Week 10: More Research

   We are still not getting far with our customer research. It's much more difficult than we thought to contact hydrogen researchers for cars. I think as a group we need to think about smaller weekly deliverables to further our project. By now, I think we see that cold-contacting is not working very well so we'll have to find other means of research and interviews to get the data we want.

Week 9: Customer Part 2

Week 9: Customer Part 2

   This week, we started to collect information on research labs for car companies. It was a great suggestion from Rick and we found contact information to these labs. However, almost all of the research labs in Silicon Valley focus on automation or other software based endeavors. We couldn't find a hydrogen person in the labs. 

   I unfortunately missed our most recent group meeting this week, so it may have changed, but now the strategy would be to find where hydrogen research is done and try to get in contact with them. And still continuing end consumer research to make the business plan pitch. 

Week 8: Customer

Week 8: Customer

   This is the beginning of our customer week. We're trying to juxtapose creating a user story/business plan to pitch for licensing our patent, and then analyzing potential customers to actually license to. Finding industry customers for licensing has been difficult so we focused on getting data for general end consumers to use in the pitch. 

   Right now there's not a lot of traction because we haven't done in depth interviews (just surveys) and there is a learning curve with hydrogen cell cars. So two main problems here: 1) surveying end consumers requires educating them on hydrogen cell cars, 2) very difficult to find people who are already educated on this within our networks (1st, 2nd, 3rd) primarily because of our age and none of us have experience in this industry. 

   We'll see how it goes but I am personally doing some more research on other patents to see if we can combine or pivot because of the accessibility issue to information. 

Week 7: Team Dynamics

Team Dynamics

   I think our team dynamics are pretty good at this point. We were fortunate to find a patent and a responding professor early on so we are mainly working on learning more about the market and industry.
   I am in a team with Niels, Nick, Matt, and Clarissa. Our current patent on the Hydrogen Gas Tank is something that Nick, a Chemical Engineer, initially chose. He is currently trying to educate the rest of us and we're getting up to speed on the industry and how it works. Niels was our star during the Rejection Game and is very comfortable speaking to just about anyone which will be useful. Matt is an undergrad Haas student which will help as we develop our business plans. Clarissa is the project manager of the group and easily delegates when things get confusing. For me, I currently work at a software startup, so I hope to bring in that startup knowledge into this non-software setting. Very excited to see where this goes.