Startup Spotlight #63: EcoCart

EcoCart empowers shoppers to make their online orders carbon neutral with the click of a button.

Dec 05, 2020

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I got the chance to speak with Dane Baker, co-founder and CEO of EcoCart, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Baker is the co-founder & CEO of EcoCart, which is on a mission to make the fight against climate change easy, affordable, and accessible so that everyone can do their part.

EcoCart’s Chrome extension automatically calculates and offsets the carbon footprint of online shopping orders at no cost to the user. Dane has always believed strongly that entrepreneurship is the best vehicle for making positive change in the world. Previously, he founded an online peer-to-peer rental marketplace because he thought that renting, in stark contrast to consumption was a far greater net benefit for the environment - especially with high-plastic items like kayaks, snowboards, etc.

After selling the business to a larger rental marketplace company, Baker spent time investing in Growth stage companies like Airbnb, 23andMe, and Pinterest at the University Growth Fund.

EcoCart for Chrome launched officially just a couple of weeks ago and now has over 1,000 users all taking small steps in lowering their own carbon footprint, which collectively has resulted in over 4 million lbs of CO2 offset and over 130k trees saved by the EcoCart community.

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Startup Spotlight: EcoCart

Problem: Actions that people take every day have an unavoidable carbon footprint - eliminating it is impossible and offsetting it is confusing and prohibitively expensive.

Market: Consumers are expected to spend upwards of $4.5 trillion dollars on online purchases in 2020 alone, which represents a massive problem for the environment, but an enormous opportunity to capture that value by creating real-world impact.

Solution: EcoCart enables online shoppers to offset the environmental effect of their orders at the point of impact and is empowering consumers to take small steps toward lowering their carbon footprint - completely for free and in the most convenient way possible.

Team: My co-founder and I set off on this journey about a year ago, and have since grown the team to 9 rockstars across business development, engineering, and marketing.

Recent Success:

Baker: One of the things I’m most proud of is our team’s ability to move fast. We initially launched our first product, a Shopify app that any merchant can install into their online store to give their customers the opportunity to make their order carbon neutral by adding a few extra cents to their order, a mere six months ago. We quickly grew to over 200+ merchants within the EcoCart community and with that, we saw about 1 in 3 consumers opting in to make their orders carbon neutral on average across all our merchant customers - and in some cases, it was even greater than 50%. We saw this massive validation for something like EcoCart to exist in the world, so we built and launched EcoCart for Chrome in just a couple of months.

Recent Struggle:

Baker: One of the biggest challenges has been juggling priorities and managing the team. Being a two-product company, there are so many things needing to be done that are pulling us in many different directions. Keeping the high-level objectives and company goals top of mind while at the same time ensuring the in-the-weeds details are optimal is a tough balance. As time goes on, I’ve personally gotten a lot better at this constant context-switching and prioritization of high-level objectives.

Founder Advice:

Baker: It’s all about passion. Running a startup is a hard life - there is nothing easy about it and times truly get tough. Therefore, the absolute most important aspect of running a successful startup is “the why.” Why are you setting out to do what you’re doing? You need to be obsessively passionate about your business and the problem it’s solving and that will push you through any challenge you face.

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Baker: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Nathan Resnick, Founder of Sourcify: Sourcify is the fastest growing sourcing platform backed by YCombinator that helps hundreds of companies manufacture products around the world.
Bethany Stachenfeld & Brandon Escalante, Cofounders of Sendspark: a video platform that helps growth teams engage customers online with personalized video messages
David Diamond & Oliver Cruise, Cofounders of Pineapple: Pineapple lets people hiring for and applying to people-facing jobs hire and get hired through personality and not Resmués.

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