Brophy Tyree / Wasted*
Start Here Podcast | Episode #89 | 04/11/2024
Join Brophy Tyree, co-founder of Wasted*, on a journey through the “wild world of circular sanitation.” The Vermont startup is using the power of storytelling to sell its product that’s based on a taboo subject: human waste. Whether you are trying to run a company that is not the most aesthetically pleasing, or simply curious about how this company reached success, this is the podcast for you. We promise your time won’t be Wasted*.
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TRANSCRIPT
Sam RG 00:01
From Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies, it’s Start Here, a podcast sharing the stories of active aspiring and accidental entrepreneurs. Today I sit down with Brophy Tyree, co founder of wasted* the revolutionary Vermont based porta potty company that’s changing the way people think about waste. Welcome. This is Sam Roach-Gerber recording from the Consolidated Communications Technology hub in downtown Burlington, Vermont. Hi, Brophy.
Brophy Tyree 00:28
Hi Sam.
Sam RG 00:28
I’m so glad you’re here. Man, you have been on the list for a long time you and your co founders. So I’m really glad that you’re here. And I, I actually haven’t got a wasted* update in a really long time. So I’m genuinely super excited to hear about what’s been going on. But I feel like we have to start by saying I did a little bit of research. December 2021. was the first time that you and I talked. And you asked me, Is Burlington a good place to headquarter our company? I said, Absolutely. Did I lead you astray? Or are we happy to be here?
Brophy Tyree 01:07
No, I think you’re you’re spot on.
Sam RG 01:10
Okay, this would have been an awkward podcast. If that was just like a silencer. Yeah, no, we got to get out of here.
Brophy Tyree 01:20
No, it’s amazing. I think we couldn’t have asked for a better first market. Yeah, we felt nothing but love from the Burlington community.
Sam RG 01:30
Hello. Yeah, that’s what I like to hear. Also, I should have probably checked before I did the intro. Is it cool for me to say Porta Potty? Or is that like, not a good word to use? Okay, great. You guys just fully embrace the Porta Potty. Great, amazing. So I think before we get really into the company, I think it’s important to understand a little bit of the big picture here. Can you talk to us about circular sanitation and what that means?
Brophy Tyree 02:01
Yeah. So I think it’s important to understand why we started this company, what we’re trying to do to talk a little bit about kind of the macro wastewater environment. So in general, we have these wastewater treatment plants that are placed on coastlines to make discharging of effluent easy. And a lot of these facilities were designed and built with 100 year old hydrological records that don’t account for rising seas, or climate change, really. And so whenever there’s a hurricane, or even with just median sea level rise, these facilities are at risk of inundation. And also, they were built, you know, 50 years ago. And so the infrastructure itself is being strained, especially as populations increase. So, you know, in the last infrastructure report card, we got like a D minus in the United States on wastewater infrastructure. And it would cost an extremely large amount of money to do the retrofits needed to just get these facilities back up to par and to protect them against the changing climate. So not a lot of people know about this situation, there’s kind of just flushed the toilet out of sight out of mind.
Sam RG 03:26
I was literally just gonna say that completely out of sight out of mind, you don’t even think about it. Yeah.
Brophy Tyree 03:31
And you know, that, that works for most people. But, you know, there’s, there’s a pretty big crisis when the wastewater treatment plants go down, you know, there’s, there’s nothing to treat the way so at least into the environment. And they’re engineering marvels, and they’re run by amazing people who are really devoted public servants. But it’s just a tricky situation. And portable toilets really don’t help the problem. They’re generally have a bunch of chemicals, formaldehyde and other chemicals in them. And they’re tip they’re inserted kind of down the pipe in the wastewater treatment plant that aren’t really designed to handle them. And so they just add to that stream. So and then you see like in Lake Champlain and Cape Cod, our newest market is Boston, but there’s a lot of nutrients pollution that comes from wastewater, as well as fertilizer runoff that creates these harmful algae blooms that cause aquatic life to degrade. So that’s the existing paradigm, but it doesn’t need to be that way. Our waste has nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in it. So those are the nutrients that we currently extract from the earth to create fertilizer to grow food, which makes a lot of sense we eat food, we absorb nutrients from the food. We then excrete out pee and poop, the remaining nutrients that we don’t absorb, and should return back into the system to create new life. But because there’s so many people, we have to develop this infrastructure to handle all this waste coming in creating what’s often a linear system. There are a lot of wastewater treatment plants that that have some nutrient recovery and biosolids programs. That’s not uncommon. But in general, our wastewater system is linear and these nutrients are ending up like I said, in waterways where instead of fertilizing food, they’re fertilizing harmful algae blooms.
Sam RG 05:44
Yeah. So with circular sanitation, you’re taking that waste and you’re creating something that can be used again.
Brophy Tyree 05:51
That’s right. So we view the waste stream as a stream of resources. So these nutrients that can be used for fertilizer, as well as a lot of water that can be recovered for reuse.
Sam RG 06:03
Okay so we can get into the like, how you’re doing that in a second. But first, I want to talk about early days, your founding team, there’s three of you co founders, right. How did you meet?
Brophy Tyree 06:14
So I met Thor in the Arctic. Yeah.
Sam RG 06:24
Do you really just have to start there, right. I mean
Brophy Tyree 06:27
So we were on a expedition in Longyearbyen, which is in Northern Norway, in Svalbard, and so it’s a very long and an interesting story. But Thor was apprenticing to be a polar guide, with the guy that I’ve met in a bar in Jackson Hole, who convinced me that I needed to climb a mountain in Antarctica, Mount Tyree, which is named after my great great uncle a few times removed that I was an Admiral in the Navy. So I’d never ended up climbing the mountain, but I went on the site,
Sam RG 07:07
Not yet.
Brophy Tyree 07:08
Exactly. And Thor and I really hit it off. And we spent eight days pulling a big sled filled with gear through the tundra, looking out for polar bears and reindeer, and have a lot of time to talk, talking about pretty much everything you can imagine. And eventually on the topic of human waste in the back country. So you know, that places like Everest base camp where there’s a really pristine environment, but a lot of human crap, a lot of human activity, there’s not adequate sanitation infrastructure. So then these pits that get filled up with waste at Everest base camp 26,000 tons of human waste build up every year. And you know, they are not properly dealt with their combined. So every other animal in nature, poops and pees separately in two different places. Nature’s design process in that way, but we invented the bathroom. It’s a good thing, but it combined solid liquid waste and when that combination happens, a compound is created that doesn’t biodegrade as quickly. So these pits fill up with waste and then get washed out into the environment. So Thor and Taylor, who I hadn’t met yet, we’re starting a nonprofit to solve this problem. And it got me pretty stoked, so I started helping them out with that nonprofit. It’s called Do Good Shit and its goal was to install sustainable sanitation systems in back country environments. So not long after that, Thor convinced me to move to Lake Tahoe and Thor, Taylor, and I lived next to each other for three years through COVID. Working on this nonprofit, we installed urine diverting dry toilets. mimic nature separate the solid and liquid waste. We installed them in Patagonia and Nepal, and in a number of other places. And then when COVID really got tense. The international projects got paused when everyone was kind of staying at home. I was working on another startup that also suffered due to COVID. It was a travel startup. And so we were kind of bored skiing a lot in Tahoe and didn’t have much to do. And so we kind of inspired by our work at Do Good Shit. We ended up being in the urine world and got invited to the Rich Earth Institute down in Brattleboro, Vermont, virtually for their urine summit. And I remember on the on the list of attendees next to us, it said urine enthusiast because we weren’t fully in the industry yet but our eyes were opened to the wild world of circular sanitation, Rich Earth Institute has been collecting urine from Vermonters, Brattleboro, for over a decade pasteurizing it, turning into fertilizer, land applying it. And they have really been the glue that’s brought together the entire industry in the United States. And so we heard from all of these researchers that were turning it into fertilizer and other really cool things. And we’re completely inspired by that. And from that experience, side of this are wasted to see if we could bring this work and these principles to the world in a venture capital environment through the Porta Potty.
Sam RG 10:16
Oh my god.
Brophy Tyree 10:17
Amazing. I feel like every co founder should have to like pull a sled in the Arctic together and then then live next to each other during a pandemic. Like that’s like the ultimate test like, is this gonna work? It’s a good way to see can you get through the self professed together?
Sam RG 11:15
Totally. That’s, that’s awesome. And just such a good story. I mean, you can’t make up a story like that. It’s amazing. So a couple of questions. You know, one of the things that that struck me, as you were telling sort of the origin story here is you speak very kindly about people who are in this industry and have been doing this for decades, right. I feel like a lot of disruptors come in and just want to like, you know, excuse the easy phrase here, but shit on the existing systems. Right? And I don’t know, Is that intentional, the way you you talk about the folks that are doing this work?
Brophy Tyree 11:56
Yeah, totally. And it’s, it’s really interesting to navigate, being an innovator in this space and trying to bring in new technology, when, like you said, the attitude is kind of disruption, disruption, but recognizing that everyone’s doing the best that they can, from a really well intentioned place to solve a problem that’s really, really hard to solve. And if you’ve ever been to a wastewater treatment plant, which most people have not, and see what you know, what’s happening there. One, it’s, it’s miraculous that we’re able to deal with this much material that’s coming in to these plants, and the people that are doing it are really doing hidden work that is so critical to making sure that our world operates and stays clean. And it’s just a really, really hard wastestream to deal with, at the end of the day. And we know that being in there. And so we don’t view ourselves as replacing wastewater treatment, or anything like that. We’re really just trying to find a way that we can support this ecosystem. It’s there’s a whole waste treatment ecosystem of you know, residential waste, industrial waste, you know, septage, and portable toilet waste name a few. And it really takes an ecosystems approach and a lot of collaboration to, to deal with it in the most effective way. So I think a lot of our journey in this space has been trying to figure out where we can have value, we can remove some of the strain, and where our skills and then tendencies can support the industry. Like making sanitation sexy, is what we really tried to do and make make toilets. Cool. Yeah, waste wastewater, interesting and inspiring. That whole storytelling component has been our secret sauce from the beginning. And so really taking the people that are already doing amazing work, and platforming them and shouting their stories from from our rooftops and trying to get more and more support for an industry that that needs recognition.
Sam RG 14:32
Yeah, I love that approach. And it’s you wouldn’t get anywhere without that right you need those relationships in order to make your business successful. But it like you said, it’s we’re never gonna fully solve this problem, right? It’s always going to be there. It’s how can we be do it most efficiently? So I just really kind of value that approach. And I think that because you all have kind of have to start with education, because so be like You said no one’s been to a wastewater treatment facility, they don’t know or see what goes on and want it sort of out of sight out of mind. But I think if you can start from a place of education, that’s huge. And the folks that are in this work every day, sort of frontlines, like they don’t have time to go educate people on it, right.
Brophy Tyree 15:19
Burlington wastewater treatment plant, though, does tours
Sam RG 15:22
Do they?
Brophy Tyree 15:23
And I would recommend that everyone listen, listening to this, go do a tour and see what’s happening. Yeah, I think it’s an easy story to tell that oh, there’s algae blooms in Lake Champlain, wastewater, contributes to algae blooms, the wastewater treatment plant must just be dumping our waste into Lake Champlain. And like, I could see how that story would be formed. But that’s not what’s happening at all. And I think just seeing, seeing what is happening is is really important as a citizen of Burlington, because you know, they need support as well.
Sam RG 16:00
Alright, VCET team field trip. Yeah, I may keep it a surprise, you know, say, hey, guys, we’re going out to lunch and yeah, surprise. Amazing. Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about your technology, and how you sort of piloted it and you talked a little bit about Do Good Shit and Rich Earth Institute. Can you talk about really early days? How does your technology work? And how have you tested it out?
Brophy Tyree 16:32
Yeah, so it’s definitely evolved a lot over the years, so I can just speak to what we did this last year in Burlington, which was our first year in market, you know, we had 180 toilets deployed across over 100 sites with suddenly customers so ran a full Porta Potty company, and in a portion of the fleet, so about 30% of the units, we had a urine diverting system that was collecting separated urine through the urinals. So most people actually think when they think about human waste, they think about the poop situation and bio solids, but actually urine has 80% of the nutrients, liquid gold. That’s, that’s really what we’re trying to get. And so we would then in our trucks have a urine tank, the solids tank, and a water tank, and pump out the urine separately and bring it back to our hub, where we would pasteurize the urine to make sure that, you know, the pathogens are, are not present. And we would remove the phosphorus, which is helpful for two reasons. One is that phosphorus itself is a fertilizer through bite. But also because Vermont has very phosphorus rich soil and doesn’t need phosphorus. So in some regions, different regions need different fertilizer compositions. And in Vermont, we don’t need for phosphorus as much. But in other places, there is a need for phosphorus. And so at the end of our process, we have a solid phosphorus fertilizer, and a liquid nitrogen fertilizer that comes from the urine. And we applied over 2000 liters of that liquid nitrogen fertilizer with with local farm partners in in the area. So not not in edible crops, but on pasture land, we have a lot of studies that are coming out now that are showing that that fertilizer actually outperforms the synthetic alternatives. Just as well, if not better, which was already proven by the Rich Earth Institute, it’s helpful to have our own data there.
Sam RG 19:09
Yeah, make sure that you can you guys can actually do that, too. Yeah. So you said that. So this past year was the first year that you’ve actually applied it? Yes. And, and results are looking good.
Brophy Tyree 19:21
Feeling great. And I mean, like I said, Rich Earth has been doing this for the last decade and so they have a lot more data, which is pointing them the same truth. Effective fertilizer. And so we only have one year, but there’s a lot, a lot more behind us.
Sam RG 19:37
Yeah, that’s super exciting. And it is important to have your own data, right and to sort of be able to walk the walk. So is there a portion of your technology that’s patented, or is it because it’s already been done before? You’re just applying it to a new business model? How does that work?
Brophy Tyree 19:54
So our original urine diverting system that we actually haven’t taken to market yet. We’re still working out the kinks, it’s, it’s, it introduces a very interesting problem set to be designing a toilet and prototyping a toilet. That is this system that we designed separates the liquid and the solid waste at the toilet level. And in order to test that, you know, it’s hard. Most engineers don’t want to actually be using real human feces, and so we
Sam RG 20:33
Can’t blame them, I guess.
Brophy Tyree 20:35
Can’t blame them at all so we use other things that kind of simulate.
Sam RG 20:40
That’s amazing.
Brophy Tyree 20:44
Then we would do some public testing. But anyway, we’re still our goal is to get to 100% separation right now we’re getting a lot through the urinal. And, you know, our ability to process waste is, is not constrained by the amount that we’re collecting, it’s within our permit, we have a certain amount of volume that we can process. We’re now processing that much. And so we need to expand the permit if we want to do more, which we can do. But our goal is to get 100% separation and so we have a patent on that system that that we’re working out and we also have an exclusive license to the urine diverting toilet that we were installing with Do Good Shit. Okay, so this toilet, Thor and Taylor went on a toilet tour, where they visited national parks across the United States and looked at all the systems, took them apart, put them back together, and talked to park rangers, saw what was working well and what was not. And, by a longshot, they determined that the best solution on the market was this toilet, called the Ecodemayo. And so we anchored Do Good Shit on that we were buying those and installing them in back country environments. And then this year, as we were operating, we had the opportunity to actually purchase the exclusive license for that toilet. And so now we’re adding on, in addition to our portable toilets, we’ll be using this. Ecodemayo for any off grid environment.
Sam RG 22:21
Awesome.
Brophy Tyree 22:22
And national parks, state parks, really anywhere Boy Scout camps, anywhere that’s not connected to a sewer is the best solution. And so we’re starting to push that product out, which is really exciting and, and focusing on Vermont and New York and New England, for these systems. And I think our plan is also to take that that urine diverting system and put it into trailers for a luxury offering. So we’re slowly expanding our, our product suite.
Sam RG 22:55
So cool, I love that you’re, you have so much going on, right? Like you’re, you’re proving out the systems, you’re proving out the technology, you’re acquiring technology. It’s just I love the approach that you’re taking from the business perspective. But I keep thinking back to some of our first conversations when you and I first met and how much you’ve taught me. And one of the things I think I asked right away, it was like, How come no one’s disrupted this right? Like seems like so primed for disruption. And then you’re like, well, basically, this business is a logistical nightmare, right? Like, it’s, there’s so much to think about. And you’re like, literally, part of that is just like dealing with pee and poop, which a lot of people don’t want to do. And then like I said, that education piece of technology piece, the systems. Can you just talk a little bit about how you as a team, and as a company have sort of tackled all of that? Because I do think it’s like, such a massive problem. And I think that’s a really hard thing to solve, right? Because you don’t know where to start often. Can you just talk a little bit about like, how you’ve approached things? I’m sure like, it seems like you have a lot more clarity, looking back over the last three years or four years now. But just talk a little bit about how you decided to take which step?
Brophy Tyree 24:11
Yeah. I think it’s a good point, right? Everyone says, you know, dirty businesses are great to be in. And dirty businesses are amazing business opportunities, and so ripe for disruption. And I think being in a quote unquote, dirty business, you see why it hasn’t been disrupted? Because it’s hard to run these businesses. You know, you’re doing stuff in the real world. That’s hard work, and often gross work. And, you know, we have plenty of stories which I want to share about what it’s like to actually be running a portable toilet company. And, you know, want to give a huge shout out to Jeff Blue who’s been running our Burlington operation and I’m in our first service technician, pilot, who they carried us through this, this first operating season fighters from the new American community. And they just completely put the team on their back. Because in order to innovate, we have to put a lot of energy and you’re thinking about technology and strategy and how we’re going to do things differently. But at the end of the day, we’re running a portable toilet company, right, we’ve got 180 units that we need to get to the right place, make sure that they’re clean, make sure that they’re serviced.
Sam RG 25:36
and a lot of customers, like a lot of customers, it’s not like you have two customers. You know, it’s, that’s a lot of work.
Brophy Tyree 25:43
There’s a lot of it’s a lot of work. And so, so much appreciation for those guys that were doing that work in the real world. And, yeah, I mean, a lot of our focus was also recognizing that industry, best practices, or industry best practices for a reason, from the naive place of we can do everything better. You know, there are a lot of ideas, but then you get out into the field and you see, oh, this is why I do it. Right. Yeah. Because this is the best way to do it
Sam RG 26:21
Humbling, I’m sure.
Brophy Tyree 26:22
It’s very humbling. And so learning those best practices. And in year one really just, you know, trying to provide a phenomenal service to our customers, and do things as well as they’re being done in the industry. And then now we’re in a place after a year of operating where we have data and a lot of data that we’ve been collecting around how long it takes to service, how much it costs to service, what actually goes into it. And then now we’re seeing there are all these levers that we can start pulling and experimenting with to be really data driven about where can we actually make improvements? Where are the highest leverage points? What one from the cost perspective, efficiency perspective, but also from a sustainability perspective? So where are the biggest emitting areas in, in this industry, and sources of toxicity? And what is where are we going to get the most ROI in terms of reducing the impact of this industry. So we, you know, circular sanitation, and nutrient recovery is really at the core of the business. But our aspiration is to integrate best practices from a sustainability perspective at every touch point in this ecosystem. And, you know, there’s a lot of opportunities to do that. So at this point, now that we’re going into year two, and we’re opening our, our Boston office actually opened in January,
Sam RG 28:03
Cogradulations.
Brophy Tyree 28:03
and now we’ve got to, to going. But we’re slowly chipping away to improve efficiencies and improve margins, and start to apply more creative and tech enabled solutions. On this foundation that we that we built in Burlington.
Sam RG 28:23
it’s amazing. And I’m sure it it’s frustrating at times, right? When there’s like areas you really want to change or improve. And it’s like, we just have to get through this and kind of get to the next step or collect enough data where we have, you know, real answers here versus just a hunch, right. And I thought that was one of the things I remember you saying you all thought really carefully about is what markets to go into first, and why can you talk a little bit about that strategy, sort of your sales and business development and why Burlington and Boston and maybe what’s next?
Brophy Tyree 28:57
Yeah so, Burlington was chosen for a few reasons. One, we love Vermont, and it’s an amazing place to live and work. And that’s really important to us. Two, is all the work that Rich Earth Institute has done in Vermont from a regulatory perspective and an education perspective. It’s, it’s a small state, but it’s really the leader in terms of urine, recycling and urine fertilizer. And, you know, we wanted a to find a market that had an ethos that was aligned with our company, so really rooted in sustainability and agriculture. And just like a groovy place, yeah, that this would fit in. And from that shortlist, Burlington was kind of a no brainer. Yeah, all those those different things and you know, the way that we see Burlington, then moving forward is it’s really our hub for research and development. So as we identify these new solutions to solve problems in this industry, we develop them and deploy them in Burlington, to see how they affect the business and, and our margins, and really tighten the screws on that, before exporting it to large markets. So that that’s how we’re growing here is viewing it as as the hub for innovation and kind of the showcase of what this could look like in the future. And then Boston. We were guided by a couple factors, when we chose Boston, one was proximity to Burlington. So you know, this is a brick and mortar business that requires presence. Yeah. So being able to jump in the car and drive to our, to a major city where we’re operating is, is pretty helpful. And we needed to choose for our second market, a large city to prove that this works everywhere. And if you can do it in Boston, you can do it everywhere.
Sam RG 31:23
And that scale, right?
Brophy Tyree 31:24
Yeah, an argument that can be made that well, yeah, it worked in Vermont, because it’s Vermont.
Sam RG 31:33
Of course, it works in Vermont. Yeah.
Brophy Tyree 31:36
I needed to counter that. Of course, Vermont wll but it also works in Boston. Totally. Were, you know, Boston is Boston. Also, we from a couple of years ago, we got a book of large corporate customers, big general contractors who are bought into the waste division. And they all had headquarters in, in Boston.
Sam RG 32:07
Amazing.
Brophy Tyree 32:08
We let our customers really, where we knew we had business, guide our our next move.
Sam RG 32:16
Yeah. And also, you know, I, I’m just thinking about that breakdown you had in Burlington, hopefully it’s like, more toilets with fewer customers, right? Because that I assume makes things a little bit easier.
Brophy Tyree 32:27
Yeah I mean, it’s all about route density in this industry.
Sam RG 32:30
Yeah.
Brophy Tyree 32:30
More toilets, in a smaller radius, the better your margins will be. Yeah. And so, in general, being in a large city, like Boston makes your routes a lot denser than, you know, if you’re driving up to Stowe.
Sam RG 32:46
Totally.
Brophy Tyree 32:47
And we tried to make our routes as dense as possible with lots of pretty rural places.
Sam RG 32:51
Yeah, it’s pretty impossible to do that. Yeah.
Brophy Tyree 32:54
Ideally, as many toilets as possible on job sites, but really designing routes that that are have a lot of toilets.
Sam RG 33:03
You must be so excited to see the data for Boston, because I feel like it’s going to be everything’s going to kind of improve, right? Because of that density.
Brophy Tyree 33:11
Yeah totally. I mean, because of the density, but there, it’s, there’s a lot of variables, that, there’s a lot of variables that make it hard to predict exactly how things are going to shake out. So you know, there’s a lot more density, there’s also a lot more traffic, right? How those things balance each other out. You know, the cost of labor and, and the ability to find and retain service technicians. So we’re gonna learn in this first year, first year in Boston, like what we did last year, and we’re looking forward.
Sam RG 33:47
Yeah, and Boston is not for those folks that may not know Boston is not a grid, like every other city, in the country. And that makes things a little bit a little bit more difficult. We love you Boston, but it’s basically like, you know, horse paths that were paved at one point.
Brophy Tyree 34:03
I think the goal is that at the end of this year, we’ll have medium sized market and a large market blueprint. Yep, recognizing that there are different environments that will require different operational strategies, but then we’ll have a package that can be deployed in a lot of different places nationally.
Sam RG 34:26
That’s so exciting. It’s a really, really exciting and like, just pause and congratulations on like, doing what you said you were gonna do, like, we had this conversation three or four years ago, and he said, This is the plan and here we are. So that’s, it just makes my makes my heart happy. So one thing I wanted to touch on is financing the company. How have you all approached that?
Brophy Tyree 34:54
Yeah, so in I guess it was July, we were really scrappy in the beginning. So we used safes and kind of raise as much money as we needed, until things started to get scary. And the flags were up, and then we were raised a little bit more. And so looking mostly at Angels and pitch competitions, were really helpful. Both the the pitch competitions themselves, and then the networks that we would develop out there. You know, this company does really long pitch competitions.
Sam RG 35:37
Yeah. It’s fun. It’s so fun. Yeah, it’s different. It’s unexpected.
Brophy Tyree 35:44
You know, the Porta Potty vehicle?
Sam RG 35:46
Totally. Yes.
Brophy Tyree 35:49
We did well, in that way. And so yeah, I mean, really, we were really scrappy, and raising a little bit of money at a time. While we proved as much out as possible, so building prototype units, getting them out into the field, getting people pooping in them, really trying to sort of add on the hardware side, and then really trying to build a case for why the circular processing is going to work now, and why in the long run, it will improve margins. So looking towards the future, where we’re actually making money, processing and extracting the value of the ways where other people are paying for them is, is the vision. Yeah. And so building that case. And then, once we had those, those prototypes on the ground, and the case was strong, we hit the fundraising hard, had as many conversations as possible with precede funds, and got connected, actually, through another Burlington entrepreneur, Grayson, CEO of Resonant Link, many college arm with gravity connected us to Third Sphere, which is a climate tech hardware pre-seed, Seed Fund. And they’ve just gotten infected by the division, and totally bought in and they were our first institutional money in. And then she’ll be who’s the lead partner on that, for that deal. She really took us under her wing and put us through a little bit of a bespoke accelerator for about six months leading up to our seed round, just helping us sophisticate what we were doing and build the case. And really the key, the key inflection point was when we went out to do some customer development and pre-sales, to get LOIs and purchase orders to just show that there was some demand, which had been really anecdotal before. And so we went out and we talked to as many construction companies we could find, and pretty much across the board, these multinational general contractors that, you know, if you’ve had this, we would definitely use it sounds like an amazing thing. So sales, pre sales ended up being a huge success. And so we had this stack of letters of intent, that were really the foundation for our fundraise and went out into the venture capital market. And, you know, had some prototypes that were working in the field, we had a strong case for the future of processing, and the stack of LOIs and pretty coherent plan. Just enough, let’s say to convince people that we were worth a shot,
Sam RG 39:08
And an awesome team.
Brophy Tyree 39:10
and an awesome team. And that didn’t, it definitely wasn’t easy. It was
Sam RG 39:16
not fun. Yeah.
Brophy Tyree 39:19
There are hundreds of pitches and, you know, a lot of diligence questions over the course of nine months and hit a tough time. But we got really amazing leads in collaborative fund and
Sam RG 39:34
and how much did you raise?
Brophy Tyree 39:36
We raised we’ve raised a total of almost 8 million awesome if you include the safes in the beginning. Yep. But the price round was closer to six.
Sam RG 39:48
I love it. Thank you for sharing that. And I think I just have so many conversations with aspiring founders. And you know, I think that the perception is that companies that have raised, let’s say, six to $8 million, like, have some secret formula, right? Have some like, advantage that they don’t have. But really, it’s hundreds of meetings, like you said, it’s hitting the pavement and getting those LOIs. And I think a lot of founders underestimate how powerful that is to investors. And how willing some customers are to have that conversation, right, and to make those commitments. So thank you for sharing just how much work goes into it, right? Because of course, you have to have a good technology, a good business plan, a good team, but like, it’s also just a lot of like really unfun phone calls and visits in person and emails and cold calls, all kinds of stuff to get to that point.
Brophy Tyree 40:51
I think the process of going through those hundreds of meetings and getting rejected hundreds of times, a lot of the time they say why there is a pass. Yeah. And that feedback loop was really transformative for us in terms of actually refining the business and what it is that we’re doing. And so the company that we were pitching in the first meeting was vastly different than the company that we were pitching, you know, three months later when we got our lead. So it’s kind of the gauntlet that you need to go through. Otherwise, if you’re just building in your own heads, there’s a lot of blind spots. Yeah, so it sucks, but it’s definitely a necessary step.
Sam RG 41:41
Totally. You gotta be embarrassed by what you first put out there, right. And like, Man, I wish we could. That’s why I say like, don’t start with your, like, most exciting prospect for investors because your pitch is gonna get so much better. I can’t believe but we’re almost out of time here. And before we wrap up, I do have to ask you the most important question. And that’s the magic wand question. So if you could change one thing about Vermont today with a magic wand. What would you change?
Brophy Tyree 42:16
Change one thing about Vermont. It’s pretty dreamy. I think if if we could have more powder, less rain during the winter, it would be the perfect place on earth. I guess and we lived in Tahoe and so it’s been an adjustment coming back to East Coast now.
Sam RG 42:37
Yeah. Well, it makes you a better skier and snowboarder right.
Brophy Tyree 42:41
It know humbles you.
Sam RG 42:45
Absolutely.
Brophy Tyree 42:45
If there were more powder here it would be to good.
Sam RG 42:48
Yeah. I love it. I love it. All right. Well, we’ll hold for more powder. I think I think we’re close to some I feel it, a little tingle. Ravi, thank you so much for your time today and sharing your story. I think we’re gonna have parts 234 Or five like I just can’t wait to see this company grow. So thank you so much. This has been start here a podcast sharing the stories of active aspiring and accidental entrepreneurs. This series is supported by the Vermont Technology Council and Consolidated Communications.
