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How it works

Donate to Stripe Climate to start private conversations with influential Twitter users. The donation acts as a statement of interest (and seriousness) to get their attention. We pass on 90% to Stripe Climate and keep 10% to maintain and grow the service. You only pay your donation if you get a reply!

Economic Contribution: A lengthy self-justification...

I wrote about the idea of Economic Contribution before and how I use it to determine ideas to pursue, so it is only right that I eat my own cooking and perform that calculation here:

Economic Contribution = Monetary value generated for your customers from using your product / how much your customers pay you

For SuperLlamas, my customers are: (1) the users, (2) the influencers on Twitter, as well as (3) our beloved Planet Earth.

For (1) and (2) the monetary benefits are slightly harder to calculate. For instance, for (1) the value could be the resultant benefit from having that conversation with a famous Twitter user. For (2), that famous Twitter user can now start conversations with people who are actually serious (the seriousness comes from the value of the donation commitment), while also using a tiny portion of their time to save the climate, killing two birds with one stone.

As for (3), the monetary value added is easy to calculate; it is at minimum the value passed on to Stripe Climate. Since this is easier to calculate, I'll use this to calculate the minimum economic contribution, excluding the contribution from (1) and (2).

For every dollar of revenue I make, $9 gets contributed to CO2 removal. That by itself has more than $9 worth of value added (helping generate long-term scale economics for CO2 removal technologies, economic externalities etc.), but let's take $9 in face value.

Now I don't actually take $1 for every $10 donated, there are costs too. Of course, there is the usual software maintenance costs, but that's fixed and would reduce in impact as the revenue scales. The true costs comes in Stripe's fees (3% + $0.50) on top of the 90% climate contribution, effectively rendering my cut to be 7% - $0.50, the formula for my gross profits.

This formula basically means that my margins are low on low donations and high and higher donation amounts. For instance, for every $6 pledged, $5.4 goes to Stripe Climate, $0.52 goes to Stripe, and $0.08 goes to me. For every $100 pledged, $90 goes to Stripe Climate, $0.8 goes to Stripe, and $9.2 goes to me. (So if you hate the fact that I take the 10% cut, donate a lower amount!)

So to calculate my real economic contribution would require a blended margin number, which is non-existent since SuperLlamas is still under construction. The best way is to be conservative by using a higher donation amount and assume that I take a large chunk (selfish me!).

So here it is:

Minimum Economic Contribution of SuperLlamas = $90/$9.2 = 9.8x

A minimum economic contribution of 9.8x is satisfactory, beating Costco's economic contribution of 5x.

And that concludes the end of my self justification. You guys will now decide if this idea is shit or not.