Startup Spotlight #109: Neutral

Neutral is a browser extension that brings transparency to the environmental impact of our online shopping.

Apr 09, 2021

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I got the chance to speak with Marissa Liu, co-founder of Neutral, about what she’s working on at her startup, and any advice she has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Neutral is a browser extension that unveils the environmental impact of your online purchases and allows users to offset their emissions, right from their shopping cart. With a click of a button, users can support UN-backed reforestation and other carbon offset NGOs across the world.

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Startup Spotlight: Neutral

Problem: Conversations regarding climate change are part of our everyday life – from the top of headlines to the center stage in the presidential campaign; perhaps the most fundamental question our society faces in this generation is whether or not we are capable of sharply reducing carbon emissions. Many consumers face the ultimate dilemma particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic where online shopping has completely changed consumerism; do they fulfill their innate desire to preserve their lifestyle and purchasing patterns, or make eco-conscious choices?

Market: North American shoppers are increasingly looking to buy from sustainable brands, with 69% of environmentally-conscious buyers willing to pay a premium for recycled products and more than half of these buyers ready to change their shopping habits to reduce negative impacts on the environment. The total addressable market would be the number of millennials in North America who shop online: 57.7 million people and with 69% of these shoppers looking to be more sustainable the serviceable addressable market is 39.1 million people.

Solution: At Neutral (shopneutral.io), we’ve built a browser extension called Neutral that measures a user’s environmental impact when they shop on Amazon. At checkout, users can donate to our curation of NGOs who plant trees to offset their carbon emissions.

Team: Neutral was created by a group of university students from the Toronto area at Stanford’s TreeHacks 2020 Hackathon. Since starting as a team of three, the Neutral team has now grown to nine people and is consistently growing.

Recent Success:

Liu: A key component of what motivates the entire Neutral team is our ability to help people, sometimes for the first time in their lives, consciously make sustainable decisions. One thing in particular that we’ve been able to succeed at is making sustainability and climate action more approachable. Through our carbon impact report in our extension, we’ve identified small actions users can take to neutralize their carbon impact whether it be offset projects or doing cold laundry loads. We have had so many users reach out about how they’ve been inspired by our work and insights to take small actions to be more sustainable. Ultimately, we want to build on this to ignite more conversations around sustainability and how easy it can be to fight against the climate crisis.

Recent Struggle:

Liu: Given the social impact component of Neutral, there are always certain tradeoffs that need to be made in order to stay true to our cause, prioritize our brand and caution on anything that could come off as green-washing. With our upcoming merchant program, we are partnering with sustainable merchants and nonprofits to provide value through vouchers and rewards for our Neutral users. In the process of developing this program, we struggled with ensuring we weren’t greenwashing with the structure and design.

Ultimately, the goal of the program was to encourage users to keep using Neutral in their everyday shopping, but we had to ensure we weren’t incentivizing unsustainable purchasing habits by doing this. As a social impact-driven company, we put our mission first in any new features. We also had to be careful to honor our commitment to our users to do the research and be selective with the brands we work with. At times, it can feel like we can never find the right balance between achieving our social mission and business goals.

Founder Advice:

Liu: This is less so advice and more so something I hope future entrepreneurs keep in mind as they build out their startups. Although Neutral works on educating individuals on their impact, we also acknowledge the biggest culprit of emissions is large corporations. With this in mind, I’m sure some of you reading this will one day scale your businesses into larger corporations. I’d like to encourage you to embed social impact into your business operations as early as possible because as companies grow, it can get harder to do this. We love throwing this word around in the team, but we’d love to see the concept of ethical capitalism grow.

Two Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Liu: Here are two founders you should check out next!

Christian Anderson, Founder of Watershed: Watershed is a software platform working to accelerate the fight against climate change.
Mimi Tran Zambetti, Founder of Project Wren: Wren helps you live carbon neutral by accounting for and offsetting your carbon emissions through transparent climate projects.

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