Five years ago, I was about to lose my job… again. This would be the 4th time, and the 2nd that’s because I was affected by my mom’s passing. As with most employment, I was a replaceable cog in the machine. Seeing the writings on the wall, I decided to move towards a dream - to be an entrepreneur. On hindsight, this was a terrible idea. I wasn’t performing at my best and then I would start venturing into one of the riskiest path there is? Well in my defense, I’ve been consuming inspiring Silicon Valley stories back then. And I so wanted to be one of the heroes in the Philippine version of those stories. So armed with 25 years of cumulative experience in electronics and software systems, me and my first co-founder started building a proof-of-concept, a PoC, for our first product. It was a device that can reduce your electric bill by turning your regular AC into a smart one that can save electricity. It was only to be our first product as we had a clear vision: we wanted to ease the lives of Filipino people within their homes - we wanted to make the smart home accessible to the average Juan. A month after we started, we got another co-founder in the form of my spouse. After all, our first product shouldn’t only be functional, it should also have an appealing user interface. And she is an awesome web developer who actually built a prototype app that interacts with the physical device. Among the 3 of us we were able to show that our idea can be built. In fact, we managed to bag the championship in one of the local Startup Weekends. We also found out in that event that there is indeed a demand for our product. So, we started defining our business model. And then, we networked. We attended pitching events. We attended accelerator events. We were in the hunt for investors, incubators, or pretty much any partner who can finance turning our PoC into an MVP. And that’s where everything went horribly wrong. We found several interested parties. But all of them wanted the MVP. So, it’s a catch-22. We actually needed investment to build one. Over the course of half a year, we kept on trying to no avail. The final nail on the coffin was our attempt to be an IdeaSpace cohort. One of the judges had a very simple question: will the mechanism not interfere with the AC’s main functionality. In other words, while the user is asleep and the device does its thing, will the AC be able to maintain the room’s temperature at a comfortable level. We never tested that - we thought we needed an MVP to even test that. But because of the question, I devised a simple experiment that doesn’t even involve using the PoC. I manually did to the AC what the product would have done. Simple, right? And lo-and-behold, it doesn’t work. Sparing you from all the Physics talk about heat transfer, let’s just say that I found out that Philippines is hot and humid enough that the product is unfeasible.
