How Conversations With Customers Helped Us Pivot Early And Better Understand Our Audience
Hey, my name is Ricardo and along with Ivan Maeder, I'm the co-founder of BACKSPACE.
BACKSPACE is a carbon analytics platform for your website, allowing you to accurately measure every single gram of carbon it generates, giving you insights about how to reduce them, and optionally removing any emissions you can't reduce automatically for you — allowing digital businesses to go carbon neutral.
Our customers are small and medium-sized tech companies, but we also have indie folks who are conscious of their impact.
We're still at the beginning of our journey. We launched in November 2022, but already have 500,000 calculated visits, which amounts to 390kg (860 pounds) of CO2 — which blows our minds.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
I'm a Product Designer with a Computer Science background and, as with most people, have been deeply concerned about climate change and thinking about ways I could help.
I've been working on multiple, not-for-profit side projects in this space for a handful of years, making things like smallbigchanges.earth, which gives you small changes in your life that can have the biggest impact on the planet; wreckset, which exposes the toll private airplanes have on the planet; and eco/system, a labeling system that lets consumers know the impact of what they're purchasing; I've decided to take my hobby full-time.
The idea for BACKSPACE came in a conversation with my co-founder Ivan. Both of us had been building for the web for 15+ years, and we bumped into an article that talked about the impact Netflix has on the planet.
From there, we started discussing our impact and started doing some rough calculations.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
Although we had some initial success, we're currently still doing things that don't scale to get the ball rolling.
We were dissatisfied with the tools that were out there, which were (and still are) very inaccurate and based on estimation models, and had an idea of how we could build an extremely accurate measuring tool.
Eventually, after becoming a father and having a full-time job, the idea was shelved — but not forgotten. In our spare time, we continued tinkering with it until we got it to a point where it could be shipped.
The first version of the product was entirely manual — we didn't have an interface. We convinced a bunch of people to embed some code on their website, and we started measuring their emissions in the background.
At the end of the month, we manually sent them an email. This allowed us to check for interest without spending a bunch of time building it. This gave us the confidence we were building the right thing.
Being a designer, I have to balance a tendency of being a perfectionist and doing the best thing I possibly can, to just shipping something I'm not even sure people want or care about.
Although, I did spend a fair bit of time at the start trying to come up with a unique brand that reflected our values & our target audience; we were scrappy and spent as little time as possible in designing a monument, and moved as fast we could while delivering the value we promised. Shipping something is, to me, the true start of the design process.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Launching is very relative. We'll continue to "launch" the product until we find traction.
We launched on Product Hunt and Hacker News in November and... it was ok. It wasn't great. It wasn't good either.
So we opened up the conversation with folks and realized that we built almost the right product for the wrong audience. BACKSPACE was initially thought of as a simple way for indie developers to remove their emissions; however, people who signed up and, more importantly, the ones who churned, were much more interested in the analytics part of the product than the removals, especially businesses. We had a catharsis.
So we started pivoting the product last week and have observed a much stronger response already. We're still a couple of months away from fully pivoting and launching (ahem) again.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
I don't believe in paid traffic (have tried it multiple times, it's just not sustainable for most businesses), so we're focussing on product-led growth & retention. A key part of the product is a badge of certification (see image below) — and this will turn into a virtuous circle of acquisition.
Don't sweat it, ship it. And then it ship again, and again, and as many times as you need to until it works.
Although we had some initial success, we're currently still doing things that don't scale to get the ball rolling. This means things like manual 1 to 1 sale, being a part of communities, reaching out to folks directly, etc.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
We're currently focussing on our pivot towards the B2B market as a carbon analytics tool. The product experience requires to be rethought in places and, as soon as we're there, we're re-launching the product. Here's a sneak peek at what's coming:
Doing this will allow us to deliver value to companies (and charge) well before they even consider removing their emissions. It's also much better aligned with our mission, which is to reduce footprints, not be used as a greenwashing opportunity.
Our long-term plans are to become a single-stop shop for everything carbon related to tech businesses. We're going well beyond the web and measuring all digital emissions.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Because we wanted to prove the business model, we made the product paywalled from day one.
However, getting to the "aha" moment with the product isn't instant and folks just couldn't commit to buying something they didn't yet understand.
This made us miss out on a lot of potential leads that could've been nurtured into paying customers with the right product experience.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
I'm a strong believer in the centralization of information, so Notion is where the businesses' brain lives. It's a CRM, ticket tracker, quasi-analytics platform, etc.
The platform itself is nothing fancy: it's built with NodeJS, React & NextJS; Stripe for payments.
We use Mailerlite and Mailersend for marketing and transactional emails respectively.
It was designed in Figma.
However, we need to give a huge shoutout to our hosting providers Greenhost and Cloudflare. They're both run on renewable energy and that makes a tremendous impact on the carbon emissions generated.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
In terms of climate, we were strongly influenced by This Is Not A Drill by the Extinction Rebellion, which was our way into activism; No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg, which is a collection of speeches that lays things out in a simple way and drives action, and How To Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates, which is a book that's less about the problem, and more about the solutions.
In how the climate relates to the web, we were greatly inspired by Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Not sure we're in a position to teach anyone — we have so much to learn!
But a strong conviction we have is: don't sweat it, ship it. And then it ship again, and again, and as many times as you need to until it works.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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