Our current venture development project is Good People Energy Technologies Inc.  We are re-posting their monthly status updates here to let Eat Drink Law blog subscribers follow along as we work on this venture.

We have a logo.  We have business cards.  We have a new tag line, “WE FIX STOOPID FANS”.  (STOOPID means the kind of on/off fans that The Phoenix fan controller turns into super smart variable speed fans.)  I realize that in the grand scheme of things a little bit of branding may not seem like much, but it is amazing how huge it feels.  I really feel like June 2017 got us ready to sell.

We are jazzed about the new logo.  We hired a local designer, Leah McDonald (who was also one of my coaches for my TED Talk last year) and tasked her with creating us something fun, colorful, and a little retro,  We couldn’t be happier with the results.  She is going to help us with a matching website and a first pass and updating the surface of the product (before we can engage in a total redesign).

Don’t worry, that isn’t the only thing we did.  We had another supplier meeting and the theme is unchanged.  They are excited to help us but hesitant to quote from our spec and BOM.  We need to fix this and I’m pretty convinced we can’t do it for free,  It’s either going to take some non-recoverable engineering (NRE) payments to a supplier with in-house design capability or an engineering consultant.  To that end, we have some names and we have engaged the Advanced Institute for Manufacturing at MVCC for some help.  We will get our NY supply chain going.

We had some great follow-up with Herkimer Industries and they are still ready and willing to move forward on assembly and NY state sales.  But we need to figure out the supplier issue to get going.

We reached out to The Clean Tech Center at The Tech Garden in Syracuse about their NYSERDA sponsored incubation program.  We liked what they had to say about programming, access to modest grant funding, and networking with clean tech investors.  So, we applied and were accepted.  The kick-off is in July.

We also met with some great folks out of Saratoga doing clean energy engineering who like our technology and might be interested in a reseller relationship.  So many opportunities out there.

And, we finally wrote a formal business plan.  It was actually kind of fun and several folks had been asking for it.

For the full original post, go to: https://www.gdpplnrg.com/single-post/2017/07/10/Good-People-Month-10-Progress-Report

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