Team: Lena Renshaw (CAS ’25), Christopher Lee
About the Venture: Sustainab.ly is a SaaS platform that empowers university sustainability professionals by simplifying the tracking, reporting, and visualization of environmental data.
A: Sustainab.ly’s mission is to help sustainability professionals track, visualize, and report carbon emissions and climate data more easily. We use AI to parse through data to provide a rough outline of a sustainability profile for an organization, which the professionals can tweak and modify as necessary.
A: Chris and Lena met in high school and have been long-time friends and co-founders since then. Their first venture was an app called BujoInspo, aimed at helping people who bullet journal find interesting and inspirational prompts and designs. They’ve worked on several ventures since then but have both been drawn to working in climate, which is why they decided to create Sustainab.ly.
A: We are working with university professionals first, making sure our application is tailored to exactly their needs, before widening our scope. There is currently no product serving this market aside from traditional tools like Excel and Google Sheets, so we’re creating something to fill this gap.
A: We have been working on taking our product from zero to one in the NYU Entrepreneurs Challenge, and the structure of the program has really helped us do this. We’ve gained lots of feedback from mentors, coaches, and advisors, which has really helped us hone in on what is important to focus on for our venture, especially since we’re two co-founders not working full-time on this product.
A: Having a working MVP of our product has been game-changing. Both of us have software development backgrounds, so we were able to build out a working web application for Sustainab.ly in just a few weeks. This has helped us gain trust with customers and iterate on our idea much faster.
A: Our biggest challenge has been software sales! Neither of us have a formal background in software sales and it has been a lot of work transitioning our conversations with customers into sales calls in a way that seems genuine. We’re incredibly passionate about this issue and don’t want to lose trust with potential customers by pushing our software onto them. At the same time, we’ve created a product that has added a lot of value to customers’ lives.
A: Our most recent milestone was finishing our MVP web application and circling back to customers to show them what we’d built. We’d shown them wireframes and Figma demos, but to be able to show them the actual application has gotten the ball rolling with customer acquisition, which has been game-changing for our startup.
A: Participating in a program like the NYU Entrepreneurs Challenge has been incredibly valuable for us by providing some structure and guardrails for work progress. It’s also been great to get feedback from those outside of our network and discuss our business strategy with them. Working with one other person is amazing, but it can be helpful to hear other voices, especially as your startup is just beginning to gain traction.
