Already during my studies, I was passionate finding ways to help decreasing carbon emissions. As CODE University is project based, many of my semester projects were dealing with that. One time I build a carbon offsetting subscription (like Klima) which I stopped because learning more about carbon offsetting let me believe, that it isn’t a viable solution. Another time I build a web shop, that would know the carbon footprint of all sold goods, and therefore, besides offsetting, allowed users to make more reasonable purchase decisions. It failed, because barely any producers would have information about the carbon footprint of their goods, and if, they mostly wouldn’t provide it. Based on that experience, in my capstone project, I worked with 9 engineers on an algorithm that could predict CO2 emissions based only on commonly available information about goods. Unfortunately, we didn’t find enough datasets to train a machine learning algorithm, therefore the algorithm was quite static.

All these experiments, research and finally my bachelor thesis about the topic, how digital solutions can support sustainable behavior change from individuals led to starting climateers. After my studies, I acquired a team of passionate individuals to work on an app, that would help individuals to become more sustainable. 

The idea is, that a lot of teenagers feel climate anxiety, persistent worries and helplessness about the future of earth. A lot of people want to do something, but don’t really know what. During 8 months in 2021, we did over 100 user interviews, and developed different value propositions from them. Based on them, we quickly build 8 different (non-scalable) products, concierge tests or prototypes and launched them to our users, to see where they see value. 

Based on those learnings we defined the product, that climateers is today: “the tinder for sustainability” where users get inspired about diverse climate actions by swiping through them. For the actions users swipe right, we support them to accomplish the actions, by providing necessary information, rewards based on the impact, and by enabling them to work together with their friends.

At the beginning of the year, we acquired over 150.000€ in equity free grants, enabling us to speed up the product discovery process, building products more quickly, and focussing full-time ourselves. 

For the end of the year, it is planned to raise a seed round, if we are able to show product market fit. You can find more information here: https://onepager.vc/climateers-ug-haftungsbeschrnkt