Envolution - the sustainability platform

Adam Surdy, co-founder of Envolution.

Experience in building startups, business development focused around IT and sustainability. A true believer that our future is to build a fully sustainable society. Passionate about converting ideas and visions into reality.

*/ We wrote down about one person as it says in the description, but we would prefer a whole team description (alike in p.14).

Humanity has been bending nature to its immediate needs as well as braking basic human integrity.
We want to help to accelerate the change towards a more sustainable world. We want to contribute by providing a global platform for sustainability, that would bring together all parties: sustainability-minded companies, individuals, foundations, charities, volunteers, employers, employees, scientists, NGOs, investment funds etc.
We feel the sustainability landscape today does not have a central, global meeting place, is scattered across places, both virtual and real. We feel this could accelerate the change by: a) bringing together people from across the globe and b) bringing together various groups of people, for whom it would be difficult to connect otherwise (scientists and startups, companies and advisors etc.) and most importantly: c) by helping them generate real, financial value within the sustainability ecosystem that will support the growth of this sector within the general marketplace.

We believe the successful implementation of the 17 SDGs the will be a major step forward towards increasing humanity's chances for long term survival and a step towards a higher level of civilization. Ending the degradation of our planet, minimizing poverty, inequality etc. will advance our society.

The problem we want to solve is that the shift towards sustainability is not happening quickly enough. The build up of critical mass to turn what we call sustainability today into “normal” tomorrow can, hopefully, happen quicker. This critical mass cannot be build by early adopters, activists and other groups of people acting out of their inner values and beliefs.

To build critical mass we need to engage the masses, the market mainstream. The motivation of this group of people is based on immediate benefits, economics, money and convenience rather than beliefs. Think of sustainability as a product -  we need to make it more accessible by making it cheaper, easier available and more present in everyday lives than it is now. How can we achieve that? By keeping money inside the “sustainable companies ecosystem”, by exchanging best practices, creating sustainability R&D consortia and generating effects of scale within this global community.

Envolution is the digitalization of real world activities that we conducted face to face.

Being interested in sustainability, we're trying to get in touch with like-minded people and spread the idea to other people. Several times, such conversations turned into business matchmaking by accident, generating value for the companies matched. Examples of these matches include food banks working with left-over app providers to minimize wasted food or producers switching to more sustainable packaging. We understand there is a need for a place where such entities could define their needs and find other entities interested in helping them, a global sustainability “Facebook” and “marketplace”, focused not on individual gains but rather on the advancement of a common goal.
The platform will allow the creation of profiles for entities like firms, NGO’s, foundations, charities, academic institutions as well as individual profiles for people seeking employment or voluntary projects, mentors, advisors etc. An AI will be matching all the parties, mentors will run expert rooms to support spreading of knowledge, scientists and startups will be able to find each other, investment funds will be able to look for projects, foundations for volunteers, job seekers for employment with companies that share their values.

In the long term and indirectly, the goal of Envolution is to push forward the 17 Sustainable Development Goals as introduced by the United Nations. In that aspect, we want to contribute our tiny piece towards a better world and society.

In the short term and more directly, we want to impact the members of the sustainability community by helping them exchange knowledge, cover their needs within this community, supporting their activities and growing the general sustainability footprint on the marketplace and society.

1. Seeing and understanding the issues, observing what’s happening, analysing the history and predicting the future, understanding the ongoing process.

2. Researching what's already being done to tackle these challenges (tons of books, articles, meetings, calls, conferences, surveys, tests).

3. Coming up with what is missing, and what is the most effective way for us to take part in this transformation, developing the Envolution concept in agile and lean methodology.

Our solution addresses global problems, we think about all people, our children and the future of them and planet Earth. We are dedicated to have as big an impact as is necessary to ensure that we will live in a healthy and prosperous global community that thrives and joins efforts for the commonwealth. We feel that it is everyone's responsibility to leave your surroundings better than it was when we arrived here. Almost every day we encounter new people who feel the world today does not work the way it should but they do not know how to act on that or where to find like-minded people. 

Sometimes we also feel like we could do more for the planet and other people. Working on sustainable community motivates to keep sustainability a priority every day.

We are a team of 6 people with different and complementary fields of expertise, united by a common idea. We have all the skill groups that we need to make this project real. 

Adam: Experience in building startups, SaaS platforms, doing business development mostly focused around IT services and sustainability. A true believer in our future is to build a fully sustainable society. Passionate about converting ideas and visions into reality.

Jan: 15 years Experience in Business Development among other in renewable energies and SaaS, a father of three concerned about the quality of the planet he will be leaving behind for his kids.

Jarek: Owner of a design agency, many years experience in developing startups and venture builders.

Krzysiek: Retired officer of Polish army, traveler, sportsman and highly skilled engineer, deeply involved and fascinated by the development of state of the art software solutions to support humanity. Data scientist during his PhD.

Ola: Experience in building multidisciplinary teams, employer branding and creating internal processes for IT companies. Passionate about personal development, outdoor adventures and sustainable solutions. 

Iza: Experience in marketing, communication, building SaaS projects and organizing events and conferences.

We have been working on this project after hours for over a year, systematically pushing the idea forward, not being led astray by changes in our work life, pandemic struggles and business shrinking or having to change jobs, children being born or dengue fever being gone through. We’ve been working across up to three time zones, spending our Sunday morning on weekly status calls debriefing on our OKR’s, calling in from holidays, hospitals and wedding receptions. All of that without any income, profit or funding. We’ve build up a team of 6 people buying in on the idea and are close to our MVP today, with first real-world sustainability match making cases done. 

We think of Envolution as a team of mini CEOs. 

We are strong believers and also practitioners of self-organization. The Founding Team consists of people who left their home and made a living for themselves starting small business at the age of 18, Polish Army retired officers responsible of leading soldiers, HR managers coaching teams of people, start-upers running digital agencies, managers recruiting and running highly motivated teams.

There are a couple of platforms gathering sustainability oriented people. However, those that we have found act as online presences of local initiatives, meetups etc, thus we feel their impact can be limited. We want to create a global platform that could connect people across the planet, which, we feel, could generate much more impact. 

Also, we feel Envolution is the first platform that has match-making as one of the specific goals of its existence. Comparing it to electric cars - it’s great if your car is electric and does not generate pollution. But it’s much more motivating and rewarding, if your car does not generate pollution AND saves you money. We want to use this aspect as a driver of momentum to grow the community. By growing the community we want to grow the flow of information. By growing the flow of information and by growing the flow of profits within the sustainability community, we feel we can advance the whole movement and make a more positive impact. Last not least, by generating monetary value we can help sustainability become more attractive to the general public and brake through the chasm between early adopters and main market.

Like with every new product or with every major change in society, the change process usually gains popularity first among early adopters, people, who want to use new objects or act in a new way mainly because it's new, in line with their mindset or just different from the rest. For any new product or, in our case, mindset (sustainability) to be adopted by the majority of the society, the new product or mindset has to deliver very specific value - in most cases - economic value. Our goal for Envolution is to facilitate business and knowledge exchange between sustainability-oriented people, firms and other entities. This flow of know-how and money should give those companies an additional boost so they could play a more major role in the general marketplace, becoming stronger competitors for “regular” companies, building a stronger foothold in the market, thus educating more and more consumers about sustainable alternatives to their regular suppliers. While more and more people switch to sustainable suppliers, two things should happen: 1) There will be a growing pressure by the general public on “regular” suppliers to become more sustainable and 2) being sustainable will become cheaper in general, through better, more popular and cheaper technology (think photovoltaics panels - at first, so expensive and with such low efficiency that the only viable use case was space exploration. Today it’s basically everywhere). Both these factors will create a natural loop of improvement which will allow sustainability to become the “new normal” as even the late majority will be expecting products and societies to be as sustainable as possible.

We have around 100 members at the moment, we plan to reach out to 5000 members in one year, in 5 years 500 000.

We aim for global change. Our plans are ambitious, but we are sure that the number of people eager to make a positive impact is growing every day. That’s why we are building a community that, by growing, will be driving the scale of Envolution's impact on the global commitment to sustainable development

Our goals to the end of the year :

• Increase the user base to 5000

• Provide a dedicated support to 60% of users in our base

• Build and test fully functional MVP

• Receive funds (300,000 USD)

5 years:

• Revenue: 120 000 USD / month

• Increase the user base to 500 000 members

• Implement AI to make matchmaking more effective and valuable

• Building and maintaining local communities in at least 5 countries (they will be hosting events, like meetups and conferences)

• Reinvesting part of the profits into the most promising projects from the community

Financial - scaling user base requires additional funds for marketing and for hiring new customer success specialists. 

Technical - online platform needs to be built (although there are no technical barriers that we see as blockers), the only one is that we have to hire a new development team and pay for the infrastructure, and we need funds for this. 

Legal - some of the pro-ecological regulations have not been implemented throughout last decade despite the efforts of many talented people, there are conflicts of interests

Cultural - consumerism society requires a huge mind-shift

Technical - we are already developing the platform - step by step, avoiding additional costs and working with contributors that want to support us. We have required know-how in the core team.   

Financial - we are looking for grants and donations from like-minded social impact programs. (e.g. Elevate Prize). We are also looking to increase the number of paid tickets that we serve and therefore enable financial independence.

Legal - activating broader audience, bottom-up approach focusing on increasing the feeling of responsibility and engagement.

Cultural - educating more people about sustainability, the benefits of it and practical steps to transformation.

At the moment we cooperate with Sustainable Change Makers from Denmark who are a multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral networking organization for young sustainable change agents in the millennial generation. They have an active community and we want to give them an online platform for more effective collaboration. 

We also cooperate with Polish Food Banks, we exchange networks, promote and host events together.

We are also in early stage communication with Australia's Banksia Foundation.

We want to provide our users with dedicated and exceptional support. They can use our platform for free but there is also a group who need dedicated support and want to pay for this extra service. We offer individual support in finding business partners, suppliers or experts as well as lead generation and promotion. We created a customer success process that responds to every individual needs and provides great value for each member.

Providing services:

- Dedicated support to some users
- Lead generation and promotion
- Hosting events
- Donations

FFF

300 k USD Grant

IT - ~80 k USD (server, 3rd party integrations, hiring additional development team)

Customer Success - ~70 k USD (hire new Customer Success Specialists)

Marketing, promotion, visibility - ~60 k USD

Other internal operations - ~90 k USD

The Elevate Prize mission seems to be very aligned with our goals and a perfect fit for partnership to work towards a better future.

Which of barriers can The Elevate Prize help you overcome, and how:

• Increase exposure and network through the organization's audience

• Mentoring - huge pool of experienced and skilled mentors

• Funds for operational expenses

We would like to work with companies and institutions that aim to share their best practices and real use cases about sustainable solutions. 

We will be honored to cooperate with GoldStandard founded by WWF that launched the best practice standard for climate and sustainable development interventions. We would like to share their knowledge in our knowledge hub for our members. 

We are also open for other partners who could share their best practical solutions.