As 2022 dawns, I look back on 2021 with gratitude & amazement. We came so far – I did and Climate Companion did. I’m guessing you did as well, and I’m grateful to be in the climate fight with you. You played a role in moving me and Climate Companion forward, and I thank you. In this blog post, I outline what we learned and accomplished in 2021 and provide a glimpse of our goals for 2022.
From Food Waste to Net Zero to Climate Data Management
When we announced Climate Companion, our first planned impact solution was reducing food waste. Even as Covid hit, we stuck to this goal, but continued our customer discovery efforts. In late 2020, we started to hear more about ESG and net zero commitments. We heard about pain points related to these efforts. We saw carbon accounting solutions emerging. We knew we could contribute to addressing some of the pain points. So in spring 2021, we quietly pivoted to helping organizations manage their net zero journey.
We studied this problem and developed our technology solution around this theme throughout the summer. Again, we kept talking to stakeholders in the sustainability ecosystem. People like you. We heard several common themes in the pain points you expressed, including:
- Questionable data quality, leading to time-consuming validation and cleansing efforts
- Finding and organizing the data needed to make sustainability decisions
- Data is located in disparate locations and disparate formats, leading to tedious unification efforts
- Scope 3 emissions are particularly challenging to understand and account for
- Reporting is a challenge, especially given the different standards and frameworks across different jurisdictions
Hearing these themes, we refocused our value proposition. Just last month, we updated our website and re-prioritized our software development to reflect this new focus.
Here’s a summary of what our customers can achieve with our cloud-based software:
- Contribute: unify sustainability-related data from disparate sources and formats without writing code
- Validate: annotate, correct, and provide feedback about contributed data
- Solve: find climate impact answers with the right granularity, format, and perspective for each collaborator
Overall, we help you manage your climate data to improve your impact.
Empowered by our Network
None of this progress came in a vacuum. Each of us contributed. We also participated in the Cleantech Open Accelerator program this summer. We continued working with other advisors, collaborators, and sustainability stakeholders in our network. We applied our philosophy of collective intelligence. Based on the reactions to our early demos, we are confident that we are on the right track. The reaction of one mentor when he saw the demo especially resonated with us: he called it the Rosetta Stone for software. We love this! Of course, it’s not for just any software: we focus on the climate challenge!
Making Impact in 2022 and Beyond
We’re proud of our progress in 2021, and we are grateful that you are on the journey with us. We’re excited and optimistic about making even more impactful progress in the year ahead. We’re now focused on developing a “killer use case” and are in solution validation with potential early adopters. We continue to aspire to the goal of helping to drawdown 0.5 Gt of greenhouse gasses per year.
In conclusion, I welcome your reactions to our evolving solution, and I’d also love to hear about your 2022 goals. How can we help? Book a time with me here and let’s make 2022 a year of climate impact!
