顧客との対話がピボットを早め、オーディエンス理解に役立った方法
月商 — · 創業者2人 · 従業員2人 · New York, NY, USA
Ricardo Gonçalves（Founder, BACKSPACE）· 創業 November 2022 · 記事掲載 — · backspace.eco · 元の記事
創業当初は手作業で顧客のWebサイトの排出量を測定し、月末にメールでレポートを送るという「スケールしない」方法で需要を確認。Product HuntとHacker Newsでローンチ後、顧客の声から「排出量削除」より「分析」に関心が強いと分かり、B2Bの炭素排出量分析ツールへのピボットを進めている。顧客獲得はプロダクト主導型成長、手動営業、コミュニティ参加、直接のリーチに注力しており、有料広告は利用していない。会社は創業者2名、従業員2名（記事時点）。
売値の出典: サイトに接続できず確認できず（過去には有料化されていたと記事に記載あり）（2026-10-14 取得）
Although we had some initial success, we're currently still doing things that don't scale to get the ball rolling.
Don't sweat it, ship it. And then it ship again, and again, and as many times as you need to until it works.
分析: Amplitude
メール配信: Mailerlite
決済: Stripe
I'm a Product Designer with a Computer Science background and, as with most people, have been deeply concerned about climate change and thinking about ways I could help. I've been working on multiple, not-for-profit side projects in this space for a handful of years, making things like smallbigchanges.earth, which gives you small changes in your life that can have the biggest impact on the planet; wreckset, which exposes the toll private airplanes have on the planet; and eco/system, a labeling system that lets consumers know the impact of what they're purchasing; I've decided to take my hobby full-time. The idea for BACKSPACE came in a conversation with my co-founder Ivan. Both of us had been building for the web for 15+ years, and we bumped into an article that talked about the impact Netflix has on the planet. From there, we started discussing our impact and started doing some rough calculations.
Although we had some initial success, we're currently still doing things that don't scale to get the ball rolling. We were dissatisfied with the tools that were out there, which were (and still are) very inaccurate and based on estimation models, and had an idea of how we could build an extremely accurate measuring tool. Eventually, after becoming a father and having a full-time job, the idea was shelved — but not forgotten. In our spare time, we continued tinkering with it until we got it to a point where it could be shipped. The first version of the product was entirely manual — we didn't have an interface. We convinced a bunch of people to embed some code on their website, and we started measuring their emissions in the background. At the end of the month, we manually sent them an email. This allowed us to check for interest without spending a bunch of time building it. This gave us the confidence we were building the right thing. Being a designer, I have to balance a tendency of being a perfectionist and doing the best thing I possibly can, to just shipping something I'm not even sure people want or care about. Although, I did spend a fair bit of time at the start trying to come up with a unique brand that reflected our values & our target audience; we were scrappy and spent as little time as possible in designing a monument, and moved as fast we could while delivering the value we promised. Shipping something is, to me, the true start of the design process.
Launching is very relative. We'll continue to "launch" the product until we find traction. We launched on Product Hunt and Hacker News in November and... it was ok. It wasn't great. It wasn't good either. So we opened up the conversation with folks and realized that we built almost the right product for the wrong audience. BACKSPACE was initially thought of as a simple way for indie developers to remove their emissions; however, people who signed up and, more importantly, the ones who churned, were much more interested in the analytics part of the product than the removals, especially businesses. We had a catharsis. So we started pivoting the product last week and have observed a much stronger response already. We're still a couple of months away from fully pivoting and launching (ahem) again.
I don't believe in paid traffic (have tried it multiple times, it's just not sustainable for most businesses), so we're focussing on product-led growth & retention. A key part of the product is a badge of certification (see image below) — and this will turn into a virtuous circle of acquisition. Don't sweat it, ship it. And then it ship again, and again, and as many times as you need to until it works. Although we had some initial success, we're currently still doing things that don't scale to get the ball rolling. This means things like manual 1 to 1 sale, being a part of communities, reaching out to folks directly, etc.
We're currently focussing on our pivot towards the B2B market as a carbon analytics tool. The product experience requires to be rethought in places and, as soon as we're there, we're re-launching the product. Here's a sneak peek at what's coming: Doing this will allow us to deliver value to companies (and charge) well before they even consider removing their emissions. It's also much better aligned with our mission, which is to reduce footprints, not be used as a greenwashing opportunity. Our long-term plans are to become a single-stop shop for everything carbon related to tech businesses. We're going well beyond the web and measuring all digital emissions.
Because we wanted to prove the business model, we made the product paywalled from day one. However, getting to the "aha" moment with the product isn't instant and folks just couldn't commit to buying something they didn't yet understand. This made us miss out on a lot of potential leads that could've been nurtured into paying customers with the right product experience.
I'm a strong believer in the centralization of information, so Notion is where the businesses' brain lives. It's a CRM, ticket tracker, quasi-analytics platform, etc. The platform itself is nothing fancy: it's built with NodeJS, React & NextJS; Stripe for payments. We use Mailerlite and Mailersend for marketing and transactional emails respectively. It was designed in Figma. However, we need to give a huge shoutout to our hosting providers Greenhost and Cloudflare. They're both run on renewable energy and that makes a tremendous impact on the carbon emissions generated.
In terms of climate, we were strongly influenced by This Is Not A Drill by the Extinction Rebellion, which was our way into activism; No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg, which is a collection of speeches that lays things out in a simple way and drives action, and How To Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates, which is a book that's less about the problem, and more about the solutions. In how the climate relates to the web, we were greatly inspired by Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood.
Not sure we're in a position to teach anyone — we have so much to learn! But a strong conviction we have is: don't sweat it, ship it. And then it ship again, and again, and as many times as you need to until it works.
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