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