Go With the Floe

Steve Melito: Hey everybody, welcome to New York State Manufacturing Now, the podcast that’s powered by FuzeHub. I’m your host, Steve Melito. Today we’re talking to David Dellal, the founder and CEO of Floe Incorporated. David was named to Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30 list and it’s an honor to have him here with us. With some help from New York MEP, Flo has completed its development of a rooftop device for snow and ice management. And yes, new York State, winter is coming. David, welcome to New York State Manufacturing Now.

David Dellal: Thanks for having me, Steve, really appreciate it.

Steve Melito: It’s great to have you with us, so please tell us about yourself. You studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT and at Yale, but you also have a background in venture capital. It’s an interesting mix really appreciate it.

David Dellal: I was always really fascinated by engineering and really I’m an engineer by heart. I love tinkering with things and playing around with things much to, I think, growing up, my parents chagrin, and now my partners, but it’s just really what my natural tendency is. But I think what I’ve always really been fascinated by is how can you use engineering and channel that to really help other people, and that’s what really actually got me going with Floe. Originally it actually started off at MIT while I was still an undergrad there a number of years ago now, and we developed this actually out of a capstone engineering course again a number of years ago and was really playing around with it as a hobby. At first I thought it was an interesting idea and wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do with it. Thought it was an interesting idea and wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do with it, and one of the things that really helped cement that was. Ultimately we went to Vermont, new Hampshire. We found these small towns and they had some email lists and I shot an email off to them and asked we have an early prototype of this product. Would you be interested in trying it? Just see what happens. And I thought we’d get maybe one or two responses over the course of like a week or two. Within like six hours we had like 60 calls and emails of people like begging us to like buy the solution, and we’re like we don’t know if it’s going to work yet, like it hasn’t been tested. But they were like absolutely adamant. They needed something new and different, because folks talk about having difficulty putting bread on the table because they’ve been dealing with ice and snow on their roofs and need to get that dealt with. Folks talk about having to have back surgery or really debilitating chronic issues now because they were shoveling off their roof, and so that was really inspiring because it really helped show how can I channel my engineering expertise to do something productive that I can give back in a sense. For sure, expertise to do something productive that can give back in a sense.

Steve Melito: For sure, and I can relate to that. I lived in central Vermont for about five years or so many years ago, and I remember those winters pretty well. So your company, Floe Incorporated, has developed a solution for rooftop ice and snow management. But how is winter weather so much of a problem that you can build an entire business like yours around it?

David Dellal: So much of a problem that you can build an entire business like yours around it. Yeah, you’d be surprised how much winter weather actually wreaks havoc. In the US alone, it causes over $10 billion in damages each year, and so it’s a lot larger than folks might expect. There’s really not much on the market right now to address it, except for some of the conventional solutions you might be familiar with, like heating cables that get on the roof and try to melt the ice and snow, or just getting guys up there to shovel or scrape off in whatever way possible, but ultimately, a lot of folks just choose not to deal with it proactively, and by the time it’s dealt with, you have water damage inside the building. You can have massive roof collapses Anchorage last year, for instance, had a record number of roof collapses, unfortunately and so there really is a lot more damage than folks might expect, and there really is a lot of opportunity to really be more proactive about it with a safer, more efficient alternative.

Steve Melito: Yeah, you know, what I can remember from my time in Vermont was something called ice dams. Can you talk about those a little bit?

David Dellal: Yep, for sure that’s one of the typical issues we see out there. So ice dams traditionally are primarily caused because a house or building is under-insulated, under-ventilated. But 90% of buildings in the US are under-insulated, under-ventilated, so it’s a pretty endemic problem. Just because, again, construction is expensive it’s expensive to get the right guys out there to really make sure that everything is designed with an architect to really be up to spec and getting it down packed. But ultimately what happens in the winter is heat rises out of the building and it starts to melt the snow on the roof. But the snow on that edge of that overhang or eave freezes over and forms a block of ice and so as that melted snow water trickles down the side of that roof, it’ll pull up behind that block of ice like a dam and essentially build up behind it and ultimately go under the shingles into the building and cause really devastating amounts of water damage.

Steve Melito: Water’s a super destructive force, of course, but let’s talk about your product, which is called Floe and that’s F-L-O-E. I got a lot of questions. How does it work? Why is it better than some of the other ways that people use to remove ice and snow from rooftops? Those are just two of them.

David Dellal: Sure, Happy to address that. Yeah, so we really try to be the smart, cost-effective and environmentally friendly solution for addressing ice and snow on roofs in the winter, and I’ll tackle each of those individually. So, in terms of just like the intelligence on the system, they’re really. Again, the two current ways addressing ice and snow are with some electric melting system like a heat tape or something along those lines. Those just operate essentially on their own. Some of them are set to a timer perhaps, or might have like a temperature sensor, but they’re really pretty rudimentary products. They get plugged in by you or an electrician, depending on the wattage, and they basically run and then the alternative, essentially, is getting guys into the roof. But if it snows on your roof, it probably snows on everyone else’s roofs in the neighborhood, and by the time they actually show up it’s already too late. You might already have water damage or significant damage into the building, where there’s no reason to get the guy on the roof at that point. And so we essentially developed the system, and it uses a combination of real-time weather data and some advanced sensors to both predict and detect buildup and then, before a snowstorm starts to hit, it’ll actually pre-coat the roof in advance of that snowstorm and then continue to address it over time. And when I say pre-coat, the idea is that once it’s detected, the system pumps onto the roof a non-corrosive, biodegradable pet implant safety icing fluid to essentially address the ice and snow and allow it to discharge off the roof.

Steve Melito: That is impressive, and I know the old-fashioned way of climbing up on the roof and shoveling, or maybe with a broom. I’ve done that a number of times. It’s not fun and, frankly, it doesn’t get any safer as you get older.

David Dellal: Yep exactly, Exactly.

Steve Melito: So let’s talk about some more applications. I’m interested to know which types of roof you can do and if pitched roofs are a problem, and these days, what happens if a roof has solar panels.

David Dellal: A lot of houses do, yeah, for sure. So we primarily do commercial actually commercial real estate. So we work with several of the major national retailers, both in the US and Canada property management firms, major real estate investment firms, things of that sort. But then we also do single family homes, so we can really do the gamut from single family homes to million square foot plus warehouse, mall and really everything in between, which is really nice to have that versatility. So again, we do flat roofs as well as pitch roofs across different building materials. We can do asphalt, shingle, slate, tile, cedar, shake wood shingles and then across different flat roof membranes as well. So, again, a lot of versatility there, different flat roof membranes as well. So again, a lot of versatility there. And solar panels are one that we get asked about a lot and we can also help address those issues both on the ice and snow front as well.

Steve Melito: That’s good. So, as I mentioned at the top of the podcast, Floe has received some help from the New York State Manufacturing Extension Partnership, or NYMEP, and FuzeHub obviously is a part of that. What I didn’t mention was that Floe worked with their friends at TDO out in Syracuse under a $65,000 FuzeHub manufacturing grant. Can you tell us about that partnership and how it helped you advance your technology?

David Dellal: Yeah, would love to. And I just first wanted to say, jets, if you’re not already connected with FuzeHub, I highly recommend that you do. It’s an incredible organization. We’ve loved working with them. It’s been one of really the best organizations we’ve worked with to date, both in terms of the funding itself as well as just like outside support for connections, mentorship. It’s really been phenomenal. So we work with TDO again also highly recommend the whole team there, and what was really helpful about them is they’re really old veterans in the industry, both on the engineering side as well as on manufacturing and things that we’re trying to figure out for the first time or really dipping our toes into they have full knowledge of. They’re very clear about what works and what doesn’t, and it’s really helpful to get that perspective rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. But essentially, we worked on really getting our manufacturing up to par. So we’ve developed this technology over the course of years and we’re engineers by training but don’t have a background in manufacturing and we’re trying to figure out how do we really get this going? And we don’t want to just offshore this to get this fully built out in China. We want to really build this here in the United States and China. We want to really build this here in the United States, really have a viable strategic supply chain that’s not going to jump at us when any issues arise and really keep it close to home here in the Northeast, and so TDO was incredibly helpful for that. So we first redesigned the product to switch out some components that we had difficulty sourcing and sourced them actually here in the Northeast. So, again, both improved the design of the product as well as improved supply chain, and then from there we ended up conducting a 10-year plus essentially accelerated life testing on the system to really verify that it’s good to go in the most extreme environments, both winter and summer, year-round just can stay on the roof and not have to worry about it. And then the last piece was we essentially did several rounds of testing in order to get the UL safety certified and actually, starting as last week, we’re actually ETL listed now, which has been really exciting, which is the safety certification from Intertech, which is one of the major national testing labs.

Steve Melito: That’s great.

David Dellal: Congratulations with that, thank you. Thank you. It’s been a long haul, but it’s been incredibly exciting, and we could not have done it with the community support that we have behind us.

Steve Melito: Well, thanks for the kind words, and you’ve done such a tremendous job. Have you received any other grants or raised any other funds? A lot of our listeners are from startup companies and they could certainly benefit from your experience.

David Dellal: Yeah for sure. We’ve definitely received a lot of support along the way and again grateful for all of it. Again, we’ve found that funding from a variety of different sources. First, I would say we started this off at a university and so for any students out there, highly recommend any entrepreneurial centers that you have, both at your university or maybe in your state, that really are geared towards students. That is a very good early source of funding, just as you’re tinkering and prototyping and trying to get something together. The next thing would be just government funding, like even small grants, like $5,000, can really make a big difference early on, just to get that first go around. So again, highly recommend that there are also regional and national different pitch competitions and startup conferences really geared towards early stage founders and folks love helping entrepreneurs and really seeing new businesses get off the ground. I think that’s why Shark Tank and so many other shows are so popular these days. I really think folks really like here rising the idea of founders. It’s not always so glamorous in the day-to-day trenches, but I think that our perspective at least is really helpful to go to conferences, see if there’s pitch competitions and really get that going. The last thing I’ll say and I think, as a hardware founder, is not talked about as much, and I actually think it’s a real shame. It’s often talked about in the software community but not as much in hardware, and even I, when I was first given this advice, was told I figured this is not really possible. But the best money comes from your customers early on. Even if you’re not charging what you think might be the target price or the full price, even just getting that first check that you get from a customer, even if, again, if it’s a pilot or you don’t know if it’s going to work it’s such a validating process, both for you internally to just feel like you’re actually accomplishing something that someone else wants to buy, but it’s also some of the best funding because, again, it’s non-dilutive and the person who’s buying it from you has a vested interest in improving your product and getting you to scale essentially, and so they’re your early customers, they’re your early adopters. That just gives you an additional leg of runway in terms of funding, but also gives you someone who’s now strategically tied to you to give you feedback, to help you iterate, and you might give them a discount down the road or get them involved in some other means but getting that feedback from a direct customer who’s linked to you. I cannot stress enough how important that is early on.

Steve Melito: I’m really glad to hear you say that, David. I wear a lot of hats for a few and one is as part of the Manufacturer Solutions Program and I do talk to a lot of startups and you really have to be your own biggest cheerleader. But everybody thinks they’ve got the greatest things in sliced bread. But you’ve got to listen to what your customer thinks of it. That’s who’s going to buy it at the end of the day. So it’s encouraging to hear you make that point.

David Dellal: Yeah, exactly, we have gone through so many iterations of the product. At this point we have a wall where they’re all lined up next to each other and it really has evolved over the years. But you really don’t know what you’re going to expect out there until you really start talking to your customers. And our target customers have also changed. I mean, we started off in residential. Actually, we’re now primarily selling to commercial and the business model has changed. The products change, the technology has been redesigned and you just have to really keep an open mind and ear to the ground and be quick to iterate it and don’t get bogged down with what you think the customer wants. Do what the customer actually wants you to do.

Steve Melito: Exactly, and you just got me all teed up for my next question, which is what’s next in terms of Floe incorporated as a business You’re interested in commercial, of course. Which markets are you going to go after, and what do you think it’ll take to both sell and install more of your product?

David Dellal: Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s the one that keeps me up 24-7 these days. So again with TDO, it was incredibly helpful, with a few sub-funding over the last few months, to really get the product revamped, get that ETL listing, and then we also revamped our production and so really starting to get this pilot production off the ground, quality controlled, quality tested, that we can guarantee our products, that we’re giving a high quality product. And so ultimately it’s really just getting out there and I think a lot of founders early on, myself included thought once you build it, they will come. And that is not the case at all and you really need to go out there and think about strategically like how do you market, how do you sell your product? And so we are really going at it across the country. We have systems installed from Maine to the upper Midwest and northern Minnesota to out in the Rockies and Utah and Colorado, and then last winter we actually expanded to Canada, which has been really exciting and so really just trying to make the most of it. I mean, more than 70% of Americans live in a place that gets more than five inches of snowfall per year, and even my brother lives in New Orleans actually, and in New Orleans they don’t get snow, but they get ice and they’re not prepared to deal with it and when it comes, the whole state’s shut down. So there’s places where you might not expect there to be ice and snow that we’re now thinking of. How do we actually start getting into those markets and addressing that?

Steve Melito: And working with TDL makes sense. I think they get over 100 inches of snow per year in Syracuse. I’m sure the team there was pretty excited to hear what you were up to.

David Dellal: Exactly, yeah, I mean northern New York is such a good market for us right now just because we actually previously worked with the city of Rochester, New York, actually Speaking with a number of folks from Buffalo all the way to Syracuse and then up to Watertown and to the Canadian border. There’s really a lot of possibilities there. It’s really just a question of staying focused, trying to find customers and getting this out the door before the snow starts flying.

Steve Melito: Exactly, hey. Last question for you, David how does someone contact you to learn more about Floe Incorporated in your technology, whether it’s as a customer or maybe even an investor? What’s the best way for them to reach out?

David Dellal: Yeah, so I’d highly recommend reaching out to our website. It’s Floesafe F-L-O-E, safe S-A-F-E dot com. All one word. You have our email on there. You’ll have a form that you can fill out for general inquiries or if you want to get a proposal for a specific building that you’ve had problems with. Please reach out and we’ll get back to you soon.

Steve Melito: Fantastic. David Dellal, thank you so much for being part of New York State Manufacturing Now.

David Dellal: Well, thanks again, Steve. Really appreciate it, and have a good rest of the day.

Steve Melito: Good, you too. So we’ve been talking to David Dellal, the co-founder and CEO of Floe Incorporated. The company’s product, which is also called Floe, is a cost-effective and environmentally friendly solution for ice dams, a problem that you don’t want this winter. Hey, it’s hard to believe that it’s November and that the end of the year is in sight. FuzeHub just wrapped up the 2024 New York State Innovation Summit and we’re already looking ahead to 2025 events. So how can you find out what’s in store? The easy way is to get updates right in your email inbox. Just go to FuzeHub.com and look for the green subscribe button. It’s in the top left corner of your screen. You’ll get some great emails from us, including information about events and the next round of the Jeff Lawrence Innovation Fund. So go ahead and sign up. It’s free. On behalf of FuzeHub and New York State Manufacturing Now, this is Steve Melito signing off.