Meet GES Delegate: Kate Thiers Steere
Name: Kate Thiers Steere, Co-founder and CEO
Organization: I-Drop Water
Country of Origin: South Africa (Johannesburg)
Twitter Handle: @idropwater
Website: www.idropwater.com
Overview of the Organization: I-Drop Water’s mission is to sell safe, affordable drinking water to millions of people in a commercially-sustainable and environmentally-friendly way. We are a mission-driven, for-profit social enterprise transforming the way safe drinking water is bought and sold in the developing world. Our team designs, builds and installs drinking water purification and dispensing systems (called I-Drop units) in general grocery stores and supermarkets at no cost to the owner. The unit purifies and sells safe drinking water by the litre at an affordable price to shoppers who refill multi-use containers as part of their regular shopping trips. I-Drop then shares the revenue from water sales with shop owners. Using our bespoke GSM platform, we’re able to remotely monitor and control all of our I-Drop units, enabling us to place them in formal and informal areas, in cities and small, remote towns — all at no capital cost to shop owners and water entrepreneurs.
My Inspiration: As proud co-founder of I-Drop, my inspiration to help start the company comes from a background in healthcare, a passion for business as an enabler for sustainable social good and a chance meeting with some great co-founders who had an amazing idea for a unique and potentially world-changing drinking water company. Having grown up in Philadelphia in the USA and moved to South Africa 7 years ago, I’ve seen how access to safe drinking water is increasingly becoming a global challenge and how a lack of safe water is causing extraordinary suffering around the world. The chance to launch and grow a company that is tackling this in such a novel way feels like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
The Next Big Step: Our next big step is to raise a round of funding to grow our capacity and expand the fleet to over 800 units in 24 months. I-Drop has come a long way in 12 months since we raised seed funding and set out to tackle the drinking water challenge. In that time we’ve established a scalable supply chain, built and tested a stable GSM monitoring and control platform, and developed and launched processes for building, assembling and installing I-Drop units in large supermarkets to small corner shops. To date we’ve installed over 20 commercial units in 3 countries (South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe), sold tens of thousands of litres of safe drinking water and had a zero default rate on payment from shop owners. We are now growing fast with new I-Drop units being installed almost every day and we are busy launching a pilot at a school in Ghana to compete with sachet water sales.
Advice to Other Emerging Entrepreneurs: The team and I have learned the invaluable lesson of listening to the market and innovating fast in response to feedback from our customers - shop-owners and shoppers. Another key lesson we’ve learned is that one of the most important aspects of building a new business in a challenging market setting is to physically be where your market is. Finally, the ability to respond to problems and setbacks and use them as feedback for quick improvements is something we’ve built into how we operate as a business.
As hard as some days are when operating in a challenging business environment, ultimately the toughest day I have in I-Drop is still better than the best day I’ve had with large global healthcare and consulting firms. I feel incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to build this business with some great people and nurture a great idea that has the potential to improve the lives of millions of people.
