Underdog Founders - Roel builds MOYU to transform the classic notebook.
Can we meaningfully lower demand for wood across the board and prevent deforestation?
Roel is writing his path in stone - literally.
If he gets it right, we’ll all be taking notes in water-resistant stone paper.
Roel (right, 32) always loved startups – he studied business and econ to learn as much as he could.
Thinking about planet Earth before it was cool (or hot), he did a masters in Sustainable Entrepreneurship.
Watching David Attenborough’s documentaries and spending all day diving in spreadsheet lakes didn’t make sense – he wanted to merge both.
Craving experience, life first took him to FBM, a Dutch company that helps SMEs raise growth capital, and then to the other side of the financing table, at Rabobank.
Then things went south - specifically to Kenya, with a tourism startup.
Working at a startup confirmed his drive to build his own – and one day, he found something interesting.
Notebooks aren’t going anywhere despite digital alternatives, simply because people love the real deal.
What people don’t love is to know that trees had to be cut in order to produce them.
Stone paper isn’t new, but if he could make it water-resistant, the pages could be easily cleaned and it would be a viable alternative to paper.
MOYU was born.
Stone paper pages from MOYU notebooks can be reused not once, but an impressive 500 times.
A single notebook can be your best friend from college well into your professional career.
Roel made it a priority to be out there and share the concept as much as he could.
“Launching to the public meant less revenue than if we focused on big companies, but it allowed us to test demand for the vision, see how excited folks were.
Our current product comes directly from feedback from those early days.”
They were doing well on Facebook, so decided to allocate most of the budget there.
One day, all the marketing got frozen because MOYU was tagged as sensitive and/or political due to its link with climate change.
The approval process took 8 weeks of revenue with it. They’ll never put all eggs in the same basket again.
On top of that, a little bug called corona dropped by unannounced, and some of their bigger client accounts froze orders.
Crowdfunding was their vaccine.
Nowadays they’re a lot more mindful of cash flow and how long things take.
The roller-coaster is steadily turning into a smoother ride:
- Last year they won the Fedex Sustainability Award, beating 2100 companies.
- Most companies in the Netherlands already own MOYUs.
- A single B2B client once made an order of 7,500 units, allowing them to meet revenue targets that year in one shot.
Roel is raising 350k in public right now, everyone can join from as little as 250 EUR. They want to run a company everyone can be a part of.
They sell both B2C and B2B.
MOYU notebooks aren’t AI-enabled or on the blockchain.
Because Roel isn’t following hype, and set out to solve a problem he cares about.
Underdog Founders is a passion project.
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Underdog Founders 15 - Roel Schatorjé 🌳
#stationerydesign #sustainablebusiness #techforgood