Why only You and I can rebuild our planet and how I'm going to build the tech that will help us get the job done

The climate and biodiversity crises are the biggest challenges we will have to overcome in our lifetimes. The good news is that you and I as consumers are in full control of our destiny - our everyday consumption decisions have a huge impact on the future of our planet. In this article I’ll share how I plan to create technology that supports us in taking decisions that are better for the planet and our own health. And how I’ll build a global market leader that supports consumers, retailers and brands in the transition process towards a sustainable future. You’ll also learn more about my current search for a world-class co-founding and executive team! 

The Challenge of our Lifetime

The human and ecological tragedy currently unfolding in Australia, as well as the incidents my family and I witnessed first hand during our three-month trip through Northern Europe last summer, have made it crystal clear to me that the climate and biodiversity crises are the biggest challenges you and me will have to overcome in our lifetimes. Because ultimately we as consumers and citizens are fully responsible for what’s going on with our planet. It’s easy to point fingers at companies producing in an unsustainable way, but if we consumers stop buying their products then they won’t make them any more. I’m referring to those that imply a huge CO2 footprint (food is responsible for 26% of global greenhouse gas emissions), contain palm oil (a major driver for rainforest destruction), soy from the Amazonas region, cage eggs and so on.

The Opportunity

The good news is that more and more consumers are aware of their personal impact on biodiversity, climate and social issues. And growing numbers of them are willing to change their consumption behavior because they’re eager to contribute to rebuilding our planet. At the same time many more brands are bringing more sustainable products onto the market. 

Yet it’s extremely difficult and time-consuming for us consumers to figure out how our individual consumption decisions impact the planet. And it’s even harder to identify more sustainable products that have an as small footprint as possible - or ideally even a positive one. 

The Vision

The vision to which I’m going to dedicate my next decade of my life as an entrepreneur is to enable hundreds of millions of consumers around the globe to learn why and how their consumption decisions impact biodiversity, climate and their own health and to support them in taking choices that are better for the planet and themselves. At the same time I want to give brands with more sustainable production processes direct access to consumers who care about sustainably produced products. By making the impact of products on biodiversity and climate crisis visible, our technology will stimulate fierce competition between brands to produce in a more sustainable way. In this way we will play a major role in mitigating the aforementioned crises. 

The Solution

The first step will be to make our solution available as a free mobile app that:

• enables you to define what you care about. In other words your consumer values (e.g. no cage eggs, less plastic packaging, no palm oil, less greenhouse gas emissions, vegetarian, reduce sugar consumption, no child labour, etc.)
• enables you to scan EAN/UPC codes of products and instantly find out whether they’re in line with your values
• enables you to share your entire food and everyday product purchases with our technology in a very convenient way (No, you don’t have to scan each and every product individually! And we’re not going to operate surveillance drones in the supermarket next door either ;-)
• provides you with information on CO2 emissions and biodiversity impact caused by the production of a certain product
• provides you with recommendations of alternative products and substitutes with a lower impact and/or are in line with your values
• will enable you to join virtual “rebuild-the-planet”-teams (e.g. together with your colleagues) and will leverage AI, gamification and nudging to encourage you to take incrementally better purchasing decisions.

We will initially support you with your grocery retail purchases, but plan in time to also cover other crucial areas such as fashion and mobility. 

How we’ll become a fast-growing, highly profitable global market leader

We aim to become the world’s leading platform for brands and retailers to access the rapidly-growing market segment of consumers who want to take more sustainable purchasing decisions. Our users will not only share their values with us, but also which products they purchase in-store and online. This opens up a whole range of business models for us. However the most interesting one we’ll focus on initially is a model we call ‘performance-based online to in-store marketing’. Performance-based online marketing such as affiliate marketing is a fast-growing industry worth billions of Dollars. We will be the first to apply this model to in-store purchases in a scalable way. And today more than 90% of all food and everyday product purchases around the globe are still happening in-store. We’ll enable brands to target micro-segments to which their products cater. They can position advertisement, sponsored content, coupons etc. at the segment that really cares for what they have to offer. We’ll charge them a performance-based commission on the revenue they make with our users. These revenues will fuel a quick expansion and allow us to bring this technology to hundreds of millions of consumers around the globe.

Austria is a small market with a significant proportion of consumers who are already purchasing sustainably produced products today - including a high percentage of organic products. It will serve as a first test market. Afterwards we plan to validate the model in the more challenging but significantly larger German market - and take on the world from there.

How ‘I’ will build it

First things first: Although I’ve gained a lot of experience in my role as founder and CEO of Zoovu (formerly SMARTASSISTANT) while helping scale the organization from 0 to 150+ employees and raise $25M+ in venture capital, I’m obviously not going to be able to build anything without a world-class team. 

One of the reasons why I’m pretty vocal about my plans here is that to successfully execute this ‘man on the moon mission’ we will need a highly committed, experienced and skilled founder and executive team. I would like to ask you to share my plans in your network and to help me find the best talent out there to make this vision become a reality.

I have recently installed a ‘founding committee’, an incredibly diverse team that currently consists of several highly committed and talented people who are working with me on validating our assumptions. The next step is to build a world-class team and get this idea off the ground. We’re currently looking for people to join us in the following roles:

• Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer (m/f/x)
• Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer (m/f/x)
• Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Officer (m/f/x)
• and further Co-Founders & Team Members in various roles

In case you’re as excited about our vision as we are and eager to dedicate the new decade to helping to rebuild our planet I would like to invite you to learn more about:

• why I’m doing this in “Our house is on fire - this is what I’m going to do about it”
• my thoughts on values & culture in “Culture & Values - defining a key pillar of success for my next entrepreneurial venture”
• what to expect in terms of working with me in “Working with me - the good, the bad and the ugly”

Please reach out to me if you’re interested. And do please think about people in your network who might fit my vision. Feel free to share the news on your preferred channels too!