ECGO acquires campus users for $1.50 using cookies at tabling events
Nicole Sewell · #124 ECGO: Turning Trash Into Treasure With AI · Mar 4, 2025 · at 8:02
Nicole Sewell, founder of waste-sorting app ECGO, discusses student customer acquisition costs during on-campus marketing events while pitching venture capitalists on The Pitch.
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“Our user acquisition cost is only a dollar 50 because like, we just put like, we have cookies and whatever to get students to download the application.”
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“Two hundred and nineteen million tons of recyclable waste enters our landfills every year. We spent over two hundred billion dollars just to send it there.”
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“Right now we're using OpenAI's clip model, which creates a caption for every item that you take a picture of through the platform. And then it looks for that item in our database of materials.”
ECGO converts $5K semester pilots into $20K annual university contracts
“Georgia State and the Georgia Institute of Technology are our first customers. So we started them off with a semester pilot that cost 5000 dollars, which I know, like no one negotiated. Yes, it was too low. And then it rolled over into a full year implementati…”
ECGO reaches 33% monthly active user rate among 1,500 students
“Yes, so right now we have 1500 students on the platform who use it. We have a 33% monthly active user rate, and on average students recycle 35 items each month, and the fraud was like less than one percent. We had like 10 students who were ridiculous and then …”