Wren financial report: year two

Over the past 12 months, Wren brought in $760,000 to fund projects that reduce or remove CO2 emissions.

Eighty percent of that went directly to projects so they could plant trees, protect rainforest, deliver clean cookstoves, create biochar, and more. In total, Wren users prevented or removed 50,000 tons of CO2 emissions! That's like taking 10,000 cars off the road for a year or switching 9,000 homes to renewable electricity.

As you can see, this has been a year of major growth for Wren as we've improved our product and marketing strategy. In recent months, we've been offsetting over 2x more CO2 than we were last summer. This funding has helped us bring on 2 new projects, and will enable us to grow the number and scale of projects we work with in the next 12 months!

Expenses

80% of Wren's income goes directly to projects, and the other 20% is reinvested to pay our team and grow our reach. Here's roughly how our expenses break down over the past 12 months.

Compensation + team expenses

Paying people for the work they do for Wren is our biggest cost. We currently have five employees working full time on Wren. Here's how our payroll breaks down:

• Median pay for Wren employees: $80,000
• Average pay for Wren employees: $105,000
• The CEO is paid $80,000 per year, same as the median pay

We think these are appropriate salaries, much less than what they might be at a big tech company but still plenty to live off of in San Francisco. We're doing this because we really want to stop climate change, not because we want to make a bunch of money!

Other expenses

• Servers, software, and web expenses ($106,000): In addition to the few thousand bucks a month it takes to keep our website up and running properly, we invest in many software tools to build Wren faster. Last year, we also bought a new domain (wren.co) for about $20k (domain names are expensive).
• Advertising and marketing ($90,000): Lately, we've accelerated our spending on marketing. We're still experimenting, but we're seeing signs that marketing can get way more people offsetting at a low cost. This would mean we can grow our impact exponentially over time!
• Accounting, legal, and admin costs ($44,000): boring but important!
• Transaction Fees ($30,000): Whenever we accept a payment online, we pay a transaction fee. In the past 12 months, transaction fees total up to about $30,000.

Current Funding Available

We currently have about $900k in the bank, mostly from investors who see the potential for Wren to have a huge impact for our climate (check out our post on why Wren is a Public Benefit Corporation). At our current size, this would last us a year or two. We expect Wren's monthly income and expenses to both rise over the next couple years—there's a lot of opportunity for us to grow. The $900k we have in the bank now should be plenty for us to dramatically increase our impact.

Looking Ahead

Over the next 12 months, we expect to continue to spend more on marketing. We'll also likely grow our team over the next year, bringing on a few more team members to help grow our impact. And of course, as we grow we hope we can reach a point where our income is enough for us to pay our expenses.