Sanchali Pal, Founder and CEO of Joro, joins ChedHER to discuss how her app can help users track, reduce, and automatically offset the carbon footprint of their purchases, and gives advice for other women seeking careers in climate.

chedHER

This Female-Founded App Helps You Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

joining us now is essentially Powell Founder and Ceo of Goro essentially break down how this war app works. Thank you so much for having me. Yes. So with the Douro app you can connect your credit or debit cards and see the carbon footprint behind every purchase, how it works is say you spend $30 at the gas station, we will take the carbon intensity per dollar of gasoline and the price of gasoline in your area to estimate the carbon emissions behind that purchase and we do that for every type of purchase you make. Once you see the emissions behind every purchase will give you real time insights just like you would get in a budgeting app on where your carbon comes from and tips for how to reduce it often, which saves money. Um, and for all the emissions you can't avoid, you can subscribe to carbon offsets that we vet and curate for you to automatically offset the rest of it. So before you were creating D'Oro, you were tracking your own carbon footprint. But you were using a massive Excel spreadsheet. Why did you decide to create this app? Well, when I started tracking my carbon footprint, I realized energy is really embedded in everything we buy from the food we eat to how we travel to even the clothes we buy everything that requires resources and ultimately fossil fuels may have a carbon footprint. So it's almost impossible to track everything manually. It took me forever to be inputting everything I did in the day or everything I purchased and calculating the emissions behind it. But by doing that, I started to get a sense of the choices that mattered most. For instance, if I cut down my meat consumption from almost every day to just one day a week, I was having an impact like taking half a car off the road every year so I could find the choices that really mattered, the ones that were achievable to me and make a difference. And slowly I lowered my carbon footprint by about 30% over a couple of years, but it was too difficult to try to get anyone else to do or even for me to do for more than a couple of months or a couple of years. So I started thinking about, there's gotta be a better way, an easier way to democratize access to this kind of data. So it's just as easy to understand your carbon footprint as it is to budget or to understand calories. Um, so I started thinking about how could we build a tool that does this automatically. Just as you're talking, I was just running in my head all the things I've purchased and ordered over the past week and just thinking about the carbon footprint of that, Do you have any tips on which activities tend to have a larger carbon footprint and maybe things we could avoid there. It's really interesting because our carbon footprints as people can be split into sort of five categories, there's your food, your travel, your shopping, your home energy and then your finances and each of those areas, you probably have a carbon footprint and for many people, they're all relatively significant. But within each category there's things you can do. So I mentioned eating plant based, just one really significant one. When you're shopping, shopping secondhand or just shopping less and more intentionally can be really, really helpful. We try to help provide tips on how if you're going to shop e commerce vs. In person, when should, should you do one versus the other to be more sustainable. Um, at your home, you can switch your utilities to clean energy. A lot of people don't realize that even if you can't install solar at your house, your utility provider might have an option to go renewable. It's just a one time action And then within your finances thinking about where you bank and even your cryptocurrencies often have a pretty large carbon footprint. Now when you first tried to raise funding, every investor you pitched said, no, what did you learn from that experience and what drove you to keep going? A lot of women could actually use advice on this. It was really challenging. I'm a solo founder. Female founder. First time founder, I had a lot of benefits and a lot of support, but also I was doing something completely new. So there's a lot of learning. Um, I think that first initial set of pitches hearing no was really hard. But what allowed me to keep going was centering in my conviction of the user problem I was solving. I spent about a couple of weeks feeling really dejected and upset and um like the external validation was was everything. But then I realized the external validation shouldn't be confused with the market need. So really centering in the user problem, going back and talking to the users, understanding the size of the market I was serving and re centering in that conviction that the problem I was solving was big. There's a huge market here, really big business opportunity that's what allowed me to keep going and what advice do you have for women who want to get involved in climate, but they just don't know where to start. It's such a hard problem. I started feeling really overwhelmed. There's, you know, the climate crisis is happening, but it's so overwhelming and where do you start? I think the first thing I would say is to center in your own power, understand household consumption does influence 65% of global emissions. So the way we spend our money is one of our greatest tools on a daily basis based on something we already do to have an impact. Think about what are the resources you already control, who are the people that you influence and then focus on the choices that matter most. That's where d'oro can help. You can't do everything you have to give yourself a little grace. but focus on a couple of big things you can change that will make a big difference. And then for everything you can't avoid there's offsets for now but be careful about where you purchase them because not all offsets are created equal. You can invest in projects around the world that reduce and remove carbon and you want to be really confident in the ones that you support. Um so we can help do that betting for you. Um but really centering in the resources and the people that you do influence is a great place to start when you're tackling the climate crisis. Now real quick before we go, what's in store for the future of Doro and what impact has Dora had to date? Well we just went through and released our 2021 carbon urine review. We found that the average user on jara lowered their emissions by about 21%. If everyone in the U. S. Did that we'd have an impact like taking every car off the road and shutting down 40% of coal plants. So that's really significant. Also our averages are saved about $3,000 just by shopping less and shopping more sustainably. So that's pretty exciting. Um And in terms of where we're going, we are launching in Canada next month. So that's exciting. Currently the apps are only available in the US so will be available in Canada in february and we're working on making our estimates even more accurate and even more actionable, giving people more tangible, easy, quick wins to get started with. Well, thanks system, charlie paul founder and Ceo of boro coming up, we break down everything you need to know about reaching your financial goals this year.