“ Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough…” -Elon Musk
Our main challenge over the past years was therefore to develop a concrete strategic plan to ensure the transition from 0 to 1, which has not been an easy task. It took a lot of patience, discipline, and determination. The team has left the current warlike aspect and kept the spirit of the group and complicity.
However, people often see only the tip of the iceberg, or rather, “success stories’’, they enjoy listening to it, but only a few are interested in hearing a learning process turning a failure into a main strength
The journey was not a shine of glory for the Tunisian startup IRIS Technologies, comparing to the high level of excitement and expectation it had during the ideation stage.
We admit it, making hardware is hard! the Agritech startup needed to survive the failure rate during the first 5 years of its existence, we’ve been through dark days of uncertainty, malfunctions within the first 3 versions of hardware, we were on a knife-edge facing unpleasant early adapters…
The revival came at the time when 2018 was taking off and with the beginning of 2019, we started to question and cast doubt upon the entire process, we identified our main faults and challenges with full respect of a steady involvement and an astute agency… it was bigtime to make the right decision, the one who is going to be the ultimate decider of our overall survival rate for the next months.
“The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.” - Bruce Lee
2019 was definitely IRIS’s year! full of achievements and prosperity. by the beginning of that year, we had already canceled all the vet and bees services projects and we focused entirely on building hardware fully equipped with sensing capabilities and desired by every beekeeper.
Today, we finally succeeded to build an efficient SmartBee device ready for mass production, and moving from web to a simplified mobile application was a triumph as well.
We are determined to disturb the precision beekeeping industry internationally, we became far-reachers developing one of the first beekeeping decision support systems in the world. Once we had the local market validation, we became aware of the importance of the support that the ecosystem holds for every startup during its life cycle.
Therefore, we opened up! our One Metric That Matters (OMTM) has always been the number of the connected beehives, first, we partnered with the Omani Ministry of agriculture and fisheries to target more than 100 000 beehives in the country, we managed to organize the first precision beekeeping day in Oman and provide an audience of top beekeeping ecosystem influencers with the technology’s added value, it was our entering point to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, land for a total of + 20M beehives.
The business was flourishing, we were honored to get the Arab Beekeeping Union’s flag during their 12th meeting in Kurdistan. Iraq and take it back to Tunisia, where the next edition will be held.
We also managed to secure a distribution channel for entire western Europe during a visit to the Netherlands.
Today we are finally capable of providing beekeepers in MENA and Western Europe with cutting-edge beehives’ tracking and monitoring technologies for better efficiency, profitability, and sustainability to simplify their mission and preserve three-quarters of our food pollinated by Bees (FAO).
To have a vision for a better world is great but not enough. Launching a hardware startup is all about raising standards in every aspect of the business.
There is always a way to fight back a failure
Success is what happens after you’ve survived all your mistakes! This is in summary, what IRIS Technologies had witnessed during its path before sweeping the board! This success is made greater with our organized teamwork labor, our union made us stronger …And we will continue to achieve what we have started yet.
To have a vision for a better world is great but not enough. Launching a hardware startup is all about raising standards in every aspect of the business.
By IRIS Team, 2020
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