Carlos Perea: Creating True Value Proposition in Clean Tech

This is kind of illustrative of why people buy from us. There's really three reasons, or three value propositions, if you will, that we provide customers. The first is safety, and I'm going to come back to that in a second and talk about why traditional chemicals pose such a safety hazard and therefore an opportunity for Miox to displace them. The second one is quality. And I'm not going to get into this in detail, but suffice it to say that when you treat water with traditional chemicals, you can get the desired effect in one sense, but create a lot of undesired byproducts. Some of that is in the form of carcinogens, some is smell and taste and odor issues that you might associate with, say a swimming pool, that chlorinous odor. Our systems basically work in a way that eliminate a lot of those undesired attributes. But the third reason, and the key piece and a key theme of all this is we offer a value proposition of economics. That is we save people money from how they were doing things before to what it looks like once they use our equipment. And in the particular case of this example, I think they paid for the system in less than a year and over the span of a 5 to 7 year lifespan, 80% reduction in overall costs. But at the end of the day, it comes down to cost. And that's one of the themes I want to really weave throughout this discussion is if you can't give people an economic value proposition, you're really not going to get a particularly large segment of the market. And so all of our energy has been on driving our cost down to give more economic savings to the customer. And the simplest way to put this is it all comes down to cost. I wish the world worked in a way that we all bought the products that made the most sense for all of us. But at the end of the day, there's a financial impact and a lot of people forget that in cleantech. They come up with these world changing ideas and folks say, hey, I want to go follow that. I'm compelled. And nobody ever stops to think about the fact that it's twice as expensive and has all kinds of other complications and people are just not going to buy it, at least not in mass quantity. You can always find some people. By the way, I kind of sum it up this way. Some people are willing to pay more to get less if it's the right thing to do. But most people wanted the inverse, right? We all wanted the inverse. Give me more and let me pay less. And that's really why we've had to focus on having a really key economic value proposition.