TRICK OR TREAT?
What's Under the Costume of a Capitalist?
We are still working on our product, but it is already clear that at first it will not be available to everyone. The experience of our competitors shows that installing a similar system for drinking water alone will cost several thousand dollars. And it is reasonable for any normal person to ask the question: "Is this a trick or a treat?" Do we really want to sell him something that flows from the tap for almost free at a high price? Let's try to answer the question hanging in the air: are we greedy capitalists or are we saving lives? Neither one thing nor the other.
Sometimes we think about a non-profit project: shouldn’t we make our work available to everyone and just live on hypothetical donations from caring people? But I’m always stopped by an obvious question: how many non-profit products and services do you have at home or on your phone? There have always been enough people willing to help the world, and we shouldn’t underestimate the enthusiasm and self-sacrifice of millions of people on the planet. However, we use the products of huge and “greedy” corporations. Of course, I want to create a product that is accessible to everyone – at the lowest cost. And smart people constantly talk me out of it: such a project will fail. And they are right. It’s enough to remember the story of Clive Sinclair, a talented engineer who made affordable ZX Spectrum and ZX80 computers for less than £100 in the early 1980s. This line of computers made a mini-revolution in Europe, especially in the UK and much later in my home country, poor post-Soviet Russia of the 1990s. I started programming on a Spectrum assembled by enthusiasts. And played with friends on a factory-assembled Sinclair. But let's go back to the 1980s, when these computers entered the market, they were significantly cheaper than their competitors, including the famous Apple II. They were not powerful, but they were affordable. However, such a business model is like walking a tightrope - one mistake and you fall, which happened already in 1985. And this story taught us a lot: too cheap is also bad! If you want to create new models, new generations of products - you need money from the previous ones. Not a single manufacturer of super-cheap computers of that era has survived to this day - not Commodore, not Tandy, not Sinclair Research, which eventually turned into a company with 1 employee, its founder, and ceased to exist with his death. Their competitor Apple, in whose case no one has ever noticed the desire to create cheaper than everyone else 😊, despite numerous mistakes made - today is in the TOP-3 most expensive companies in the world, and continues to delight its fans with new products. And these products are available to many today: they are not cheap, but accessible.
So, we have figured out that we also have a bit of the "greedy capitalists" in us - the desire to create more products. But let's get back to the question: is the generator and the water it produces worth the money? And how much does water cost in general? This is not such a simple question, if you remember how we buy a bottle of water in the store at a price hundreds of times more expensive than similar water flowing from the tap. And we not only do not need the bottle, it is inconvenient and harmful - it takes up a lot of space in the garbage, requires sorting and pollutes the world around us. The huge market for bottled water, 300-400 billion dollars, exceeds the market for all the other water with which we wash ourselves and cars, water lawns. Moreover: it takes 3 liters of water to produce 1 liter of bottled water... Have we all gone crazy?
Picture from here
Not really. Water is a valuable resource, one of the main ones, without which life itself is impossible, and without clean water - civilization is impossible. If you live or travel around Europe, then you probably admired the incredible aqueducts of Ancient Rome. The first city with a million citizens in the world, Rome, could not exist without aqueducts that supplied it with clean water - up to 500-1000 liters per person per day. If you have never been to Europe, then look around for an example - aqueducts, water pipes and their analogues were created all over the world, from the Aztecs to ancient China. And the most ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia arose due to the need to lay canals for water. Water was never "free". And in order to have it in abundance all year round, people united into large groups, which was later called civilization. We were already a civilization of springs, lakes and rivers, canals and aqueducts, wells and boreholes, and now we are turning into a civilization of bottled water, desalinated sea water and water from the air. We will talk about the reasons for such changes separately.
A paradox inevitably arises in the mind: there is a lot of water, but it is priceless, and we pay a lot for it, getting it almost for free. Yes, that's right. But there is no paradox: the price of water depends on the specific situation. The same water can cost differently in the city, the desert, or on the fictional planet Arrakis (Dune). While water flows from the tap, it seems endless and almost free, but it is enough to break this tap, for example, because of some catastrophe, and people sweep the increasingly expensive water off the shelves of stores. But it is not only about supply and demand. Water can also be different: at home and at work, we have water flowing from the tap, but we run into the store on the way to buy another bottle of water. We intuitively distinguish water, even without knowing its exact composition. Water that has traveled a long way to get to the tap is like a guest for many homeowners: there is no actual reason not to trust it, but we do not know what kind of water it is, what its history is, how it got here, how many people it has met. And the longer its journey, the more suspicious it is. And water with a passport on its bottle looks more reliable. For most of us, it is enough just that the water in this bottle was somehow separately processed, purified, stored independently in a safe, closed bottle. It's like a magical ritual in which water has been given new qualities. Like with blacksmithing, which has long been considered magical, since the properties of metals changed. And now, a bottle of water is trusted. Well deserved?! This is a subject of debate. After all, sometimes this is the same guest, only combed and dressed in new package.
So what are we offering you: a tap with “free and endless” water from the air, or an endlessly refillable water bottle? Neither one thing nor the other. Water is just an excuse for us to sell you something you value much more than water. It is your time spent buying water at the supermarket or waiting for a courier to deliver it. It is your freedom to live and travel wherever you want, anywhere on the planet, not just along the laid water pipes and around the shops with water. It is your safety, no matter what situation you find yourself in, be it a drought due to global warming or a flood polluting water sources. It is the health of you and your loved ones, when you can drink the water of your choice, clean, devoid of useless or harmful impurities. A person consists of 60% water - from the water he/she drinks. As you can see, the value of pure water is that you live the way you want – in conditions of hygiene, civilization, you get sick less often, that is why water is valuable, and not because it contains the now fashionable hydrogen. If you become our client, it is not because you do not have water – you have, of different quality and in different quantities, but you definitely have. We sell what you are looking for – train tickets to the future, to a new type of civilization.
P.S. If we have not convinced you, if all this for you is just a marketing ploy of “at least a little bit” greedy capitalists, then we will refer to the GiveWell Fund, which directly asked the question, how much does it cost to save one life. According to their calculations, it is from $3,000 to $5,500. Although often saving a life consists of just one malaria vaccination costing $7, if we are not talking about saving at the moment, from some disease, but about a really qualitative change in a person’s life, then even such an assessment of the fund may be underestimated. The amounts may look impressive if you forget that a person’s life in developed countries is valued at several million euros/dollars, and minor injuries – at several tens of thousands. And saving a life costing $5,500 in their case will be an incredible deal. And how much does part of this life, health, for example, clean drinking water cost for one person? We do not know, no one knows. If we calculate by bottled water, even at a low price of $0.2 per liter, then the minimum 2 liters per day for 80 years of life (the desired minimum) of one person is $11,688. This is the case when it is better to give a person a fishing rod than to feed him fish every day, even cheap ones. And it is even better to give an automatic "fishing rod" that itself catches water in the air flow. Let our "fishing rod" not be very cheap and accessible yet, but we are working on it - after all, we are only partly greedy capitalists.
