What is Building a Sustainability Startup Like?

What is Building a Sustainability Startup Like?

Sean: Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Tonight, we have someone here in the Philippines, his name is Joseph Werker, and he is the founder of humblesustainability.com. You might want to check that out because how I got to know him is actually by browsing this website and realizing that he is into the business of just getting your stuff. Stuff that you wouldn’t want to keep at home. And he repurposes them to be charity, to be given to someone who needs them, who wants them.

He’s half Welsh, half Dutch has been living here as an ex-pat in the Philippines for eight years. He’s passionate about impact in employment, abandoned children, and the environment – talk about charity. No vices, a hundred percent vegan, fitness fanatic, and daily meditator. Is there anything that is wrong with this guy? I don’t know. And we’re getting, we’re going to get to know that tonight. So Joseph, thank you for being here on the show.

Josef: Thank you so much for this opportunity. It’s a genuine pleasure.

Sean: Joseph, one of the first things that I usually ask my guests is the startup journey because that is one of the things that I find people super interested in, I am super interested in and I find that my guests are super delighted to tell us the story. So we’ll start with that. How did you get the idea of Humble?

Hey, you know, I want to do this startup just make help people declutter, and it is a pain point. Now that I realize it is a pain – I, you know, my wife wants me to declutter a lot of times, a lot of times. But it just ain’t happening. Cause I have better stuff to do. You know, and decluttering takes a lot of time and effort, and organization just hit us with this story.

Josef: I love it when I hear things like that because that reminds me that this really is something for everyone, right? We all have that, that pain point, look thank you again for having me on it’s a real pleasure. And to anybody who’s, who’s listening, it’s a delight that you’re actually going to sit down and listen to this British guy talk at you with this annoying accent coming across the screen, so thank you sincerely for that.

The story of Humble is an interesting one because. It’s not like there was one clear moment and then suddenly humble was here. Right. It was really kind of a series of events I would say. And it really started when I met my co-founder, which was three and a half years ago, Nina and we were both working for a different company and we met and we really realized that our values are extremely aligned.

And we really want to create something that was meaningful with genuine impact, but we just didn’t know where to start. And we felt that our impact was almost insignificant because we were just a couple of people. So that sort of stalled the practicality of coming up with an idea, even though we knew we had to create something. Even sustainability back then really wasn’t necessarily at the very front of our minds.

It was just creating impact in general. So then the years kind of went by a little bit and we got to the end of 2019. And Nina and I went on a trip to the UK to visit my family actually, went to see my family. I tried to go back once every year. See it has been more difficult recently, but I still have family back in the UK.

My mother happens to be a very active environmentalist. She’s actually a member of this group called extinction rebellion. Non-violent protest groups really encourage governments to take action on our climate emergency.

And I think she was probably the first real catalyst to show us like, okay, sustainability is really, not just a problem, but it’s an opportunity. And we saw that so many wonderful organizations out there trying to address this problem, you know. Greenpeace, extinction – so many, but not many of them were actually coming at it from a kind of solutions-driven, tech startup, positive points of view for consumers.

And we just thought that perhaps there was some opportunity there. So fill a bit of a gap that maybe there weren’t quite so many companies or organizations actually feeling, which is how do we create something which is extremely impactful and helps the planet, but it actually solves a more selfish individual problem for all of us as well?  Because then if we can do that, then surely more and more people will get involved.

And it’s essentially a numbers game. The more people who take small steps towards living sustainably, the greater impact we have and the greater chance that we have of actually achieving sustainability. So all of this sort of spiraled into one and, you know, we were thinking of what kind of idea can we come up with?

How can we do something towards sustainability startup? and Nina and she first came up with the idea of clothing, and kids’ clothing. And I’m sure you can probably identify with this, but kids’ clothes are very short in lifespan, right? And very quickly you buy and you spend on something new, and then you realize – okay, if I have a younger brother or a younger sister to hang this down too fantastic, then you get one use.

If you have 2, 3, 4 children and fantastic, even more use. But at some stage, that stuff is just going to go to waste. So she came up with this concept of really circular kids’ clothing and making sure that you know, how can we give one child’s clothes to another, once they’re finished using it and create this kind of circular ecosystem.

I heard this idea and just thought, why don’t we think a bit bigger, right? It’s not just children’s clothing that we’re not using properly and actually enjoying the rest of the lifetime, but it’s everything. We looked around. All of the clutter in our place looked at the plastic in the corner, the furniture that was kind of over here, but a bit dated, the clothes, the electronics, and realized what if we actually gave this service, which makes it extremely easy for someone to be able to declutter their home or office even, and give it a meaningful outcome, free of charge and will turn up when they want us to?

Because now we can come up with something which they really don’t even have a choice. It’s so easy and handed to them on a silver platter, to do something sustainably. That was the kickoff of humble. And then we just let the idea flow and develop into what it is today.

Sean: That is a very good story. And I love that you’re solving a real-world problem and have done something about it.

Now, would you agree with me when I say, it is, for now, something that is a work or a startup that is born out of passion and you’re funding it and you’re burning the runway?

Josef: Definitely born out of passion, that’s for sure. And a lot of resources and time and energy and blood, sweat, and tears, of course, goes into it.

And yeah. That’s really how most startups begin, right? You really need to be the one to sacrifice as much as you possibly can, whether it’s money, whether it’s time, like whatever it may be, or just free time to yourself, that you don’t have anymore, but that’s why we do it. Right. I don’t think anyone who is not purpose driven should even go into the startup world.

I think it’s really a priority that needs to be at the front of your mind if you’re even going to consider becoming a founder because even after year one and year after year two. And I’ve got founders who are friends of mine, they’ve been founders for years 6, 7, 8, even then they’re still definitely not seeing any of the joy in it, still much of the pain, but I think that’s actually part of it. Right?

It’s like we kind of start to start up with lots of people thinking, maybe it’s that end goal in mind that I want to chase after all of that sacrifice at the beginning. But then ultimately you realize it’s like life, it’s actually the journey itself that you need to then appreciate and to love and then to enjoy the process.

But yeah, not denying it. Has it been tough? For sure, and we’re just at the very beginning of our journey.

Sean: As of now, are you funding it on your own? Do you have a monetization model?

Josef: We funded everything ourselves so far. We bootstrapped it all the way. We’d have very recently came out of a program called Idea Space, which is the accelerator here in the Philippines.

And they partnered with Google for startups as well for the last year, which is fantastic. We got access to all of these wonderful resources and of course, such an exciting name to even be associated with. Right. And we entered that back in January 2020 and over a full year, we went through, I dont know, how many rounds, seven or eight sort of quite tough rounds of competition and brilliant accelerators.

And somehow amazingly ended up actually being named as one of the winners and the investors, which is just great, because of course we get a little bit of extra capital to use, to spend on the business so we can grow the team with that. So Idea Space are actually now, you know, they will be an investor if you like into humble.

Which is a kind of a wonderful reward for winning that program, but more than the investment, way more important than the investment is the learnings, the mentorship, the connections, and just, you know, we’ve grown as human beings. It’s really the experience of something like that which was really impactful.

But other than that, we’ve not seek outside investment as of yet, we might do at some point, depending on how the model looks like at certain stages. And if we really want to pour petrol on the fire and go a lot faster, But for now, I think it will be growing as we are for the next few months, for sure.

Sean: Humble is a very interesting startup because it’s something when I looked into it, and it’s so ironic because it’s all about sustainability and this is just me. This is just coming from a third-party perspective. I’m not the expert. I’m clueless on how you’re running things in Humble. I’m just wondering, like a sustainability business, how do you sustain the business? What’s the monetization model behind it?

Josef: Yeah, good question, right? Because often these things, they look very, like they might look flashy on the outside, but then, of course, it’s like well, how’s that actually going to survive, right? How’s that going to grow at the same time? And we had a decision to make at a very early point, which was, do we want this to be just a pure, you know, nonprofit social enterprise? Or do we want this to actually be a for-profit social enterprise? 

And we did think about it for a long time. Actually, this could have gone either way, but one of the reasons for going down the for-profit social enterprise group was actually some advice I got from a mentor who I look up to a huge amount.

And I remember him saying to me that a for-profit social enterprise is therefore interesting to outside investment. And if it’s interesting to outside investment, it can then get funded and then get access to different types of networks and partners, and communities, and connections essentially. And that is really the true way to grow with any kind of speed in order to proper impact and have access to millions of users instead of hundreds of thousands of users.

And this argument, I was kind of sold, actually. I kind of really saw that and it looks at different companies and looks at like, the Gates Foundation and all of these different, incredible elements, Google. I mean, the most impactful companies in the world may not all be charities, but they’re actually for-profit organizations that have done outstanding things for millions, even billions of people.

So that was why we went down that road. Then the actual model is it’s quite simple. So we don’t charge anything to the customer who declutters with Humble. So if somebody goes through our platform and they book a collection, we turn up at their doorstep for free and we take the items away and they book when they want, but we make money from what we do with the items.

So there’s a number of different monetization channels, if you like, some things will be purely just resold be to our B2B buyers. Then more excitingly; we have upcycling, which is sort of we’re in the prototype phase right now. And the upcycling model is we have these like wonderful Filipino artists, people like Jinggoy Buensuceso, Leeroy New, Maco Custodio who actually creating exclusive designs for Humble.

And then using those designs and the items that we collect, we then reproduce those actual products with the help of local communities, and then sell the final upcycled product to the end customer. Both B2B, but also potentially B2C through our own marketplace, which we’re looking to build later on this year.

So in a nutshell, that’s really a couple of the things we’re doing in terms of monetizing it. But of course not everything can be monetized, right? Which is actually another opportunity for more impact. So we partner with lots of charities who let’s say there’s a Philippine Toy Library or SOS Children, or whichever it may be who will actually just donate some of the items that we receive.

And of course, we don’t expect anything from that. So it’s an operational headache, as I’m sure you can imagine, but that’s essentially the model in a nutshell.

Sean: That’s amazing.