mtranzambetti

All of the stats about likes from the third party focus only on influencer profiles — I wonder how removing like count has affected and will affect an average user's engagement.

I think Starbucks was founded in 1971, but I do agree the visuals for Nature's 150 year anniversary page are beautifully executed.

> “On the question of burning in the Amazon, which in my opinion may have been initiated by NGOs because they lost money, what is the intention? To bring problems to Brazil”

He is making dangerous claims without evidence while failing to acknowledge his role in encouraging illegal logging in the first place. Bringing problems to his own country and the planet. >:-(

Wren co-founder here — we ask for your email so we can send you a report on your footprint (if you choose) or come back to the onboarding flow later. We're spinning the calculator out into an open resource soon though!

Finally, we just started two months ago and have not sold user information to ad companies nor do we ever plan to. That sounds like an evil and unnecessary way to go about not accomplishing our mission.

> I'll assume you are a woman.

Why are you assuming this person is a woman? What does that have to do with your point about prostitution reducing shootings?

> sexual abstinence is compared to "going out with a loaded gun."

Also what does legalizing prostitution have to do with reducing sexual abstinence? Color me confused.

Hi! Thanks for putting in the time to respond to so many of the comments on this thread! You've all been in this space for so long and it's really valuable to hear your perspective.

>Beware b2b with large corporates

Just a note on b2b, we aren't going after large companies. Right now we are just responding to inbound interest from users who want to offer Wren as a benefit to their employees. We don't do offsets in scopes 1 through 3 because we're focused on individuals, and as you said there are 20+ incumbents who have been doing this for over a decade, and much better than we can right now.

>Don't think you're different, special, better... that "it's different this time"

I don't think we're under the illusion that we are special. We are only trying to build a good product to get individuals engaged who haven't been reached before. We are also not trying to put down any organizations that are already offering offsets to individuals by building Wren. I don't think we're going to get anywhere by competing internally when the vast majority of the world doesn't know what can be done on an individual basis to take action, whether that's lifestyle changes, political action, activism, offsets, etc. We are here to contribute, not take away from or hurt the space. Whether it's changing our organization structure, margin, projects we're working with, whatever it is, I'd love to hear from you about what you think we should be doing better. Please email me at [email protected] if you'd like to continue the conversation!

Hi! We are still reading replies, though a couple days late as well. That's a great point and something we're planning on doing — We're going to spin out the calculator to be its own tool separate from the sign up flow soon. We can keep you posted when that's up!

If you want to try the calculator now but don't want to use your email, you're free to use a fake email. You can change it to your real email if you do decide to create an account after calculating your footprint :)

Related: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/7/17/20698271/faceapp-pri...

"The panic about FaceApp’s old-person filter isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just tinged with xenophobia and devoid of context."

Nice plug! Reminds me of this ask from Tobi Lütke at Shopify but with wind + solar credits: https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1148376688423854080

Here's the info on how we built it — Landon posted about this a few hours ago:

> We use data + research from Berkeley's cool climate lab (https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/publications) The main model is maintained by them, and is based on linear regression from a bunch of lifestyle variables that you input into the calculator. Our version is slightly different because we base it on country instead of zip code, so we scale most input variables by the country's per capita emissions to get a good estimate.

Some of the data might be a little tricker to find but most of it is based off of Cool Climate's model + World Bank per capita emissions data. Let us know if we can help with anything here!

Ivy walls are very beautiful. Might be hard to do at scale + also apparently difficult to maintain but I wouldn't know

We're big into tree planting :)

Super cool ideas here. It'd definitely be fun to offer consumer level carbon capture tech, but the main reason we're starting with established project partners is that they have verifiably offset carbon.

Can you elaborate on how this is a better startup idea than funding projects that are fighting climate change at scale? Curious to hear your thoughts.

Yes, we've spoken to many (i.e. UC Berkeley's Cool Climate, Nori, and Pachama) who have deepened our understanding of the space and inspired us to keep building. As it turns out, the best solution to climate change is divesting from fossil fuels entirely, but we will need a whole host of solutions that includes carbon sequestration and carbon removal — projects and technologies that individuals can fund. If you have anyone you think we should talk to, please send them our way!

Have you tried editing your footprint further in the accordion below the first six questions? There are options there to edit your diet, transportation, electricity etc. at a much more granular level (i.e. I eat meat twice a week). The first six questions have the greatest deltas between you and your country's avg, which is why they're first, but I see how the setup makes it confusing that you can go more in depth underneath. Let me know if you were able to get that to work!

> switching to electric car gave me another 10%. IIRC that's making some big assumptions (not considering electricity costs, lifetime emissions, state electric emissions).

Are you talking about not considering electricity costs for manufacturing an electric vehicle or more generally for your personal footprint?

Might be helpful to note that our previous calculator set up was much more state specific (to postal code level) but we had to switch up the setup so it could accommodate for international users. Our breakdown is still based on the Berkeley Cool Climate model (https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/publications) but scaled by a country's per capita emissions (data from World Bank). Unfortunately that means there's less granularity on region specific data for the U.S. for now, but it should still be a pretty good estimate. That said — there's still plenty of improvements that we can make to the calculator, so thank you for the feedback.

Oh, I like the idea of competition on a country basis. Maybe showing your percentile in your country could work. Let me know if you have any other ideas here!

For the fake emails, from a product perspective it was more confusing for people to enter in their emails after calculating their footprint than right upfront. It might have been the way we had it set up or something but we can come back to explore what can be improved there. For now if folks want to calculate and leave without a way to get back to their footprint calculations or offset their footprint, it's fine to leave a fake email. If users make it to the create account page, they're able to confirm their email or change their fake email there. :)

Ideally we're going to make the calculator completely open to use, but for now it's still in our onboarding flow until we get around to spinning it out into a separate tool.

Satellite imagery is definitely very powerful, and we're including it in updates for the rainforest protection projects. We'll look into providing that when we have reforestation projects :)

Here's a tweet from a user with a satellite image update from the Tech-enabled rainforest protection project we're working with: https://twitter.com/crabbyafrica/status/1144332819969105920

Mimi from Wren here:

1. You can change info about your transportation habits + electricity usage in the footprint breakdown below the first six questions. Those top level questions have the largest impact on the delta between your country's avg and your footprint, but you can go more in depth below to account for diff between if you live in an urban, suburb, or rural area.

Does that answer your q? I'm not sure if you are asking for more specificity on your footprint overall or just the housing section.

2. Good point. We're improving the electricity section of our calculator to account for renewables and other specific energy setups. Will keep you posted when that's up.

3. (Yay indeed!) All of the initial values pre-populated in the accordion below the first six questions are actually averages from your country. It might not be clear right now since the values appear somewhat random and also disappear as soon as you enter in your own information, but we can have those values persist and show specific deltas between you and your country / world for each question if that's helpful.

4. We're setting up those links so it's easier to get back to your information in the calculator! Also, we have the cost to offset your footprint appear a page later once you choose your project. Wasn't sure if you hadn't made it to that step or just want that information in the footprint overview link as well.

Hope that's helpful, thanks for the feedback.

Oh great to know. We recently added in support for metric conversion and weren't familiar with the standard for mpg to metric. We'll change that!

Oh got it. Yes, we'll add in an ability to checkout with debit via an IBAN / Paypal soon. Will keep you posted!

Oh perfect. We're using Stripe and accept Debit Cards currently. The credit card wording we're using is pretty confusing, we'll change that!

Mimi, Wren co-founder here. What payment methods are most convenient / common for you?