From nothing to Europe's biggest Google competitor: Christian Kroll and his colleagues have achieved this within just a few years. The Berlin-based search engine now records 100 million searches and approximately five million users per week. The special feature of Ecosia is that the search engine uses 100 percent of its profits for tree planting and renewable energy projects. In this way, the company has financed more than 175 million seedlings so far in countries such as Burkina Faso or Madagascar—making it an example of a true growth story (in the ecological sense as well!).
In the podcast, founder Christian Kroll talks about the difficulties of competing against a Goliath like Google, the problem of reaching users beyond the green mainstream, and the dilemma of having to place ads on platforms that one does not particularly like. But how does a start-up even get on the radar of its target audience in the first place? What advantage does it have to be a "purpose" company? And how does a firm ensure that the profits are not used to finance its founders' Ferraris?
Christian Kroll gives us interesting answers to these questions as well in this episode (that is, after all, his job as a search engine operator 😉).