If you’re hoping to start your own business, a bit of advice: learn what you can from your 9-to-5 while you’ve still got it.
Dave Rouse co-founded CarbonClick after his co-founders, who worked for an international airline running a carbon offsetting program, realized that people neither understood nor trusted offsetting programs. Each day they worked their 9-to-5, they experienced the problems with these programs firsthand.
This, in turn, helped him and his co-founders develop a solution: CarbonClick, a tech platform that makes climate action simple and transparent for businesses and customers by connecting their offset dollars to meaningful carbon offset projects around the world.
Allow me to introduce Co-Founder, Dave Rouse…
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CarbonClick is a Certified B Corp Climate Tech platform that allows consumers to meaningfully offset their purchases at the point of sale. Businesses can enable the feature with a simple plug-in install process, but businesses can do much more, from offsetting their own carbon footprint to engaging their team to learn and reduce theirs too.
We carefully select and audit the most meaningful carbon offset projects from around the world, and our platform connects businesses’ and consumers’ offset dollars to these credits. We are the only platform that provides full track and trace transparency so you can see that your dollar has been accounted for against the project, right to the registry where the project is listed.
Two of our co-founders were working for an international airline, building and refining their own carbon offsetting program. They realized that despite the number of good projects out there that could help restore balance to our planet, people didn’t understand or trust offsetting, and they didn’t trust that the airline was passing all the funds through to the offset projects. CarbonClick was born to make offsetting simple, meaningful, and transparent.
Our first product was our core platform, built enterprise-grade to handle the volume and security demands of airlines. This core did the carbon calculation and presented the carbon quantity to offset, and the corresponding price, into the booking flow via API integration or plug-in.
It also contained the full audit and inventory management system so if people clicked to offset a volume of carbon, it would settle this against the projects advertised and instantly send an email confirmation with the track and trace link to show that the money had reached the planned project.
It worked perfectly and it was boring, like an accounting package, but the offset projects supported were super meaningful. Then we built front-end products that worked on top of that, like plug-ins for Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and SAP.
Then we built out our “My CarbonClick” dashboard reporting tools that allowed anyone who had offset with us to view all their offsets in an account as well as learn their footprint using our calculator tools and offset or subscribe accordingly. From here it’s been more of a refinement, dashboard reporting tools for businesses, and so on.
We registered the business on May 16, 2019, and did a launch party in November 2019 at our office in Auckland. At that stage, we had an airport and a couple of airlines already keen and we were only halfway through our tech stack platform build…so we were really off to a flying start, no pun intended. (Then COVID hit, but that’s another story)!
We have great 96% retention for our business customers using our offsetting at the POS.
The secret behind this lies in the fact that after a consumer clicks to add an offset to their purchase from the business, once the transaction is processed, CarbonClick immediately sends an independent email receipt saying we’ve received their funds and shows them the projects their dollars can be accounted against transparently on a secure public ledger.
We show them why each of these projects is so important to the planet. Suddenly, those consumers feel a sense of relief that their money has actually done what they hoped and they feel a sense of heroism for saving the planet with a project they love.
Now, because they’ve just had such a positive experience, they associate that with the business/brand they just purchased from also. So they become between 7-13% more likely to purchase from that brand again. This can be measured in 7-13% higher purchases by those clicking to offset, compared to those who don’t.
Early on it was Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad, then a number of entrepreneurial books such as Slicing Pie by Mike Moyer.
Today things are exciting, we’re just in that transition from startup to scaleup to growth stage company, with a lot of the longer-term customers and partnership opportunities landing, providing leverage and expansion at a far greater pace than we have ever had before.
Take your advisors with a grain of salt. Treat each bit of advice or wisdom as a playing card, and treat the business decisions as if you’re in a game of poker…look at the data for yourself, and consider playing the card your advisors have given you. But only you know how to apply the right advice for your unique set of circumstances.
Often you’ll get conflicting advice when you ask more than one advisor the same question, which is where I learned not to offload the decisions to my advisors, but to seek their opinions only.
LinkedIn is always easy, but www.carbonclick.com has connection details. You’ll find CarbonClick on Facebook and Instagram too of course.
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