Ecoflow Group Blog

For our final week, we really wanted to clean up our slide deck, practice our presentation and finalize the minute details regarding our financials. When creating our prototype deck, we wanted to keep a very clean theme that focused primarily on words and strayed away from using images. We wanted to keep the information to a minimum and focus on presenting only the main parts, and explaining the more in-depth parts during our presentation. After seeing other groups present, we felt like our tactic of a clean, “bare minimum” slide deck was a good idea, but felt as though we should elevate it using images and graphical representations. Taking advice from Rick and Tal, we completely changed some of our slides to wholly represent certain ideas that were more important than others. After meeting up and practicing our presentation, we found out that it takes us 5:30 to 6 minutes to finish. To adjust accordingly, we suggested that some of our faster speakers to slow down and speak in a ...

What did you want to do? This past week, we were supposed to meet to practice our pitch, which we did. We also planned on getting ready for Thursday's dress rehearsal and finalizing our P&L statement. What did you learn/complete? We have finished our value proposition canvas, clearly defined our competition in our resegmented market and completed our financials. We put together the last pieces of information needed for our income statement and spent time practicing to get ready for the final pitch. Our sessions of practice were essential into helping us understand how we should allocate our time to be within the required time limit of the presentation. We also learned that since our patent technology is highly complex, the best way to go about pitching our idea is to be as simple as possible so that investors can quickly understand the need we are trying to address. Issues? We need answers to several important questions before the final pre...

This week we made a lot of progress on figuring out our costs and honing in on who our customer is. After talking to Professor Gutierrez and her grad students, we've learned that the cost to manufacture our solar optics greywater reuse device is similar to that of solar panels. We looked up the cost of producing a solar panel and found that it was between $1 - $2 per watt. Our solar optics systems are 5 kilowatt systems and as of January 2017, the average cost of a solar panel system is $3.26 per watt or $16,300 for a 5 kilowatt system. (Source: http://news.energysage.com/5kw-solar-systems-compare-prices-installers/). After talking to the contractor we are in contact with, we learned that the cost to install the system may cost a few hundred dollars so we estimate the final cost of our entire system to be $17,000 for the consumer. Our go-to-market strategy involves going directly to home builders like KB Homes and NVR (among others) and selling our systems to them in bulk. ...

It was an interesting session in class this week because we were suddenly made to pitch to other groups and really explain our patent and business idea in a clear and concise manner. We were rather surprised by the change in class schedule, and we did not do a good job at making our pitch at the beginning. However, as we moved around the classroom 'pitching' to different groups, we saw our problems and tried to improvise and improve as we go along. Our pitch was definitely more better at the end of the session! Here's a video of Nitin explaining what our patent is, in a short 1 minute time. This was a video taken at the beginning of the session. We could all say Nitin improved his explanation of the patent to be much clearer and direct, at the end of the session. This is also partly due to Prof Tal giving him advice and making him redo the pitch.  Some of our classmates also commented that they could understand what our patent is about through Nitin's pitc...

This week, we contacted Professor Maria-Paz Gutierrez, an associate professor who was a lead researcher for the project. She told us to contact a graduate student for more information and that we should research by reading papers and watching videos. She mentioned that it is essentially a solar water system with photovoltaics. Currently, there exists no system that saves & recycles water while also generating energy at the same time. To figure out the cost, we would calculate how much each individual system costs and compare those costs. The biggest difference is that we are not only having an economic benefit for the user but the overall infrastructure of the city. The value of this varies based on the building, such as commercial or public investments. She also gave us a link that explains how the technology works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS_HgfanRjA .  Ultimately, this week we focus on finalizing costs and figuring how our revenue stream works. Essentially, we w...

After refining our research on our competitors, we found out that our product was located in a re-segmented market rather than a new market. This was clearly explained as we could define who our customers were and at the same time consider what our edge was. The niche we are targeting- solar optics based active panels- is making our prototype highly differentiable in the solar energy industry. The differentiation of our product occurred as a result of the strong fit between our idea and the UC Berkeley patent of tech ID: 21053. Indeed, our project is directly related to the technology of the patent using solar panels for cleaning water at home according to a complex infrastructure of unique photovoltaic cells installed inside residential building facades. In the process, we learned that a re-segmented market was a great environment for building innovative ideas as well as for providing customers with effective solutions to their specific needs. Our main issue right now is to find out...

This week has been centered around getting into more details about our project with other companies, and getting their feedback. We were able to see which firms were truly interested in our project as compared with others. To do so, we asked a series of specific questions outlined in our group presentation to assess the need for solar optics based active panels in residential areas. This led us to get in touch with one of the most specialized firms in the field of water preservation: Solar City. Solar City is partnering with Tesla for its home solar installations. We were able to get in touch with an energy consultant to talk about our innovative strategy for implementing our specific type of solar panels in homes around the US.

After talking to the greywater professor, we had a better idea of how the product works. We can turn the greywater patent into a product that we can sell to construction companies, radiant heating companies, or to homeowners directly depending on our business plan and strategy. The product is an integrated system of filtration, disinfection, and organic compound removal using a photocatalytic disinfection technology viable in small spaces (exterior walls of a house) The system uses sunlight for water disinfection, and can also act as a thermal mass to control daily temperature swings by absorbing heat during the day and releasing it through the night. The new exterior wall building system will significantly decrease water use allowing homeowners to save up to 100% on water cost. This brings a significant incentive to homeowners for not having to pay for water. After completing our value proposition canvas and talking to the professors, we realized that a good avenue for selling our ...

This week focus was on making our final decision on the selection of one of the 2 patents we were initially interested in. Waiting for the professors to answer our emails, we were eventually able to have an appointment with the cyanobacteria researcher on March 2.  We gathered valuable information regarding the potential commercialization of projects from this technology as well as details on the opportunities this patent has to offer. The market is currently not competitive as no one has managed to commercialize the technology. Most of the biofuel production companies using  cyanobacteria photosynthesis go often times out of business as the operation cost from the chemical processes is important. The professor repeatedly emphasized that this patent was an enabling technology. Therefore, we cannot directly use it to develop any final products but rather take advantage of it in any transitional process that will be needed to develop our prototype. The professor asserted that ...

In week 6, our group, Team A, decided to weigh our options with the two patents we had. The first patent is a greywater reuse system that filters water using sunlight and uses that heated water to regulate the temperature of a building. The second patent is an efficient method to utilize cyanobacteria to produce biofuels. We recently talked with the cyanobacteria professor, and he was very excited to talk with us. He actually advised to take a different route with the commercialization of the patent, and go for a sort of energy consulting business that helps other companies that produce biofuels. Our patent would give them a better method to produce their biofuels. Though this idea sounds intriguing, we are not sure how likely we could accomplish something like that because we lack the qualifications to give advice on biofuels, so we would have to hire people to do that. However, after talking to the greywater reuse system professor, we became very eager to pursue this patent....