Click’n’Tree: The Right Founder for „Carita­lism“ #DHDL

Yes, the audi­ence was offered a lot of action before the summer break. And a topic that leaves no one cold.

With his company „Click’n’Tree“, founder Chris wants to help plant more trees. But unlike non-​profit orga­ni­sa­tions, which also have to rely a lot on volun­teer work, he wants to build a scalable busi­ness model out of it.

He started with an almost „classic“ affi­liate model in the travel sector: via the B’n’Tree website, users can go to various travel websites. If they then books something here, B’n’Tree receives an affi­liate commis­sion as an inter­me­diary. Unfor­tu­na­tely, these are not parti­cu­larly high in the industry, and so on average about 4 € per booking are paid out. Since the plan­ting of a new tree can be realised for around 3.50 €, the model is roughly sustainable, but it is easy to calcu­late that it will be rather diffi­cult to scale the model for the 50 cents that remain here on average.

That is why the founder has expanded his model and now part­ners directly with large compa­nies, not only from the tourism industry.

He sells the planted tree for 5 € – so the margin is slightly higher and the part­ners do the marke­ting for their own project. With more than 100,000 trees planted in 12 coun­tries and a well-​filled pipe­line on the corpo­rate side, the model is already off to a good start. In his first full-​time month for Click’n’Tree, the founder alone managed to acquire 6 new corpo­rate clients, which made him even more opti­mi­stic for the next year.

The lions think it’s a great idea. But Nils Glagau thinks the busi­ness model is still a bit too vague; the two current models don’t seem enti­rely clear. Carsten Masch­meyer also asks again what exactly the USP is.
The founder uses his neolo­gism „carita­lism“, which means doing good, but on a highly scalable scale – and earning money with it. Besides, there is another posi­tive effect: jobs are created, one is not depen­dent on chari­table work to fulfil the orders. Because that would always limit growth in some way.
And what SirPlus and LetsAct couldn’t really get across, the founder, who has already lived and worked on five conti­nents, manages to convince the lions that he has built the right model to do good, still earn money with it and ideally make the whole thing as big as possible.

He sees himself neither as an envi­ron­mental acti­vist like Greta Thun­berg nor as a full-​blooded capi­ta­list like Marc Zucker­berg, but as a mixture of both. This at least makes for sympa­thetic laughs but was perhaps also precisely the expla­na­tion that fully convinced some lions of the founder and model, who were persuaded by the argu­ment that only the healthy middle can also be truly successful here.

Unex­pec­tedly for many, Judith Williams in parti­cular then shows undis­guised inte­rest. „Is that something for you?“she whis­pers to her seat­mate Carsten Masch­meyer. The two are whispe­ring. And finally make an unpre­ce­dented offer in „Die Höhle der Löwen“: they offer the requested 75,000 € but want 25.1%. But they only want to have their money back at some point, if things go well, and not make a profit. There­fore, this 25.1% is to be distri­buted to future employees as part of an ESOP programme.

This sounds compli­cated, but it is actually a very elegant solu­tion. If employees are to parti­ci­pate in the finan­cial success of a company, they often receive so-​called virtual shares within the frame­work of an „Employee Stock Option Programme“, or ESOP for short. They do not actually own any part of the company, which means they cannot exert any influ­ence at the share­hol­ders‘ meeting. But if, for example, the company is (parti­ally) sold, they get a share of the pie equal to the percen­tage of virtual shares they own. Normally, this share is then deducted from the foun­ders‘ share, because someone has to get less money if there are suddenly other bene­fi­ci­a­ries who are not actually no real share­hol­ders of the company.

Here, however, the lions offer their shares of the finan­cial profit – minus their invest­ment – for distri­bu­tion to the employees. This is actually a very simple and elegant solu­tion that can be solved with rela­tively little text in the share­hol­ders’ agree­ment.

But it is remar­kable how effec­tively the lions ensure that they will not share in the profits.
But Georg Kofler and Nils Glagau – who was initi­ally already out at this point – see it differ­ently: they like the founder’s thin­king and are compe­ting for the deal with their offer of €100,000 for 20% – so they even offer a higher valua­tion.

After the founder only reaches his mentor’s voice­mail – which has probably never happened before as well – he decides on the combi­na­tion of Judith Williams and Carsten Masch­meyer – and thus gets the investor what is probably her most tech­nical deal to date.

She is pleased, as she expects a lot of praise from her daugh­ters. „Mum, that’s the most sensible start-​up you’ve ever done,“ she hears them say. So at the very end of the season, there was another pitch with so many first-​time-events that it is a record in itself.

And a worthy conclu­sion to a season that has been shaped so strongly by sustainable busi­ness models as none before.

Photo (above): TVNOW / Bernd-​Michael Maurer