UrbiGo

So, after 8 months of working with local manufacturers, we finally finished the tooling for the injection molding for UrbiGo.

A small step for humanity, but a huge milestone for our startup!

With this stage done, we will be able to manufacture a bigger batch of products much faster, deliver them in a timely manner to our customers, and have a healthy margin to actually sustain our business in life.

Before we made and deliver around 50 units to the early customers that were mostly 3D printed and required additional manual work like painting, gluing, etc.

The cost of one unit was so high and the production was quite slow so it would eventually kill our startup.

But the great thing is we learned A LOT on what we should improve and validated the business model with consumers.

Things we learned when working with manufacturers:

1. DON'T ASSUME ANYTHING. Contact your manufacturers frequently and confirm the tasks and deadlines you agreed upon multiple times if needed to secure that they would be done.

2. DON'T PAY UPFRONT. We had this misfortune in fortune that we needed to spend the limited amount of money from one grant and pay the manufacturer upfront. Money is a great and simple motivator. When you pay someone upfront, they usually have low motivation to do the work.

3. INCLUDE PENALTY IN THE CONTRACT. This simply means that, if the deadlines are not respected by your manufacturer, he will need to pay the penalty for prolonging the manufacturing longer than needed.

After delivering the first version of the product we got feedback from our early adopters on what should be improved in the product functionality and design.

Some products were leaking water, which was definitely a bug that needed to be fixed fast! So we stopped with the shipping of the ver 1 and hired an industrial designer to overcome these obstacles.

The new version of the product was 3D printed and semi-manually done. The production of one unit was a bit of pricey, but as we got more pre-orders for UrbiGo in the meantime we continued with the delivery of these units.

After bootstrapping for months the Innovation EU Fund has granted us a 100K for the further development of UrbiGo. These funds will help us invest in product development and prepare the product for serial production.

Grants are a good thing because they're basically "free money" meaning there are no debts or equity taken in the process.

There were many high-quality startups competing for this grant and the application itself required a detailed financial plan. So we're really grateful for getting this opportunity.

We got funded by the Startup Yards accelerator in Prague as the only green-tech hardware startup in the batch.

The competition was rough, but we made it. :) After applying to various startup accelerators we found a perfect fit with them.

What to know when looking for seed investment:

1. It's best when the investor is someone who actually built and sold their business before so they understand all the challenges and troubles you're experiencing and could see the potential your company have

2. Up to 10% is OK for equity-based accelerators.

3. See if they've already had an experience with similar startups in their portfolio before. The greatest value accelerators could offer is not money but a network of their partners, press etc and future VC's they could introduce you to.

Now we knew how the product should look like so we launched the new design on our site.

We started building a mini smart indoor garden with low-cost materials as we had really limited budget.

By visiting a few tech fairs and investing around 25$ of FB Ads we managed to gather roughly 300 pre-orders for UrbiGo in few months.

Eventually, we started delivering the first version of UrbiGo mini smart garden and gathered the feedback of the early adopters.

We experienced a major throwback in product development when we saw that just few people from the initial list actually preordered UrbiGo wall garden.

The reason behind this was that the wall garden was too big for their living spaces and people just didn't feel comfortable enough to have all these water-tank-plant-electronic Frankenstein hanging in their living room.

Our first reaction was "F**K what are we going to do now?!". It's not like we could just change a few lines of code and change it. It's a physical device.

But, we did something similar! :)

We made and launched a secret webpage with renders of three different smart planters: One was shelf-like, the other was wall garden, and third was this mini, gadget like planter.

They had similar features with different price points.

So, again, we asked people who signed up for another round of conversations and gave them the access to our secret page featuring these products.

They gladly accepted and shared their screens while browsing these solutions.

On our amazement, 95% of them got interested and clicked pre-order on this mini version of an automated indoor planter. It fit perfectly into their lifestyle without taking too much space and was effortless to use.

So, after receiving and analyzing all the info, we decided how the product should actually look like.YAY!

After collecting over 250+ sign-ups from the people who are interested in our solution, we began talking with each and every one of them to understand their motivation and problems they have with urban indoor gardening.

For weeks we interviewed dozens of potential consumers and saw the repeating patterns in their answers: their main problem was lack of space, skills, and knowledge when it comes to growing plants.

They tried various indoor gardening solutions but they were to big or not really that "smart" thus required additional knowledge and manual work. So eventually all of their plants died!

We'll see if an automated wall garden could fix this.

After winning our first startup incubator Social Impact Award, we made an MVP of our smart gardening system.

A wall garden that had different and various plant sensors and was connected to an app.

It basically was a plywood panel with attached felt pockets that carried soil and different plant health sensors (humidity, temperature, nutrients).

We made a website featuring our MVP on different FB groups and online events and invited customers to sign up to test our smart vertical garden prototype.

How can I get nature closer to urban people? How can I help future generations understand the importance of plants in their everyday life? And how nature can live in harmony with the latest tech?

Those were the questions that were popping on my mind as I sat in that corporate office working the job that I didn't like just to have ends meet.

As a University graduate with a major in Environmental Sciences and Urban ecology, I've persistently sought the job opportunities that would help me find the answers to the above questions. But with no luck.

As a passionate ecologist, I just wanted to create something that would improve people's lives and make them realize the importance of nature.

I didn't know what or how. I didn't think about the money. The impact was important to me.

When I shared my thoughts with Alex, my now co-founder, an experienced techie, he found it really interesting and we started brainstorming about possible solutions.

Eventually, we came up with the idea of a smart gardening system where people can control and learn about their plants using just their phones.

The idea of UrbiGo was born!

Later, we entered our first startup incubator, and very soon after that, I decided to quit my job. The best decision I ever made.