Seed Home 2 Product Strategy

How to Define the Product

What does the customer receive? How do involve entrepreneurs in our customer base?

1. For stakeholdership, we involve entrepreneurs who want a house - to guarantee proper execution incentive. Risk: good fit, so all customers are not freeriding. Solution: customers are vetted and onboarded.
2. Training Fee is separate from House Facilitation Fee.
3. Customer pays for materials
4. Materials schedule is defined as a shipment schedule for partial completion, as one goes along. Multiple shipments mean additional shipping cost ($130 per 34 mile delivery to FeF as example from Menards (300 stores))

Incentives for Success

Transparency: Getting the Incentives Right. If our goal is to solve housing, how do we get the incentives right?

1. Open Source - If we even begin to claim that we are to provide impact with a fundamental solution - then open source collaboration is an absolute prerequisite. Further, it is a significant competitive advantage: there is on other collaborative, open source project for practical, affordable, owner-builder housing.
2. Owner-Builder - (OB) We focus on re-skilling people in real production - and building a house is one of the most empowering, life-changing experiences that one can go through. For this reason - we want to make it easy for people to become Owner-Builders - and we mean Owner-Builders - not hiring out all the work. So that even with a full time work schedule - a person can afford the time to do the build. To this end - we require the weekend hackathon, and a one week of immersion build training. After that - we require that.
3. Build Facilitator - the build facilitator is committed to the OB to make the house build as easy, inexpensive, high quality, and fast. The Build Facilitator provides the custom design to the OB's requirements - and provides the bills of materials that the OB then orders. The facilitators prepares a Building Package (designs, calculations, support materials) that the OB submits as part of the OB's permit/inspection schedule. The Facilitator provides all the support and answers all the questions that the OB may have. The facilitator facilitates any skills gaps by pointing OBs to resources, videos - or even encouraging them to attend another immersion build training session. And the Facilitator is empowered to organize a swarm build, to the small fraction of builders that need it most - about 1 in 10 - conditions permitting. The facilitator spends about a week doing the customization work. OBs can schedule up to 40 hours of facilitation time directly with the Facilitator, and can also consult with the OSE Product Manager on bigger-picture issues of product improvement. For any events that the Facilitator decides to run as a swarm build - these are featured on the OSE/OBI websites.
4. Try it first - Before people commit to becoming Owner-Builders with us - we are offering the weekend hackathon, and a week of immersion build training - so that potential owner-builders can determine whether the build is for them. If so - they pay the $10k for our service - as part of the advertised $50k house cost. The first immersion training part ($2500) counts towards this $10k total.
5. Full Control - the Owner-Builder (OB) is in charge, so no conflict of interest occurs. The Owner-Builder has full control of budget expenditures and build schedules. The OB decides what features to include, and therefore what the final cost will be. The Owner-Builder negotiates with local officials, and owns the project. OSE is there to provide the support.
6. Owner Builder is in charge of the Budget. We provide the materials shopping list - you purchase materials on your schedule.
7. Support to the Owner-Builder - OSE invests into continuing development. Revenue is put back into R&D to improve and expand the product. OSE wants to create growth opportunities so that customers stay for a lifetime - and where the relationship of a customer is flipped to a developer.
8. Owner-Builders are Product Developers - We are designing an enterprise where Owner-Builders are involved in developing the product. We use mass collaboration to achieve the best product. We are open, so we invite everyone to contribute to development. The goal is clear: solving housing.
9. Bring Your Own Land - you have the freedom to decide where you want to live. You own the land, you own the product. We train you and we support you in building the best house for your needs on your land. If you don't like the location or its regulations - it's your choice to find a more suitable spot.
10. Low Cost to Owner-Builder - The program is designed to minimize costs for the builder. OSE provides a service, and that is to get the most effective and affordable house built. This includes good design for easy build using common materials. OSE's incentive is to solve housing. We provide the shopping lists - if you want to save money by finding alternate sources that meet specifications - or you want less features than in our standard package - you are welcome to do so. You decide just how much you would like to invest in your to build, and the materials cost changes according to your limits or extensions.
11. Incremental Housing - Your fee covers a 1000 square foot house. You decide how fast you want to build, and what size you want to build. If you only have the need or resources for a smaller house, you can start even with any size up to 1000 sf, in 250 sf increments. For example, if you want a 500 square foot unit, your materials cost may be as low as $20k.
12. Extra Options - there are various options that the Owner-Builder can select. The OB is in full control of these. OSE provides the support (bills of materials, phone support) for this.
13. Entrepreneurship - To build in successful execution support of house builds - we are providing 6 month immersion training to entrepreneurs to provide the build support to Owner-Buidlers. If you take our entrepreneurship program - you can work with OSE, or you can go off on your own. OSE can provide you leads so that your training cost pays back for itself in less than a year. The entrepreneurship training involves participating in the build training at the OSE headquarters at least 3 times - first as a participant, then as an assistant, then as a lead instructor - to get certified as a fully-qualified instructor. The number of trainings is determined by the point that the entrepreneur candidate can run the full training successfully, for a complete build of a house in the 7 day build training session.
14. Build Training - success is up to the Owner-Builder. OSE provides proven technology, it's up to the Owner-Builder to learn the basics and to build it. This means getting hands-on skills. To this end, we provide a 7 day construction crash course at the OSE headquarters - where Owner-Builders build an entire house from scratch. This allows potential Owner-Builders to decide whether they are interested in our $50k Owner-Builder package. If someone does not gain the confidence during our immersion crash course - but still would like to build - they can take the crash course again - as many times as they need. We are offering unlimited free tuition for this. See the terms for this in the OSE Service Agreement.
15. Hiring Assistants - If you cannot do the build yourself - hire someone or get a family member to help. Train them, and have them produce the modules for you. Or send them to one of our build immersion training sessions so they can help with the build. We provide an extensive, expected to be 2000 page e-book manual, to all Owner-Builder candidates. This is our exhaustive text with all that we know - intended to assist in the building process. We want to make it easy for you to get help in the build, so you don't have to do it alone.
16. Turnkey Build - if a potential OB finds that the build is not for them as a result of our immersion training - then there is the turnkey option. This is a turnkey house where OSE does the build. The charge in this case is $100k. OSE may host a swarm build around such a project, at OSE's discression, conditions allowing.
17. Building is Complicated - After numerous builds, we understand that building a house - between finding land, navigating regulations, understanding good designs, doing the actaul build, or connecting utilities - can be a complex and intimidating process. But it doesn't have to be so inaccessible. We are here to help. If you have the support of someone who is on your side - the process becomes much more manageable. Clarity on building starts with understanding that a house is made of 5 things: foundation, floor, walls, roof, and utilities. We use state of art for the foundation: helical piers, and outsource this work. The rest are made of modules.
18. Building is Hard - We understand that building is physically-demanding. That's why we are designing our modules to be easy to manage by 2 people. Our wall panels are 139 lb each, and our window panels are 211 lb each - so that no crane is needed. The heaviest lumber - 2x12s - are 66 lb each. We have a one-story design to make things easy - and a 2 story design for the more ambitious. We pay utmost attention to build ergonomics, where lifting is minimized by design, and by using support structures so anything heavy does not have to be held up - only put into place. Through our build experience, we have been working out build ergonomics so that our builds take the least effort possible - as we were personally involved in the builds and we know that to serve the customer most effectively - we must make it as simple as possible. We are not just architects - who do not prioritize build ergonomics - or just tradespeople - whose interest is as much work as possible. As both the designer-builder-user - we have learned to make builds cheap, fast, and quality - breaking the Iron Triange with open source collaboration. Further - we encourage outsourcing work - such as the helical pier foundation - and anything else if needed. There is the option of teaching others to help to make the build easier - with only entry-level skills needed. We provide the assistance of our documentation and build videos. And - for those who would find it most challenging to complete a build but have committed to it - we plan on offering help in the form of swarm builds where OSE runs a build workshop for the house build.
19. Building is Expensive - $50k is no pocket change - but it is also at least 2x less than anything else available on the market. We understand that owning a house should be everyone's right - and that it shouldn't be expensive. So we provide optimized design - and let the OB optimize the budget further according to their needs. We also know that hiring skilled labor can be difficult or expensive. By lowering the skill level necessary - one can enlist build help at lower effort and cost if needed. See our build data for the total number of hours required - which currently we estimate at 300 hours of build time from material drop ship to move-in. We are designing for a build that costs under $10k in labor at $25/hr labor cost.
20. Learning Community - Everyone working with us is part of an open learning community. If we find new things that work even better, faster, and cheaper - we make those options available to everyone else by publishing all our design openly. Every OB agrees that the custom design generated for them is open source - for the benefit of all. Further, each OB agrees that the outcomes of the build process are documented so that everyone can learn - about codes in a particular area, inspection schedule and inspection results, any troublespots - which can help others build more easily in the future. As part of a learning community OSE generates new designs for ever - such as for more advanced features: open source solar cars, hydrogen energy systems, nickel-iron batteries for off-grid operation, biodigester improvements, aquaponic greenhouse development, and extension to other building materials such as CEBs, 3D printed house materials, solar concrete, construction and materials production machines - and everything related to improving the build environment in an ecological way. OSE promises the participation of OBs in a much larger picture of making a better world.
21. It takes time. We understand that building a house takes time. So we compress years of information on build optimization into something that can be executed - in only 1 week with 2 people (plus the weekends of module preparation). Each of our wall modules takes about 2 hours to build with one person - and there is 32 of them in the 1000 sf build. So this takes 8 weekends of 8 hours per weekend work - or 2 weekends if you can get 3 friends to help. We expect the total module preparation time to be - if solo - to take 24 weekends. Here's the Seed Home 2 Module Build Data - and Seed Home 2 Build Data.
22. Solve Housing - this is a great imperative for OSE, and everything is filtered through this mission. As a public-interest organization, OSE does not allow for any scarcity-based business models in its operations. That means we are really working on solving problems, without creating artificial scarcity. Our goal is to solve for housing without debt. This means that we encourage others to replicate our work by publishing all of our designs and enterprise models openly. The more people that are doing this, the quicker we will house the world without debt. We are publishing all of our designs and enterprise blueprints online, so anyone can access them for free. Furthermore - we publish any designs and bills of materials that we generate for our customers, so that others can use them or learn from them. So what do customers pay for if our designs, and even custom designs, are available for free? Our goal is to solve for housing without debt. Our customers get a chance to change the world with collaborative design - dedicated to making the product simply the best that it can be, with no vendor lock-in. Our customers get hands-on build training - and personal build assistance at every step of the build from design submission to the building department until move-in. We also provide consulting on any other questions that may arise through the process. If someone just wants to download our plans and do it all on their own - we welcome them to do so - the more people building debt-free housing the better. And we also encourage replication of our business by anyone who would like to do that. We provide a 6 month dedicated program for this purpose - but if anyone wants to start a business on their own - we encourage them to do so just by studying our extensive documentation. The value we provide in our paid entrepreneurship track is rapid learning to get there. Our primary goal is to solve housing - so we collaborate openly to get there.

Products

Products Proper

• House Manual - solving for housing. See Extreme Enterprise Book.
• Coffee table book.
• House
• Large 3D Printer
• High T 3D Printer
• Inverter
• 3D Printing enterprise for producing trim and other materials
• Tractor and Microtractor
• Mowing and baling attachments
• Helical Pier Manufacturing
• Helical Pier Driver
• Nickel-Iron battery

Method to Products

• XE Hackathon
• Crowd development recruiting - for the Hackathon
• Hiring SMEs for XE Hackathon

Diagram of Overall Product Ecology

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Diagram Towards XE Hackathon

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OSE Service

1. We need to gurantee that our entrepreneurs stick around.
2. Immersion training needs to assure technical skill:
3. 7 day basic training - foundation, floor, wall, roof, interior wall, utility panel, bathroom
   1. 1 day foundation
   2. 1 day PV
   3. 1 day kitchen
4. Monthly schedule - 2 sessions per month - 100 people each - for 5 months - for the first 1000 houses.
5. First builds - people can start on modules after 3 months - the immersion period for entrepreneurs. $25k charge for entrepreneurs.
6. Eeach entrepreneur gets $15k. Integration with OSE Certified Entrepreneurs - after 6 months fo
7. 2 year overall delivery time
8. OSE Contractors - charge them for 2 months of immersion
9. OSE service - from the time of 3 months after Basic Entrepreneur Training.
10. Each entrepreneur gets 10 houses for a year, 50/50 share of $15k. $75k.
11. Each individual who builds benefits from OSE marketing to advertise a public Extreme Build - if the situation allows. This could allow the house to be built easily, and more finishing to be done.

Shape Options

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Beautification Budget

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Links

• Seed Home 2
• Extreme Enterprise Development Model