Removed 188,000 lbs of CO2 from the atmosphere.
by Ben SterneAs 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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