The challenge of early sales planning in green startups: How to sell and to whom?

Abstract

Our world requires more than ever green entrepreneurs, willing to develop sustainablesolutions to solve the ecological problems caused by our modern way of living. This workfocuses on the major challenge of Green Startups: finding costumers and generating sales.This thesis presents a clear definition for Green Startups, statistical data, as well as trends,opportunities and challenges, as well as a simplified methodology based on the Eco-Canvasfor a circular economy, to analyze the value proposition of Green Startups to identifycostumers, implement communication and sales channels that enables to capture value.This work presents:(1) An empirical study of Green Startups in Austria and a survey of the communication andsales channels of preference in Europe taking into account six different sectors wereGreen Startups operate: Green Energy, Organic Textiles, Organic Food, RawMaterials, Green Mobility, Natural Cosmetics and Household Products.(2) An analysis that leads to the formulation of useful recommendations for coming greenstartups when developing a strategy to attract consumers and generate sales.The study shows that the simplified method based on three steps from the Ecocanvas can beuseful to analyze the social and environmental impact of the business to maximize its valueproposition, locate the suitable customer segment through communication and sales channelsthat generate sales.It has been found that successful entrepreneurs are supported by a network in order togenerate the first sales, most of them makes use of the internet to create awareness of theirproducts and services, as well as to close sales and that are strongly supported by the wordof mouth.the customers for each sector has different channel preferences. There is a dominance of theinternet as the first option for searching for products and services, with exception of the organicfood, natural and household products, were the public prefers to visit local shops over all theoptions assessed in this work.