Resyn -The world works in circularity, so should our economy

Large tracts of fertile land growing mono-cultures for export at the expense of local communities and environments. Communities running out of water. Micro-plastics in rain water. Containers filled with waste shipped back to Canada from emerging economies no longer willing to be our dumpsters. 

These examples are symptoms of our linear, centralized, and wasteful economies.

Comparatively: farmers rediscovering drought resistant heritage crops; producers introducing regenerative agriculture to rebuild soil and capture carbon; reusable coffee cups made from pressed recycled coffee grounds; compostable plastics made from kelp grown in carbon-sequestering kelp forests. 

These solutions are only the tip of the iceberg of the potential shift in our economies from linear to circular. Resyn aims to catalyze the paradigm shift towards local circular economies using emerging technologies to gather and repurpose collective intelligence, incentivize the creation of local supply chains, and provide market-ready business intelligence to millions of farmers and producers. 

The barriers to increasing equitable production of renewable and recyclable raw materials for products and packaging are the access to knowledge and the access to financing for current producers or potential producers. There exists a disruptive innovation potential to tackle the lower end of the production market as well as create a new market for production, but there is a lack of information and transition support.

Producers often lack the informational and financial incentives to dissociate themselves from centralized export-focused production. Resource producers, such as small scale farmers, lack access to real-time market opportunities, detailed information about sustainable or regenerative growing practices, and locally appropriate alternative renewable resources. Additionally, producers have no support to financially plan for a transition away from typically unsustainable production and shift towards renewable raw material production. This leaves our economies lacking in opportunities for the bottom billion due to inequitable sharing of information and purchasing power. There are over 570 million farms worldwide. Of these, 500 million are considered family farms and 475 million are less than two hectares in area. Empowering these producers with knowledge and financial planning will support a shift towards circular economies that are locally appropriate and offer higher revenue potential.

Our main user base are primary resource producers, for example farmers, whose principal activity is the production of renewable and recyclable resources. For the last four years, we have been working with producers from around the world to gather their feedback directly and understand their needs through conversations, surveys, and collaborative technology development. This category of people are considered the bottom of the pyramid economically. We aim to provide knowledge and financial management solutions that can spur the development of small businesses based on renewable and recyclable raw materials. Our most recent phase of development targets the early technology adopters within this global community of producers. Resyn is building a digital ecosystem for the sharing of collective intelligence about opportunities to create or tap into renewable, local, circular economies. Our system is purposefully built for small scale producers and is designed for constant feedback and iteration to continuously evolve to suit their needs.

We are building a people-centric resource-based ecosystem to empower producers to achieve sustainable business models and facilitate access to markets. Our digital ecosystem has a public user interface and a private user interface, built upon an ever growing global database of collective intelligence. The public interface allows visitors (producers, businesses, consumers) to access a regional snapshot of available resources and who produces them. This will transform into a marketplace to incentivize local markets for renewable raw materials. Resyn will host a search-engine-optimized web page for each producer on our system that summarizes their production and connects buyers with sellers. 

The private interface for registered users is a dashboard that includes a financial management tool for producers to track their outgoing expenses and their expected and actual incomes, as well as track their production inputs, ex. fertilizers, and outputs, ex. manure. The user dashboard visualizes the current and future state of their production (inputs/outputs and financials), incentivizing the continual updating and addition of production data. Data input from thousands of producers around the world feeds the back-end database that learns from crop production data, and is combined with location relevant information - climate, water availability, soil fertility, hardiness zone, etc. The back end is the database that acts as the collective intelligence engine that collates and repurposes information for users to learn about and benefit from marketable opportunities to build and participate in the local, renewable, and circular economy. 

Regional demand and search data from consumers (individuals and businesses) is also gathered and analysed to collate and supply market information for producers. This repurposed data is supplied to producers for them to learn about commonly searched for items, locally appropriate alternatives to unsustainable common materials, and value-added production opportunities. 

The user dashboard is designed to support producers in their transition away from narrow and unsustainable practices towards diversified, renewable, and circular production methods, with a continuous supply of targeted information and regional market insights. 

The back-end is intended to be filled with high resolution data about each crop’s production potential so that producers in other regions with similar environmental conditions could benefit from Resyn’s collective intelligence around the production of marketable raw renewable resources. The inherent goal is to support sustainable, appropriate, and diverse production for resilient communities and economies. The longer term objective is to migrate that collective intelligence into an open-source commons that will enhance scaling circular economies. 

We are building a knowledge reference system that continuously learns about the production opportunities in a given set of conditions. Our technology maps the multitude of potential pathways of resource inputs and outputs to recommend additional sources of revenue from renewal products. Resyn’s way of organizing information changes the producer-buyer dynamic by providing real-time market intelligence about regional opportunities to empower producers to broaden their business models and encourages buyers to support local production. We are serving a mostly untapped market of small scale resource producers.

Compared to other businesses that simply provide producers with an online marketplace, we aim to leverage information from small scale producers from around the world to create an ever growing and continuously learning intelligent system. Our planned integration of data science, AI, IoT, and trust protocols will continuously enhance the functions and knowledge of the ecosystem, learning from producer’s data to enhance resilience. We have worked with our target audience for many years and have created a digital ecosystem purposefully built to support in their transition to a circular economic system.  

We combine various technologies around strong guidance of purpose to develop a software as a service system (SAaS. A yield’s database is the backbone of the project. To create a digital environment that correlates all resources potential pathways, we are defining them with theoretical and user information to characterize their input requirements and output value. These parameters are assembled to define and evaluate regional appropriateness. Supplemental technologies such as data science, AI, IoT, will be integrated to accelerate the catalog learning capacity. Certain pilots in development will see the deployment of data acquisition for resource production such as Biogas.

A creative, iterative and across user-types business model is the other side of the project. We are deploying affordable options to resource producers and progressively converting the revenue model towards other user-types.

Resyn’s is about finding what transition is locally appropriate in different user contexts, and highlight how their business benefits from closing loops of supply locally. 

Resources producers are disenfranchised from the opportunities that would serve them, their communities and environment best. Decisions made to source and supply outside of sustainable loops comes from absence of convenience and economic pressures. 

We are tapping directly in users’ drive to better their economic situation and reduce long term insecurity by creating local and sustainable convenience. The technology we develop is not a panacea, it is about scaling the concept of operating within ecological limits and incentivizing benefits in doing so.

Currently, our minimum viable product has organically attracted 306 unique self-registered farmers.

With the pre-sale we are about to launch that will shortly be followed by a product launch, we are conservatively expecting to be serving ten fold that number, growing to over 3000.

Five years from now, we aim to be serving 300,000 people in expanded user categories. 

Within the next year, we are focused on launching a pre-sale followed by a product launch to gain momentum in growing the producers’ user base. A critical mass of free & paying users will allow us to record significant levels of products and related data points to target specific directions. We are also expecting to become cash-positive by the end of 2019 with a fair and regionally-priced model. 

We are looking at securing 3 distinct pilots/locations to improve resources matchmaking, explore waste management facilitation and expand in waste to energy conversion potential. 

Within the next 5 years, we will have all deployed all 5 profiles of user types (Farmers/Producers, Consumers, Businesses, Organizations, Equipment & Service Providers), have facilitated hundreds of fully circular communities, and helped 300,000+ resource producers become diversified and self-reliant.

The main barrier that we currently face is a lack of funding to finalise building the platform with the necessary data science integrations to elevate our offering to the degree needed to satisfy our customers requests. As we are not seeking an exit, our challenge is to find purpose-driven investors whose visions align with ours. We aim to bring on board financial, legal, and technical collaborators that understand our vision and mission, however our resources for adequate remuneration have been a barrier. Funding to bring people on full time instead of part-time is one of our greatest challenge. 

In the next five years, our barriers will be related to scaling while remaining a small enough team to limit the overhead costs and continue to reinvest profit into supporting our users’ needs. Based on the current growth, we will need to build a highly scalable architecture that can support large amounts of high definition data for a reasonable price. Our hosting costs will grow exponentially as our data inputs increase and our machine learning models will need to be trained. Our self-imposed constraint is to keep costs lowest for producers and so we will need to attract business level users to offset the costs of operations.   

We will keep looking for various funding sources to accelerate our deployment rate. We will also launch a pre-sale and a first product in the coming months to become cash positive. We are continually seeking sources of funding that align with our values - through networks, accelerators, and grants. In parallel, we are accelerating the growth of our producer user base around the world. 

In the next year, we will be connecting with technical collaborators to roll out initial pilots across our resource streams - food, energy, biomass, water. These pilots will act as leveraging tools to attract diverse sources of funding, as well as case studies, and data collection for our digital ecosystem. 

Within the next 5 years, we will grow our team and income streams to scale our technology stack appropriately and build resource producer ambassador programmes to continue to attract a varied user base. Our solution to the barriers of establishing a circular economy will be embedded in our own workflow to overcome the barriers of funding, growth, and knowledge acquisition.

In addition, it is a hybrid model for a couple reasons. 

Our key stakeholders will be producers, there will always be a free/affordable option available. 

Over time, the goal is to place more knowledge into a commons structure (likely managed by a foundation) to maintain a separation between the revenue models and the collective intelligence ownership.  

1 full-time (founder)

4 part-time (communication, strategy, marketing, business development)

• 3 women, 1 man

4 contractors (Design, Project Management, 2 coding)

• 2 women, 2 men

10 international expert advisers

• 6 women, 4 men

Our founder, Julien Roberge, has worked in communities in Honduras, Nicaragua, Rwanda, Haiti, and Nepal, learning from and sharing knowledge on appropriate technology, permaculture, renewable resource production, and circular economics. Our team of passionate part time collaborators sits at the intersection of the realities of needs on the ground for the transition to a circular economy and the capacity to build a sustainable and regenerative structure that will support this transition. Our years of experience in appropriate technologies, and working with communities, has taught us what results in tangible resilience instead of short term patchwork solutions funded by development agencies. Our board of international expert advisers have been brought on to incorporate detailed knowledge and experience in food, water, energy, and biomass - the pillars of renewable resource production. The combination of these skill sets, buffered by contractors to deliver the technological component of our system establishes us as being well placed to deliver this solution to our customers. We combine domain expertise, openness to iterative and continuous feedback from our user base, and technological innovation. 

On the technology side, our partners are in stealth mode, but as an overview - we are currently partnering with blockchain projects that are focused on certification confirmation, for example for organic or fair trade products, and supply chain traceability. We are also partnered with a knowledge economy project that will trade production data for revenue or participate in enriching the growing Resyn’s database. 

On the hardware side, we are partnered with Greenforge and other vertical farming hardware developers to collaborate on pilot projects for data acquisition to feed the Resyn database.

On the producer side, we are working with individual and collective groups of farmers around the world to align the building of our systems with their needs as producers.

Our business model is sequence based. Initially, resource producers (ex. farmers) are offered software as a service. We will always operate along a Freemium model as a method to onboard users and to create a wide user funnel and build trust over time. 

We will soon initiate our Presale phase as a way to stimulate onboarding and crowdfund for developing beyond the current free version. There are two product levels that incentivize data participation and sharing of resources data:

• Higher value and purpose web service for producers that will generate a digital identity, automate communication to market and assess opportunities for inputs and outputs.

Then we will carry-on with a subscription model while retaining a free option with certain level of production-based data participation. 

• Option incentivizing production information (Affordable or free for additional data provided.

• Higher-end customizable option with market equivalent competitive pricing. 

And continue transitioning the business model into additional user types and more volume-based small fees services. 

Overall, we are building our company into a SaaS business model, but in an incremental sequence as we scale through the different phases of growth. Initially, we are open to investments and grants to support building the platform. Once the minimum viable product is built, we are opening up a phase of pre-sale to build awareness and grow our user base with early adopters. The income generated from early adopters through the pre-sale will fund the larger scale building of the platform that includes advanced functionalities for mainstream farmers.

We will generate revenue from various levels of service fees from users based on a fair pricing model related to disposable income on a per country basis. Over time as the user base grows and we expand into onboarding businesses as service providers, the revenue model will shift towards income from intermediaries and then transaction fees as the marketplace is developed. 

We currently have over 300+ users and counting on the minimum viable product platform, and we aim to convert a % of our users to annual membership customers and create “a la carte” features to be bought on an “as needed” basis. Progressively integrated B2C solution providers will see the benefits of paying for enhanced access to the local communities and the various resources’ pathway opportunities being exposed. 

Our participation in Solve is an added opportunity for potential funding to accelerate the development of the next phase of building our tech combination that will support our users. 

Having attended Solve in 2018, we saw the potential for growing our business through the Solve network and improving our visibility within a respected group of amplifiers. We are also searching for a community of peers within which we can learn and share the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. As a small team, we are searching for mentors who can support our ambitious vision and mission, and help guide us as we grow and scale globally. Our solution is cross-sectoral, ambitious, and complex - and we see Solve as being an opportunity to develop the various sector partnerships that will enhance our reach. Finding data partners will be a challenge for us, and we hope to use Solve as a way to network, as well as spread the word about the gaps we are aiming to fill in our team. Funding is an obvious benefit, as it would allow us to invest in and accelerate our product development as well as fund initial pilots that are currently on hold, however as we want to grow organically, we are most interested in the network and access to support systems that Solve would provide. 

In the short term, key partners for us will be small scale renewable energy production and storage solution providers, heritage seed banks, associations of producers, and overall scalable groups of users who can contribute to the Resyn database. 

We are aiming to partner with a wide variety of organisations and are open to discussions with everyone. Large corporations that brand themselves as being leaders in the circular economy like Patagonia would be ideal long-term partners for us to work with to source locally appropriate raw materials in different parts of the world, and feed our database with market information. We would also be interested to connect with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to trial some projects. Any product/food transformer looking for specific local and sustainable resources could be a partner of interest for Resyn.

AI is required to build comprehensive knowledge of circularity for an expanding catalog of resources and their potential pathways. To map and facilitate resource pathways, there are connections and patterns that we know to look for and some we will have to discover. 

Resyn’s ecosystem is currently cataloging information according to known and expected parameters of production, stage and potential uses. When the data’s origin and volume become large (and that will come fast) supervised learning will become required for effective sustainable characterization. Each resource is being characterized by combining user input, data relating to their specific location and additional relatable open-source or academic data.

There will be opportunities to discover unforeseen factors, classifications and pathways,and inform new ways of local sourcing, appropriateness and climate change adaptation. This will be especially true in realms of knowledge that are emerging or those in which forecasting is predicted to be excessively difficult. Unsupervised learning will become an essential tool of powerful discovery.

A functional circular economy will be powered by the participation of all actors.The ecosystem will be second-nature in discovering value and pathways that are closing loops and serving the user’s best interest. 

We will focus heavily in balancing out the technical information with user experience and convenience tools in which we will invest: versatility of data learning, analysis, and communication tools (visuals that relate across cultures and languages) so these opportunities become relatable in tangible small-business terms. 

Understanding the pathways is important, incentivizing decisions is primordial. Take recycling as an example. Not everyone implements it, yet aluminum can that have an incentive do find their way to the recycling facilities through people that see value in “doing the work”. Resyn focuses on getting communities to thrive by highlighting the value in action on a “per resource” basis. 

In a zero carbon and zero waste economy, every renewable resource (material, matter, and waste) finds its way to the optimal scenario of use (goods, energy extraction, nutrient conversion, etc.). 

Empowerment through market awareness is key: any holder of a resource (ex: manure, wheat crop waste, mixed food waste) will be able to see if it has value to be upcycled, converted or sold. Each user will gain the capacity to find a pathway for their resource as a business opportunity by “closing the loop”.

What Resyn does for small-scale producers is something that will have greater impact on women due to the socio-economic and cultural segregation of opportunity they are victims of. 

According to FAO’s study “the role of women in agriculture” and others, in countries where women need the most help to reach parity of opportunity, women’s typical proportion of labour varies according to a range of factors. But they reveal that women are typically pushed aside from the value-added tasks that lead to a better hourly pay and safer environment. For instance, most work hover around weeding, harvesting and fertilizer application. 

The aspect of transition for resources production to sustainable practices as facilitated by the Resyn ecosystem proposes some immediate impacts on women’s health, especially in the case of painstaking labour and chemical use that can be replaced by permaculture, regenerative agriculture, and organic practices. 

On the business empowerment level, because Resyn production and financial management tool offers a way of entry to new markets to those who my struggle to get their offering across. Because women’s time is often mostly spent on household and family tasks, they lack the time to go to market and meet sales’ opportunities. 

Because women’s work burden is typically larger than men, they often are relegated to part-time employment opportunities, and kept on a cycle of revenu insecurity. Spreading access to tools that empower anyone to market the way Resyn does will have a positive reinforcement loop effect.