Buy with Impact
A carbon-offsetting credit card with a real business model.
- Role
- Co-founder · acquired
- Period
- 2017–2020
- The work
- Vision, strategy, product management, marketing, sales, growth
The story
Our goal was to make a positive environmental impact as simple as swiping a card. It began as a pivot from Lake Finance and explored merchant-funded rewards, insurance products and green investing. Buy with Impact was acquired by a top-10 bank.
It was the hardest thing I had done at that point, and a rewarding one for the team and the environment.
From the résumé: Designed and built mobile-first climate-fintech experiments around merchant-funded rewards. Buy with Impact was acquired by a top-10 bank.
How we won
- Test concepts with Instagram campaigns before writing a line of code. It built a waitlist fast and sharpened the message.
- Calling something “the first” was too risky for some investors and for consumers.
- People’s footprints barely change month to month, so a marketplace that shifts behaviour slowly worked best.
- Let people direct rewards to CO₂ offsets, planting trees or a digital wallet.
- Monetise through merchant partners moving ad spend to us, and margin on offsets. Acquisition cost was roughly $6 per signup.
- For a financial product, building trust (the brand) mattered more than building features.
Validate demand before building.
Early Instagram campaigns tested concepts before we built anything, at an acquisition cost of roughly $6 per signup. Buy with Impact was later acquired by a top-10 bank.
A historical acquisition cost I reported at the time, not a current campaign result.
From the design files.
As originally published on rishabh.ca. Select an image to open it full size.
