Hi! This is Peann. I'm the co-founder of Eco-Greenergy,
a social enterprise focusing on eco-solutions.
We want to do something 'eco', and at the very beginning we think
about four ways and later on it evolve to coffee grounds, and we have
successfully identified some market demand, and then luckily we have
different customers supporting us, and make us able to move to bigger and
bigger space.
I think I'll have two key tips. One is really be critical on ...
whatever that you have found via different sources, no matter it's Google or from
other people or from some companies that are very well-known, it doesn't matter,
but you need to be very critical on that, and you need to see it from the way that
you need to challenge it, challenge it, until you cannot challenge it, and then
that's really the fact, or it really works.
Because for most of the news or the information that you can see from media,
it is somehow masked; because of maybe marketing reasons,
or because of confidentiality reasons, there are a lot of reasons behind.
And you need to, kind of, go through those layers, invisible layers,
until you find the bottom to see the facts.
Like for food waste management,
we really visited the residential estate doing waste recycling,
we go through the entire end-to-end process to see what different
parties are doing along the whole process, and to see how our company can
play a role in that process and to see if it is something that we expected, and
not surprisingly as usual, really when we go into the field,
the fact is really something different from what we have learned from the news, from
Google, from ... or even from other companies in the field, so what we have learned
very clearly, is that we will need we see by our [own] eyes,
And point number two, is how do you evaluate.
You need to persevere as well,
because it is a journey; actually you don't know when the evaluation is
really completed; there it's not an obvious timeline, progress bar,
"OK it is done, the evaluation is complete", you need to ... when you cannot
find any new findings, you still need to go into that, go into that, until you
find something.
OK, it helps your business, or it is a key gap between the
customers and the business, and then you start working on that.
Because we have suffered for a period [when] we can hardly find a customer,
which can give us a
stable income to make this company survive.
The reason is actually [because] our key
customers that we were looking for is the residential estate, and usually the
residential estate is looking for some low-cost solution and they do not have a
hard timeline to push things forward, and it will be us to push things forward, and
it makes the whole thing dragging and dragging, and this is not healthy for
start-up like us, so we have started to explore different direction in tackling
the food waste recycling.
We have thought of different food waste, and coffee brands
is a food waste that is very clean, very hygienic, we can easily collect from
different cafes, hotels or [corporations], so we started actively participating in many,
many marketing events, to mingle with different [companies], and then luckily we
have connected with one big corporation, to start the coffee grounds recycling service.
And that's a good start, because we can demonstrate, OK it works and there is
need as well, because right now more and more companies are actually looking for
innovative eco-solutions but not just recycling paper bins, plastic bottles,
it's not just about that; they want to expand the scope,
to prepare for the waste charges
in upcoming news.