From Entrepreneur to Ecopreneur
I’m Krates Ng, cofounder of mokugift. I’m delighted to become an occasional contributor here on Ecopreneurist.
I have always considered myself environmental. I care. I drive a hybrid car. I recycle religiously. I minimize the use of electricity, paper and water. I even cut down the amount of meat I eat (started with no meat 2 nights a week) with the intent to reduce the amount of live stock it takes to support our lives.
However, I hadn’t thought about pairing business with the environmental initiatives until we started mokugift the end of 2007. In this post, I’ll write about how we transformed from entrepreneur to a ecopreneur.
In the first half of 2007, we were curious about social networks. In particular, we were attracted to the economics of virtual goods. For the life of us, we could not understand why someone would pay a real US dollar for a virtual gift. We thought that we would have a much higher chance of success to market something that we understand. Embracing purely virtual goods wasn’t going to happen for us. We couldn’t figure out a compelling plan that took into account market size and competitive dynamics.
One day, we happened to be talking about Green Dimes, a brilliant service that was focused on helping consumers get rid of paper junk mail. On top of that functional benefit, they also planted a few tree for each customer. This is when we started toying with the idea of selling virtual trees with a real tree planted for each of them.
Our curiosity turned into excitement. With this idea, I would be no longer only have a positive environment impact on a personal level. I could contribute much more impact than not eating meat 2 nights a week (we still haven’t progress to 3 nights). My work became more exciting and meaningful than just to make a living.
From a business point of view, the economics of selling virtual goods with real world components is not as attractive a model as selling purely virtual goods. However, it gave us something that we could understand and that we could go to work each day knowing that we weren’t selling frivolous things. The real-world component (tree planting) also let us look at audiences outside of social networks.
We were excited about the idea, but there were some harsh realities. It was mid October and we needed to hit the Christmas rush to test the concept. We decided on a simpler e-card model. We pared down features to the bare minimum to launch in just 5 weeks by Thanksgiving. Those 5 weeks felt like a year.
On November 20th, we launched and a few days later we were covered in the San Francisco Chronicle.
