Our Journey So Far (Part 1)
Broken pumps and pipes. Water flowing into homes for the first time. Contract negotiations. Exploring opportunities. Exhausting days and exasperation. Excitement at possibilities. COVID-19. Growing with and marrying my best friend.
These have been my past five years. It is a tale as old as time: highest of highs, lowest of lows, and everywhere in between.
I could go on and on about everything, but I’d like to give everyone an update for where we are in June 2022. Topics for another day (just a hint for now):
Team building and coaching (both within 3BL and the importance of a team at home)
Mental health and resilience running a startup (thousand yard stares and picking yourself back off the ground)
Cool organizational tools we use (if you don’t use Miro and Trello, you’re missing out)
Fundraising strategies and leveraging any traction (we went from a $6,000 fundraiser to working on a $400,000 investment)
Interesting lessons learned along the way (Pro Tip: build a water system for 50 homes before you build a water system for 500 homes)
For the People in the Back: A Little Reminder of How We Got Started (Season 1 Recap)
I established 3BL all the way back in 2014 in Colorado so that I could have a legal entity to explore the ideas that had been running around in my head ever since I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya from 2009 to 2011. 3BL is registered in Colorado as a Public Benefit Corporation, meaning that while we are a private company with the need to make a profit, we’re also required to show our shareholders our impact. This goes to the heart of the Triple Bottom Line: impact the world financially, environmentally, and socially.
I moved to Ethiopia in 2015 and hit the ground running. I was privileged enough to have a job that would let me work remotely (MB BIM Solutions is run by incredible people) and could explore opportunities more precisely (it would be silly to develop a business plan for Ethiopia while living in the US). Eventually, with the help of the people at iceaddis, we hit upon the plan:
Get water to rural people where they are: in their homes. Nearly everyone recognizes the value of getting water at home, but it’s simply too expensive for most rural people to afford.
So this became the essential question that we have been trying to answer: how do we make piped water systems radically affordable with a business model that we can sustain?
Getting Our Hands Dirty: Slogging Through the Mud (Season 2 Recap)
We officially established 3BL in Ethiopia in 2017 with a couple of Co-Founders. Side Note: I will say that one of the things that I am most proud of along the way has been that I am the only non-Ethiopian on our team. I cannot stress enough the need for understanding local context when designing a business.
To build our pilot project in the community of Wita, we raised funds from a few places:
Amazing people that helped us raise thousands of dollars through crowdfunding and friends and family investment
Some local government material purchasing
$50 Payments from every household in the community
Along the way, we also took second place in a startup competition with Imagine H2O (Check out our story on Disrupt Africa) and were awarded a grant from the USAID Development Innovation Ventures Program. We were speeding along.
And then we hit mud.
The problem with many ideas and businesses is that you don’t hit a wall where you have a quick and obvious thing that stops you. You hit mud. You keep moving, but the ratio of energy to progress snowballs.
We tried to import solar panels…we got some bad information (and didn’t ask the right questions) and the panels got stuck in storage.
We had a low-cost solution to piping and storage at the homes… it didn’t work very well and the community wasn’t happy, though we worked on a solution together (and they’re much happier today).
We switched our power source to the local power grid… and the transformer malfunctioned and fried our pump motor, which took 15 months to fix.
We built our system… and spent way too much money on it, realizing that our financial model was not going to work long-term.
We had a working team… and then I was not the leader that I needed to be (to be elaborated upon another time).
I could go on and on about our lessons learned (and perhaps one day I will), but suffice it to say that I seriously considered giving up a number of times along the way.
And then COVID hit. Work everywhere ground to a halt. The chaos of the pandemic spread to every corner of our lives. Every single person in this world was affected one way or another and we are still dealing with our collective trauma.
We were buried up to our necks in the mud, but we could still breathe.
We. Kept. Pushing. Forward.
Next Time on The 3BL Diaries: Where Are We Now?
We Get By With a Little Help From Our Friends: 3BL and the Order of the Phoenix (Season 3)
Slowly, we rose from the ashes mud.
The Flowius Cinematic Universe: Flowius Sustain (Spinoff, Season 1)
But wait, there’s more!
Tune in next month! Same Bat Time. Same Bat Channel.