Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Tsemaye Uwejamomere, Founder of Cascade, a behavioural sustainability app based in the UK.
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Here’s what Cascade is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
Many people hear so much about sustainability but don't really know what to do, how to get started, or if what they're doing is even going to help. The media currently focuses the topic of sustainability heavily around carbon, but there are other important measures of sustainability such as ethics, biodiversity, and plastic pollution. With so many aspects to consider, it can be hard to know which decisions to make to truly live sustainably.
The Solution:
Cascade is an app that looks to harness the power of individual action and aims to create systemic change in terms of sustainability. Cascade is a tool that takes you through different steps of things you could do to live more sustainably. We also want to go beyond that and connect the fact that individuals influence other individuals, who then influence businesses and governments and their priorities. We believe that people change governments and industries, not the other way around. We want to reduce the activation energy needed for people to actually do something and get involved.
The Team:
I am an Engineering Student at the University of Cambridge, and I'm very interested in sustainable development. Our team is made up of many students, comprised of team leads, responsible for their respective areas, and others who are in the teams. In total, we are around 60 people working on the project part-time.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
It all started while I was brushing my teeth a while ago with a new toothbrush and thinking about recycling it. I knew I could recycle the packaging but I realised I couldn't recycle the toothbrush itself because it was made of a mix of hard plastics and soft plastics. Multiply that up across everyone in the UK, that's a LOT of toothbrushes going to landfill. Then I thought, I could just replace it with a bamboo toothbrush, to solve the problem. But if everyone replaces theirs with a bamboo toothbrush, what effect will that have on biodiversity? Will we be overharvesting bamboo? Being an Engineering student, I considered actually sitting down and calculating the relative impact of both approaches and realised it would take me a couple of hours. And that's just the first decision regarding sustainability I had made that day.
This is really where it started, and I just thought, wouldn't it be so cool if there was an app that would just tell me whether to buy the plastic toothbrush or the bamboo toothbrush.
What is the idea behind the app?
Ultimately, our approach is entirely centered around data. We need to just put the numbers back into climate change. And then we go into behavioural insights from this.
For example, if the data says that people need to drive less, we want to think about how to actually make the average person drive less. There are loads of reasons as to why people drive the way they do, so we want to figure out if we can systematically go through this and see what to do in response. Then we think about whether there are app features we can do in response to this. Sticking to the driving example, maybe people drive because they're afraid of cycling. And if they're afraid of cycling, why are they afraid of cycling? Could we have a little game on the app that teaches people how to feel safer cycling, and boost people's knowledge and confidence in a short amount of time? This would lead to people cycling more and therefore driving less. And from this, we then get new data, about the way users are changing their behaviour.
For example, if we can detect that, 50% of our app users have played this game and have told us they are now cycling more. This is data we can use to go to the city council and say look, all these people are cycling now. The limitation now is on infrastructure, we need more cycle routes for people to feel safer.
This was a small example of how we want to use data to really drive change from the bottom up, and not wait for it to gradually change from the top.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
I think that for all problems involving sustainability and the global climate crisis, the right time really is just as soon as possible. Also, currently, people believe that there is still hope to create lasting change, and don't feel like it is too late yet. So, launching the app soon is important so that we can take advantage of that energy and create change because we still have time to solve the problem.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
We've finished up the concept and design for our first app feature, which is a huge success. It's the first tangible thing we have to show people and represents that we've moved past the idea phase into the implementation phase. And we achieved all this with a virtual, part-time team. I'm really proud of us for getting to this point.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
Trying to understand the business aspect and business model of the app and convincing people it's a viable idea is something we're still working through. We find that, in funding competitions, if we can get to the stage where we actually get to pitch our idea and speak to someone, people love the idea, but when we don't get past that stage, we get the feedback that it just doesn't seem feasible. So we also need to work on communicating the information in the written application. Because we do have the answers, we just need to communicate them better.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
I would say that in hindsight, we really spent quite a while figuring out how to go from the ideas and concepts to the actual implementation stage. Given that I have no background in business, fully understanding the concept of a minimum viable product (MVP) would have been helpful. I really had to learn that the first version of the product you build doesn't have to be the finished end product. You don't have to do everything at once. I think if I had known this, the 'feeling stuck' phase would probably have been much shorter.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
The feedback from our grant applications has been really helpful. It's not enough if your idea is solid, you need to be able to communicate how exactly your business is going to work and be viable. Try to nail down what your value-add is, and make sure you highlight that.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Build a team. The team doesn't have to be massive but have people around you to bounce initial ideas off, who are also interested in the project. But remember, even when you have the team, you as the founder will have to drive that team forward and hold it all together, at least at the start. Make sure that the team is aligned around the same values, so that over time everyone intuitively is moving in the same direction
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
Learning how to prioritise. Everything feels important, and everything may be important, but not everything is important right now.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
I don't really have a single role model who inspires me, because I don't believe anyone can just do it all. Being religious, I do find a lot of inspiration in people who are Christian and still have a passion for social justice or sustainable development.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Admittedly, being a full-time student I read so much for my degree that I'm not a very active leisure-reader at the moment. When it comes to motivation though, there are certain songs I find myself going back to a lot, and I like to re-read scriptures and other faith-based readings.