Mission First - Entrepreneurs for future

In this Best of episode from the Mission First Podcast, Kimberly Breuer, co-CEO and co-founder of Likeminded, shared her experience about pivoting from B2C to B2B.

Learn how potential customers can validate your product, the challenges and joys of pivoting, and the hard lessons learned along the way. Kimberly shares her experience of rebuilding a product from scratch, the significance of finding product-market fit, and the complexities of transitioning from founder-led sales to a scalable sales machine.

Listen to the full episode to learn💡 How to build a successful mental health company based on data and machine learning 💡

In the episode:

- How the idea of Likeminded was born?

- How they decided to have 4 people co-founding the company

- What helped them make the decision to pivot from B2C to B2B after a year into the business?

- What’s it like to pitch a non-existent product

- When do you know you found a product market

- The benefits of being data-based

- How to choose your set of data you collect

- The hardest part about machine learning setup in a company

- OKRs and how they help to keep you focused

- From founders sales to global sales

- Short vs long-term benefits when launching a business

In this Best of episode, Timothée Parrique, PhD in economics specializing in degrowth and post-growth theories, shares his view on the impact of wealth on political decisions and environmental policies, strategies for building democratic pressure to enforce corporate responsibility on environmental issues and the importance of equitable resource distribution during environmental and economic transitions.

Listen to the full episode to learn whether economic growth is necessary to overcome inequality, the differences between degrowth and recession, and how entrepreneurship can align with environmental goals.

How do you build a hardware company that not only generates immediate revenue but also creates a lasting, positive impact?

How do you bring investors on board?

How do you build an international team of A-players in Research & Development, Data, Marketing, and Sales?

The answers in this episode.

Morfo restores large-scale forest ecosystems, with the help of drones and an innovative method.

With a single drone, they can process up to 50 hectares of forest imagery per day and plant 180 seed pods every minute, even across steep and difficult-to-access lands like rainforests.

But it is not just about planting trees. They make sure to have local participation in their projects, so far, they’ve involved more than 1,000 people. Morfo is building sustainable livelihoods for the most vulnerable communities of this world.

🌳💪 In just a year, their first project went from a vegetation cover of 0.3% to 42%, by planting 15 different species, all native to the region! 600 Hectares of forests in restoration in 3 different places.

Their mission is to restore, by 2030, 1M hectares of rainforest, which means planting 1.2 Billion trees, with their innovative solution.

To achieve that goal they:

- raised 4M of seed round in November

- have built a team of 31 people across 2 continents

Pascal Asselin, co-founder and CEO of Morfo shared his insights on:

- How to find financial models that make investors interested in the company

- Short-term revenues with long-term forests: Working two time horizons at the same time

- Projecting into markets with gigantic potential: low risk, high reward

- How to build credibility with science as a foundation

- How to build a solid, experienced and trustful leadership team

- The “sharing is caring” concept and how this helps to better understand your company’s mission

- How OKRs help to define a clear common vision

- How to optimize people management, when you have operations in several locations

- How to make sure you have both sustainable and social impact and involve local communities

In this Best of episode, Tessa Clarke, co-founder & CEO of Olio, shares her experience fundraising as a female co-founder. Learn from Tessa's experience about the challenges that female founders face and how she managed to overcome them.

Listen to the full episode with Tessa to learn also: How to define a new business model and grow a food sharing app

Only 15% of old phones get recycled.

And that’s not the biggest problem. 

When you get your new phone in your hand, most of the harm has already been done. 70 - 80 % of the phone’s footprint is in the making, not in the usage.

If we use our phones longer, less resources are needed for their production. And there will be less electronics waste.

But how do you design a phone for circularity and longevity?

Fairphone managed to create and grow a phone company with a circular and fair model:

• A phone easy to repair

• 100% electronic waste neutral

• Made in fair factories

• Repairable, sustainable, ethically sourced

It all started with a campaign back in 2011.

Bas van Abel, founder of Fairphone, was raising awareness around conflict minerals and mining practices in the electronics industry. 

They came up with the idea of a made-up, non-existing Fairphone.

People loved the concept so much: they got 30,000 people on the pre-order list.

That first year Fairphone made a turnover of 16M euro. They became the fastest-growing technology start-up in Europe.

Fairphone was officially launched in 2013 and today they have:

- 40M euro turnover

- sold 500,000 Fairphones

- released 5 phone versions

- 150 employees across the world

Listen to the episode with Bas van Abel, founder, board member, and ex-CEO of Fairphone, to learn How to balance a sustainable mission with a profitable business model, while taking care of your health as a founder

In this episode you will learn:

- How to operate a circular business model and make it fair

- How Fairphone found their product-market fit through campaigning

- What conflict minerals are and the complexity of the supply chain needed to make a phone

- How to make the supply chain as fair as possible

- How they managed to set up the Fair Cobalt Alliance

- What makes Fairphone fair?

- How to create a business model that supports a longevity mission and is profitable at the 

same time

- How to move from an old to a new reality through the theory of change and set impact milestones

- How steward-ownership can help to have a healthier relationship with your stakeholders

- When is the right time to raise VC

- How to hire a management team

- How Bas went into a big burn-out and how to take care of your personal health as a founder