Private Challenge Lab Blog

My entrepreneurial journey... While reflecting on this semester, I've realized that I went from not knowing what the fundamentals behind a startup are to now being relatively well versed in the elements that go into building a business. This class has taught me several practical skills from constructing financial statements to raising money from VC's to understanding the subtleties of intellectual property, but I think one of the biggest things I've learned is how to work with a team. Understanding how to work with my team has been an important yet underrated part of entrepreneurial journey. In the beginning, we had some issues forming our team because we had 1 too many people so it was tricky trying to figure out who would be in our final team. I had to mediate some stressful situations regarding our team formation involving talking to everyone so they would understand who would be in the team if we had to cut 1 person. Luckily, one person decided to join another tea...

After meeting with my group this week, we got a good amount of work done and figured out a lot of things that we needed to address. Our to do list included addressing technology, pricing for the system, cost savings for end users, production of the product, market sizing, and scalability of the product. We researched potential competitors in the greywater recycling and solar energy business. For example, we looked at SunRun and Solar City and saw how much they priced their product. We then used this number as the benchmark that we had to compare to. The average solar system is around $25k for a 5 kW system. We figured out our pricing by first finding out the cost to produce a solar panel - about $2 per watt and they usually sell for around $7 per watt. A more detailed view of our pricing and potential revenue is as follows: Unit economics: Number: 92,000 new homes in California each year; 1% of this each year 1% x 92,000 = 920 Revenue: 920 x $16,300 =  15 M ...

Our patent is a wastewater reuse and integrated thermal building control system for residential and commercial buildings. The product is a panel placed on the walls of your home/building that is connected to your water pipes. It filters and disinfects this water using sunlight and uses this water as a thermal mass to control daily temperature swings by absorbing heat during the day and releasing it through the night. The key is photocatalytic disinfection technology - glass surfaces that resemble spheres in the panels are coated with nanoparticles that react with sunlight. This reaction releases OH radicals that can kills microbes. This water can then be reused for purposes such as washing clothes or flushing the toilet. An average family uses 250 gal a day. Most of it is greywater - all the water we've used besides toilet water. Our product decentralizes greywater filtration, allowing the homeowner to filter their own water for reuse - this saves money on water bill and signific...

This week has been a pivotal week in terms of getting our project up and running. First of all, Nick has set up a mock up of a logo design, and I am working on developing a webpage for our product. We are thinking of calling our company EcoFlow because it suggests an eco friendly solution related to water (water). The design of the logo and webpage look clean and will get across what we are trying to sell. (Nick has the image file on his computer, once I get it, I will post it here). I learned a lot after doing customer research this week. I have realized that it is difficult to get in contact with the right people at companies. I called a company called SunRun, a solar company in San Francisco, and got the contact for a customer experience specialist. Initially, I talked to a customer service representative who transferred me to the customer experience specialist. This person then told me that I would have to talk to someone in the technical side of the company to figure out if ou...

I'm taking the initiative to do our customer interviews, but since I can't do everything, I asked someone else to take up the job of contacting companies. My group members are taking care of the solar company interviews and creating our powerpoint presentations. I also made the value proposition canvas by myself. I made a homeowner survey that I sent to some friends and family and Niels is working on contacting construction companies to find out the viability of our product. We are gaining more customer insight after talking to friends who own homes. We still have a little more work to do in figuring out which demographic would most likely buy our product, but we should be getting that research done this week. We'll get everything figured out once we meet up this week and everyone is on the same page. Surveying customers is interesting because it really forces me to get out in the field and understand what exactly the problem I'm trying to solve is. I talked to my...

This week is really exciting because we finally spoke with the professors for both of our patents. Niels and Lei talked to the cyanobacteria biofuel production researcher ( Anastasios  Melis) , and he gave some valuable insight on potential commercialization opportunities. Melis talked about a potential biofuel consulting company idea in which we could offer consulting services to biofuel and cyanobacteria companies to give them advice on how to improve the efficiency of their biofuel production process. This seems viable because a lot of biofuel companies are struggling because the high cost of production. However, the people in my team are not qualified to provide these services so we would have to hire consultants. This seems like a small market, so it's not too exciting to me. The greywater reuse system seems like the project we are going to go with at this point. The professor we talked to talked to us about how we can actually implement the system in buildings, and it is ...

I would say that our team is coming together pretty well. This is our current workflow: 1. Attend class, learn from professors, and see what we need to focus on for the week 2. Communicate through our group chat about what needs to done (send out emails to contact professors, research, or brainstorm independently) 3.  Meet up on Sunday afternoons and put all our ideas together and complete any group tasks assigned to us We have been consistent in following this workflow, and it seems to be working so far. For example, since we had to focus on professors for the previous weeks, we assigned leads for the two different patents, and those leads would be in charge of contacting the professors and setting up an appointment to talk. Then those leads would communicate the information to the rest of the team. So far, we've had some trouble talking to professors. We were supposed to talk to one of the professors today, but he was not at his office hours, so we scheduled another tim...