Oco
Fund impactful projects that fight climate change.
The Oco Crew has taken some important steps to grow as a project. We are expanding the projects our group funds ongoing. We are steadily growing our email list and slack community. We are beginning to see results from our SEO strategy and we are learning a lot in the space about how to tackle the climate problem in a unique way.
Oco is flourishing. There is genuinely no pressure to grow Oco at a certain rate or by a certain time and that has let me focus on the experience only. Doing stuff that is really for the supporters. I love it.
Contribution growth has slowed but web traffic and email subs is picking up. Oco Forever!!
Oco continues to grow organically and garnering more and more passion behind it. Will subscriber growth is the goal, the focus right now is to make everyone involved love being a part of Oco. with 150+ email subs and 30+ contributors, we have lots of awesome passionate people and we grow everyday. I am humbled and honored.
Oco grew 22% in the month of December and removed 132,000 lbs of CO2 from the atmosphere. We see no churn thus far which is a good sign and are mainly focused on improving the clarity of the message and spreading awareness. Also this month, our email sub and Instagram following has increased considerably compared to October and November. On this Giving Tuesday, check us out!
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Hey @bensterne it's amazing to see you do literally great things with Oco. I run a social venture called We Care Social https://wecaresocial.co/ , we work on behalf of founders to help build free websites for charities and non-profits all over the world.
I currently have the bandwidth to take on two more charities or non-profits, I would be delighted to help one of your non-profits build their website for free. Let me know if this would be a possibility.
Oco is founded on the belief that we can all fight climate change.
The idea is that we make it as easy as possible to help remove the CO2 we put into the atmosphere.
At first the lowest pricing plan to join Oco was $13 a month because that is how much it costs to remove the CO2 emissions of the average American.
In the first two months, we have gotten a bunch of people sign up at this price, but a lot of people I know said they couldn't afford it.
We are launching the $5 a month membership plan so that more people can become contributing members of Oco and not strain their budget.
As of Nov 1, Oco grew over 30% in the month of October and removed 108,000 lbs of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Due to some awesome feedback, the project has continued to improve its messaging. Also, we began planning other offerings like merch and a podcast.
The vibes from everyone related to the project are awesome!
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Love the idea of having a ForGood topline metric. How are you balancing these contributions with total revenue?
The site says that 90% of the last month's revenue was given to these orgs so curious if you just take a % or cover costs or something else.
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Hey Sirhamy, thanks for the question!
Yes, 90% of contributions went to funding projects in October. The project was build with very low costs and is a side project so I am donating my time :). In October, about 5% went to Stripe credit card processing fees and the other 5% went to operating costs. All up, web hosting/tool costs are about $5 a month so there are will be extra funds that can go back into the business to improve the experience (moving to Shopify, adding discourse, etc etc).
You can actually look at all of the finances on the website if you are curious: https://ococrew.com/#finances
The main focus is to make sure that when Oco members contribute, it is having the biggest impact possible. Let me know what you think!
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That makes sense and I love the open finances you have. Was curious about your strategy as I have a parallel 'for good' initiative that approaches this from a different angle.
For my projects I give 20% of the profits to support various causes (see: HamForGood - https://labs.hamy.xyz/hamforgood/). I like this approach as it encourages both profits and doing good, two things I value.
Plus it gives a simple calculation for taking on new costs - would I rather have x or $x.value? Or another way - is x worth taking $x.value away from a good cause?
So was interested to see your strategy for tackling this - particularly as you actually have MRP (Monthly Recurring Profit, idk if there's a better term) vs mine where I've been in the red for the past year - and if you were taking an SLA-like approach (like >90% of profits given to cause) to make cost-increasing decisions simpler (i.e. is it worth adding / can we afford Shopify, Discord, etc. yet).
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Thank you thank you! Your project is super cool.
I think my situation might be a little different but hopefully helps. I landed on always keeping >86% of contributions going to orgs because that is the gold standard of giving in the nonprofit space (what I ultimately want Oco to become). So yes, that is kind of how I plan to keep it.
Oco's growth is contingent on improving the experience and marketing. So I just have to be very bootstrapped and creative as I grow. We are about to drop merch, in which case I will take on the cost myself and then recoup once the shirts have sold.
Maybe HamForGood can live as a project on its own. Just an idea. Either way I hope this was helpful. Your projects look awesome, very cool work! I just subscribed to your newsletter.
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This is a huge achievement very congratulations to you for this extra ordinary effort I am also working on removals york project you can see here.
As of Oct. 1, Oco has over 15 contributors contributing between $13 and $20 a month to remove the CO2 they put into the atmosphere. We also gained a similar number of email subs that are not contributing but interested in staying up to day on the project.
In the smoke of the California wildfires, Oco was launched focused on helping people take action against the climate crisis already underway.
The initial soft launch was focused on making sure the website worked great. The website is focused on being a great experience and make it seemless for people to remove the CO2 they put into our atmosphere.
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