestones?

Most founders who are fundraising right now undermine their strategy.

They build a content strategy around their company.

But investors want to meet the founder, not the brand.

After all, they're investing millions in the leadership and the team.

—

What does your LinkedIn say about you right now?

One thing Chris Do and I have in common?

We've both been guests on Sergey Leshchenko's Be Yourself podcast.

(Hi Chris 👋)

Sergey asked me how I built my business from scratch.

The honest version: I had 15,000 followers when I quit my last job. Not one of them would've hired me.

I'd spent two years at my last company building a personal brand around helping young marketers.

The moment I wanted to ghostwrite for founders, I realized I'd built for completely the wrong people.

Nine months of experimenting followed:

→ Sustainability tech
→ General founders and CEOs
→ Six-figure entrepreneurs

Nothing clicked.

Then climate tech.

I went in with only passion. Zero industry knowledge. Not what people recommend, right?

My first client was an angel investor in food tech. I gave her a big discount in exchange for something more valuable: sessions where she'd teach me about the space.

That's how I started to learn a niche I had no business being in.

Over two years in now. Still learning. But it's paying off.

I can now close new deals by simply saying "oh yeah, I've work with 2-3 founders just like you."

Good times.

Listen to the full conversation between Sergey and me here: https://lnkd.in/d4BVwQV5

PS. Still grateful for those 15,000 btw. It sucked having to disengage, but I had to.

First podcast appearance in a while. Really enjoyed the chat, cheers Sergey Leshchenko!

Producing video podcasts and growing YouTube for your business🎙️Cinematic videos for ads 📺 Host of Be Yourself Pod

My guest today is a fellow Ukrainian Roman Pikalenko 🇺🇦🍉 who made a bold move: leaving a stable corporate marketing career to become a solopreneur in a completely different arena.

After organically growing his LinkedIn audience to 15K followers, Roman took advice from Matt Barker and pivoted into ghostwriting and LinkedIn strategy for climate tech founders 🌍 —> helping them attract investors, talent, and attention.

What impressed me about Roman’s journey is how intentional it was. No overnight hacks. Just experiments, consistency, and sticking to a niche long enough for the compounding to kick in.

This episode is a guidebook on:
 • how founders use LinkedIn to raise capital and hire talent 💼
 • why niche positioning beats trying to appeal to everyone 🎯
 • the biggest personal branding mistakes founders make
 • why AI won’t fix your content strategy 🤖
 • how patience quietly builds inbound opportunities

📺 Check on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/eE-DZ4Wt
🎙️ Listen on Spotify: https://lnkd.in/efUUzMGj

In the last 3 years, I've ghostwritten for 6 different co-founders (2 co-founders in 3 different companies).

Almost every scenario is the same:

One founder is posting.
The other is quiet.

Or they're both posting, but saying nearly the same things.

Both situations shrink your combined reach without you realizing it.

Not great.

In fact, I genuinely believe every co-founder has a UNIQUE PoV worth sharing.

So, I turned everything I've learned from doing this into The Co-Founder Content Split — a free guide for climate tech founding teams.

Here's what's inside:

• The 2 patterns that quietly kill co-founder content (and why both are fixable)
• A role-by-role breakdown of each founder's natural LinkedIn lens (with post ideas for CEOs, CTOs, and commercial leads in climate tech)
• The tagging rules: when it works, when it reads like PR
• A 5-question Content Lens Map to run each founder through
• An AI prompt that generates 10 post ideas per founder in under 5 minutes

Want it?

Get it for free here: https://lnkd.in/djm9ybbA

She was sitting in a brewery in the Netherlands.

Staring at the buildings across the street.

That's the moment Erika Boeing figured out how to turn city rooftops into wind farms.

Meet Erika Boeing, Founder and CEO of Accelerate Wind.

Erika didn't come from the cleantech world.

She studied mechanical engineering at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering — a school built on the idea that engineers should build things, not just study them.

After graduating, she joined DRS Technologies as a systems engineer. Her work: off-grid waste-to-energy systems, water transport technology, energy efficiency in challenging environments. Not glamorous. Genuinely hard.

Ten years in early-stage energy tech. Then a Fulbright Scholarship landed her in the Netherlands for a master's in Society, Science, and Technology at Maastricht University.

That's where the brewery came in.

One evening, looking across the street at a row of European buildings, something clicked.

When wind hits a building, it doesn't stop. It accelerates as it flows over the roofline.

Every building in every city is generating a pocket of fast-moving air — and throwing it away.

She came home and built around it.

Accelerate Wind's patented airfoil hangs over the edge of a building's roofline, captures that accelerated wind, and feeds it into rooftop turbines.

The result?

An average of 25% more power generation added on top of existing rooftop solar — using wind energy that was already there, just being wasted.

Today, Accelerate Wind has:

→ Filed 3 patents on the core technology 
→ Completed a residency at Argonne National Lab (the DOE's Chain Reaction Innovations program) 
→ Earned recognition from Project Drawdown as a Climate Fellow 
→ Had their latest prototype covered by Fast Company

The buildings already running solar? They're sitting on untapped energy every time the wind blows.

Erika just happened to spot it from the right barstool.

—

Did you know about Erika and Accelerate Wind's work before today?

I share stories of exceptional climate leaders every Monday for #ClimateFounderMondays

Follow me and click the bell icon 🔔 on my profile to get notified next week.

"Should I start a newsletter or focus on LinkedIn?"

I get this question a lot. Here's how I think about it:

LinkedIn is a distribution channel.
Email is a nurturing channel.

They do completely different jobs.

LinkedIn puts you in front of new people. Email deepens the relationship with people who already trust you. One fills the top of the funnel. The other nurtures what's already there.

The problem with starting a newsletter first: you need traffic to grow it. And traffic has to come from somewhere.

You can collaborate with other newsletters. You can buy a list. But both require advanced email marketing knowledge most founders don't have yet — and shouldn't need to have.

The simpler path: build your LinkedIn presence first. Use it to drive people to your newsletter. Then let email do the rest.

There's one exception worth mentioning.

If you want to start on Substack, the platform has its own organic reach — up to 40% of your readers can come from inside the ecosystem.

So if your goal isn't urgent and you're comfortable experimenting for 6-12 months, Substack can work without LinkedIn as your primary traffic source.

But for most founders?
LinkedIn first. Email second.

And if you want one platform that gives you both — LinkedIn has a native newsletter feature. Not perfect. But it removes the sequencing problem entirely.

—

One thing I'd add: everyone should have an email list eventually. You own it. No algorithm touches it.

If LinkedIn keeps going the way it's going, having a list to fall back on is a pretty good strategy.

—

Are you building an email list alongside your LinkedIn, or is one taking all your focus right now?

Part of the bottom 99% of designers. Building Kleo. Serving teams with fractional product design.

I help product teams move faster with fewer bottlenecks.Trusted by startups who have raised over $350M.I’ve partnered directly with founders, PMs, and heads of design.Web + mobile. Fast-paced. Strategic + hands-on.U.S.-based and async-friendly.If you need part-time design that feels full-time reliable, reach out. ⤵https://tidycal.com/trevordesign/chat-with-trevor

Trevor Nielsen

My Monday morning hot take:
AI hype is louder than AI adoption.

If you only read social media, you’d think:
Designers are dead.
Developers are dead.
Entire teams replaced overnight.

That has not been my experience.

I have worked with strong product teams recently.
Modern. Talented. Moving fast.

Most of them are experimenting with AI.
Dabbling. Testing. Exploring.

They are not rebuilding their workflows around it.
They are not replacing entire departments.

Adoption is much slower than the internet suggests.

A lot of what we see online is clickbait.

“AI is taking your job.”
“If you’re not using it, you’re behind.”

Fear drives comments.
Comments drive reach.
Reach drives sponsorships.

But inside real product teams, the tone is calmer.

Here’s what I think is true.

You should try AI.
There is no reason to avoid it.

But the idea that you are “falling behind” if you are not using it constantly makes no sense to me.

If AI does what it promises, it makes your job easier.

So how are you behind for understanding how to build products without it?

If you can design well without shortcuts, you understand fundamentals.

AI should amplify skill.
Not replace it.

The bigger risk I see is homogenization.

So many products are starting to look the same.
Same layouts.
Same patterns.
Same tone.

The work that stands out now is the work where someone thought harder.
Pushed further.
Added originality.

That matters more than ever.

And think about this..

Designers have been using UI kits for years.
Design systems.
Component libraries.
Shared patterns.

We have always built on top of existing work.

AI is not some alien concept.
It is a faster remix machine.

The internet makes this feel like a revolution happening overnight.

Inside teams, it feels more like gradual experimentation.

AI is not the apocalypse.
It is not the miracle either.

It is a tool.

And tools tend to amplify whoever is holding them.

Freelance Product Designer | Helping teams build great products

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The Battle

Roman Pikalenko 🇺🇦🦩

Trevor Nielsen

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The Battle

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Trevor Nielsen

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Roman Pikalenko 🇺🇦🦩's LinkedIn Performance

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