Friends Build Water Filtration Systems for Outdoor Hydration

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Friends, listeners, community, have you drank enough water today? Listen, I have lots of bad habits. Don't always have the perfect diet or exercise routine or anything else. But one thing I do somewhat well is I usually drink two large glasses of water. The first thing after I get up, I pretty much roll out of bed and then start drinking water right away.

And then throughout the day, drinking lots more water at my desk, of course I'm also drinking coffee and other things. So there's some balance there, but hey, drinking water, a good habit. And today's story, there's a reason why I tell you I'm drinking water, right? Today's story is all about two friends who team up to create an outdoor water purification system. The system provides profits for them.

They're just getting going, but it is profitable, as well as planet saving improvements. So we're going to talk about water filtration and also shout out to the P-Lux. P-Lux, we featured back in episode 815. That was an invention, a contraption, I guess you'd say. I'm not sure of the right description for it, but that was a device, perhaps, that allows women to use the bathroom while wearing shapewear.

Shapewear is pretty difficult, notoriously difficult for that. So that story was about a woman named Tracy Beck. And I briefly mentioned her husband. I think he had a little bit of a role in creating the P-Lux, while he makes another appearance here as the co-founder. So lots of inventions taking place in the Beck household.

And he's got a theme going, obviously, with the P-Lux and now this water filtration system. So without further ado, I want to say thank you to our sponsor. They allow this show to be completely free to you, our listeners, and then I'll tell you all about it. How he got the idea, how he made it happen, and what developed along the way. [Music]

Water is as basic a need as we humans have.

We just can't get enough of it. But especially in the great outdoors, sometimes the water that's available has a funky smell, a stale taste, or even contaminants that might do us in. Taylor Beck and Sean "Dookie" Cuvro realized that people who spend a great deal of time outside not only drink lots of water, but also that their water sources needed improvement. With Tyler and Dookie's Guzzle H2O system, water on the run is now safe, fresh, and even ecological. Friends in Hood River, Oregon since 2004, the two often rode bikes and sailed together.

Dookie is a professional sailboat racer, and he noticed that the large teams on the boats went through lots of plastic water bottles during their long trainings and competitions. He knew that some of those bottles ended up in the ocean, a blight on the environment. He also knew that marina water often tasted suspect, so filling reusable bottles wasn't the best solution. Tyler, who builds parts for unmanned aircraft cameras, at least when he's not building inventions for his wife, had the technical savvy to work on a solution for the water problems Dookie saw out on the surf, a portable water purifier adaptable to various recreational needs. So in a garage style workshop in early 2018, they began on the design, making some prototypes, going from iteration to iteration in cooler bags and then backpacks, all while eliminating a lot of non-essential parts.

The Spigot version of Guzzle H2O was the first result. A lightweight device that can connect to a water tap at a park, campground, marina, or anywhere water is available. The Spigot pulls out chlorine and chemical contaminants with a carbon block filter and then purifies the water with LED UVC purification technology. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds impressive. You just put a bunch of letters in front of something and people are like, "Wow, that's technology, cool." Anyway, here's how it works.

You just hook it up, turn on the tap, and freely fill your container. The partners estimate that using a Spigot, instead of single-use plastic water bottles, can eliminate 700 pounds of plastic on just the first maintenance cycle of the filter. The project ramped up when Doogie got the pair of job building a custom water filtration system for one of his sailing teams, and they then got some other projects by word of mouth. Those projects allowed them to experiment with and pay for the prototyping of their later products. In the early days, they used a clever bootstrapping technique, getting the job and then figuring out how to do it afterwards.

I'm a big fan of that approach, get the job and figure out how to do it. The first onboard system was installed on a racing yacht. By spending clients' money to develop features that they later put into sellable products, they didn't have a lot of startup costs. During prototyping, they bought parts wherever they could find them, including overseas and from US suppliers. After finding the parts they liked, they then went up the supply chain to get the best bulk buy pricing, whether from a distributor or a factory.

So far, they've sold 50 systems, bringing in $32,000, around $18,000 of which is profit. Now, in terms of profit, it's actually gone back into buying inventory, marketing and tools for improving production. For now, they're reinvesting that profit into buying inventory, marketing and tools for improving production. Their first true customers were a New Zealand group that was putting on a professional level sailing event. They paid $1,000 for the system, prompting Tyler to celebrate with an Oregon IPA after shipping it out, because after all, not all drinking has to involve water.

They now have larger systems for people that spend long days on the water. The onboard version allows users to filter the water as they use it, which is important because sometimes the water from tanks on boats becomes less than fresh. The fact that they get most of their customers from the sailing community around the world is particularly gratifying because they enjoy the long reach of the products. And knowing that their systems give people a strong alternative to single use plastics is further inspiration. They expect to spend up to $10,000 ramping up for the summer season.

They're pursuing media contacts, testing out email marketing and sending demo systems to sailing clubs for events. In short, their approach was simply to start building the product they had in mind. When their first guzzle version was done and they saw people using it, they were unhesitatingly honest about determining which parts and features were working to make the user experience better and which parts were just adding costs or otherwise not contributing to the consumer experience. From there, they made some changes and built again. For each system, their approach is to keep doing that until they can't think of any changes that don't come with trade-offs or compromises.

Those uncompromised products are now used in parks, campgrounds, and of course, on the water. This summer, Tyler and Doogie will be exhibiting at the Overland Expo in Flagstaff, Arizona. That's a gathering for the Overland driving community, also known as people who travel on back roads in remote areas where good water might be scarce. They believe no recreational venture should involve water with contaminants, chemicals, viruses, or bacteria. And the guzzlers have solutions for all of that.

In the meantime, know that water makes up a full 70% of our body mass. We are literally made of it. Everything comes down to water. So when it comes to making a product like this, if you've been listening to the show for a while, you may have heard some other approaches. Oftentimes, people won't even start manufacturing or designing or even kind of going down that road until they're pretty clear that there really is a demand for this, that they're gonna be able to be successful.

Not just that there is a need, because you could say, well, there's a need for clean water, et cetera, but that doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to buy it, 'cause those are two different things. So the fact that everybody needs clean water doesn't mean that all these boat owners and other customers, recreational vehicle owners, et cetera, are gonna make this purchase. However, in this case, the way they did it, they kept their costs super low. They really did hustle because they built their prototypes with the first few orders. Startup costs are essentially non-existent or at least minimal, let's say.

So in this case, this is another approach. It basically means you just build it and adjust as you go along. So you do kind of go from iteration to iteration, but you do it in the context of a real world marketplace. So now I think they have three or four different versions of these systems and they're selling something like $40,000 worth so far, reinvesting the profits, but this definitely seems like the kind of thing that could go big, or even if it doesn't go big, it seems like it can definitely fill a niche and hopefully sell a lot of products for them, help them build more sustainability in their life and work and ventures, and of course bring a lot more clean water to people in a great outdoors and reduce the use of single-use individual bottles of water. So all good things there.

More than one way to make these things happen. That's why there's a different example, a case study story every day. My hope is that you'll take something from each one of them, even if it's just a little small moment of motivation or perhaps an idea, a tactic, a strategy, something to apply in your own way. And if you haven't found it yet, well, it's okay. It's all right, just keep listening because, again, different story every day.

Something is going to hit you and then kind of sink in and you're going to be like, wow, okay, that's it. So that's the reason I make the show and of course, much more is on the way. Today's show notes. All right, sidehustleschool.com/860, 860-860. If you want to check out the Guzzle H2O system plus anything else I mentioned, and of course, come back tomorrow for 861.

Thanks so much. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is "Sidusleschool." [Music]

From the Onward Project.