Curb6

I spent some time talking to potential users, adjusted the copy of the landing page and developed a carbon dioxide calculator for bus, car and train.

That's more than enough code and the only focus is now to get peoples on that landing page, see if I can generate a bit of traffic, and get insight on product market fit.

As an engineer this is the hard part for me, but it is always exiting to learn something new!

After some experiment and great discussion with other founders from Startup School, I decided to launch without any machine-learning. This reduces the competitive advantage of Curb6 but it will allow me to develop a full MVP way faster and without any technological blocking point.

The new MVP is to create an easy-to-use carbon calculator for all type of transportation (plane, bus, car, train). As it's fairly simple I can spend more time thinking about the UI/UX and make it extra simple and nice to use.

The goal of that MVP is to start building a brand around carbon dioxide calculation / offset and build an email list of companies that could be interested in the SAAS product offer.

Today I shipped the first feature, the flight carbon dioxide emission calculator. It took quite some time to find an accurate formula and to make the airport search engine fast.

Hope you'll like it!
New features will be released in the following days.

I stripped down the project to a single feature to make sure I could launch and iterate fast.

My biggest pain point is to be able to calculate a carbon footprint based on a plane boarding pass, Uber receipt and any other kind of travel related email or files. To solve this I need to train a machine learning model with a lot of data, so I tough that I could design the first feature to help me on this issue.

The landing page is minimalist, only offering anyone to send a travel receipt by email. This allows me to collect some data and start building an efficient ML model.

As an incentive, all sent emails will receive a short footprint summary, and a link to a non-profit offset organization to compensate it.

I was looking for a meaningful project that could have a real positive impact on the world, and fighting climate change is the biggest challenge faced by humanity in the coming years.

Sadly most businesses are only driven by profitability and do not even take the time to compensate their carbon footprint, even at the current cost of the carbon dioxide metric ton that is laughably low.

After some brainstorming I came up with a few ideas that could motivate business and individuals to compensate their carbon footprint, by providing a no-hassles solution and incentives to do it.

Curb6 (6 being the atomic number of carbon) was born.