Morgan Babbs and James Downer are in the class of 2015. They are Empower fellows.
There are a few distinct moments I can recall when I was overly disheartened and uninspired with the whole process of starting a company. One of them was the T ride back from Kendall Square after pitching to Dorm Room Fund for $20k. I was underwhelmed by the amount of questions and was probably psyching myself out and was certain I wasn’t going to get it (nevertheless, an hour later they called me to tell me they had all unanimously agreed to fund SolarRoute, something that rarely happened). A few times during the pilot here in Matagalpa I remember thinking that maybe our mission just isn’t possible to pull off at all and that it was a fruitless fight.
Extreme ups and downs seem to be a common thing during a start up experience. It’s easy to get brought down by things moving slowly, challenging future prospects, and the notion of not knowing when and how things are supposed to start changing.
It’s been an interesting visit. I knew that starting SolarRoute while I was still in school would be a challenge—what would I do when I had to go back and finish my senior year? William (Country Director) has been managing what we built and keeping a consistent level of sales and brand recognition. However, there are all kinds of things we’re itching to implement and it just doesn’t make sense to do so right now—we’ll have to wait until we’re in the field full time after we graduate. It would only be detrimental to half-implement something during a visit. It’s a frustrating thing to do with.
So instead, this trip has been extremely useful for monitoring and evaluation and to make sure we’re not out of touch with the field—plus, we made an awesome promotional video that will be out in February. Just like I elaborated upon above, we had a “down” after an extensive interview with our main distribution channel. We realized we hadn’t quite been reaching out exact target market. Our distribution partner has been sold more solar units to those already living on the grid than those living off the grid—primarily to home-run kioscos. However, these households are still considered to be in the lower-income quintiles and will indeed save money by investing in a solar lamp. They also informed us that these kioscos were buying several lamps to sell to people living off the grid who came in to the kioscos to buy various household items. So we were reaching our target market—almost. We were a little bit disappointed by this news, but starting a social enterprise requires resiliency. It was an opportunity to go back to the drawing board and it was important information we needed in order to pivot. We realized it was actually a step in the right direction. For months we had been brainstorming how to best set up points of sales throughout Nicaragua and had always come back to the idea of having a network of kioscs as solar-unit restock points. So, what our distribution partner was already doing was already a step in the right direction.
So back to my other point—while it may be frustrating to feel like you can’t go full-force on your social enterprise because you’re still technically a student, it’s equally as important to spend time monitoring and evaluating so that you have the proper information to ensure success when you’re back at it full-time.
Link to Website: http://www.solarroute.org/