Also, I get the impression there’s an inherent lifetime to these things. If it works for 50 years, you’d consider yourself happy with the result.
It’s like changing your roof; it lasts long enough that you can consider it maintenance-free and only just be wrong (it’ll be a nasty surprise if you buy a very old home without considering when it was done last).
Usually, what will happen is that someone builds an indoors living space in a cellar where this is sub-par and there’s only been chilly storage rooms before, and then get mold in the plaster walls after a few years. The next owner discovers the problem and gets the resulting bill and lawsuit.
The few people knowledgable enough will avoid these houses, while those who don’t are happy that they seem surprisingly cheap.
I've helped with construction of some houses with gravel+filter bedding. There is usually more than one layer of fabric+gravel. It also helps keep the gravel around. The estimated lifetime of the filters I helped putting in is around 150 years. It's a fairly standard way to bed a house in germany outside the cities.
I wonder what the ancient Greeks and Romans thought about the buildings they were building? Did they think that if it was still standing in 150 years they'd be happy? Would they be surprised the buildings were still standing 1000s of years later, or was that what they were hoping for at the outset?
The thing is, back then statics and architectural design were in their children shoes still. So if your roof was 3 tons, your supports had to hold up 300 tons because you had no better way. Nowadays, it holds 15 tons for 3 tons + 12 tons snow, for example, or in more äquatorial areas, it's 3 tons + 1 ton rain water.
It's not hard to make things last when you helplessly overspec because you have no idea how close you are to collapsing and the material quality is extremely unreliable.
I would guess that a clogged membrane is more of a barrier to water flowing into the gravel than flowing out, as reverse-flushing is often a (partially-)effective measure to restore the flow in a clogged filter.
Ideate, build and grow companies in partnership with stealth investor group run by former public Unicorn CIO and big 3 Consulting MD. We have hypotheses on several "indie.vc" type products, believe we can find more, and are willing to put capital (both $ and intellectual) behind getting them off the ground.
We are seeking an indie-hacker to validate ideas through rough and ready hacker product market fit testing (google ads, landing page conversion testing, simple wordpress sites, consumer insights) and then lead early customer development.
We will supply investment $$ to fund the costs of testing and validation, then make a go-no-go decision of further funding and/or bootstrapping. We will give significant equity to the indie-hacker. While you can be anywhere, our ideas are primarily US based markets, so knowing the culture would be helpful.
We are not looking for fancy application builders - that can come later - but more folks who can string together existing tooling to create initial no/low code apps for initial validation. Additionally, you should have a hacker / builder mindset where it comes to customer development.
B2B SAAS with Customers | Remote | CEO/IndieHacker | Flexible
Want to run and have significant ownership of a B2B SAAS business?
I have a B2B SAAS up and running in the employee benefit space. It provides data and analytics on employee benefit plans to employee benefit insurance brokers and insurance carriers, and retirement 401k advisors. Basically it is a database of all employee benefit plans in the US with a 10 year history, with some analytics behind it to clean up the data and present it in a user friendly way. The brokers and advisors use it to look for and develop prospects / lead gen.
It is a direct competitor to Judy Diamond, Mi-Edge, and Larkspur data. Our value prop is very similar, but geared towards ease of use and lower cost for the small to medium sized rep. Additionally, we have synthesized data which can be aggregated and sold back to the carriers for market share, etc.
I built it last year as a semi-hobby to really learn about all the data tools and experiment a bit. Launched in October, got some customers through brute force Linked-In ads, and then took from January to now off to build a house. Well, we've moved in and now I can turn my attention back to it. Note that during my "hands off" time, it did add customers when I was absolutely not touching it. That said, it has pretty low revenue now (~$500/month).
But honestly I don't really have time to focus on it the way I should, and I have other activities (more lucrative for now) that need my time. I do believe it could have legs to go after this market in a really efficient way, but it needs a motivated leader.
I'd love to find someone who might be interested to take this on. Here is the offer:
1. Significant equity / ownership of the business
2. All the cash the business generates (until a certain point - but you get it all until well after Ramen profitable)
3. My support on the market / innovation side(I am a management consultant who has served this market for years, so I know the space.)
4. Some additional capital to help get up the curve.
