Introduction: Meet the Founder and the Mission

My name is Yadira Diaz. I'm the founder at Gradable.

A lot of people get the name wrong. They say Gradable, but no, it's Gradable.

Why It’s Called “Gradable”

It actually stems from the word biodegradable.

From Grading Sustainability to Building Solutions

I originally wanted to grade businesses on their sustainability, kind of like the FDA grades restaurants on cleanliness. Have you guys ever seen the blue A's out front?

I wanted to partner with the EPA, which is crazy because I am an official EPA partner as of like like two weeks ago.

We're helping them with diverting unsold food to those in need. So it's not really technically the same that I wanted.

But when I started grading these businesses and going to like hotels and restaurants, I realized early on that all of them were going to get big fat Fs.

And I didn't want to be that person going to people's businesses and telling them everything that they were doing wrong. So instead of that, we became more solution focused.

And down the rabbit hole I went on finding really innovative business solutions that exist out there.

What Gradable Offers: A Marketplace of Climate Solutions

Just think of products, services, technologies, all around waste, energy, and water.

So we carry everything from edible coffee cups, to paint that absorbs carbon, to gray water recycling technologies, to clean cement, to urban rooftop gardening, to a machine that that turns food waste into energy to, yeah,

I think that kind of gives you an idea of just the wide range of things that we offer.

And so I wanted to go just through quickly what we do, and then I'm gonna show you a demo.

Building the Platform with AI Tools

And then I guess what I can say is that, one, AI created this presentation, and I really hope you guys like it, cause shout out Claude Design.

And I also had AI, Claude, shout out Claude Code, and Fable. it was first built the product that I'm going to do a demo for it was first built on lovable

when like lovable first came out and then I built it on bolt and then when Claude came out I had Claude code go through my entire code base and then when fable came out it took it to the next level so now it's super healthy it's a real product it went from something that was just

literally I guess I don't know like napkin thing that you say it was like really just unlovable very ugly very minimal to yeah you'll see what it's turned into after Claude and Fable so

The Business Case: Savings, Incentives, and a $2T Opportunity

I'm not going to get too into this but sustainability today it's fragmented expensive and under -resourced but here's the deal when you reduce waste energy and water you are reducing your utility bills and that's what we're trying to get businesses to understand that not only is it a good thing for their bottom line but it's good for the environment because same thing when you

reduce waste energy and water it's good for the environment so um it's a two trillion dollar opportunity and a lot of capital that's out there is unclaimed there is um on a local state and

national level you can find rebates subsidies tax credits deductions the list goes on and on but a lot of these incentives have deadlines.

So the reason why we're talking about this is because a lot of our solutions and our marketplace come with financial incentives, whether that's a rebate, whether that's financing, whether that's even sponsors who are willing to sponsor these things.

And I have a crazy story about the Miami Heat, but long story short, there's also a really big play for us to not only offer the solution, but offer the funding to our clients, which has worked.

Early Proof: Pilot Projects and Grant-Funded Wins

So this is just an origin story from when I first started.

I started working with the Elzer here on Biscayne Boulevard, right across the street from the Heat Arena.

And in just six months, we implemented nine initiatives.

And these six stakeholders were the directors of every department in the hotel. So director of housekeeping, engineering, food and beverage, the executive chef, the director of marketing, we were all working together to implement solutions solutions from our marketplace.

And at the time, it was just a portfolio. It wasn't what you guys are going to see now.

So when I realized that it worked and that I was connecting these solutions to the right people, that we got a lot done in such a short period of time.

So this was another

aha moment for us where we had a solution and then we found a grant that covered that solution. So we worked with a developer out of Jacksonville, they're called Future of Cities, and they're kind of recreating the Wynwood of Jacksonville, which is really cool, but we carried this HVAC technology called Blue Frontier, which reduces energy use by 90 % compared to traditional HVAC systems, and so we had that solution, and then we found out there was a grant that would cover the entire system cost.

So that's when we connected my client to not only this incredible HVAC technology, which is MIT's named it one of the world's like top climate tech companies to watch out in the world, Blue Frontier.

But when the grant covered it, you better believe my client was super happy that he got a solution. It was free and all that good stuff.

So I'll just get through.

Results Across Industries and Measurable Savings

We've hit the 250 mark for products, services, and technologies, and we work with stadiums, convention centers, airports, hospitals, universities, hotels, restaurants, music festivals, because we just have solutions for all these different departments that they have within these organizations.

This is just what savings look like from some of our solutions. So one solution saved the medical center $90 ,000 a year, just one.

Same thing with this hotel in Cape Town. They save $20 ,000 per year with one solution.

These are all different solutions. And then same thing with that one.

So we are basically a sustainability platform built to discover, fund, and implement at scale. And it's already built on what we've already proven.

Product Walkthrough: The Dashboard and Core Features

So this is a little snapshot of what the marketplace, our dashboard is looking like, which I'm going to do a real live demo here shortly so we can actually kind of go through these quickly.

But you'll be able to access our solution catalog now. You'll be able to upload your bills, and that way we can start really tracking ROI payback and all that good stuff. Even savings will match you to the incentives.

You'll have an outreach tracker. That way you can manage all the projects that you're working on, solutions.

You'll eventually have an AI assistant still working on that. And messaging will be really cool, also working on that, where you can actually talk internally within the implementation tool with your directors, with your CFO. That way it's all streamlined and you're not having to go through Gmail and Excel's and different tech platforms.

So you get to find what works when you discover a marketplace. You can build the business case and then you get to implement it.

And our business model is we make money when our clients succeed. So right now we make a commission off of every solution that we implement. we own the introduction and then we are expanding revenue as we scale with subscription models partner listing fees and a corporate sponsorship layer which we don't really have to get into

this is just to show the traction that we've been getting i think the biggest one is that we are we were we did not get accepted but i just found out like a couple weeks ago but we are an official we were an official nominee for the earth drop prize prince william it's like the noble peace prize but for sustainability companies so it was really cool that we got nominated and then we've

had some other things that we've done as well this is our advisory board some really badass people from the sustainability officer for miami -dade county public schools a former mlb player a guy from climate first bank usf and vantage airport group so these are just some real results

of what we've done we've supported over 40 organizations we've diverted 44 000 pounds that's actually much bigger now. And we've avoided 27 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Okay, yeah, so that is gradable. I'll just stop there to see if you have any questions before I get into the demo. But I'll like go quickly through the demo too, because that's what I think brings it all together.

Questions? Demos? Great.

Replacing Manual Project Management with a “Salesforce for Sustainability”

Do you manage all of those projects? I do. Well, I was until I built this. So the tool is now supposed to manage it all versus me doing it.

Cause yeah, before it would be a lot of handholding. Here's the solution. Here's some case studies. Here's the client. Like it just took forever.

Now it's all under one place. Not necessarily. Claude has built the tool, but now the clients are the ones that are having to do the work within the tool.

So it's like a Salesforce, but for sustainability. I hope that's like a good example, um, which I'll show you guys here shortly.

So, um, this didn't look like this. It's just crazy. Uh, Fable actually made this look the way it does.

Um, I asked Fable to kind of clean up the UX UI and it did wonders.

This picture here is actually my idea. So I'll I'll take credit for that.

But, um, I, I basically implemented, implemented our brand guidelines, which Claude also helped us do through just our logo. So I use Claude design essentially to build brand guidelines and it was like a 20 page document, but it is something now I can use for media partners and for all things, uh, my brand.

So, um, energy, water, waste, every business has all three and we're turning it into a business case. So as you scroll down again, Again, Claude did all of this.

Obviously, it looks very Claude -like, so we're still kind of working on making it to where it does, because a lot of people that use Claude, of course, can say, okay, this was made on Claude.

But it doesn't matter because I still love it, and it's a lot better from our first iteration. So we're going to sign in. I have another question.

How Impact Is Measured: CO₂ and Other Metrics

How do you measure the CO2? Is that accurate? Yeah. Good question.

So it depends on what the client has done. So, for example, like, let's say we diverted 1 ,000 meals from the landfill. You can actually quantify an estimated value of what that means in CO2. But you also can quantify how many cars off the road that means, or how many gallons of water saved, or how many kilowatts saved. It just depends on the metric.

Just the detail is what I'm interested in. And so your project management tool, let's say, is a project management tool. It's just calculating all of that out of the projects that are into that tool? Correct. Okay. Yeah, nothing outside of that.

I mean, I wish I could do that for everything. But there's, like, calculators and stuff that you can find on websites that you can be like, if I implemented this energy efficiency device, how many kilowatts would I save? And I'm sure you could probably find something like that. So that HVAC probably reduced a lot of CO2 into that.

yeah but we that is next step for us yeah like we'll have to wait until they're using it to then be able to quantify right so yeah a lot of it still has to like we have to wait a little bit but um others are quick too it could be a quick pickup of food or it could be a composting yeah just depends consumption of compostable correct yeah or like instead of that plastic

a cup like if we replaced it with aluminum cups that we've now instead of you ordering for the next five it's crazy the numbers we can pull from just one change so good question question yeah of

Live Demo: Personalized Dashboard and Solution Discovery

course um so this is a demo demonstration um account so demo purposes only so this is what it would look like once you've used it so alex for example is the director of engineering at the coral bay resort um and so what we're trying to do is show alex in his dashboard one where he stands

gradable wise so he's doing really well but he's not bad um but we also want to show him things because at this point we have like new solutions like every week so we can show alex hey alex and maybe alex told us that they're looking for more air filtration or more geothermal technologies technologies that it'll show him right off the bat what is tailored to him.

Great. So we scroll down and I'm just going to show you quickly what it looks like.

He can look at his projects, what they're spending on utilities every month and then the marketplace.

This is where the real magic happens. So this is what it looks like.

Again, Fable is the one that fixed the UX UI of this, because if you look at a lot of marketplaces, they all look kind of the same that are built on vibe coding. so you know it took my brand guidelines and just completely transformed the look of it and I'm so happy with it it'll probably look like this for a while but yeah you can just kind of just start

scrolling through all the things that we offer right and then you can even filter through you know whether it's an energy solution a water solution waste food transportation and EV we're now doing health and wellness design and infrastructure things that are in carbon and reporting, but I did want to show you guys a solution.

Example Solution: On-Site Food Waste Processing (Biodigester)

So like, let's say I'm looking at things around food, right? You're going to see, this is the technology I said that turns food waste into energy and you're scrolling down and then maybe you think this looks cool.

On -site food waste processing system. This is basically a biodigester and I'll show you what that looks like.

So it's just a big piece of machinery. You feed it food and then come out comes compost that you could use for your plants and stuff you can sell it if you want but um this is what it's

looking like so if this looks interesting i'm looking okay roi is 100 i'd get my money back in three to five years there's financing available the company has eight years hundreds of clients tells you a little bit about the technology the key benefits oh there's a grant i can apply for

industry served even down to case studies okay what did they do to these parks and what did they they do for this K through 12 education school.

But you can add it to your outreach tracker if you want, sharing it to someone from your team. Maybe your executive chef should look at this, right? Like my chef needed this, maybe whatever.

And then you can request a discovery call. So the discovery call will then ping the partner that this director of engineering from this hotel wants to have a call about their solution. So makes things a lot easier for me.

Outreach Tracker: Managing Pipeline and Implementation

And then the outreach tracker is really cool because this actually shows you everything you're working on, right?

Let's say there's six solutions that you're looking into, five are active, one meeting is scheduled, and the pipeline value,

if I'm the director of engineering and I can see that the six things I'm working on is gonna have a value of 137 ,000, you better believe I'm gonna be working on that

so I can get a promotion or a bonus. So that number's really important.

We're eventually gonna have one that says like, utility savings, revenue generated, because there's a lot of things that we offer that also generate revenue.

So you scroll down, you see everything. If you've gotten the status right, whether they've been contacted, interested, the priority. This is where you can upload your bills. So that way we can have the AI kind of intuitively track everything as far as savings.

This is still being worked on right now.

Incentives, Messaging, and What’s Coming Next

There's only eight solutions on here from grants, rebates, tax credits. But we are looking at an API connect or an API. What is it called? I don't know, there's a database that we're going to tap into and have hundreds of the incentives eventually.

It's kind of pricey. It's like three grand. But yeah, this is it.

Overall, this is kind of the messaging that I mentioned earlier that we'll be able to have everyone that's working on all things sustainability within the platform versus having to go back and forth on Gmail or whatever, Outlook. and um yeah i guess the settings you just kind of fill things out and profile intelligence if anything has changed we ask them questions on whether they have new goals new budget rains new constraints anything that's changed and they can update their profile

um and that is it for the demo thank you guys so much for listening so yeah i can take questions

Q&A: Pricing, Workflow After Discovery Calls, and Positioning

i heard there's a lot of founders in the room so i'm happy to like go into a little bit of like what I've done and how I built this tool and some really cool tools that I use that are free that are great obviously as I'm a bootstrap founder so any

questions on the demo my company anything like that sometimes I do such a good job no one has questions good do your customers subscribe for free so

yeah right now we have a founding member cohort is what I'm calling it so we have some really incredible users people that I know people from my advisory board that are using it right now because this isn't officially launched this is in beta launch that they're gonna then provide feedback and then we're gonna

make those changes and then make it an official thing so we're not gonna charge too much for it I think it'll be like a freemium thing where you sign up for free you access our marketplace so that way is accessible for everyone but that

eventually that if you want the outreach tracker and the way to upload your bills that then it will be like a like a monthly thing yeah and like every seat will be an additional charge i think i'm thinking like 20 a seat or something crazy so we can follow up yeah

i'll shut up i just want to just want to know what happens after the discovery call

who follows up that they continue working together yes them and my partners so the partners then get connected to the client hey i really like this solution i found and then they do what they do do best with every other client that they work with it's vetted they send whatever information if it works great if it doesn't there's plenty more yeah yeah yeah and it's yeah so the marketplace

is what like vendors essentially yes yeah it's a little i there's so many words i can call it like sustainable procurement or yeah uh sustainability command center or an implementation implementation tool or if you just want to call it a marketplace my AI has been advising me not to call it a marketplace because it's more it's more than that but I feel like people get it when

I say marketplace I like to call it an implementation tool because that's what I really care about is that these things actually get done versus you know it just being up in the air or like management changing or whatever like we're I'm trying to make this to where it makes deals

deals close faster, obviously for the sake of like my runway, but also for the sake of the environment.

Why This Matters: Miami as Ground Zero for Climate Risks

Because another thing I'll say, which what inspired me to start this is Miami is ground zero for climate change.

And so we have a landfill crisis, we're running out of space for our trash. Biscayne Bay right here is dying. It's worth $64 billion of economic output every year and it's worth zero if it's dead.

We have sewage all over our streets, literal shit on our streets because we have septic tanks and anytime it floods, there's shit everywhere. everywhere. So don't wear your shoes inside.

And then the list goes on and on climate gentrification, inequalities, food insecurities. Um, so that's what inspired me to start gradable.

It was because I watched this documentary back in 2010 about the global landfill crisis. And then I moved here and we had a landfill crisis like 15 years later and I'm like, okay, wait.

So anyways, yeah. Um, any other questions?

Service Model: Self-Serve vs. Hands-On Advisory

Uh, so, so the else, or was that you were physically there working with those teams so is there an advisory piece of this business yeah yeah good question we are thinking of like a hybrid model right because what we don't want to do is push this on someone who doesn't want to touch it or has so many other tech stacks or so much to do that they're just like this is

just too much where we are going to basically offer like three different tiers one where you handle it yourself you use it super user -friendly or that event we have like a six -month period where we're with you doing calls like getting you set up more comfortable with the tool and then the other option where we just hold your hand forever so yeah we're figuring that out through the

founding member cohort on like what to do hold your hand forever is that like uh you want to sign an agent to do it because i imagine that's you mr agent guy yeah i mean that would be really

cool i look i thought it would be so cool with this to how cool would it be is everything every every time you logged in you have like a AI avatar maybe me that's like hey what's going on today or like why'd you log in or what are you up to or what do you want help with and then it like helps you do it so yeah I mean I think the options or possibilities are endless right now but right now

my whole focus is just to get people to use it provide feedback and then that way you know like even the outreach tracker I've already heard that like that one's a game changer because then it's just like shows everything that you're up to and the pipeline value and all that is super important

because yeah at the end of the day people want to do the right thing but when it comes to the bottom line that's more important and so just really trying to show the economic benefits of all these things because it's not just your bottom line when you save money it's brand value right

it's employee retention it's customer retention right you're going to want to come back to a place that's like feeding people and like doing good for the environment or whatever it might be

Sourcing New Solutions: Staying Ahead of Climate Tech

but um yeah so you said that you guys get like new solutions often are you guys just constantly just sourcing out like vendors for new things yeah well you know my phone my laptop my linkedin the algorithm is just like in my face about all these really cool solutions and you know paint

that absorbs carbon and makes the indoor quality better and then eventually becomes hard enough where you can peel it off like things like that like blow my mind even that machine that turns food waste into energy they're being installed left and right in uh in hospitals and then it's

providing energy for the hospitals and then one last one i'll bring up that i didn't bring up which is a really cool one it's an ai powered recycling assistant where when you go up to the trash receptacles there's a huge screen you show it what's in your hand let's say that coca cola can and it tells you it goes in recycling but then it also reminds you i know isn't that fun

and it reminds you that if there's liquid inside to dump your liquid in where the liquid recycling goes before you and if you do it wrong it has like a huge X with like a sad like sad emoji and you're like oh shit I fucked up and so then you do the right thing which helps yeah sorting and stuff no I'm sure

that TV screen is LED whatever don't they have those little stickers that say say like powering this TV will be like 30 bucks a year or something, get out of here. We have solar panels on the building, it's fine.

Energy and Water Solutions (Beyond Waste)

So, and you didn't mention anything about the solutions to help enterprises save water or energy.

Yeah, we do, we have, oh, like, oh, like talk about what we have? Yeah.

Oh, yeah, let me see if I can, solar, no, we have like solar thermal hybrid technologies, We have technologies that take the excess water pressure from a building and turn it into energy. What else we have?

We have a smart water valve that takes, like, the air or something out of, like, the building pressure or something like that that saves you 10%. The list goes on and on. We have floating solar panels that go on bodies of water.

We have, what else in energy? Solar thermal.

Who It’s For: Enterprise Focus vs. Consumer Use

Are there solutions for, like, the everyday human as opposed to? The price grade? Like consumer? Yeah.

No. I mean, yeah, we have like a smart toilet. I guess you could buy it.

You could go up to a big company. Yeah.

I mean, the bigger the company, the bigger impact. That's why I go after like the big facilities. Because if you saw the bills that I see, well, just give me an example.

One hotel, South Beach. It's not like the biggest building, but it's, yeah, pretty big. They spend $100 ,000 on their water bill. And their energy bill is $200 ,000 a month.

imagine a stadium imagine airport when you get those solutions like do you do you set up like

Partner Economics: Referrals, Commissions, and Perpetuity

some sort of referral yeah yeah yeah so it's no cost or risk right now eventually when this start because here's the thing i've connected a company to some of their biggest clients she has an airport now she i've connected her to universities to school districts like she obviously is like Like she's just she's a startup, too. The point is to replicate that for all of the companies, because obviously the more we scale, the more they scale and the more this work scales. So it's no cost or risk. We only ask for a small percentage of business generated.

And now we're changing that. It's going to be in perpetuity. We're not messing around no more. We're going to get that money forever. Oh, yeah. We're taking it seriously.

Before I was like, oh, it's up to you. Just like give us what you want. No, no, no. Now it's in perpetuity.

so yeah okay so founders raise a hand who is a founder oh my gosh okay well

I'll just show you one thing that I wanted to show you guys because honest I have another speaking engagement in 30 minutes so I got to go but I this is

Founder Tooling Tip: Composio as an “Ultimate Connector”

blowing my mind it's called Composio has anyone heard of Composio let's go you have okay so Composio is really cool who's who uses Claude I think now ChatGPT has connectors now? It does? Okay so then this probably works with that

too, forgive me I'm non -technical I'm like learning all this but ComposeU is really cool because this is a an open source tool and it's free and essentially what it does is instead of you having to connect Claude or ChatGPT

to its connectors which some of them you'll find here right like Claude has most of these this one takes it to the next level because it has more than what Claude and chat to BT offers in this like Instagram Instagram oh we like the phones out yes Instagram is not a connector on Claude or chat to BT this

one is right so I'm just gonna scroll down real quick so you guys can get a little taste Google tasks I don't think Google Maps definitely is not one like Like, you just keep scrolling down.

You'll see, like, every single app imaginable is on here. Google Photos. Like, I know all the ones I've just mentioned definitely. I don't even know if Claude has that one.

Maybe. Facebook, I'm not sure it has. But you can just tell by this. Panda Duck.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Epic Games. Definitely I don't think that's on, Claude. So, yeah, you guys can take a look at what this all means later.

But the last thing I'll add before I leave, and please connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm really active on LinkedIn. I can pull that up real quick, too.

But what's very special is that it's not just one connector to a Gmail. I have five different Gmails with five different domains connected. How cool is that? That's awesome.

I know. And it's free. I see them better. Right. So, yeah.

I mean, if I had different cool calendars, I can connect to a bunch of different ones. And then when you're on Claude, you just say, connect to my gradable email or connect to my Heal House email or connect to my brand revamping email and it'll do it.

And so you don't need to connect your ChatGVT and Claude anymore. You just connect it to Composio that is connected to everything. This is the ultimate connector.

Conclusion

All right. Well, that's it for today. Thank you guys so much for your time.