Make Sunsets Monthly: A Year Flies

[We originally sent the following to our mailing list subscribers 10/31/23. Added to website 11/10/23.]

Revenue: $2,915 ($1,471 MRR)
Burn: $46,077
Cash In Bank: $866,055
Runway: ~20 months

We’ve been in business just over a year, and it hasn’t been boring. In addition to the ~5kg of SO2 our customers have allowed us to put into the stratosphere, we’ve played an important role in moving geoengineering from “crazy scifi” into “practical necessity.” This transition has happened faster than we thought it would: founders of a major environmental activist group are calling for geoengineering, and a major investment bank has “geoengineering becomes mainstream” as a climate investing forecast. Now we just need to scale up ~1.7B times and not run out of money in the process;)

We learned several “ways to do it wrong” this month on return-to home. 1 of 4 attempts to fly an off-the-shelf parachute worked… and even that one resulted in a tangled mess.

Modified RC planes are the leading contender so far for return-to-home telemetry vehicle. This month, we’ll up the altitude with at least 3 flights released from drone.

Extra spend because we geared up for major new tests: we have all large gear we’ll need to work on the first phase of localized cooling. Initial experiments are designed, and we will have some basic results by end of month.

Andrew conducted 20 "website visitor who didn't purchase" interviews and learned we need to do a better job at communicating:
1. How Make Sunsets can scale deployments.
2. That purchasing Cooling Credits is legal.
3. That we are willing (and eager!) to collaborate with researchers. 

Andrew has also been working on reducing CAC and increasing conversion rate by testing various landing pages and ads. Half the month was spent creating landing pages and testing various Google Ads. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough data to get a clear picture of CAC. Via Google Ads we spent $2,530 and got one conversion. This will improve dramatically in November: we’ll hit 10 purchases from ads with CAC of $200 or less. And, we’ll hit corporate buyers: Andrew will meet with at least 10, converting at least 1.

1 cool year and hundreds left to chill,
Andrew and Luke