Background

About seven years ago I realized there was a need for this new product. I needed a valve that would allow me to to get more pressure or more flexibility from my lawn irrigation sprinklers. I started working on design concepts. As usual, I tried to design something I could build myself in my garage (I have a machine shop in my garage). This led to some compromises that I didn't like. It did prove the concept, though. The early prototypes worked, but were not representative of something I would put into production. They helped refine the specifications for the production design, though. So I set out to design a new valve that would meet all of my requirements. Specifically, fit within a close nipple, have low pressure drop when open, and operate off of low system pressure. The next series of prototypes were impossible to machine in my garage. So I decided to use rapid prototyping…stereolithography. Luckily I had an old friend who was a sales rep for a few SLA companies and wanted to get some new business for them, so I was able to get FREE samples. Now that’s good connections…thanks John. The SLA parts were awesome. Very representative of the production design, except that the SLA process did not produce smooth parts…and my moving parts needed to be smooth. So each part took hours of hand polishing (under a stereo microscope) to make functional. After I had several prototypes, I was ready to demonstrate the concept in a representative test rig. I put together a compact sprinkler system with a regulator, several valves and 10 spray heads. I was planning to make ten prototypes, but I think the most I ever had was about 6. It worked, I could use the spray rig to cycle the water pressure and show the valves switching on and off. I took the valve to some retailers and asked them if they could sell it…if they thought there was a market. They liked the concept and said they could sell it. They also gave me valuable information about their pricing ideas and how much profit they would expect to make. I was ready to patent it and seek licensees. I wrote the provisional patent myself and filed it in early 2005. Next I developed a powerpoint brief that I could send to manufacturers to get them interested in the concept without giving away the method. I contacted many manufacturers and got good contacts to send my brief to. I followed up and asked if I could get a meeting to demonstrate my product. In each case I asked for a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Most companies sent me a copy of their invention submission form to sign. These were most often the opposite of a non-disclosure agreement…what I often refer to as a FU agreement. The basic premise is: anything you show us belongs to us unless you can prove that you have a patent on it….and no, we won’t keep any info confidential and will do whatever the F we want with the info you give us. At that point I didn’t feel very strong about my intellectual property (IP) position because if someone tried to steal my idea, I would have to come up with the money for a good patent to follow up my provisional AND money for litigation…all with no sales revenue. I certainly didn’t want to risk that, so I declined to sign any FU agreements. The only big company that agreed to sign an NDA was Toro. They were excited about the potential based upon my powerpoint and wanted to know more. I set up a meeting with the VP of engineering, the director of marketing for consumer sales (a woman) and the director of marketing for commercial sales. I showed them my design, took it all apart and showed them how it worked and how easily it could be manufactured. They seemed very impressed. There was a lot of open discussion about market potential and manufacturing. The highlight, for me, was when the two marketing directors got into a bit of an argument. The commercial director said “my customers don’t want this product…they make money from re-plumbing systems and this product solves the problem for less cost…they’ll lose money”. The consumer director thought for a second and said, “that may be, John, but the question is not whether or not this product will be offered…the question before us is whether Toro will be offering it”. I thought “this is going great!” I left that meeting feeling sure that Toro would show some further interest. They passed. I had no other manufacturing prospects at that time and my personal life got squarely in my way…I filed for divorce. Anyone who has been through divorce knows that it is a major distraction…to put it mildly. Mine was a major distraction. Money was an issue too. When I finally got back on my feet, I had become involved with another invention. I wanted to make a swimming pool toy. A torpedo that could go really fast…self-propelled. I worked on several prototypes. I did lots of design work and lots of fabrication and testing. I eventually decided that I would never get a torpedo to meet my specifications and be safe…so I gave up. Ironically, I saw one of my early designs for sale about the same time I gave up. I laughed…because I knew the limitations and felt pretty sure it wouldn’t be a big seller. Anyway, giving up on the torpedo left me without a project. So I decided to pick up the valve again. When I opened my models and pulled out my prototypes I found that it was all junk…for two reasons. First, the prototypes were made from a SLA resin that was slightly water soluble. This wasn’t an issue for the few weeks that I was testing them. But after they had set (wet) for a long time they had swelled and no longer functioned. I also realized that the design was flawed anyway. It was not dirt tolerant. I thought to myself, “wow, how could I have missed that before…this would be a commercial flop…maybe that’s why Toro passed”. Anyway, I set out to redesign the valve yet again. This time I added the requirement that it be totally tolerant of impurities. Not just dirt, but sand, microscopic stuff, large rocks, anything. You never know what might get into the valve and it needs to survive. It took some time, but I came up with something much better than the SLA prototypes. I also decided that I could design the main mechanism to use an off the shelf retractable pen. I went to the store and bought a whole array of retractable pens. I tore them apart and cut and measured and found one that would work nicely. I set about making prototypes. It was mid 2008 and I had a bit of a delay buying a house and moving. I had also managed to save enough money that I thought I would be able to fund tooling and initial production, so I was eager to get going. By the time I had most of a working prototype (including the most important molded rubber part) it was late 2008, life kept getting in the way. I filed a provisional patent in early 2009 and decided to get going on commercial development. I had decided that I would fund initial production myself, somehow, and that if I was going to get a licensing deal, it would be on my terms, after I had demonstrated that a market existed. After all, the market was getting hot. Southern California and most of the southwest was in a prolonged drought and water conservation was a hot news topic, the time was right. I needed money. I asked an old friend who is a city engineer if she had any friends in the water department (of course she did) and if she would ask about any government grants that were available. I found out that there was a grant that seemed perfect for me. Metropolitan Water District (MWD) of Southern California had a grant program for innovative water conservation technologies…with award values up to $250K. The program was structured as a two step proposal. Step one was a three page conceptual proposal..and it was due in three weeks. No problem. I got quotes from an old friend with manufacturing ties in China based on the pen-derived design (do we see a theme yet…these old friends have really paid off!!!) Then I was sure I could make it profitable. I made graphics, I wrote a description, I made up a schedule and I sent off the proposal. That was 3/12/09. Remember, at this point I still didn’t even have a working prototype…but I was close. The timeline for the MWD proposal was ~2 weeks to get feedback from the first proposal and find out whether I would be invited to submit a “full proposal”. If I was selected, the full proposal would be limited to 10 pages and would be due in three more weeks. It would also have to be much more detailed and include things like market analysis and statistical basis for water savings. I wasn’t concerned with the second proposal, I hadn’t been asked and I didn’t want to waste my time if I didn’t get the nod. I kept working on building a prototype. I also rationalized that if I did get interest from MWD, they might actually want to see something that works. I think I had a working prototype about the time I heard back from MWD. They liked my first proposal and they wanted a full proposal. Oh shit. Now I had three weeks to figure out how to cram $250K of value proposition into 10 pages. Oh, and I didn’t actually have a company or a real patent. Luckily, I had the leftovers from my previous company that I could use to start a new one...and a good relationship with my business attorney and accountant. We agreed that I would have a legitimate corporation within the three week window. I also hired a patent agent acquaintance to get going on the real patent. I went about researching the market and trying to justify the water savings. It was a rocky start. I thought that I would be able to go online and find research papers that were relevant. I found very little data about water usage for landscape irrigation (although there was plenty about farming) and even less about the inefficiencies that I knew existed. I finally caught a break and found one decent article that was on topic. I decided to google the researchers and see if I could ask them for more. That was a lucky break. It turned out my keyword searches weren’t working, but I was able to find much more by searching on authors (small community) instead. I found a few more gems….stuff about irrigation efficiency issues, statistics, solutions…it supported my hunch. There was one article that was particularly interesting, but it was an interim report. It was dated 2007 and it said the final report would be done in 2008. I couldn’t find the final report on the web. I called the author. His contact info was no good…he had moved on. I asked the person on the other end of the phone (at the receiving agency….the ones who paid for the study) if I could get a copy of the final report. She said “oh for that you’ll have to talk to person #2. I called person #2. He said, “I don’t have that report, try person #3”. I called person #3 and, you guessed it, he said I’d have to talk to person #1. Nobody knew anything about a major research study that had concluded about a year earlier. Priceless government assistance! Regardless, I managed to get enough reports of different types and different sources to piece together a story. At the same time, I was building a statistical result in Excel. So I took a piece of info from one report (how many homes in MWD service area) another piece from a different report (the percentage of homes using sprinklers, etc) a different report to figure out how much water the sprinklers were using, and still another to determine the statistical distribution of “efficiency”. When I got done I was amazed. Without any fudging, and being very conservative, my excel spreadsheet told me that about 1 in 6 homes (1 million total in MWD’s service area) had serious irrigation efficiency problems (they used more than twice the water they should) and could save at least 35 gallons a day if they brought their efficiency up to the norm. That’s 35 million gallons a day!!!! I was astounded. That sounds like a lot, but it is a small percentage of MWD’s overall water supply. Anyway, I had a good story. I identified and hired a marketing firm to make me a logo and included them, along with their qualifications as part of the proposal. There was one hiccup getting the proposal finished. At the last minute, while doing the pro-forma financials, I asked my accountant if the grant money would be taxable. He said it would. I thought that I would need to include taxes in my expenses. I was moving really fast and not thinking clearly. I got some good edits from my family and got the proposal done one day early. I took it to Fedex Kinkos but I had already missed the shipping deadline. No problem, I had one day to spare. The next morning in the shower I suddenly had this rush of terror. What was I thinking?? I only had to pay taxes on profit! There was no way I would make a profit during the grant period…and charging them for taxes was a dead give-away that I didn’t know what I was doing! I called kinkos and they said my package hadn’t left yet. I hurried and re-worked my financials and retrieved the original 6 copies form kinkos and substituted the tax-free version. Dodged a bullet. That was March 19, 2009. The MWD solicitation said that they may request an interview as part of the review process. I had one prototype and little else. I decided to make a batch of prototypes so I could show a little more progress. I also wanted to test the product in real-world systems to make sure it was going to work. I had a slight concern about pressure fluctuations. Some of my patent research showed that similar valves in the past sometimes included damping in large agricultural systems. I was hoping that my valve would not need damping, but I wasn’t too worried because I figured I could deal with it if necessary. So I would build a batch of prototypes and try them in many systems to make sure that damping wasn’t an issue. One of my key parts was a molded urethane part. I had started with one type of urethane from which I had molded several parts successfully. It was great, I think I had about one bad part out of five. While this material worked for the first prototype but was not ideal (used too much pressure to actuate) so I switched to a softer urethane for the batch run. I had lousy success molding the softer stuff. The properties were just different enough to cause voids that made the parts unusable. I think I got one part for five tries. Each try took about 2 hours of mold prep and turnaround and 24 hours to cure. It was starting to become evident that the batch run wasn’t going to happen. I still needed to test the system response, though. One day I decided that I didn’t really need a batch of valves to determine if pressure fluctuations would be a problem…I could just hook up a pressure gauge to the sprinklers without the valves and look at the pressure during startup and shutdown. The first time I hooked up the gauge to my front lawn system, I had my answer. The air in the lines caused so much pressure fluctuation the answer was obvious. There was no way my valves would work without damping. That meant back to the drawing board (or more literally, solid modeling program) to completely rework the design. Luckily, the design for the damped version came quickly. Now I was ready to send it off for mold production. That’s right, I had already decided that I would start the mold production regardless of the grant decision and I had told MWD in my proposal that I would have the molds in work before the award date. Oh, and since the damper design no longer had click pen lineage, there was no way I could build it myself…only molded parts were representative. The goal was to have the mold design in China by the first of April. The MWD award was scheduled for April 9…which didn’t happen and I was still designing. The most surprising was the hours upon hours I spent making tiny tweaks to the individual part designs to make them mold-ready. The design dragged on…and the MWD decision still didn’t come. Eventually, I finished every last little nit and sent the models off to be molded. It was mid April. Now, I had to go back to work on the patents. Since I had changed the whole design to allow for damping, I needed a new patent. I also added some features for future product evolution. I spent the rest of April working on the new patent. All the while I was wondering when the MWD decision would come. I emailed the program rep a couple times but all he would say was “we’re working on it…soon”. As the patent work was winding down in early May, the word came down from the San Diego water authority. Water rationing would start on June 1. Residents would be forced to limit their sprinkler run time. I was both excited and exasperated. Water rationing would be accomplished by limiting the lawn irrigation days and run times for residents. This was, to me, a highly misguided approach. It was obvious to me that most residents would simply run their sprinklers at night to avoid penalties. It also did nothing to address the inefficiencies of the irrigation systems or give residents tools to use to improve them. After I thought about it more, I realized that it may have been a somewhat calculated plan. Specifically, the rules would require law abiding residents to reduce their overall water usage by about 25%. The savings goal for the city was about 8%. So, if 1 in 3 residents actually followed the rules, they would meet their target. Of course the alternative, actually addressing water use efficiency and/or landscape choices would be much more difficult to implement (oh, even the thought of it is making my tiny municipal government head spin) so they took the easy way out. I saw that as an opportunity for me. I could help “educate” the public about what was really going on…and the news media would help me. Water rationing had gone from a very warm topic in the news to Hot! I decided I needed to respond immediately…but I didn’t have any ammo yet. I had no product, no website, no marketing materials or PR plan. Time to get moving. I called an old friend who had done a website for me before. I asked her to quote on something quick, so when I responded to the water rationing rules in the media I could point residents to a website. Of course, at the time I was thinking in terms of days. I also asked my other marketing firm to quote at the same time. They both said it would take about 2 weeks to get a decent website up. I calmed down a bit and decided that the water rationing topic would still be hot in 2 weeks and better to make a good first impression. I wrote the website content and got the ball rolling. As my patience for the MWD decision ran thin, I emailed the rep once more to ask about a notification. He said the process was complete and that notifications would be mailed on May 18. I continued to work to put the final touches on my second patent and prepared for a weekend getaway with family for May 16-18. The only time I would ever get a chance to catch up on this blog would be that getaway…and so it was…and forward we go. Welcome to May 18.