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.

First, I apologize for skipping a month (and being late with the posting).  I’m largely going to blame it on summer; two kids, lots of camps and logistics, family vacation time, etc.  But what a couple of months they were…

The website is up (obviously) and we have started learning about the bells and whistles that Wix offers in terms of contact management, blog subscriptions, e-mail automation, and other cool stuff.  We haven’t had time to implement any of it yet, but it is nice to know it’s a tool with some growth options.

I promised after June that we would ramp up the pitching and selling.  Our journey with The Foundation continued with a pitch to their staff to set up a pitch to the impact investing committee of their board in September.  Stay tuned.

Perhaps more exciting, we pitched a large university on our product based on an introduction from OGD.  It went well and queued up our first sale of test units, which should be delivered in September.  In August, we made a couple of local sales calls in Utica and Rome.  We have delivered one test unit and feel pretty good that we will close an order for another in September.  So, that’s six test units with Good People stickers being released into the wild.  We are also working with MVCC on a possible pilot project that we would need to help find funding for.

On the downside, we did get a “no” from the angel investor we had been pitching.  He remains supportive, but decided the investment wasn’t in his wheelhouse.

But support from the Upstate venture ecosystem suddenly seems abundant.  Based on getting started with The Clean Tech Center program, we also got invites into Tech Garden and the partner program with the Syracuse Center of Excellence.  We had good sitdowns with those folks and are looking forward to being part of their funding and networking programs.  We also applied and got accepted to the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Commercialization Academy program.  We really like that it is local and provides a very clear path to modest grant funding ($8,000) with an opportunity to pitch for more.  We met our first two milestones and now have $3K available to help offset expenses.  thINCubator recommended us for the 2017 Fuzehub competition and we got our application in just under the wire.

You may be asking where we got the test units when we still haven’t sorted out our supply chain issues.  Well, OGD had a hodgepodge of older versions kicking around that they are letting us purchase and use as test units.  But perhaps our most exciting news is that we finally found an Upstate supplier willing to give us some real numbers and timelines to work with.  The best part is that the numbers look like we will be able to use some of the money from Commercialization Academy to get our first NY units built.  With that missing piece found, it looks like we can get serious on sales this fall.

For the full original post, go to: https://www.gdpplnrg.com/single-post/2017/09/19/Good-People-Months-11-12-Progress-Report

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