Toohla
A D2C Climate App
It’s not often i work with a Founder with the maturity and insights to shut down their company six months in….but the words still stung a bit, “I just don’t have conviction in the idea or problem. I can’t ask others to buy or do something that I would not”. Six months down the drain, and I had been brought in to help make sure it would be successful. Every experience of failure has a few lessons in it….so if you’re a product person or founder looking to avoid pitfalls, let me explain.
Joining before PMF (Product Market Fit)
It’s a rare thing to get to join a founder before PMF. You’ve got nothing but the idea. No customers. No product. No website. Just something you want to breathe life into. Personally, i love it. There’s a sea of opportunities, no red tape, no management, no politics, it’s pure freedom.
I was not expecting the opportunity and joined for two good reasons:
- I was impressed with and loved the Founder (and i still do)
- I was interested in and passionate about the D2C climate tech space
We were the only ones talking about the direct-to-consumer opportunities at a climate tech event. We both personally felt the guilt, saw others feeling the guilt, and wanted to find a way to have an impact in the space. He had some ideas on the product, and I had d2c product experience. We shook on it an started the partnership.
The idea: Toohla
Toohla is derived from the Sanskrit word “Tulā”, which means “balance” as well as a balancing scale. Toohla empowers you to track, reduce, and offset your pollution seamlessly.
The Problem
- 70% of Gen-Z and 60% of Millenials experience Climate Anxiety
- Another 70% of this Demo think about Climate every day or every week accordingto our proprietary surveys
- What’s more, people most often feel Helpless when thinking about climate change.They just don’t know where to start
- There are many other mainstream individuals who are willing to do their part, butwant an easy way to reduce their Carbon footprint in their daily lives by choosinglower-carbon Products and offsetting
The solution
- Users can turn their Climate Anxiety into Action in their daily lives by reducing and offsetting their emissions in a fun, social and easy experience.
- Toohla will also draw in mainstream individuals to the Climate fight by making it easy for them to take action in their daily lives, whatever their level of commitment
- Users will earn Points for making climate-friendly lifestyle choices
- They will earn more Points (and reduce more Climate Anxiety) by buying Carbon Offsets from our marketplace, which we are building directly with existing Exchanges and Registries
- We intend to partner with climate-conscious businesses to let customers redeem Toohla Points with them. We will market their Brands directly to our customer base as Climate-friendly alternatives
V1
Here’s a red flag that I missed (or intentionally ignored because i wanted to work with the founder pretty bad at the time). The founder had an IOS engineer working on building the product already.
I’m of the mindset and philosophy that you should never actually build anything until you have some confidence (enforced by real world results) that the thing is the right thing to build. Talking with customers and building prototypes is my specialty so i approached this product the same way. I didn’t want to rock the boat with the founder, and the IOS version of the product was not going to come out for a couple months, so i asked
“What could we build and test with customers before the app was ready?”
This is one of the most fundamental questions everyone in product should be coming back to.
More generally stated:
“How can I learn what I need to learn in a faster way?” “How can I get learnings without having the finished product?”
One of the reasons I was so impressed with the founder was that he had a number of customer interviews completed with insights. We set some more up, gathered some information, and put our heads together to build the first version of the product.
Personalized climate insights with the ability to offset
For the first 8 customers, it took about two weeks to build and deliver everything. We build it in Figma with personalized results from the customer interviews and links to offset their carbon emissions, and emailed it out…..
I actually thought it was really cool. You got to see how every little thing you did added to your carbon footprint, with a break down, and it ranked you against the other users and baseline. Then it gave you tips to reduce your footprint or and links to buy carbon credits to offset your emissions.
After a few days, it became clear that this was a big swing and a miss. No conversions. No real interest.
What we should have done
At this point, we likely should have realized that this was not a real problem for enough people to build a company around. Alternatively, we thought we could have missed the right users since we had mostly been talking to friends who were interested in climate tech.
What we did
We pushed on with the same problem and solution for IOS and largely ignored the findings. What we took away from that initial version was users misunderstood it, and that we had miscommunicated the way to offset your emissions through a PDF report. We convinced ourselves that the value proposition of the product only worked in a mobile setting and users would want to offset in real time when they took an action.
V2
Remember that red flag that I had called out earlier? At this point, i knew I needed to address the ongoing IOS build with the founder. The truth is that building a native IOS app was just wrong for what we were trying to do. It was costing so much and would never get delivered on time, even though the engineer kept promising it would.
I started diving deep into the no-code/low-code space that I was exploring regularly. I found a great list of tools to try out that would get us to the first version of the mobile app much much faster (credit goes to No Code Pros - <insert name> ).
🖥 For websites, try Webflow, Typedream or Carrd.
🧑💻 For web apps, try Softr, Noloco or Bubble.
📱 For mobile apps, try FlutterFlow, Adalo or Glide.
🤖 For automations, try Zapier, Make or IFTTT.
🏗 For infrastructure, try Philip Lakin's Switchboard, Hookdeck or Zenity.
💬 For chatbots, try Crisp IM, Intercom or Chatfuel.
💾 For databases, try Airtable, Xano or Rows.
💳 For payment, try Stripe, Memberstack (YC S20) or Gumroad.
📝 For forms, try Tally, Typeform or Jotform.
🛠 For internal tooling, try Retool, Internal.io, or UI Bakery.
I spent a night moving the first version of the app into Adalo and was able to recreate a good amount of the mobile app within a day. When I showed the founder the progress I had made, a switch flipped. We both knew we could get to where we wanted to be without spending the money and time on a native IOS app.
While more time was needed to get the calculation of emissions and offsetting payment portion into the Adalo build, this was a huge win. Employees are the most expensive part of any company, and paying for a full-time engineer at a startup is a great way to burn money for very little ROI.
With the founder and I building the new no-code version of the product, the next step was to make sure we could target some different users from the V1 test. As members of the local climate organizations we found some users there, found a few more through other friends, and decided we would hustle with the product in person to try and get other potential users. We thought climate-friendly restaurants, public transportation, and bike shops were all interesting locations to try and find our target demographic.
It took a few weeks of work to get there, but we did it. We had a new website, a list of beta users, and a real mobile app that you could download from the app store. This version allowed you to track your emissions, rewarded you for taking actions like public transit or biking, and gave you access to high-quality carbon credits to offset your impact. Every day people could finally live without climate guilt……
What happened….
This was a particularly tough time for us. We didn’t believe the app would be a smashing success or anything in it’s V1 form, but we didn’t expect what happened next.
Before we launched Toohla to real users, we had been using the app every day personally. We knew we were biased, but it made us all the more confident that others would want to use the app too. I was even starting to feel a little bit better about the current state of climate change from it.
When we tested Toohla with individual users at local coffee shops, bike stores, and green-friendly restaurants, we mitigated big usability risks and knew users would understand how to use the app.
A punch to the gut. We had users logging in, we saw users go through our onboarding experience, we saw users log a few climate-friendly actions and get rewarded for it….and that was it. There was a bit of retention within the first week as some users would remember to log an action, but after that first week, there was 100% churn. ZERO offsets had been purchased.
It was the same insight that we had before with the PDF report version of the product. People did not want to buy carbon offsets. We wanted to make sure we did due diligence before drawing too many conclusions and set up another set of ten user interviews.
Feedback
Not surprisingly, we heard some consistent feedback after the first few interviews. Users did not want to buy offsets to mitigate their climate guilt. They barely understood them, and usually just equated them to donations. The app was an interesting idea, and there was a bit of satisfaction with the reward system around taking climate-friendly actions, but there was no real incentive to continue to log them at this point besides social validation, and a little bit of a good feeling.
We also heard that users enjoyed the emails that we had been sending and the chats that we had about the climate space in general. The climate space was full of doom and gloom news and had become increasingly politicized, so we decided to just send our users positive climate news once a week. We reflected on our first meeting at a climate event. Surrounded by like-minded individuals, all having fun in a social setting, getting to discuss a topic that we all cared about, and coming away from it seeing tangible work that others were doing to help solve the problem.
V3
After wrapping up the interviews, synthesizing the insights, and doing a retrospective or two….we felt we needed a big change. Toohla V3 incoming. We still felt that the problem of climate guilt was felt by individuals, but decided to pivot away from carbon offsets completely in favor of a community product. The problem was…..neither of us had experience in working on a community product and we didn’t know where to start. So we became ‘experts’:
- Read the top blogs
- Read the top books
- Watch the top youtube videos
- Study the top community products
- Connect with top community product builders
The list above is similar to a list I read years ago in the 4 hour work week by Tim Ferriss. Being an expert is a matter of perspective, you just have to know more than the person you’re trying to sell to and you can be an expert. After going through some learn for about a week, our former selves certainly would have considered us ‘experts’ on community products.
In fact, here are some of my favorite community resources I like to share whenever someone is getting started:
- Here's that analysis i did a while back on some community hosting platforms (My personal favorite is Skool): https://airtable.com/shrC4jhLRdOw9bOPy
- https://gettogether.world - Great resource and podcast on communities
- https://miro.com/miroverse/community-building-framework/ - Here's a Miro board from gettogether that I like to modify to run community product sprints.
- Some other fun videos from community creators:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS97ZWPFIZ4&t=1121s
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8qlaBp2OWk
Anyway, we got together and ran another design sprint (My favorite tool to kickstart a new product) and spent the following week the first version of the community project. Again, we thought it was very cool but had some doubts about the value it would provide and how it could compete in the market. I was a member of several communities, including Climatebase, My Climate Journey, and Work On Climate. Those climate communities were all competing in the climate-job intersection, helping people who wanted to work in climate connect with companies and get hired. We decided we wanted to help teach the everyday person to take actions in their life to mitigate their climate. What we found were reddit communities like ZeroWaste and BIFL(Buy it for life), and a few activist communities working on local projects to conserve water or reduce waste. Honestly, it gave me a lot of hope and excitement to see so much going on in the space. We incorporated those ideas into our own community and content to try and differentiate ourselves from the other climate communities in the space.
Launch
When we announced the new community product to our mobile app users, we had about a quarter sign up. We had built a full onboarding experience and asked users to participate in sharing where they were from, what they were interested in learning, and actions they were taking on climate. We set up calls with the community to do Q&A and connect with the members. We regularly posted our positive climate news and provided challenges and actions for the community members to take.
Churn, Churn, Churn. We did not see participation or engagement. There were a few holdout participants in the community that we personally knew, but we were having a very tough time recruiting users and getting them to participate.
We took another week to interview a few users, and reflect. What had we done wrong? Why couldn’t we get users to engage? There were a few big issues that stood out to us.
- Not a specific enough problem - Toohla’s mission was to help consumers relieve their climate guilt. While we had data that people said they were feeling this guilt, we didn’t find a specific enough group with a painkiller problem that they were willing to pay for to solve.
- The problem solved itself - For ourselves and many others in the space, working for climate tech-related companies was the ultimate way to relieve their climate guilt and anxiety. They would gladly go on living their life of plastic and driving big trucks if they were working in the space.
- Direct-to-consumer climate tech is hard. Very hard. Here’s a note from Gustaf Alstromer who leads Y Combinator in their climate tech investments and has helped to fund well over 100 climate tech startups, together worth over $10B.
- In a YC post with the heading labeled “Tarpit Ideas”, Gustav wrote this:
- Too much focus on Direct-to-Consumer vs. B2B. In our experience consumers are motivated to decarbonize when the products are better or cheaper - for example EV’s and solar. Corporations however, are much more committed to quickly reduce emissions than consumers. As a result they are generally more knowledgeable than the average consumer about decarbonization and more willing to try new technology, and initially pay higher prices. Big corporations have a lot more capital to deploy, and their emissions are obviously massive compared to individual consumers, so a single partnership can be very scalable and high impact
End
I thought there was likely still an opportunity in the zero waste space. Users didn’t think about climate offsets or emissions, they thought about trash. They could see it everywhere. It was tangible, and the only thing they knew how to do was recycle. Toohla’s founder and I had a few days of discussion and we decided it was best to end the venture. We had learned a lot and built a few different versions of the product. Of course, we were disappointed that we were not able to help more people reduce anxiety related to climate change, but throughout this journey, we had helped reduce our climate guilt. Besides picking up some new product skills and tools along the way, we made so many new connections in the space and met so many interesting people doing great work. It was the first time in a long time, that I felt good about the future I would leave for my children.