Development work always takes longer than one thinks – and only now we’re finishing off the product release of Seed Eco-Home 2. You can see about a 1000 pictures of the process taken over the last year. Now we’re finalizing the full digital model of the Seed Eco-Home 2 mechanical-electrical-plumbing in FreeCAD to finish off the complete CAD model.
This is at a level of detail rarely found in design documents – but critical for us as we open source the complete design. We aim to do a photo shoot as we finish the house soon so we can get the house product on our website. From then, it’s getting land somewhere in the local Kansas City area, and submitting design documents to the building department for approval. This will be the first house build to test the financial model – as we begin our first builds for customers. Ideas are good, but success boils down to effective production and real customers.
We aim to build several houses for customers this year, and to start version 2 of our apprenticeship program based on lessons from last summer – so we can deliver homes to customers at a rate of 1 house every 2 weeks. Our goal is to develop a skilled crew of 24 people as our base unit of Swarm Build operation – such that each house takes 5 days to build. Once we achieve this, we intend to train 10 such crews to operate out of our headquarters in the Kansas City area within the next couple years. This would allow us to build about 500 houses per year. And it means investing significantly in our infrastructure towards a full educational campus.
Our immersion education will include a construction management and enterprise track so that we can replicate operations to other locations worldwide. You can read more assumptions about the revenue model here. The link is not light reading – it is consistent with the immersion training as our latest thinking on how to build a team of trained super-cooperators with the mindset and skill set necessary to do the work that we do. Together with the financial model, there are literally thousands of pages of design documents that you can peruse in your ample spare time.
The current thinking is that production revenue bootstrap funds the completion of the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) by 2028 – a promise I made to the world back in 2018 and time is running out. The idea is that as soon as a cohort of 24 apprentices is up and running, we can diversify to other supporting projects – such as product release of the tractor for construction, development of the Compressed Earth Block (CEB) version of the house, development of large-scale plastic recycling for 3D printing construction materials… And much more – such as solar concrete and solar steel – materials that we produce on site using solar energy. Unheard of.
We estimate that realistically, the 50 technologies of the GVCS will take approximately $1M – each – to enterprise release. For comparison, our budget over the last decade was $3M – total. When I say ‘enterprise release’ – I mean releasing not only the open source blueprints for the product – but also the blueprints for the enterprise including how to train workers. And in the current times – who knows – we may end up building in Ukraine to help in recovery.
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