S7E8 'Building websites that emit 99% less C02 ', with Jesse Ramon Brown from Sprout 🌱
Hi there. Welcome to another episode of the EcoSen podcast. I'm thrilled to be back. I'm James, your host, and I am thrilled today to be joined by a wonderful guest. Now I am so excited to welcome Jesse to the show because Jesse is in a very similar world to me.
James Gill:We're going to be talking a lot about digital sustainability, the impact of the web and our digital lives on the planet And Jesse for those of you who don't know Jesse Raymond Brown is the founder and CEO of I think two projects, two companies, Enverse Labs and Sprout which is I know about Sprout. So, Sprout is the no code platform that helps you build a sustainable website in just minutes. So, I'm very excited to unpack all of this. Jesse, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?
Jesse Ramon Brown:I'm doing very well, thank you.
James Gill:Was a
Jesse Ramon Brown:great intro, by the way.
James Gill:Tried my best. Might have been helped, but Jesse, I know we were talking a little bit just before the call. You're in Madrid right now, which is making me very, very jealous until you told me the temperatures over there.
Jesse Ramon Brown:Yeah, I'm currently in Madrid. I've been in Madrid for about three years now. And yeah, actually really happy to be here because I think it's a city that's really well, it's taking the lead on many renewable projects in Europe. I think mostly because there's lots of solar companies that have started in Spain. So yeah, it's great to be around an ecosystem that's just like Madrid.
James Gill:Amazing. Yeah. Awesome. I could ask you a lot more about Madrid but we can make another show for that. I am very keen to unpack a lot more about what you're working on and Maybe just to start with, it'd be great to understand what is Sprout and what is EnVerse and tell us all about both.
Jesse Ramon Brown:Yeah, so I guess I'll go with EnVerse first because we started EnVerse before. Envers Labs, we're a software agency that builds future proof solutions for forward thinking companies. So we really put forward kind of sustainability, accessibility, and kind of, taking it to the next level when it comes to digital solutions. And yeah, we've been active now for about three and a half years. We started in Paris.
Jesse Ramon Brown:I'm currently in Madrid at the moment, but like my business partner is currently in between Paris and Vancouver and so on. So we're pretty much remote first. And then we were also working on Sprouts, which as you just said, is a no code platform that allows anyone to build sustainable websites within minutes. Chris.
James Gill:Amazing, amazing. I reckon it'd be great to hear more about both of these. Think clearly your passions are in building for the web but building in a very mindful way that is conscious of the planet, our impact on the planet. Also related topics as well like accessibility. So it'd be great to understand how you got to this place.
James Gill:What was the path that that you went on to ultimately be doing what you're doing now Jesse?
Jesse Ramon Brown:Yeah, so I guess my background, so I started in the in the startup scene. I was working in Paris for about six years. I I started off as a software engineer and then moved on to two products worlds. I came to a point in my life where I wanted to find something a bit more impactful, I guess. And, to be fully honest with you, like I knew nothing about sustainability or climate or climate tech.
Jesse Ramon Brown:It was just purely because I took some time off, started reading about this big subject, which was climate, the climate crisis. And through I started reading and in the beginning we wanted Embers to be kind of an agency that just provided solutions to climate issues. But the more I started reading about it, the more I started realizing that in fact, tech is a huge part of the problem. Like, I'm sure you've heard this quote before, I guess it was back in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, where there was that, where they said that, 4% of global emissions came from the internet. That was very impactful.
Jesse Ramon Brown:I was like, okay, surely there's something we can do here. And that's how Embrace Labs was born. And, we've been active for now three and a half years. We're lucky to have contributed to projects and with massive companies like, well, Izdine. We've worked with Pivot, which is a leading startup now in France.
Jesse Ramon Brown:We've worked with Kering, the fashion brand, United Nations. You know, we've had the pleasure to work with incredible clients.
James Gill:That's amazing. So with these clients, you've been working on their web presence, is that right Jesse? And helping them think about how they can build websites that are more conscious of their environmental impact?
Jesse Ramon Brown:Yeah, so the service, like we have a wide range of services, from the actual design to audits. So for example, we've worked with Ecole Mines, sorry, from Nationale Mines, which is one of the top engineering schools in France, just to do audits of their systems. We've created projects from scratch. We've gone into systems to optimize. So we've a wide range of things that we've done, but all of them having to do with changing the way we build things digitally.
Jesse Ramon Brown:An
James Gill:incredible journey in a relatively short space of time over a few years really. It's incredible the kind of impact you've already been having. I'm curious then, so you've been working on Sprout, the no code kind of platform. Did that come out of the lessons you were learning from those client projects? Was it something that you had an itch and you really wanted to build it yourselves and felt that you you wanted it more than anyone.
James Gill:I'm curious how that came about and, what the spark was for for building that.
Jesse Ramon Brown:Yeah, definitely. I think there's a few reasons why we started it. I think the first one was that there's lots of bigger companies that are aware of their impact, primarily because of regulation or because they have to report their scopes and so on. Therefore they look into the tech stacks and take action, right? But there's also lots of smaller companies or individuals that also want a more sustainable presence because website or app, it's the main point of entry and they really want to like make sure that they're not only talking the talk, they're walking the walk.
Jesse Ramon Brown:So there's that part where there was a smaller companies that also wanted a sustainable website, but probably couldn't afford going to an agency and actually getting it done for them. So we were thinking, okay, how can we kind of, is there a tool that we can provide these people so that they can also start creating sustainable websites? And then there was another big part, which was talking with other agencies and freelancers. They were very much aware of the demand for sustainable digital products, but they didn't know where to start. Think it's, now there's incredible communities and networks that are actually like pushing that knowledge out there on how to build something a bit more sustainable, but it's still very hard to access.
Jesse Ramon Brown:It's also a new subject. So like all the info that we currently have is very new. So you need to navigate through all these resources. So we're like, okay, let's also provide something to these actors, whether it be agencies or freelancers that can actually, we're giving them a tool to kind of produce for the demand that they're having, right? So it's a new kind of service that they can provide to their clientele.
Jesse Ramon Brown:Yeah,
James Gill:that totally makes sense. Curious, I guess there's so many areas here where things must overlap with what we're doing at EcoSend and that I'm sure anyone listening to this will be aware that there are many ways one can go about building a website and there are many ways one can go about sending an email newsletter. How do those conversations get started or how did the users come about Sprout and ultimately decide to adopt Sprout? And how are you juggling those conversations when from what I've seen at least on our side people want to use sustainable tooling but then their needs as a business also are often the overriding priority. How do you juggle those?
James Gill:How do you find customers that ultimately want to make the switch?
Jesse Ramon Brown:Yeah, so I think that's a really good point because sustainability is, I guess, currently seen as a nice to have. I think businesses care about money and having new clients, let's
James Gill:be honest.
Jesse Ramon Brown:We really need to keep those in mind. So I often say that if you have a product A and it's not sustainable, but it's great and you have a product B that's okay and sustainable, they'll often go for the one that's better products. So the way we try to manage this is to build a product that's as good or better than the competition and make sure that we can integrate that sustainability in there. Because again, another big thing is that when a product is sustainable, it is also much lighter. Therefore it's more performant.
Jesse Ramon Brown:It's also better in SEO. So there's lots of benefits within the product that's kind of, you know, we play with as well, right? We can't just rely on sustainability itself.
James Gill:Yeah, that massively resonates and I think one of the conversations I've had with a few other people in the space is often that there's always in any team there's often people that care about sustainability more than others and I think sometimes that word sustainability can actually be translated into something that maybe connects more with someone's own responsibilities. Like sometimes sustainability means efficiency, it sometimes means performance and I find that so interesting in terms of I know I'd be curious on your take on it like do you care that people are buying sprouts for the sustainability or do you just care that people are buying sprout full stop and that it is the most sustainable option?
Jesse Ramon Brown:Can you repeat that again just so I understand
James Gill:Yeah, I guess do you care that people are adopting the Sprout builder platform for sustainability primarily? Are they buying it? Do you care about that or do you just want people to be using Sprout knowing that it is a sustainable platform? Does that make sense?
Jesse Ramon Brown:Yeah, definitely. I definitely care about the musing Sprout for its sustainability because again, every small We're shaving off, I guess depending on the actual traffic that the user has, but every person that adopts a tool like this, we're shaving off a bit more impact, right? And that's the main idea behind it. We know that it's like anything really, it's not a perfect solution, but it definitely, it's there to guide the user into better practices. It's a reasoning when creating web products, right?
Jesse Ramon Brown:That's really the important aspect for us. I also have to them using it for all the other reasons, of course, because I love seeing, we're passionate about having proper digital products. I'm sick and tired of seeing bloated Squarespace websites or stuff that really have way too many resources when they shouldn't. So yeah, I love people adopting the minimal tools, whether it be Spout or anything else really.
James Gill:Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a very mature answer. Appreciate, Jesse. I wanted to touch on one of the topics you also wanted to I know that you were keen to discuss which I guess relates on this a bit which is making the invisible visible and I think that you just touched on sort of people using website builders of all sorts, making really the flashiest website they can, wanting to stand out. How do you convince people that this thing that they're not going to see, they don't even necessarily know about matters?
James Gill:And how do you get them to care about that in the context of the web? I'm against all of those other priorities.
Jesse Ramon Brown:Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, you're right. So what we're trying to do is make the invisible visible. What we're trying to do here is that people are not aware of the footprint digital products have. I believe possibly it's because it's not tangible.
Jesse Ramon Brown:Therefore, it's not there, it must not have a footprint. What we're trying to do with either Ember Slabs or with Spout is to show the users whether they have an end product or they're building one, the actual footprint that it has. So taking Sprout as an example, we try to, within the platform itself, we guide, well, once the user does any changes to the website, we have a calculator within the platform that shows the actual weight of the page and the footprint it has. So that if that user goes on and thinks that adding a huge video or some sort of streaming feature within a platform and they think that that's a good idea, they can actually see that in fact it might have an impact, it might have a greater impact than expected. So we wanna show this to the user at all times and guide them through the best practices, because I think ultimately that was the way we learned.
Jesse Ramon Brown:We weren't really aware of the impact it had until we saw the actual metrics, until we saw the actual numbers behind our apps. And we want to really push that towards our users.
James Gill:That's such an interesting point. I mean, it's something that we've been exploring ourselves at EcoSend as well. Idea that sort of playing with something, tinkering with it, changing it and seeing what that does, I think is one of the most powerful ways for people to learn when you compare that to reading in a book or hearing someone else talk about it. You're there creating something and crafting something, often as a marketer or a website builder, you're thinking about visitor numbers and traffic or conversion rates or open rates, but none of the tooling out there today really shows that in anything relating to the environment. And I think there's is something I think incredibly empowering about that, that as users of your product they can make these changes that I guess multiply out by the hundreds of thousands of millions when you think about the visitors that come to those sites.
Jesse Ramon Brown:Absolutely, I completely agree. And then touching on that subject, we shouldn't make the mistake of only looking at the footprint. Think when we're looking at true sustainability or subject as a whole, we should always consider the wider range of things. So how accessible it is, is a huge factor as well, how performant and how usable the actual platform is because yes, it can be extremely sustainable. But I mean, if people can't access it, or, you know, it only works on the latest devices, and it's not really doing its job.
Jesse Ramon Brown:So I think you're completely right. We currently don't show it as much. We should show it more, but it shouldn't be complete pitch of things either.
James Gill:Yeah, I think there's something really exciting there. Something I increasingly find interesting is just the impact. Just thinking about people in the digital world, that sounds very futuristic or 80s futuristic. People that are responsible for a web presence, whether that's a website, an email campaign, things like that, have an opportunity to consider the environment in what they are creating. But I think there's also the environment in terms of the digital impact directly of what they're doing, but then there's the wider message as well of what they're sending and the choices they're making.
James Gill:And that to me excites me a lot as well. When you think about what you are doing, Jesse, and then your direct customers, but then the customers or visitors of all of those customers. Potentially the decisions you make can impact millions of people. Exactly. I think that knock on ripple effect is just such an amazing thing and I think a lot of digital practitioners maybe haven't grasped that enough yet to fully embrace it.
Jesse Ramon Brown:Yeah, definitely. No, I think that's what we're trying to do at Sprout. We're trying to apply certain rules. We don't want to limit users completely either, but guide users in a sense because we're firm believers of that ripple effect.
James Gill:Yeah, I love it. I guess that kind of touches on another one of your topics you wanted to talk about which is sort of this idea of progress over perfection and that's a topic a lot of people get caught up in the world of sustainability. I know especially at the start for us, we almost didn't begin EcoSen because we were so worried about getting things wrong and I think a lot of people have that fear in the world of sustainability that they will say the wrong thing or like you know you're so by yeah yeah so I yeah I'm curious how that kind of has influenced your work Jesse and what you're up to.
Jesse Ramon Brown:Yeah. No. I mean, it's it's such a stigma, right? People, they they expect perfection at all times, when in fact that's not gonna happen. We believe in making small amounts of progress, and it's seen in our platform as well.
Jesse Ramon Brown:If we can help the user, guide the user to use a, let's say a very simple example would be to use a web based font rather than the downloadable thing that's just those tiny increments of progress can make a big change later on. We're completely aware that if we were to follow the exact perfect standard of sustainability on the web, no one would use the websites. Because I mean, let's be honest, like we shouldn't be using images on our websites, but I mean, we have to face the reality. There's not gonna be a perfect state of sustainability. So let's kind of like guide them to a better state.
Jesse Ramon Brown:And yeah, it's pretty hard because I think of all industries, sustainability is really the ones that call you out, right? If you're not doing it really well and so on. I think none of that just kills any sort of, motivation or progress in a sense, because we should be acting in small steps like in any other thing, right? Yeah.
James Gill:Totally, a lot of that resonates again and yeah I think something we talk about a lot is you know if there's no point building the most sustainable version of anything if the ultimate product sucks. And like for us, you know, there's no point building a sustainable email solution if no one wants to use it because your emails have to look so ugly that no one wants to read them. Then the impact just shrinks to zero. I think it's such a difficult thing though and I think anyone in this profession is always struggling with that, to compete with often players and platforms that don't care at all and trying to compete for as effective or if not a more effective product while delivering on those sustainability goals. I have huge respect for anyone trying to do that.
Jesse Ramon Brown:Yeah, definitely. No, I completely agree and like I said, we completely believe in we shouldn't see it as a black or white kind of world in a sense. There's certainly a lot of gray in between and we believe in guiding people towards better decisions. And these decisions are made in the digital world, that's even better. That's why Sprout's there.
James Gill:Yeah, yeah. I feel like we've gone so far and I haven't even asked you for any of the features of Sprout that enable this. Was just curious, it'd be great to hear, I mean, maybe some people out there might be familiar with something like Squarespace or WordPress for building a website. I'm curious, Jesse, are some of the things you've been working on, either that you have today or that maybe have coming in the future, that help people be more mindful of their footprint of their websites?
Jesse Ramon Brown:Yeah. Before I talk about the features, I must say that we're still in a closed beta phase. So we've come out with a first version of the MVP and we're currently testing with few users. I guess the primary features here are, well, you have a no code editor that allows you to drag and drop and really build a proper website. I think we took about a year in creating this MVP because of that aspect.
Jesse Ramon Brown:All the drag and drop system is done from scratch, which is very hard to make from a tech perspective. Chris and Jono and James and my team have definitely empowered through and have done an excellent job. We're getting really good feedback on that aspect because it's extremely A big part of what we want to do is to make sure that it's super easy to create a website, extremely easy. And sometimes you find platforms like Squarespace and so on, you just get lost. You don't even know where to start.
Jesse Ramon Brown:We've worked with Gabri from Heights Digital, one of the leading sustainable software design agencies, and they're based in London, to build this UI that seems super intuitive. Big shout out to Gabriela. And yeah, so we have that part. We also have live carbon calculator. So every block or everything that you put into your website, you'll have a live, what do you call it?
Jesse Ramon Brown:I was gonna say number.
James Gill:Like a yeah, yeah.
Jesse Ramon Brown:Exactly. Sorry. My language is mixed up.
James Gill:No. No. Don't worry.
Jesse Ramon Brown:You're also able to see the page weight at the same time. All the actual So the websites that are built have minimal, minimal JS. Just on average, our websites are around 35 kilobytes, which is ridiculous.
James Gill:It's smaller than the average. I wouldn't name any names, but yeah.
Jesse Ramon Brown:So we try our best. That's obviously not going to be the case for all of the websites, but that's what we currently have. And then, well, also using We have an accessibility, I wouldn't say calculator, but at least it gives you a how do you say, not a calculator.
James Gill:Like a score?
Jesse Ramon Brown:Not an audit. Yeah. That was the word that
James Gill:I was trying to
Jesse Ramon Brown:We're actively working on that accessibility score. Each feature that you also drag in contributes to your accessibility score. We have contrast checks as well. Accessibility is a huge part of our website. You have, well, there's quite a few things.
Jesse Ramon Brown:But yeah, just in the actual backend itself, we use a lot of server side rendering, all the websites that are published are then, as I said, mostly HTML CSS, but very functional. So there's been a lot of work done on that aspect, but of course I'm going to leave the technical team to talk about And what else? Have a few things in the works. So like if you want to add images, we wanna have an image compressor that does it within the app. And then what we would love to do is to also make sure that Sprout is a hub for other sustainable web features.
Jesse Ramon Brown:For example, I've heard of this platform called EcoSend, it would be incredible to integrate something like that or have a marketplace of sustainable alternatives within like Sprout.
James Gill:Amazing. Honestly, that's painted such a good picture for anyone who's not seen at all to think about. I'm sure a lot of people there are thinking like, my goodness, I wonder what would happen if I tried to build my current website with this. So I'm like, what would it be like? What would the score be?
James Gill:So I love as well that you've got, you know, it's not just about sustainability, but the accessibility is such an important and I think very overlapping area of interest for a lot of people that certainly that watch the show and that we talk to. So thank you for summarising that Jesse. And in terms of the beta, it's closed at moment. Are there plans to open it up to more people? What can people do to go check it out or go get on a list?
James Gill:Can they sign up?
Jesse Ramon Brown:Yeah, definitely. So you can sign up on sprout.site the You can enter your email. We're doing a kind of phased approach for the moment. So just selecting a few users at a time to really take the time and do proper product demos. We really want to listen to users and take their inputs to then define what's going to be next for Sprout.
Jesse Ramon Brown:I think this is a very democratic approach we're taking here. We really want to give voice to the current users. We've just done version one. We're going to be finishing these tests in a few weeks, and then we're already gonna start looking at opening it up to the public, I guess.
James Gill:Very exciting. Very exciting.
Jesse Ramon Brown:The dates are to be detailed.
James Gill:Yeah, we won't hold you to that on here, Jesse, don't worry. Amazing. That's so exciting. I knew this would happen. We've flown through our time, Jesse, and I'm realising So people can go check out sprout.site.
James Gill:They can also go to nverselabs.com. We'll put those links in the show notes. I wanted to make sure we just touched on you maybe have received some advice over the years, maybe you want to pass anything on. Was there anything you wanted to kind of finish on Jesse in terms of sharing anything?
Jesse Ramon Brown:I think that I guess progress over perfection, which we mentioned before. It's definitely not my words over there. It's something I've been hearing quite a bit and it's so true. Let's not focus on perfection, let's focus on progress. And yeah, I think that's the proper way of going.
James Gill:Absolutely. Wise words indeed, Jesse. Thank you so much. Jesse, it's been such a pleasure chatting with you today. You've filled me with inspiration and ideas already and I'm wanting to try out the tool myself now and I'm hoping many people will be hearing this and inspired to go take a look at their own websites, about how they can make their own websites more conscious of the world around us.
James Gill:So thank you for sharing your story today Jesse.
Jesse Ramon Brown:Thank you, thank you. It was great chatting.
James Gill:Awesome, thank you very much and thank for those of you who are listening. If you've enjoyed today's show You know what to do, please give us a like, give it a five stars, give it a lovely comment if you can, tell your friends, your family, anyone you know about this, especially if they build websites or interest in the web, go tell them about this because it would be great for more people to hear Jesse's story. So thank you for joining us and we'll see you next time.
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