Over the past semester, we have had the amazing opportunity to work with Propel, Cornell DTI’s student startup accelerator. The experience was invaluable in not only contributing to the development of Filosophy, a recycling startup for 3D printed plastic waste, but also the professional development of the cofounders: us. We learned so much in such a short amount of time and could not be more thankful for the community and resources that Propel has provided to help us on this journey. In the sprint that we will be describing today, which is our website MVP, you will soon discover the highs and lows we transversed in rapidly pivoting, prototyping, and testing our business model.
Filosophy entered Propel with the grand vision of recycling 3D printer plastic waste in house through the construction of a filament machine, which would remelt the scraps into new quality filament. It was clear from the beginning that a lot of testing had to be done before any machine could be built, but we nevertheless had great excitement over what the future of prototyping and environmentally sustainable 3D printing would look like. As the semester began, we focused on customer interviews. We met with corporate and university makerspace directors and asked various questions about their entity’s printing habits. The goal was to gage interest in a recycling service and how that would look, whether we would be returning them filament, how the pickup or drop off would work, and much, if anything, the customers were willing to pay.
Around this time, we began development of our first prototype website. The website layed out our business model as a 3D printed plastic waste subscription service, which would collect the scraps and return 1kg of black recycled filament for every 1kg of waste collected. We thought that the best way to test our business model and gain quantitative data was to create our website as quickly as possible and distribute it to as many people in our customer segment as possible. We began planning ads and curating content, which would belong on this MVP website. We researched ways to track statistics and thought of catchy slogans to sell our idea. If all went well, we would have a business.
After a few weeks, our first draft of the website was finished. At this point, the sprint had taken longer than expected, but we continued to push on with our plan. It was soon clear though that a pivot was necessary. The landing page didn’t seem nearly convincing enough and as we continued to talk to customers, we realized that many of them didn’t really want any filament in return for their waste. There was a general stigma against recycled filament due to the quality of their past experiences, and another major problem was the price. It seemed that many of these makerspaces were buying filament in bulk at 50% off. A $25 roll could be bought at prices as low as $10 per unit. We also realized that filament was a tricky product to perfect quality wise. Industry leaders have spent years and tons of capital on their processes, and there was no reason to reinvent the wheel by building our own machine. Our trip to 3D Brooklyn, where we had the opportunity to make filament for ourselves, showed us that manufacturing filament was harder than we imagined. This led to phase 2 of our sprint, which was a redesigning of the website to reflect our new truth.
As we compounded everything we learned from the sprint, we revisited the website MVP and began to redesign the content and style of the landing page. Instead of a filament company, we pivoted to becoming a 3D printed plastic waste collection service, where we could focus on the collection network. The style of the website was also altered to be more inviting, playful, and modern. We validated through more customer interviews that this was a much better business model and entry point into the industry. For example, we spoke to people at Terracycle, University of Minnesota, Closed Loop Plastics, Brandeis, and Google X, who all seemed excited about Filosophy. This then leads us to where we are today.
As we wrap up the semester, we realized that there is still a lot to do before Filosophy can officially launch as a business. We are now moving in a better direction thanks to the results of this sprint and all the guidance we have received along the way. Thanks again to Han and Ying for your incredible energy at our weekly standup meetings and thank you to Rebecca Fu, our mentor, for the advice and continued support throughout the semester. We look forward to what the next few months will bring for Filosophy and we can’t wait to tell you all about it!
Ann Xu and Karina Popovich
December 16, 2020
