Tresure

Introduction
3 main concepts
Gamification Feature
Carbon footprint monitoring feature
Cashback and advertisement feature
business model

Get rewarded for greener choices.

Inspiration

Climate change poses a serious threat to ecosystems and the well-being of future generations. Given the severe global warming conditions, we believe that we can all do better, starting with changing our shopping habits. With economic incentives, visualization of personal carbon footprints, and gamification of the “shop greener” process, Tresure, is pushing people to shop greener and encouraging companies to reduce carbon emissions.

What it does

Cashback on green transactions

By partnering with companies with low carbon emissions, Tresure, acts as a platform to attract customers to buy greener products and to help customers earn cashback for each purchase from certified green companies. The cashback comes from a portion of the commission Tresure collects from certified green companies.

Visualize carbon footprints

With permission to access users’ transactions data, either by linking to their bank account or credit card transactions history, Tresure uses third-party APIs to convert users’ transaction data into carbon footprints. Tresure then organizes and visualizes personal carbon footprints to help users keep track of their habits of consumption and make better choices.

Gamification

In addition to changing habits to fight climate change, we want to introduce entertaining elements into our app to make the process more fun and enjoyable. Therefore, we decided to gamify greener shopping to attract more people to join. With every green purchase, we plant cute trees in the app to symbolize that the user is making better choices. We would like to add a feature integrated with the game for users to donate part of their cashback to grow a real tree in the future.

Personalized Advertisement

As an affiliate marketing partner of green companies, Tresure incentivizes companies to decarbonize by promoting their green products and improving their image through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) advertisement. This service will not only encourage companies to go greener, but also creates another channel of revenue for our platform. In the future, we plan to integrate with carbon measurement platforms like Watershed to power our company collaborations.

How we built it

We started by brainstorming potential solutions to encourage customers to develop greener shopping habits.Then, we did competitor research and analysis. We found some mobile apps that can help users track their carbon footprints, such as MyEarth and Green Karma. However, we noticed that the main problem is that most people do not have a strong motivation to track and reduce their carbon footprints. As a solution, we built flow charts and user journey maps along with a business model that provides economic incentives to encourage people to go green. After refining the business model, we used bubble.io, a no-code development tool, to build a prototype for our mobile app. For calculation of carbon footprints, we leverage Mastercard carbon footprints calculator API to convert transaction data into carbon footprint.

Challenges we ran into

Lack of data on companies' carbon emissions. We reached out to one of the sponsors Watershed, but they said that they cannot provide us with the database. We also found some online databases, but they are not free. We will need to pay in order to access these databases in the future, if needed. Lack of user transaction data. We will need to collect more user transaction data to test the compatibility of the third-party API with our app. Tracking the user transaction records through cookies needs to be done ethically, in partnership with the sponsor green companies. But, in order to present the shopping scenario for our users, we developed a prototype to mock the e-commerce website for Nike in our app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is our first time participating in a Hackathon and coming into this, we did not have a lot of experience in web/mobile application development. It is truly a fulfilling experience to learn the concepts of how to use the software from scratch and to produce an app by the end of the hackathon. We are confident that this is an idea that can create a huge impact on a global level as it uses economic incentives to drive the behavior of people to make positive climate-conscious choices!

What we learned

We got a great insight into the process of developing an app and building a prototype with the tools that are easily available on the internet. Using no-code development tools is a quick way to build a mobile app prototype. We also learned how to simplify seemingly complex ideas and to package them in an easily understandable and executable manner. We learned to look into the business aspects of our idea and come up with a revenue plan in a short amount of time.

What's next for Tresure

A deeper market research to understand how the companies can seamlessly implement this idea of a “green marketplace” would be necessary since bringing a change at this level would likely be met with uncertainties. We would conduct user interviews to understand how the experience motivated them to care more about the cause. We would try to see if there was a sufficient “hook” on the app that the users wanted to keep using it. Finally, we want to use a “lean method” to rapidly build a prototype and test it. One of the things to do would be to dive deeper into the technical details of integrating the app with public APIs and other large databases. Other things would be to redesign the backend of the game feature and make it more attractive. We would also lay some of the groundwork for the success of our application by seeking potential partnerships from green companies.