The Ion journey so far…
It’s been an exciting six months since we started the Ion journey. We’ve gone from an idea over a coffee to a company with a great team, a batch of wearable IoT devices and a contract to run a pilot with a federal government agency.
Reflecting on how far we have come in a relatively short time, I thought we should document the journey, so we can look back on it when we have forgotten, and hopefully it will give some insights to other founders in the early stages of their startups. Our team will all be contributing so there will be a varied mix of topics and styles covered. I’ll be writing mostly about our journey.
Getting started
Craig and I were catching up for a coffee. He was doing some auditing with a security firm and thought there was an opportunity for an IoT startup in the OHS space, something that security guards could use to track them and alert a supervisor of potential issues automatically. At the time I was investigating setting up a super fund for self employed people, but was about to decide that the figures didn’t stack up, so was looking for something to do.
Craig asked if I wanted to be involved in an IoT/OHS start up. We didn’t know what it would be or what it would do, but I was interested. I said I’d think about it.
I was intrigued by the idea, I’d recently built a portal for an IoT fridge for Anheuser Busch, and the idea appealed to my electronic engineering roots. But after my last startup, DragonBill, I wanted to do things differently. This included not having a product aimed at the consumer level. I’d rather make a few multi-million dollar sales than millions of tens of dollars sales. But the founder in me was looking for a defendable position. With everyone having a smart phone, an app would suffice for security guards, and there would be nothing stopping potential competition from spending $20K and being at our heels. So I thought about industries with a higher barrier of entry. Military, aviation, emergency services. At the time I didn’t have any high level military connections, but I had worked at Airservices Australia previously so I did some sniffing around. They showed interest in a product that could measure fatigue in real time for their Aviation Rescue Fire Fighters.
Within a week we had a website, logo, social media properties and a business name — easy. Now to get a team together.
Getting the band together
Something I had learned the hard way was the importance of having a great team. Early. I contacted Aaron (now our Chief Technical Officer), we had worked together at Tribal DDB earlier in the year and had kept in touch. We all caught up and he loved the idea, tech solutions spewing out of him like lava from an erupting volcano. He also had boots on the ground military experience so understands the environment we are aiming to operate in. Aaron started work on some high level network architecture design. We needed a sciency person who know about the theory of fatigue and how we can measure and calculate it — ideally in hostile environments.
LinkedIn to the rescue! While I was going through connections, I stumbled upon Anthony (now our Chief Science Officer), a fire fighter with a PhD in applied physiology. We had a chat and what we wanted to do was a perfect practical extension of his research. So we now had a team of four, two co-founders, a CTO and a CSO.
With verbal confirmation and constant contact with Airservices we started moving forward. We were accepted into the Victorian Government’s SummerTech Live program and worked with two Victoria University post grads (Masters and Phd) who worked with Aaron on developing our Machine Learning and other algos. Meanwhile we continued development of the wearable units and on our deployable field network hub.
Challenges
Airservices is a big federal agency, $1B+ turnover, a lot of staff and a lot of projects on at any time. We expected things to go slowly, it took five months from our first chat to having a signed contract, an age in startup land, but pretty quick for government. We were impressed.
Our biggest chanllenge was getting insurance. Having been part of the fintech community for nearly four years, I’d heard a lot of talk about ‘insurance for startups’, innovation in insurance etc. Phfffft! Maybe for software startups. We kept hitting dead ends, refusal to quote after refusal to quote. It turns out, hazardous environments, fire and airports are deal breakers for many insurers — who knew? We finally had success with Bradley Tempelhof. Now we were covered, with the team, product and contract in place! We were ready to start.
Next steps
I won’t go into too much detail about the pilot, but I will say, just to be able to observe the ARFF recruits in action was a privilege in itself. They are so dedicated, fit and focused and their instructors are of the highest caliber. The training ground itself is a sight to behold, a large scale mock-up o aircraft: A380 front and 767 rear. This is set on fire for the recruits to train on — a sight to behold.
The pilot has been invaluable, we are reviewing our lessons. Some we anticipated, others we didn’t and are continuing to work with Airservices to develop our product to a commercial level.
Our next milestone is to secure a commercial partner, a world class, innovative organisation who wants to lead their industry. If you are a leader in an industry that manages teams in hostile environments, and you want to improve the safety and efficiency of your teams while improving situational awareness — we want to hear from you. Visit our website for more information or email us at contact@ionsafety.com.au
