This Founder Broke Multiple Records On Germany’s Shark Tank

Chris Kaiser

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Published: September 6th, 2022

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Chris Kaiser

Founder, Click A Tree

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Click A Tree

clickatree.com

from Radolfzell am Bodensee, Germany

started June 2018

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Hi, I’m Chris Kaiser, Founder & CEO of Click A Tree.

We run one of the world’s first “Impact as a Service” platforms. So if you as a business or as an individual truly want to make a positive impact on our planet, you simply sign up with us - and we take care of things.

Then we help you to market the heck out of your impact to ensure everyone profits from this - including you and your business.

The process is as simple as with any SaaS: Create a free account, select subscription, and done. Don’t forget to pat yourself on the back - you just helped make our planet a better place.

To date, we have planted over 160.000 trees, created over half a million square meters of forest, stored thousands of tons of CO2, and secured hundreds of jobs for people in less privileged regions of our planet.

Last year, we made a multiple-record-breaking appearance on the German “Shark Tank” with our travel brand B’n’Tree, blew away millions of TV viewers and convinced 4 out of the 5 sharks to invest in us.

What's your backstory and how did you get into entrepreneurship?

I had never planned to be an entrepreneur. Nor do I have anyone in my family running their own business. But, as they say, “life happens”. And, usually, life happens for a reason.

As a travel addict, I always loved exploring new corners of the world. After finishing my A-Levels and backpacking for two years across Australia I decided to study tourism. Working in places where other people went on vacation - what else to wish for?

Between 2012 and 2017 I lived in Thailand for five years, working in close contact with elephants. Their biggest problem is the loss of habitat due to deforestation. Hence I decided to start planting trees, so these gentle giants would have somewhere to live. Can’t be that hard, can it?

I partnered up with various tourism companies like Expedia, Skyscanner, Booking, etc, and negotiated that I’d earn a commission for every sale I’d refer to them. I built a super basic WordPress website, and off I went to market it online via social media groups.

The process was as simple as it was powerful: The only thing travelers had to remember was to visit first, then select the booking platform of their choice and place their booking. The booking platform would then remunerate me for my referrals. Classic affiliate marketing.

And then I took that commission and invested it into planting trees.

When I returned to Germany in 2017, the bureaucrats were like “Hey, you’re running this website, and you’re generating money with it. That’s what we call a “business” - and you need to register that.”

And - boom - suddenly I was an entrepreneur.

Take us through your entrepreneurial journey. How did you go from day 1 to today?

Setting up a website, agreeing on affiliate partnerships, then investing the commission into planting trees?

Yes, I agree: It’s sensationally simple. Nonetheless, nobody else was doing that, hence I received massive attention on social media. People loved this incredibly easy way to help make their travels a little more sustainable.

My current investor loves to call it “incremental innovation”. Merge two existing things, or make an existing thing incrementally better - and there you have your innovation.

The beauty of incremental innovation: It helps you go to market super fast. It took me a week to build my website (I had no clue about building websites back then!), and there I had a URL link I could share with friends, family, and social networks.

Fun fact: This basic website made me famous enough to get invited to Germany’s Shark Tank! (Yep, they approached me. That’s the power of creating an impactful business that people want.)

Learning: Go to market as fast as you can! Yes, your website will be ugly and your product not perfect. But you have something people can try - and then they give you feedback.

Take that feedback and improve your product. That way you can be sure you’re creating something the market wants.

And that’s all you need to be successful: Create something the market wants.

The second benefit of this approach: It’s unbelievably cheap.

Shared Wordpress hosting costs 50 USD a year, domain included. (I used Siteground - fantastic customer service!)
Organic marketing on social media is free.
Email marketing for startups is free. (E.g. up to 1.000 subscribers on MailerLite.)

As soon as you generate sales you can scale up your tech stack.

And that’s what we did after the Shark Tank broadcasting: Suddenly we were truly famous. I remember having people approach me in a restaurant like “Hey, you’re the elephant man who’s planting trees, right?” It was weird.

But it generated lots of buzz and tens of thousands of new trees. And it got us the attention of seriously big companies, like Allianz insurances, Ernst & Young, the Best Western hotels, etc.

As affiliate marketing can be very resource intensive, we expanded our business model to offer “Impact as a Service”. So a company like Allianz now plants one tree for every contract they sell in Germany.

Or for a particular contract. If e.g. they want to sell more car insurance, they incentivize their clients by planting 3 trees for every new car insurance. Clients love this marketing gimmick.

And it’s a sensationally long-lived marketing tool since trees grow slowly and steady. So Best Western contacts their clients along the lines of “Hey, you stayed with us 6 months ago, and planted a tree with that. Check it out: This is how big your tree has grown already. Now it’ll be transferred from the tree nursery out into the field to grow even further.

By the way: We just launched our new autumn specials. Why don’t you book with us again? We’ll plant another tree for you, and then your current tree has a friend to grow up with.”

Great storytelling goes a long, long way. And clients love receiving these kinds of emails instead of a dull “Hey, here are our new offers. Book now to get 10% off.”

And, again, we’re always listening to what our customers have to say. Since many of them asked for a more transparent way to showcase their impact stats, we now launched the Universal Impact Platform in the spring of this year.

All clients have their impact dashboard, where they can see exactly how many trees they planted, how much CO2 they store, how much habitat for animals they create, how many jobs they secure, etc. With a single click of your mouse, you can share these stats with your networks - and delight your clients by showing them what they impact by purchasing your products.

Just to be clear, let me repeat this: Listen to your clients. Then continue building a product that the market wants.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Click A Tree has always been profitable since we keep our overhead as tiny as possible. We don’t do paid ads, for example.

Our goal is to maximize our impact worldwide. That’s also why we continuously reinvest all the profits we make, e.g. by creating new projects.

So if, due to the economy of scale, our prices per tree drop by another 20 cents, instead of decreasing our sales price we rather invest that additional money into a new project.

As a result, we’re now supporting an entrepreneurship school in Ghana. Unemployed young people here learn how to create a better future for themselves. It’s a much-treasured added value to our clients since now they’re supporting both ecological and social sustainability, both in the same run.

In the Philippines, for every tree we plant we collect 1kg of plastic from the ocean. And so on.

In total, we’re now supporting all 17 Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations.

This, again, offers a brilliant added value to our business partners: Busy executives don’t have to discuss any longer whether they should plant trees, build a school or collect plastic from the ocean as part of the ESG strategy. They simply use Click A Tree - and get an all-inclusive solution. It saves them a ton of time and headaches.

And that surely is another important learning from my entrepreneurial journey: Save people time. It’s the most valuable resource we all have.

If you can save people time and stress, they’ll love you for it. And that’s what you want your customers to do, right?

Going forward, we will build on this even more. We introduced subscriptions a few months ago, helping people across the globe to truly save the planet on autopilot. Set and forget - and every month you’re contributing to a fairer, healthier planet.

We now want to build integrations for Shopify, WooCommerce, and other e-commerce systems, to ensure “good simply happens”, no matter where in the world wide web you’re shopping.

We’ll launch our affiliate program at the end of this year. So you can make money by promoting the planting of trees. If you’re interested - get in touch.

We’re also planning to grow our core team in 2023. And we’ve just started the certification process to become a B Corp - the probably highest ethical standard a for-profit company can achieve.

The current goal is to plant 1 million trees - and we have that on the roadmap for 2023.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Becoming an entrepreneur is one of the best things that ever happened to me. Every day I learn a huge lot.

My 3 key learnings:

Ask for help. Honestly, openly, often. There are millions of people out there who are keen to help you, e.g. by making an introduction or offering feedback. Make use of that.
Be grateful and stay grounded. Nobody likes arrogance. Be grateful that you have the means to embark on such an exciting journey to become an entrepreneur. But always remain respectful towards others - not everyone can afford the luxury to start their own business.
Do good. Nobody needs yet another dropshipping company moving useless stuff from China to the West. Start a company that has a deeper meaning and that helps make our planet a better place. Our planet needs that. But also you as an entrepreneur will need it. Times do get tough. And when they do, the best motivation is to know that you’re impacting something that is much, much bigger than your bank account.

Be open to learning. We all make mistakes. Many of them. Accept them. Learn your lesson. Move on.

If you can do that, close to nothing can stop you.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

The one tool I can’t rave enough about is our CRM: Streak.

It integrates directly into your Gmail account (and yes, we live 99% within the Google universe), and helps you keep track of all your leads, conversations, investors, and other things you’d like to keep track of.

The only thing I don’t like about them is that they never pay me commissions for raving about them so much. Ooooh, the trees I could plant with that…

For our email newsletter (which is awesome - sign up on here, and we’ll even plant a free tree for you to say thanks) we now use Sendinblue. We used MailerLite for years, and it’s a great tool to start with (plus they have amazing customer service!), but as we grew, Sendinblue now makes more sense. Especially how they handle multi-language emails is so much easier.

Our website is now hosted on DigitalOcean. Again, Siteground was a great start, but DO offers more flexibility.

If we do need freelancers, Fiverr or Freelancer.com do the job just fine. Freelancer.com offers a brilliant feature called “Contests”. It’s especially valuable e.g. for designs. If you need a new logo (or anything), simply describe your needs, set a price, and then all freelancers on the platform can compete for the price. You usually get dozens, if not hundreds, of different designs. Super handy if you’re not 100% sure what the result should look like.

Bonus: Productivity Apps

I’m an absolute nerd when it comes to productivity. If you truly want to be efficient, here are 3 apps you need:

RescueTime: What can’t be measured, can’t be improved, they say. Use RescueTime to track how you spend your screen time.

Evaluate the outcomes, then improve from there.
2. WordExpander (Word; Apple has TextExpander): Automatically creates words, sentences, or entire paragraphs that you often use. Massive time saver!

You set a shortcut, like “Wis”, and the app turns that into “WordExpander is a super sensational time-saving tool” - or whatever other phrases you often use.
3. Mouse gestures for Chrome: If you’re using your browser a lot, install a mouse gesture app. (e.g. swipe the mouse down to close the tab, swipe up to open a new tab, etc)

Not apps, but hugely helpful: Learn keyboard shortcuts. Improve your typing speed. Practice speed reading.

For more tips, connect with me and sign up for my LinkedIn newsletter “87 seconds” - every week there’s another high-impact productivity hack on there, in 87 seconds of reading time max.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

I’m a book person. Not sure why - I never got the hang of listening to podcasts. Some of the best ones are:

The Art of Thinking Clearly - Rolf Dobelli (helps to think clearly - valuable in any life situation)
The Art of War - Sun Tzu (thousand years old - yet still holds valuable advice, which you can easily use to scale a successful business (instead of winning a war))
The Personal MBA - Josh Kaufman (a true must-read for all aspiring entrepreneurs!)
The 4-hour work week - Tim Ferris (20 years old - but tons of great tips on how to run your business efficiently. (Beware - he often offers advice on how to build a dropshipping business. Don’t do that - see above. Nonetheless, you can use his ideas to create an impact business as well.))

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

I know, it sounds cliche, but: Do get started!

The majority of companies don't fail within the first five years. The majority of companies fail before they ever get started. Yes, you can hide in your basement for decades to develop the perfect product along with the ideal marketing strategy.

But no business plan ever survives the first contact with your customers.

So do get started. Build your MVP (which can be as simple as a one-page website!), then share it, collect real-life feedback, and develop from there.

Once you do get started, never be afraid to tell people what you’re doing. You’re building something great, so be proud of it and tell people - they’d love to know! (Since your startup is creating a massive impact and making our planet a better place, right?

Two tips on pitching yourself:

Create a 30-second pitch on “who you are”.

I even have each of my team members create and practice this pitch as part of the induction training. Every time they meet new people at a dinner party or any other social event they can immediately explain in clear, simple terms what they do - and why.

And that then often leads to “Oh, amazing - you should meet xyz”. Bingo.

Never tell people what you do. Tell them why you do it.

When I started out, I pitched myself as “I’m planting trees” - and people thought I’m a gardener or something.

When I changed that pitch to “I’m on a mission to plant 1 million trees to create jobs for people in less privileged regions of our planet and habitat for endangered animals such as elephants. Because I worked with elephants in Thailand for five years.”, it became a completely different ball game.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

While right now we’re not actively looking to hire for a certain position, we’re always open to truly motivated people who’d like to make an impact.

“Hire for attitude, train for skills” is our credo.

Bringing certain skills is, nonetheless, surely an advantage.

We mostly look for people skilled in marketing and sales, including graphic design, video cutting, or online lead generation.

In case you’d like to put your skills to good and impactful use: Don’t send us your CV. Send us a 2-3-minute video about who you are, why you want to help save the planet, and how you will enrich the Click A Tree team. (Stick to 3 minutes. I don’t watch videos longer than that. If applicants can’t follow one simple guideline, we’re not a good match.)

Further details on; Emails to [email protected].

Where can we go to learn more?

If you and your business want to make an impact, visit the website.

And please: If you do have any feedback, thoughts, or comments: I’d love to hear them. Email me on [email protected], or connect with me on LinkedIn.

We’re always stronger together. (And, as you now know, we truly value feedback at Click A Tree.)