The Final Result

Just thought I'd make a separate post to show our deck. Please feel free to leave any feedback! We've made a few changes since my last post. Our group blog includes an audio of our proposed presentation as well that we recorded last week.

Last Week

It's the last week of class before our final pitch and my team has been focusing on refining our pitch deck. We've been getting some conflicting feedback from our mentors in terms of our deck/financials/patent knowledge so this week we'll be trying to reach a middle ground. We took in feedback about increasing our ask price to around $3M (instead of $100k) based on our numbers, and I've specifically been working on the P&L statement. As a team, we need to work on our actual pitch- in terms of what we'll be saying during the presentation- and make sure we know the deck like the back of our hand. Our deck can be found here, we're still working on it but feel free to leave comments about it on this post :)

In terms of the journey of this class as a whole, I've definitely had some high and low points. I had prior knowledge of entrepreneurship and VC/startups so a lot of the information we learned about was repetitive, except for the lessons on patents in particular. I recognize it can be hard to form a company in a non-organic way with a time constraint, but I was happy I got a chance to look at startups/VC from a new perspective by focusing on the technology. I enjoy working with my group and the class as a whole, so it was a worthwhile experience for me.

Close to the End

As the last few weeks of the course approach, we're nearing the end of the journey! My group has been putting together our pitch deck over the last week or so, as we got approval from Rick last week for our final business model and general plans. I'm a bit nervous about getting everything ready in time but I think we should be able to pull it off. I'll probably be in charge of doing most of the financial work, as I've taken a some classes in the field and done a few internships in VC/banking. The task is both exciting and daunting as the numbers really drive everything. Hopefully I haven't lost my Excel skills from last summer!

Stay tuned to our group blog to see the outline for our deck and what we put together for this week's run-through, and I'll post a link here as well in a few days.

EDIT: Our pitch deck can be found here!

What keeps us up at night?

Edit: for some reason this didn't post when I meant for it to a week prior

After talking to Tiffine and Rick last class about our business model (we decided on B2B2C) and the direction of our project, we got a bit concerned that we'd have to start all over: they both said that hardware can be hard to sell and maybe we should be targeting home alarm companies instead of phone service providers. We were also encouraged to look more at companies like Nest and explore ideas about operating and partnering with them.

While this makes sense, it would be a totally different model for our team. We're going to meet over this week to discuss but I personally think we should totally flush out our B2B2C model first, as it definitely has potential.

When we met this week, we started to construct our pitch deck- it was actually the hardest to think of a company name and logo!

Updates

Check out my team's blog for weekly updates about our patent!
You can also find our current value proposition here, and our business development canvas here.

Our Patent

Patent: The Network-Connected, Low-Power Early Warning Device For Natural And Man-Made Disasters is a detection device combining hardware and software in order to alert users of potential dangers. This unique device’s simple design (similar to a smoke alarm), inexpensive price, easy installation, and minimal requirements (wireless internet access or USB power) allows its usage in various establishments such as homes, offices, businesses, schools, and hospitals.

Technology: The prototype is made up of a spare battery, a speaker, and a raspberry pi with a disc SD card. Another part of the technology is the software, which is a mobile device application that alerts users of natural disasters in the determined geographic location through a channel over the internet.  The warning device is always on. Thus, the user is able to receive up-to-date alerts about their personalized location and any additional emergency networks they subscribe to, wherever and whenever. In the case the device were to malfunction, the device has a built in battery backup for up 72 hours and can failover to other networks such as cellular or WiFi.

Idea/Uses: Depending on the nature of the disaster and the distance from the origin of the disaster, alerts may be generated seconds (earthquakes), minutes (tornados), hours (tsunamis) before the effects are noticed local to the device.

Claims:

• network communications interface
• annunciator mechanism
• computer processor
• non-transitory computer-readable memory

Taps into central warning system in a certain geographic location

Senses seismic movement

Broadcast alerts visually and audibly to one or more locally connected devices

Surveys & More

This week in class, we looked over the Apple patent and discussed all the little details that go into framing a patent, and even how often people create similar things both before and after a patent is published. We tried to apply this to our patent, basically finding that the proprietary knowledge is the early warning network linked to the device.

We also created a customer survey that launched this week- feel free to take it here! This will allow us to further track down our target customer market and help us in later weeks to market our product and form a better business model. We also reached back out to Professor Joshua Bloom (who was busy last week) and will be meeting with him Thursday morning. We'll be forming a list of questions as a group to prepare for the meeting. Some of those include asking if we can see an actual prototype of the product or if he has any images of it, and what he thinks of our proposed business models.

Group Blog: Dream Team

Side note: my team's group blog can be viewed here! We'll be posting our weekly updates and any blog/vlog posts on there going forward.

Target Markets

We hit a bit of a bump-in-the-road this week, which was a little disappointing considering we had been progressing so quickly. We were unable to contact the professor we had been talking to about our patent, which pushed back all our plans to discuss our business model ideas and questions about the product with him. Instead, we opted to work more on the customer side and began to develop a survey to send out to our target customer profile. We also worked a bit more on our value proposition-which Rick and Tal had said was already pretty good and would just need minor edits- to perfect it. Overall, I think our group is doing quite well and we seem to be a bit ahead of the rest of the class. Hopefully this week doesn't push us back too much.

Finding Customers

For week 7, we started focusing on potential customers for our product. We each interviewed a friend or family member and got their input on if they'd use the app or device and how it relates to their daily lives. I interviewed a friend who graduated from Cal two years ago and now lives in New York, working in finance. He said this product isn't too appealing since things like earthquakes and tornadoes aren't an issue in Manhattan and that since he rents an apartment, he's not as concerned with property damage.

This made us realize that we'd have to be careful about targeting our customers, and that we can't simply assume that everyone would find this useful.

Rejection Challenge

This past week in class, we had a new activity to try out: The Rejection Challenge. Basically, we started with a small plastic box worth around 50 cents, and our goal as a team was to go out and try to trade up the box to get the most valuable product we could. At first, my team definitely dismissed the challenge as pretty silly- who would trade anything for a close-to-worthless box? Turns out many would,

We first went to MLK Student Union and talked to a few people at the front desk, explaining our challenge. They were actually eager to help and see what they could trade us. We ended up trading our box for a small mini stapler.

Next, we headed to the Equator coffee shop in the building, and were very surprised at how excited the barista was to help us. He offered us a mug initially, but we turned it down, realizing not many people would be willing to take a mug off our hands. Instead, we asked if we could get a pastry, and ended up with a muffin worth about $3.
 
Next, we thought about who would be willing to buy a muffin off of us and headed to GBC, realizing that people eating there would be the most likely to want a snack. We ended up trading our $3 muffin for $4 cash!
 
Lastly, we got a little creative and decided the best way to win the game was to end with something priceless...like a person! (More specifically, their time). They say time is money, and we did exactly that by trading in $4 cash for 5 min of time for someone to sit in our class. 
While some other groups got a little funny and creative (and close to cheating!!) as well, I thought this experience was fun and something cool to do in order to get closer to my group.

Market Needs

We were able to narrow down our patents to two of the five we initially sought to research.

The first is the Disaster Warning System, created by Professor Bloom in the Astronomy department. It's essentially a hardware device that can be installed in homes and buildings and provides natural disaster alerts via an accompanying phone app. The Professor already has a prototype installed in his home and when we reached out to him, said the app would just need to be created. We talked more about our findings in our group video. The market need for this product is pretty universal- Japan has a similar product, which is especially useful given their location and how susceptible they are to earthquakes and tsunamis. In the United States, I can imagine this being used by individual households in more dangerous areas- like at the top of hills and near fault lines. Also office buildings in busy areas as well as maybe large campuses like universities where hundreds could be affected by a disaster.


The second is the Traffic Monitoring System. Coming from a driving-heavy city like Los Angeles, I can definitely see the need for a technology that could direct users on alternate routes to avoid congestion, car accidents, and even just improve quality of life. The patent is called the Low Cost Highly Accurate Traffic Monitoring System, and would be valuable in all modern cities.

Picking Patents

Last class, we formed final groups and created a list of patents we would look into. I'm very excited to work more with my group, especially because all of us have such different backgrounds. We have two engineers, a biology major, and another business student like myself. When looking through our patents list to pick our top 5, we ran into some issues understanding the technology and applicability of some of them. For example, the energy patents were very cool but we had no idea of how they actually worked. I actually had to leave class early and wish I could've stayed to do the lego game! My team later told me more about it and it seemed like an interesting exercise.

We met up as a group on Tuesday and decided to vote on our top 5 out of the list we had and each person would write up a slide of that patent. I ended up picking the occupant-tracking fan that I had seen during the first week, as I think it's an applicable and feasible idea to form a company around. One of my team members is a civil engineer so it might be interesting to see how her ideas play into that.

It seems like our team is coming together and hopefully next week, we'll be able to pick a single patent that we all really like and get started on our startup idea!

Getting Excited

I've actually had some time to think about what makes for a good team over the last few year. A lot of us start with things like sports teams, class projects, and sometimes even just working with friends. For me, a good team is one that allows each person to do what they do best, even if this mean an unequal distribution of work. I think it's actually better in order for a team to grow and develop when everyone can specialize in a certain field, rather than wasting time doing a little of everything instead of a lot of one thing.

We looked at some different patents last week and I've come to realize I'm most excited about projects that can be applicable to daily life and that have a global scope. Products and services that I'd be able to use have a more personal touch and understanding. Applicability on a larger scale is what will let an idea grow and spread.

I'm looking forward to forming groups this week and seeing what exactly we'll decide to work on this semester.

Introduction

Hello! I'm Alka and this is my blog for IEOR 186: Challenge Lab on IP Innovation. I'm a junior here at Cal and have been very interested in technology and business - specifically where the two intersect - since freshman year.

After the first class, I was pretty interested in learning more about some of the patents we researched. I thought the one we pitched, the Occupant-Tracking Fan, was a great concept and had many relevant uses. I personally have been getting more into health and fitness, so the idea for a sweat monitor that can track your health was one of the (pending) patents my team liked. I think it I'd like to base my class project off one of these patents, or similar ones which are applicable to people like me.