Singapore Bonanza: Finding your product market fit

MB:We learned so much from our mistakes that if I have to redo it again I’m willing to make the same mistakes.

JC: Hey there, welcome to today’s masterclass.

We’re going to have Mathias Boissonot, Founder and CEO of Handprint. Handprint is a social enterprise on a mission to help companies integrate their sustainability actions into their business processes. They do that through a platform operating on the blockchain.

We’re going to talk about finding your product market fit and building a product your client actually wants. We’re going to talk about how to leverage data to adopt a user-centric approach, and how to do that from Singapore, the hub of business in Southeast Asia. I hope you are as excited as I am. Mathias should be here any minute now.

Hey Mathias, how are you doing?

MB: Good good.

JC: Got your coffee.

MB: Thank you so much. Wow, cappuccino.

JC: Your favorite.

After we take that coffee, we climb to the Pinnacle. We’re going to have a nice view. And we can have a nice chat about how you build an awesome company and a product.

Mathias you can see here we are at the top of the Pinnacle. Pinnacle is what they call a high HBD here. So it’s a you know that’s the equivalent of the low-rent buildings in Europe. Now Indonesia is on this side and Malaysia is behind us. And all the tankers that are going to the port over there today.

Today I’d like to talk about Handprint with you. But more specifically to talk about how you build the company and focus a little bit on finding the right product market fit and where you bang your head on the product end, and what was the adventure of building a company and taking it to… almost series A, now!

Alright, Mathias let’s get into it.

Can you start maybe by telling us a little bit about who Mathias is and how you landed at a founding Handprint and what Handprint is about.

MB: Yeah sure. So I’m a system engineer by background. I arrived in Singapore six years ago in a consultancy firm. Then I became director of that firm, which was actually the branch of a French consultancy firm. So that was the Asian branch. And I started to do pro bono work for a non-profit organization, the Global Mangrove Trust, which at the time was developing a technology for crowdfunding of reforestation projects.

And I happened to found a company with the two directors of that NGO, so that’s how it started: good chemistry, a great team. So we decided basically to create a for-profit to commercialize the technology that was developed in that nonprofit.

JC: Awesome and we’ll get back to the non-profit getting into profit later. But can you tell us a little bit about what Handprint is about then.

MB: Handprint is a platform that enables companies to regenerate ecosystems as they sell their products and services. It basically enables companies to green up their business model and how do we do that? We enable two levels of transparency: one is on the cash flow and we are also quantifying exactly how much your contribution as a company benefits to the environment, in terms of carbon absorption, in terms of support to biodiversity, in terms of social impact. Everything is quantified and written in a public ledger that everyone can audit and everything is made transparent basically.

JC: You gave us the three years pitch of the company. Where did it start? What was the original idea, and what did you guys change on the way?

MB: The idea was to democratize climate action, in a way. We didn’t know if we would address a consumer market, a corporate market. We just wanted to democratize climate action. So we started by designing this platform that will be some kind of digital alternative to carbon credits, based on direct impact.

Basically, it means that anyone in the world or any system could automatically access that platform and compensate for some carbon emissions. And just to give you an example, basically the first product that we had in mind was an electric socket that you can plug between your fridge and the electrical power, that would connect to our platform and compensate for your carbon footprint in real time. But we actually stayed around those lines because what we actually do even now is democratizing access to climate action, in an automated way. That’s exactly what we do with the platform.

JC: So you kept the vision. Where did you bang your head and what did you have to change on the way? We had to define a market, first, if i had to rewind and do the story again, we would have been much faster in defining one single problem that we wanted to solve, with a single market, with a single audience. And this we didn’t do it in the beginning. So that’s why we had to pivot and to converge into something that is today a product that can be used mostly by consumer-goods companies that have e-commerce platforms so it’s we are niching a bit the audience. Today we have one vertical, one market. That solves one problem basically.

JC: Do you remember what were the triggers for that change? How did you realize that you were on the wrong path, or that you were in a no-go zone.

MB: We always had in mind “ok, what is the most scalable product we can build?” And by doing interviews and product discoveries with potential clients, it happens that the audience that we have in Singapore is very digital. So we happen to converge into a e-commerce plug-in
because it was solving a very specific problem. That was clear, that could be defined, with hypotheses that we could test. So that’s why we had this shift toward e-commerce.

JC: Any big screw-up you can remember any big mistake you guys made and you were like [sigh].

MB: Yeah yeah of course. [Both laugh] But I think it’s a learning experience right. So we learned so much from our mistakes that, if I have to redo it again, I’m willing to make the same mistakes.

So pace to product market fit, it’s not even done yet. Your product market fit is already in movement, like how do you adjust the pricing? How do you adjust your communication to address the right audience? How do you adjust the product so it serves the right audience as well?

But I think we could have been much faster on that with a much larger scale product discovery, so interviews of people etc. At the time we were only three, but now we’re 14. But with three, three people, three co-founders, it’s hard when you have things like fundraising, product market fit, communication, ideation, technology.

Mistakes, but i would say no regrets.

JC: So we’re talking about a company that proposes to plant trees on the blockchain. So it doesn’t really seem to fit. Why blockchain?

MB: So first of all, it’s not about planting trees. It’s about regenerating ecosystems.

What you can do with the platform is, if you’re a consumer good brand, you can align yourself with the interest of the planet. And why do companies want to do that, it’s because consumers care about it. So we see figures like companies that do care about the environment they grow three times faster, for example.

What we enable is to regenerate ecosystems and it can be planting trees for example, because they absorb carbon, and they are very good at fighting climate change. It can also be cleaning plastic from the oceans,replanting coral reefs. It can protect habitats of endangered species.

So it’s much larger. And why the blockchain? It’s because the fundamental problem that we’re trying to solve is transparency. How is the money used? And what is the exact benefit of your contribution to the environment ? And if there is no transparency, there is no trust. And with no trust, there is no scale.

JC: You just work with your friends, right?

MB: Yeah. So that’s why blockchain. And just to popularize the concept a bit, for people it’s still hard to understand what blockchain exactly is. What i can say is that we use blockchain
as a transparent and very secured database. It’s our back office basically where we record all the transactions.

This company is investing in 1000 trees, it’s there. Then it creates public accountability.Because it’s there on the blockchain, we, as a company, cannot even tamper with it. We cannot change what’s in it, unlike any other kind of database. So it’s mostly to create transparency, trust, and another side benefit I would say is that if Handprint tomorrow goes to bankruptcy, and disappears, the blockchain remains. Because it’s distributed among thousands of computers around the world, we have a copy of the database in every country in the world. So that’s also a benefit.

JC: I get why you’re on the blockchain now but how does it work to build a product on the blockchain? Where do you start?

MB: We use technologies to solve problems. The main problem we solve with blockchain is transparency. It’s inherent to the technology: it solves that. But for us it’s just a back office
technology. We’re not a blockchain company, right? We also use machine learning to analyze satellite images to automatically see what’s happening in the forest, how much it has grown.

For us, it’s just one of the tools that we use to solve problems and address a certain pain point in the industry. We know blockchain has a bad reputation in terms of the impact on climate.

JC: How do you manage to fit that into a company that offers to offset carbon emissions?

MB: So first of all, not all blockchains have a very energy-intensive process. So what you might refer to is maybe the most well-known, which is the Bitcoin blockchain. So basically the internal mechanics of that blockchain to validate a new data entry, which is called a consensus mechanism. This is what consumes a lot of energy for that kind of blockchain.

On our side, we use a blockchain that is very less energy-intensive. And on the other side, we also compensate 10 times what our operations generate. But our operations generate way less carbon than companies that address the same issues as us, but that are less digital, like consulting companies and so on. So when you compare, we’re actually emitting less and absorbing more.

JC: So continuing on this carbon offsetting trend. And you claim to minimize those fees so how do you actually do that?

MB: So in a typical project of reforestation, for example, that is going to absorb carbon. You have up to 80% of the fees that actually go to intermediaries, for verification, bank fees, consulting firms, that are like a lot of bureaucracy on top of that.

And what most of our competitors do is that they buy carbon credits in the voluntary markets, which are basically off-the-shelf projects. You don’t know what’s in it. It can be a bit of a reforestation project, can be a bit of support to solar panel farms and this kind of stuff. So they buy those things that are full of middleman cost basically.

So by using blockchain, we reduce up to 80% of that cost so that the entire contribution goes to the reforestation project. And we don’t make even a 1% margin, we make 0% margin.

JC: Okay and so how do you monetize?

MB: We monetize by creating value for corporations, with features, for example if they want some kind of advanced reporting on their carbon absorption, if they want to have pictures and videos of the ground, of their trees growing over time, this kind of stuff. So we’re trying to find the best ways of monetizing, adding value that we can bring.

We are not developing a technology to cut all the middlemen to be ourselves a middleman, you know.

JC: So you don’t sell carbon emissions, you sell value by offsetting the carbon emissions.That looks easy on the paper but how did you actually build that into not only the product, but the solution itself. Because it’s a wide and complex ecosystem, right?

MB: Yeah, it’s extremely complex. So there are basically two parts: the technological parts and the product parts. Both are extremely complex problems to solve for entrepreneurs. The technology part addresses the transparency issue in that industry,and the product part tries to find where is the perception of value from the market, from corporations.

What do they actually need? How do they they want to interact with their consumers on what they are doing good for the planet? So that we create value from the product, so that companies pay for it.

JC: What you’re saying is basically you’re cutting a lot of sources of revenue. Did you get any bruises on the way? Did you upset anyone? Did you get punched in the face? How do you convince the rest of the ecosystem that this is the right way to do it?

MB: There are lots of habits in that industry, so people, for example, always think that to be able to do something good for the environment, they first need to assess what they are doing bad,
which is called the footprinting, how much carbon they are emitting and so on.
On our side we know that and science says that if everyone is carbon neutral in the world, we are not going to solve climate change. What we need is planet positive companies and individuals and organizations, like states, and to achieve that, we need people to go way beyond carbon neutrality. We need people, we need companies to be 50 times carbon positive. And so we are developing a product that enables those companies to absorb much more carbon than what they are responsible for.

JC: Okay so you’re not buying what you consume or what you produce but you’re buying for the planet, and possibly much more than what you consumed.

A lot of what you’re saying is about data, right? Like I want to know how much i’m producing,
I want to know how much i’m offsetting, even though I’m not necessarily buying what I consume.
How did you leverage data to actually build a solution? And maybe how did you go about it? How did you set it up?

MB: We try to build products based on what is called empathy product development. So we try to put ourselves in the shoes of the consumers from the market we address. And we’ve tried to industrialize the consumer feedback collection.

So I will just give you an example, so on our SaaS platform, you have features on the interface, like for example: “click here to have access to more photos”. But it’s not even developed on the back end. What we do, it’s called a fake door. What we do is we track who is clicking on that,
when, what is the behavior, etc… So we have a very deep analysis of what is the perception of value and what people are willing to pay for, what companies are willing to pay for.

Willingness to pay is another very interesting problem, because what people say they are willing to pay and what people actually pay for are two different worlds. So we are setting up on our SaaS platform a betting system so that companies, when they reach a fake door, are encouraged to bet on what is the value of this feature. And we incentivize them to have a fair estimation by giving them incentives, like a cash prize or a free paid plan. So that they are incentivized to give what they think is the fair price, always based on consumer data. Otherwise we are building a Frankenstein out of nowhere that solves no one’s problem. So we always try to collect data at scale to build products.

JC: That’s super interesting but then jump back three years before. Like so now you explained it and it sounds very obvious, right? but like three years back, you look at your empty platform, you don’t have any users, you don’t have any data, how do you think about all this ? And how do you set it up? Where do you start? How do you kick off the data strategy and collection?

MB: At first we do things that don’t scale. So we set up zoom calls.

JC: YCombinator haha

MB: Exactly, but we set up zoom calls with potential customers, we do product discovery one to one over a coffee, and we watch people using the platform, and we collect feedback like this. So it’s a very time-consuming effort. But that was the first phase of our consumer data-collection phase, basically.

JC: Yeah and then from the insight that you got, then you’re starting setting up stuff?

MB: So we started building the roadmap based on this. And it’s funny because the features that we have today on the platform, I would say that 90% of them were ideas from the clients we first spoke to during the product discovery phase.

JC: So you talked about the empathy approach, and it’s really about data allowing you to be very user-centric, and build products that people actually want, and build features that people actually want, instead of just relying on your own ideas.

MB: Exactly yeah absolutely.

JC: I suggest that we move on to the last part of our interview where we talk about building a company in Singapore, with remote offices, and all this stuff, and see how you handle that.

You’re scaling up a company from Singapore. You have impact projects in Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar. Your tech is developed in India and France beyond Singapore. You have teams in Bangkok, clients in Australia. The company is all over the place from Day One. How do you build a company on those premises?

MB: So first of all, we are a software as a service company.So we tend to be geography-agnostic in the sense that any company in the world could just go to our website, subscribe and become part of the regenerative economy, thanks to Handprint.

In terms of how we built an organization that is all over the place and that is remote, I would say that it was very natural for us because we were born during Covid. So that’s one of the side benefits of being born during Covid.

We, from scratch, started like this. And so we had to set up an organization that would work that way, basically.

JC: Is there anything that you think is more challenging or like benefits of doing that, as compared to a traditional company, where everyone would be in Singapore. Maybe the most difficult part is to create a culture in the company. So we are lucky, because we are a mission-driven organization.There is already a strong culture in the company, but it’s very hard to spread that culture on a daily basis, because, you know, you don’t have the chit chat
in the morning, for a coffee.

Sometimes we realize that, for example, one month after our fundraising, one of our employees didn’t know that we fundraised. So we’re like, okay, how is that possible? This lack of communication. It comes basically from the fact that we are not speaking to each other physically in the same space, so it’s also a challenge.

JC: Coming back to what we said a little bit earlier. Handprint is a social enterprise, right? Social enterprise seeks to maximize benefits while maximizing the impact on society and the environment.

Talk about the triple bottom line. How do you optimize for three different bottom lines? and that links to what you were saying about hiring employees that are fitting the mission. How do you choose between a rock star marketing person and a rockstar marketing person that’s not as good but has a stronger purpose for instance?

MB: So to answer the first part of your question, I don’t think startups are about maximizing profits but about creating value, identifying that value and monetizing it.

JC: So it’s not a maximization of profit, but really like an adjustment to find the right market, at the right price. It’s about making money, not making as much money as possible.

MB: Exactly.

JC: And so we’re talking about driving a positive impact on society and the environment. Your thing is more like climate change so it tends to be more on the ecological impact. How do you embed the societal impact into that?

MB: Those two issues are actually extremely contingent. Basically, you cannot solve climate change if you’re blind to societal problems. So if you don’t address the social problems you cannot really address climate change. At scale, at least. So we’re trying to find ways to incentivize local communities over a period of 20 years to actually care for the forest, instead of seeing the forest as a potential resource and financial resource.

JC: What when they are big industrial groups that are doing that?

MB: There are limits to that, of course regulation has to play an important role, especially for big corporations. When big corporations are involved in deforestation for example. We are a part of the solution, I believe. The social problem needs to be addressed at the same time, otherwise I think it cannot work.

JC: The one thing you’re trying to crack at the moment?

MB: How to enter the offline retail market?

JC: And how do you go about it?
MB: We are doing a POC with a major brand with a QR code system that enables basically, consumers to make an action. When they scan the QR code, which is on the bottle, they trigger in real life the plantation of a tree or 10 kg of plastic cleaned up from the oceans.

And they can visualize this in an interactive map with pictures, with data, real-time metrics of what is their real impact on the environment.

JC: I think it’s a pretty cool use case. We’re getting to the end of our discussion.

Two things I’d like to ask you to close up. The one thing you’re excited about for the future of Handprint at the moment. What are you most excited about?

MB: Yeah so we are developing an API that basically enables any application, any website, any mobile app to integrate with Handprint. So that, for example, a very cool use case is with a major ride-hailing company that is going to integrate Handprint to compensate for the carbon footprint of all of their rides. So it’s a very scalable use case. So I’m very excited about that.

JC: The one advice you would give to Mathias three years ago. That’s a good one I would say: don’t be too impressed by all the theories about what it is to be an entrepreneur, what is it to… whatever. It sounds very cliche, but trial and error is the best way forward.

And use a scientific methodology, like having an hypothesis, testing that hypothesis and then learning from that in everything you do.

JC: Very cool seeing you. Thanks for sharing everything today and best of success to Handprint. we’ll see you in the Unicorn club soon enough.

MB: Alright. Thank you.

JC: Cheers.

Thanks for watching our pilot episode of the scaleup masterclass with Handprint. We’re now back to the studio. I would love to know what you think. So do reach out and tell us.

The topic of today “product market fit” is partially dear to my heart, since a lot of what we do at Co-Creation Lab is focused on helping companies find a solution to complex challenges. And for that we adopt a user-centric approach. Now here’s what I personally take away from this masterclass with Mathias:

-Stick to the why not to the how.

Have a clear vision of the challenge you want to solve but don’t get attached to your ideas. It will change with the rod blocks you meet on the way.

-Be a user addict.

Spend as much time as possible with your users. Build empathy with them to truly understand their needs and the problem you’re trying to solve inside out, from their point of view.

-Think big, start small.

Start by solving a small part of a very specific problem first and take it from there. There is no point trying to solve the most complex challenge on earth at once.

-Create real value.

Focus on creating value for your users so that they will want to pay for it. The key to monetization is here.

-Track, measure, analyze, repeat.

Find ways to assess the value you are creating. Set clear goals and track them precisely. It’s the data that will enable you to be user-centric at scale. Nothing else.

– Tech it easy.

Technology is just a tool that can power up a solution, not the solution itself. Always go back to your users and their needs. Then, identify what technology will help you get there. Not the other way around.

– Take it easy.

Don’t get distracted, or stressed out with all the buzz about unicorns out there. Try, iterate and repeat, until you find the sweet spot where your users actually fall in love with your product. That’s all that matters.

So that’s it. Thanks for joining us today and stay tuned for the next episode of our scaleup masterclass.

Like this video, share it, subscribe to get an update when the next one comes out. And hopefully we’ll see you soon in Singapore.