Week 13: My Entrepreneurial Journey

Some of the biggest highlights from this project include how I was able to go out of my comfort zone to meet and talk to professionals. Even though I am not actually developing this technology, I think speaking to them gave me deeper knowledge on the product and allowed me to modify my business model canvas. A lowlight for me was definitely understanding the technology and logistics behind the product. While I understood it was an integrated greywater filtration with thermal regulation, for the longest time I didn't understand the mechanisms behind it. Most customers do not understand what "greywater filtration" is so I think understanding and breaking down the logistics would be helpful for me, customers, and investors. In order to do so, there were some videos and pictures my team and I had found, detailing the process and general overview of the system.

Week 12: The journey is ending...

As the journey comes to an end, I feel much more confident with my product. After doing a lot of research with pricing and customer discovery and practicing pitching in front of the class, I feel more prepared for the final presentation. Right now, my teammate and I are focusing on creating the slide deck and overall branding for the company (color scheme, logo, etc) and this creative part is exciting. As we wrap things up, my group is now focused on putting together our pitch.

Week 11: What keeps you up at night regarding your project?

The biggest concern I have for our project is how we plan to scale it. During our class pitch, we realized there are various avenues we can take when it comes to scaling our business. For example, we could broaden our customer base. Currently, we are selling to new home developers. What if we could sell this to existing homes or even independent contractors? Another method is to expand geographically. We are currently based out of California but we could try to expand throughout the West Coast and beyond. We could also figure out if our technology can be used to develop more products. Based on this, I wanted to figure out what is the best way for our startup to grow.

Week 10: Our Patent

Our patent is a wastewater reuse system for residential and commercial buildings. The product is a set of panels placed inside the facade on the exterior walls of your home/building that is connected to the water system of your property. Those panels are composed of glass surfaces filled with nanoparticles that react with the sunlight to filter the water you are using every day. Besides recycling your water, our panels have the ability to act as a thermal mass. The disinfected water is stocked and heated up by the sun in the facades of your walls through the day allowing our system to control daily temperature swings by releasing the heated water under the slabs of the floor at night.

Ultimately, this patent provides technology for an integrated greywater reuse and thermal control system that reduces water consumption and heating energy consumption. Currently, existing technologies address these problems through separate units but this patent ensures a combined unit.

Week 9: Customer Interviews

This week, we had created a survey for customer interviews. The general trend of our customer's response to our product is that they would not be opposed to this but in order for them to buy it, there needs to be a more convincing reason. For most customers, they are unsure of what our product truly does simply because advanced terms like "nanoparticles" and "greywater filtration" only sound cool but not exactly something they understand. With that, we asked if they would be willing to buy our product so that they could implement this service in their business, and most responded "N/A" --meaning they are neutral about the product. Others responded "Yes." We also asked if they would be willing to have this system in their home if it saves them 50% of their energy and water bill per month, and 50% of the responders said "yes" while the others responded "maybe." We decided it would be best if we broke down our product further and we are glad that no one was opposed to the idea.

Week 8: Progress

This week we had modified our market. After pitching in class, we realized our customer base was too broad and figuring out how we would scale and price our product would be difficult. We honed in on our TAM, SAM, and SOM. Our TAM has shifted from the California population to number of homes, making calculations a lot easier since its based on units as opposed to the number of people per household. We then were able to conclude that we would address 10% of the new homes in California. This allowed us to figure out all the financials for our technology.

Week 7: Progress

I believe this week, I personally saw growth in terms of my initiatives. After contacting and interviewing professors to learn more about the technology, I was able to gain clarity on the overall directionality of our business model. Meeting up with the professor, however, became a struggle as they were not available during their office hours. After following up with the professor,  we decided it might be more efficient to email our questions and they will get back to us. Emailing the professor turned out to be helpful. The key takeaways from the professor's email was that there no similar system in the market that saves water,  recycles water, and generates energy at the same time. The best way to approach the pricing is to figure out the costs of these 3 individually and figure out how much an individual is ultimately saving. The panel uses solar photovoltaic technology and knowing that, we can determine the average cost of a solar panel for comparisons. Overall, this week helped us better formulate the way we plan on pricing the unit.

Week 6: Team Feedback

Overall, I am really excited that our team comes from diverse backgrounds, each having a different skill set. I think this helps us out greatly for the rest of the semester because it will be easy to delegate tasks amongst the team members. With respect to our patent, the difficulty is honing in on our customer base. While we have decided how we want to create a business from our patent, our customer base is currently to wide: construction companies, independent contractors, and home owners. With this great gap, it becomes difficult to do more research on how to specialize our product because each customer base has their own needs and modifications. We plan to meet with the inventor to get some more insight on the patent and proceed from there.