Handprint

Handprint is a B2B Impact as a Service platform that helps companies go green in a simple and transparent fashion. Our clients integrate curated positive impact into their sales channels to become earth-positive and engage with their customers in digital impact communities via our consumer app and through our APIs.

We have raised over 300,000 USD from friends and family and are finalizing the terms of an additional investment of a large French family office. We are currently working with 23 beta testing companies to further fine-tune the features of our platform ahead of an official product launch in October 2020. We have already had initial conversations about integrating Handprint with organizations in fashion retail, food retail, data services, commercial real estate, hotels, consulting, sports events, and an Australian city.

As a B2B2C platform, our potential clientele is large and diverse. We however start with a clear focus on e-commerce and have developed a widget that integrates our service into WooCommerce and Shopfiy, giving us access to 2,500,000 corporate clients all over the world. In addition, our APIs enable integration into the applications of companies that have built their own checkout and payment system.
The second phase of our tech development focuses on the creation of a consumer app that will enable consumers to keep track of the positive impact they create through their purchasing and other behaviors. In two years, consumers will put their Handprint (their total positive impact) on their CV, much like their Linked In and Twitter profile.

While many small and medium-sized companies have founders who truly care about the state of the world and the ongoing destruction of natural ecosystems through climate change, they often lack the time, resources, and knowledge to tackle this problem head-on. Moreover, even large companies that have their own sustainability departments still struggle to make their positive impacts tangible. Besides some local community outreach, these projects tend to disappear into annual or integrated reports.
This is a massive missed opportunity because consumers increasingly care about a company’s purpose and how it enacts this purpose in its business processes. That’s where we come in.

Handprint is a multi-sided platform that connects three types of actors. On the one side, we have the NGOs and local impact project partners that are supporting reforestation, regrowing coral reefs, removing plastic from the oceans, regenerating diverse biomes, financing education projects and so on.
These curated impact projects are tokenized (turned into discrete units of positive impact known as Sparks) and presented to our corporate clients who can select the projects that align with their purpose and mission and integrate these into their sales flow. Finally, our widget also enables corporate clients to invite their customers to contribute to the positive impact they are generating at the moment of check-out.
E.g. Our Shopify widget allows the company to tell the customer that 1% of their purchase will be donated to a reforestation project, after which the customer can amplify that positive impact by adding a couple of bucks to the total bill.
The entire amount donated is tracked for both the company and the customer and forms part of their Handprint. A consumer app allows individuals to track their own Handprint.

Organizations like Pachama (Shopify integration), EcoMatcher, the English start-up Almond, and Poseidon are active in similar spaces that we are. They are enabling carbon offsetting and a more carbon conscious society like us.

Handprint enables integration with multiple ecommerce platforms and in bespoke apps and payment systems of our clients, which gives us a big competitive advantage over companies that lack this capacity. Our consumer app also adds significant value to our clients because it enables them to communicate with their customers through a new channel, focusing on their positive impact. For consumers, we create a track and trace system of their own positive impact. Rather than, e.g. offsetting carbon emissions for a flight by donating money into a black box with little to no accountability, our system allows every single individual to track their positive contributions into a single app. Handprint is also the first platform that helps companies personalize their sustainability and corporate social responsibility activities through integrating them in sales and other processes. This creates a much more direct conversation between client and customer about their purpose. E.g. with a hotel chain, we are creating a QR code system that would be present in every room. Hotel guests could scan the QR code once a day and claim the positive impact (one tree planted) that is linked to their overnight stay into their Handprint account.

Handprint does not make money on positive impact. We are FREE for people, and FREEMIUM for corporates. Corporate clients can integrate our widget or APIs and pay a monthly subscription fee for this service as well as a surplus that is dependent on their traffic (API calls and financial transactions).

Our key costs are development and salaries for the CEO, Chief Impact Officer, CTO, and Head of Marketing. Next, we have a marketing budget and are in conversations with AWS to finalize our cloud costs.
Our key metrics are the SAAS Magic number (below 4.7x), Bessemer's CAC ratio (max 4.6x) and the CLV / CAC (max 5.1x). These are estimates based on our cash plan.

Handprint is a B2B2C Saas platform that delivers Interactive Impact as a Service. We connect high-quality NGO projects to companies who want to support specific good causes (aligned with their purpose) but lack the internal resources and time to orchestrate these processes themselves. We take the guesswork out of CSR activities and optimize their impact by curating high impact, high quality, and low cost projects globally.
We build a sales funnel through direct and inbound marketing and have built a low-touch, highly scalable platform.
We follow a product-led growth strategy by speaking to both employees and companies and help them achieve their sustainability goals together.
Our key touch points are the e-commerce widgets we are creating and the API integrations (powered by HandprintTM) we enable.

Our key metrics are cost of client acquisition, cost of customer acquisition, total positive impact enabled, monthly app downloads, number of e-commerce transactions contributing to positive impact and number of customer amplifications

Our pathway is anchored in three verticals
- Marketing and sales: we will hire a head of sales to work as an account manager for large corporate clients who need more help with Handprint integration
- UX and UI development for the Handprint consumer application as well as user testing
- SaaS integration with the blockchain technology of the Global Mangrove Trust as well as advancing our capability to tokenize local positive impact projects and monitor their performance in trustless fashion (e.g. using remote sensing to monitor state change in forests)

Subject to negotiation. We have 12-15 month runway now and are only looking to add investors who can add significant non-financial value as wel

We have designed our payment and settlement systems together with the head of global payments for Grab, the leading ‘super-app’ in Southeast Asia (transport, food, marketplace), in order to minimize risk and liabilities. For a Saas platform like ours, the risk is that our cost of client acquisition may be quite high initially because we are bringing something quite novel into the market, which means many corporate clients will need a lot of hand-holding in the beginning which hampers our scalability. Therefore, we pursue a dual strategy of e-commerce clients who could directly interact with the Saas platform and rely on video tutorials for the deployment of the tools, as well as various discrete projects that would bring in bigger cheques from larger clients.

None

With Handprint, we have not taken part in any competition yet. Our sister organization the Global Mangrove Trust, a non-profit started by two of our founders, has won various international competitions, including best climate start-up in India (via the global climate policy initiative), and grants from the Green Digital Finance Alliance, Zilliqa (Singapore blockchain company), and DBS Bank.
The blockchain technology stack developed by the Global Mangrove Trust is being folded into Handprint as a back-end system that enables transparency of money flows from every individual donor to the impact projects we support. This helps us build trust. The Global Mangrove Trust also is developing ML algorithms to estimate carbon sequestration in mangrove forests together with an AI partner and a big commodity broker and an international top tier university. These accolades help build the credibility of Handprint as well.