What the Solar Panel Playbook Can Teach You About Launching a New Product Category

[Music] Water is a very geographically specific problem. I would argue that there are places in the US that have worse water challenges than many places abroad that we might think of as developing countries. What we are providing in the conversation is a tool for you to take that into your own control. The flexibility, the speed, and the personal control over your water is what we're able to provide. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I'm your host, Beth Popney-Kolev, and in this episode, we're joined by Brian Cheng. He is the co-founder and CEO of Aquaria. They are rethinking one of the most fundamental elements in residential construction, which is the need for every home to have clean water. Brian, thanks so much for your time. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Beth. I'm super excited to be here. It's been quite a long time since I've been on a podcast, but really excited to share what we're doing. I'm excited for you to talk to our listeners, because I think what you guys are doing is really interesting. Before we jump in, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your role at Aquaria. Yeah, certainly. So I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of Aquaria. We are based in Austin, Texas, and we are focused on building a new form of on-demand clean water, starting with for your residential home. The way we do that is by harvesting the air around us. I think our claim to fame, if you will, is we built the first homes in the world where you can shower with air, cook with air. Of course, we're going to do that for much more, but that's a quick 30 seconds of what we're doing. So obviously, your product sounds like magic, and we're going to get into innovation, inspiration. How do we bring those ideas into the market? I don't usually let people talk about their companies at all. I'm going to make an exception, because what you said sounds unbelievable. For sure. Yeah, that's a great question. And even when we talk with our customers and everyone is excited, and the first thing has is, is that real? How does that work? So talking a little bit about our actual product, it's actually a very similar in size and shaped to maybe a battery pack or a HVAC system. But essentially, we've created a series of heat exchangers, as well as materials. That's the science part. But the still down is there's a massive amount of humidity in the air around us. Clouds or morning dew, those are actually all examples of air water. And so we created a machine that allows us to harvest this air water on a massive scale, enough to deliver it into your home and help you cook shower right out of your taps. So you have the unique experience of being a person who had this crazy idea of someone should build this and a lot more for most of us, that just ends in a conversation of like, oh, yeah, that would be cool. That sounds like a lot of work. And then we just go back to our regular lives. For you, Brian, you have this crazy idea of what if we solved pulling water out of the air, tell me a little about the origin story of how you came up with this idea and what it looked like to bring that idea to life. Yeah, certainly. And the genesis, I guess, for this is quite a personal topic for me. My grandmother actually came from the city. I guess a lineage of my grandparents and great grandparents came from a city near Mongolia that is the call the city of 1000 springs. And it used to be a beautiful city with lots of very fantastic groundwater springs. What over the years from industrial pollution, all of the water became tainted and actually unfortunately my grandmother passed away from stomach cancer. And so I really inspired me to look at water and water technologies when I was at Princeton. And so I was looking at how do we solve our water challenges. And I came across fog nets. People might have heard of a fog net before, but it's these nets you put out and if the mist comes through and the mist would get caught up on the nets and then you have there you have clean water. And so I thought, huh, everyone is looking at the ground. But what if we looked up instead? And I guess many generations later, here we sit with the real product. That's fascinating. So you have this idea of what if we solve this problem, what did the journey look like for you to decide not just what if but actually say I'm going to make this happen. What did that process look like for you? Yeah. So I looked into it and I can't say that I'm the first person to have come up with the idea of air water capture depending on who you ask and maybe your star wars fan and you would have seen water capture in the movies. But I guess in more modern history, air water generation is actually something that has been used for our military. For very obvious reasons, you have to guarantee the supply of water for our troops are on the go. And you always have a reliable source of water. And so in those cases, air water made sense. So when I looked at it, I said, okay, certainly there's a use case for it and there's a technology behind here. But it's super expensive. It's super bulky. But this is something I think that can be really used for every day and that there's lots of people and communities that can benefit from being able to use it if it only produced enough water. And it was affordable enough. And somehow was able to integrate with our everyday system so that we get water just like water from the air water from the ground doesn't matter as long as I have clean water. So at least that informed me that it was possible. So then it became the challenge of how do I turn something that was maybe more expensive and fulfill the military into something that everyone uses. And of course, maybe think about computers back in the day all the way to what we have on the computers now. And I think that's a very similar trajectory. Where do you see the whole that you're filling in the industry? Because I for I'm sure a lot of Americans would say access to clean water isn't as big of an issue here as it is internationally. How are you positioning what you're doing as a need for the current market state or do you see that as the place where you belong or somewhere else rather. Certainly water is not either or it's not saying whether outside of the U.S. or right in our back yards we have water problems. Everyone has water challenges in different kinds as well. And water is a very geographically specific problem. I would argue that there are places in the U.S. that have worse water challenges than many places abroad that we might think of as developing countries. I think at the very minimum we have once a year we have a major water crisis happening a couple years ago the weather is Hawaii or Jackson this year right now currently it's corpus Christi in Texas. So certainly we have pretty widespread water challenges here right now. And so the way we think about it is that actually America's water infrastructure is really in need of a major upgrade. But it will take time and it will take a lot of capital. So what we are providing in the conversation is a tool for you to take that into your own control. One that doesn't take years and waiting but one that you can take into control yourself and we can make it happen in just a couple of days. The flexibility the speed and this personal control over your water is what we're able to provide. Who do you see is your target customer. Our target customers right now are essentially builders of homes or just homeowners themselves so both of them are our customers. How are you approaching conversations with let's say home with builders. How are you approaching those conversations to help raise the need or urgency for your product as they're considering the products are going into the next home. So interesting enough again this is where we make a very purpose full decision on where we are at we stood we started off in here in Texas. We don't really usually convince people to have a water issue you either you know it or you don't I'm originally from New York. I didn't go to New York City for this first because first go to market because I think when your city's water is okay. It's not bad. So it's really about as a per as a South Floridian our waters gross. My parents live in Orlando so say it's totally it's totally but that's I think that's that that's the exact point is that there's a lot of personal awareness around water and so it's less about convincing you that there's a water problem is that hey did you know that this is possible. And almost always the answer is no almost always I've never heard of this but certainly that's where the curiosity starts to learn and see how we can improve the home the homeowner experience with the value and what do we actually provide what can we actually do and that's where the curiosity starts. So you're marketing to a subset of a subset really talk we're talking like builders or homeowners in a particular area who already have an awareness of their water problem which obviously is very smart to go to people who have the problem not convinced people they have the problem just sometimes necessary but a whole additional hill to have to climb. How do you begin marketing something to the very specific niche and you have a product that I think it's a don't be offended like that nobody's ever heard of the concept even not like your brand but no one's ever heard of the concept of the solution how do you begin to market that. Sure. So I think there is a slight misunder I don't want to say misunderstanding but I completely understand your question but I actually typically think of it the other way around which is at the beginning stages of. Building a product that is providing value this kind of bringing something novel into a market. You actually rather have a hundred hardcore lovers of your product. Yeah. And this is pretty cool and we'll see. And we really focused on understanding are there people that really need our product and what are some of those problems? And what we came to is that Texas, Florida actually, a similar kind is that people just didn't know, but would love that if they had a higher quality water source that they can control, you could still water your plans, you could flush your toilets with your city water and your other sources of water. But wouldn't be amazing if when you shower that you didn't have to put so much shampoo in your hair felt like crap because the water sucked and slimy or when you drink water and cook that there weren't residue. Those are things that we provide that once people realize what they can do, they're wow, we love this. In the beginning, thoroughly, this is not, we're not saying that we can, everybody immediately lash onto this. But by finding those initial group of people we realize it just spreads like wildfire. Okay. So I wholeheartedly agree and I think that's really smart. It's all, you get that product market fit feedback. You get to really have some people who become champions. So I really love that approach. Your product is done. Give me from day one to where you are now of how you're moving your go to market. Day one is you're going after these core 100 people to fall in love with your product. How are you finding them and then what was next and then what was next? Totally. And we actually change our strategy here a couple of times to even get to this point. Because so obviously introduced the query, we can help you shower with air. That's like home scale. But what many people don't know is that Aquarius started many years ago and the first version of our products was actually quite small. It was a countertop water unit that produced two, three gallons of water a day and was more like a water cooler. And the value proposition was giving you a drinking water, replace your gallon jugs of water from Costco, microplastics, PFAS free, that kind of pitch. So it's like a water appliance, which by the way, all hours of water stills. Microplastic PFAS free. But we decided that we wanted to go way bigger the size and we're trying to even go bigger even from now like we're trying to be able to supply entire communities and entire cities with water from the air. But I think that is the trajectory of gone. It is really we've before we even got to the point of going from one to a hundred out of a hundred hot cuts really hardcore lovers of our product. We've left many iterations of what are we actually building. So how do you move from knowing you switch your shift to your strategy? How are you moving your strategy to scale? Still knowing your target, your targeting a very specific audience and in an industry that isn't really known for how much we love change. I guess I had no predisposition on any of these thoughts. Yeah. But just go. So about the fact that you wouldn't want to adopt an innovative product that provides you's real value. I guess that perhaps means the pain wasn't painful enough. I'm not sure. No, that's great. I think it's I don't think you should have to know. I think that's how we get innovation is people not knowing. Innovation is important. Like every industry needs innovation. Otherwise you become stale. So please don't take that as something you're not knowing what you're doing or anything. Oh, no, not at all. I appreciate you kind of putting that out there because when I think about it, I'm like, that's a good question, but I'm not really thought about that. So let me ask a different question then, which is, does that mean you don't feel friction for concern about adoption of change from your customers? Oh, no. That's certainly not the case. Like you said, this is a new product. We have to build a lot of trust. We have to show and tell seeing is believing. But I guess to that point, there's two parts of it. One, isn't that the case for everything? Yeah. I don't know. There's certainly industries like we often talk about care because it just feels like the 180 degree difference from building materials like skincare or SaaS. I would say it's like 180 different where there are innumerable skincare brands, products, launches, ideas. And do they all reach billion dollar valuations? Certainly not. I would say it's easier to break into that market even with the level of saturation they have just from the sheer adoption and people like want new skincare. Understand. I understand your question now. You know what I'm saying? In a way that like for building materials, there's a lot higher risk than lotion. You're like, I don't know. I spent 80 bucks and I just like, yeah, I understand your question. Yep. So how we thought about it was that while Aquaria is new, but there is something that is conceptually very similar to what Aquaria provides, but for power. People are very familiar with the idea of putting solar panels, backup generators, batteries, month-year home, and arguably these things are way more expensive than Aquaria. Like they're probably around two to four X more expensive on a typical home setup than what we are. But that was the analogy we made to people is that hey, you already have energy freedom or sustainability, whatever you care about. We're a device, a smart connected device that could do the same before your water supply. And so we really leaned into the idea and the value proposition, the familiarity of a analogous energy product, which I think now is a very proven home building material product in even mandated for buildings in new homes and certain states. And we think that should be the same and the value proposition is at least the same because water is crucial to life and provide that quality and safety for your family. I love that idea. We often frame that it's like same but different. Here's how do we break in? How do we get you to pay attention to us? And also understand us. One of the biggest hurdles we see for new products that are, they're great products. They have a huge need. They're really going to add value. It's not just, it's not gimmicky. It's the, I don't have a box to put that in my brain and so I just can't be bothered. Then I just move on and I move on and it kills amazing products all the time. And so that idea of how do I tell you, it's like this thing that you already know and you already believe in and you already trust, but it's just for this thing instead is really smart. It's a great way to increase speed of adoption with innovation. I think that's exceptional. All right. Let's fast forward to where we are now because you and I were joking before the podcast started up for the market. It's still a little new, but it's not a net new idea for you guys. You've been living deep in the trenches for years before being able to bring it online. Where are you now in your evolution of bringing an innovative product into the home building market? I think this is a year. We've been working. This is our fifth year of the business now. A lot of that time has been spent on research development, technology development, listening to customers and iterating the product to really build something that the market needs. And even though of course the past year, we've learned a ton that evolved their product. But I think we've hit this critical point where the natural fractures of water demand is hitting front and center. That's from, I think it's starting from the fires in LA two years ago to the massive hurricanes of Florida this past year. And now these crazy water demands from data centers and we have a lot of customers who are well supplemented and literally they're well-striped at the moment that data center goes up nearby. I think the timing and the actual problems has is surfacing in a very aggressive way. And at the same time, after five years of hard work, we're able to bring that and meet the market. I shouldn't even say the market is really meet our homeowners at the place that they really just want this product. And so our hard work and the approach we took in building trust, building education. For example, if you go online, you can find a lot about not just us, but our technology, how this thing works, a lot of information. We've invested a lot into education to make people feel comfortable about what it is that we're doing. Okay, so you're a year in. Tell me one of the biggest lessons that you've learned since bringing your product to market. One of the biggest things. Two things. I think the first one is, it's still seeing is believing. I think everyone talks about AI these days and everything is AI, the blur between the physical world and the virtual world and what everyone's doing is massively coming close with each other too close, in my opinion, in some ways. But water and what we're doing and especially something that that sounds so magical, I see literally the light bulb turn on and people go, ah, when they actually see the product and drink the water for the first time and you can go over, make videos, make all kinds of stuff. But that physical experience is super important. And I think it's going to be even more important, like the experiential factor of business or whatever is just going to be even more of a factor because the digital reality is just overload all the time. So that's one thing I learned is that I think we've gotten over the past decade over indexing on digital and now we're coming back to the physical world. In other words, no, that's a little bit, but I want to see it touch it, feel it. That's something we're going to double and triple down on. The second thing is a little bit actually opposite to what I just said, which is we're finding that using AI tools, we're able to provide a much better customer service. experience and a customer's success in building those relationships with our customers that just wasn't possible before for a smaller company. And so something we're really proud of is building systems that allow us to really care for our customers even though our team size is relatively small compared to an established billion dollar company. And I think that using these tools to supercharge the same values that builds businesses is something I'm very excited. That is not at all what I thought you were going to say and really great. I want to unpack what you shared for a couple minutes because number one your first lesson is just talking about like the value of building a physical product. It's part of it's from at Benville like we're a digital marketing agency and so that sounds really odd but like when we go on factory tours which we type dozens a year or factory tours like between clients and different manufacturers and things I always feel deeply grateful that we work with physical products. I feel like there I think I would have a mental breakdown if I worked in SaaS and like we never got to touch anything that we build which is funny because we are a digital agency and so there's a lot that you will never touch for the things that we build. Importantly it's four things that we can touch and so that just feels like it evens it out and I've seen more content and products shift towards the value of analog in the last 12 months than I've seen in the last 10 years I feel like I completely agree we've over indexed on digital. Have you seen that that house phones are coming back? Oh really no one didn't do that. It's my most problem but I called this I didn't call it I just said like often what happens is small children end up with smartphones sooner than you want to because they get old enough to be able to be in their house by themselves not even if they're not like simply self-s by themselves and so you end up getting them a phone so that you can call them and I when we started having kids I was like house phone is what we will have like house I'm not just going to leave you with an iPhone that's wild that's just a crazy idea. I'm starting to see ads for home phones that is well that's amazing. It it like I'm getting ads for newspapers and magazines and I think the world at large is just burnt on the improper application of technology because I also agree in the other way like most good academic conversation I see around what you're talking about is like how do we leverage AI and digital and technology in the places where it really does add value instead of just is that a flat surface should be a screen is that anywhere and everywhere that you can add a screen it feels like that's an option whether or not it's done well or intentional or adds to the experience or detracts from the experience and I just think it's so important the balance that you're bringing to that conversation because the pendulum is certainly swung in one direction the pendulum swinging all the way back over and us going back to the 90s no matter how much we all liked it is not the solution it's the where does it continue relationship build value help an organization be able to match somebody who's at a billion dollar valuation with a billion dollar payroll but be able to scale up what you're doing well I think it's just really really important of putting it in the right border in the right proper placement so that we don't lose the advantages that it gives us as well I just I really love that. I've started saying this to my team I think maybe only less than 60 days ago maybe even the last 30 days that work as we know it is over how we think about providing the values to our customers and how organization needs to be built needs to be completely rethought with the realities of tools that are available to us today and it's simply a matter of time before this whole thing shifts and you can either choose to be proactive and build value from it or you will be eliminated because your lack of ability to adapt to the new realities and honestly I think that's a good thing because it just gives people more time to do higher quality work than repetitive low value work so I think that's when you use the right ways or that positive. Yeah agree what do you think people misunderstand about innovation? I think the innovation in 2026 has just got even it's everything has changed I think in 2026 with tools we have never seen in human history the evolution that we're seeing right now and I think when we think about innovation in the past the bottleneck for innovation a lot of it had to do with maybe execution bottlenecks or intellectual breakthroughs but we're getting to a point where creativity is actually the bottleneck because all of the current work necessary for innovation is being automated away. Say more about that creativity is the bottleneck tell me more what would it require to solve that? They used to be the case that you thought of something cool you could validate it you got to go validated if it is worthy then you got to go build it then you got to iterate it then you got to build it again and then you get to a point where it's truly innovative or innovative enough and continue to improve that it provides that value in the market. Today the feedback loop from where you have an idea to when that gets executed is like 10 minutes you know what used to take a team of engineers and two weeks of time literally takes 10 minutes now and so the bottleneck is actually creativity like how many good ideas can you have? How many creative ways to think about things do you have and that's how you that's how it's totally flipped it used to be that ideas aren't worth anything because you got to go build it building it and execution is the bottleneck so now as flipped the other way around execution is not the bottleneck you actually how many better ideas can you execute how many better ideas do you have like a day a week and that compounds because everything just ships. But risk do you think is introduced with the speed at which creativity can be executed if any. I don't think there is a risk with creativity I think the risk is with the systems and the things that we're building behind it. I'm concerned about the security of our society from AI. I know we're here to talk about water but actually this is the thing what I think about all day isn't even necessarily water is like how do I innovate how do I build better products that the product just happened to be water. Tell me how you connect those two ideas you're concerned about the security of our what did you say like you're concerned about the security of our communities. Well so much of our lives are intertwined with the digital world but the digital world is directly having an effect on our physical life right like the water challenges that we talked about before it's literally over development data centers draining or polluting our water sources and so what did you want your own water and live increasingly secure and control your own water supply. Would you let data centers use Aquaria to get their own water supply? Totally because then that would decrease the strain on the local water supply and use it from a more sustainable source. We won't put this in the podcast that feels like an element idea. I'm sure this is not the first time I know that's got to be on your radar but I'm just like man what a year to be in water. Great idea. Let's go sell water to data centers who are like suddenly they were nowhere like construction category wise they were nowhere suddenly they have trade shows that like multiple people are going to that one just happened like the data center on a world trade show or whatever. All right Brian if you had one piece of advice for manufacturers dealers product managers that are listening this podcast and want to bring more innovation into their organizations what would that be? This is one of those areas where increasingly again going back to software is software and software tools are able to now blend themselves into the physical world and also the world is increasingly democratized in terms of reach and audience building so that the direct links between the manufacturers and the market can be closer than ever. That link between the producer and the consumer of the product is now completely open and I guess the best piece of advice is really focus on the ways where you can listen and quickly build for what the world wants because you have the ability to reach into niche pockets of the world that you didn't really have the ability to before building the products for these communities and then being able to bring that kind of bridge that gap and quickly turn things over based on that need like I'm not sure if I'm actually saying anything like crazily insightful but it's actually it's part of the changing times where that you can get and the feedback loop that you can get because of the advanced sentence tools that are available it really shortens that cycle of innovation and it and guess you much closer to the insights if you pay attention to them don't go run like traditionally like what I do like user groups or something I don't know what they use or testing and just testing and get them in a group and do interviews good concept but we got to move away from that we got there's so many better ways to do testing and idea of validation okay I want you to tell me more you want to user user testing focus groups you're like there's better ways to do it what are those better ways first of all I think you think about you think about direct to audio especially if you're like a consumer product and you actually have individuals platforms You everything from Patreon to just X to direct equity crowdfunding platforms like Make. These are all ways that you can directly either monetize, pre-fund, validate ideas. You as the manufacturers can host live sessions on X and talk about your product and get direct feedback, build a community, direct, bring all your customers, come visit your manufacturing site. How many people have ever visited the manufacturing site? Period. It's the best, either way. It's just the best, I think manufacturing sites and manufacturing plants are just the most fascinating places. Super cool. How cool are these places, right? Yeah. Well, what manufacturer is doing that to let people come and see how cool the stuff they're doing? Probably very few. I think there's a lot of these where if you can bring, like everyone can just get closer. I mean, go make a TikTok account. I mean, like manufacturers probably don't do Gen Z TikTok stuff, but why not? I'm about to build a factory in Texas and I'm going to document the entire thing on how we're going to make a brand new industry to support America and build our air water industries. It's just be like my personal vlog. Why not? Why not? I love it. Brian, this has been so fascinating. Thank you so much for your time. If any of our listeners want to connect with you, reach out, learn more about what you're doing, a query, a pick your brain. But what's the best way for them to get in touch with you? They should just reach out to me. I LinkedIn and mentioned that they came from the podcast and I'm very available and I spent too much time on there. As we all do, as we all do. For our listeners, if you want more great content like this, head to vinvio.com/podcast to subscribe. Until next time, I'm Beth Papi-Kolov. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]