During the first COVID winter of 2020-2021, restaurants raced to buy propane heaters for outdoor seating. Al fresco dining was necessary for the hospitality industry’s survival, but this shift came at a significant environmental cost. With emissions from a single propane heater equivalent to two-thirds of the annual energy use of an average household, the increase in propane-heated patios was bad for the climate and costly for restaurant owners.
When warmer weather arrived and COVID restrictions lifted in 2021, Raj Tilwa (HKS '24) visited his longtime friend, Rohan Pandya. The two had known each other for decades — meeting in elementary school in India, living together as high school roommates in Singapore, and coming to the United States in 2012 for college. They began discussing the meteoric rise of outdoor heaters and people’s increasing preference for al fresco dining, and whether they could design a better, more efficient way to keep people warm outdoors. Soon after, they decided to start a company, Focal.
Three years later, Tilwa reflects on Focal’s startup journey from prototyping and customer discovery to preparing for commercial launch.
Listening to a calling
Since childhood, Tilwa has worked on climate and sustainability initiatives, from volunteering at an NGO focused on preventing deforestation in India to participating in a sustainability club at his high school in Singapore. When Tilwa came to the U.S., he said it was his first time living in a place “where there was an abundance of everything,” from clean tap water to heating and cooling in indoor spaces. He also observed that the “energy intensity of all of this was extremely high, with buildings representing 39 percent of global emissions.”
While decarbonization efforts were underway in many states and localities, everyone seemed resigned to using exorbitant amounts of fossil fuels so people could eat outdoors. Tilwa said, “This problem and issue kept calling to me. When I came to Harvard Kennedy School in the fall of 2021, I dove in right away with Rohan. And the first thing I did was become part of the Harvard i-lab.”
This problem and issue kept calling to me. When I came to Harvard Kennedy School in the fall of 2021, I dove in right away with Rohan. And the first thing I did was become part of the Harvard i-lab.
Accessing i-lab support
“As first-time founders, we didn’t know anyone — we didn't even know any founders,” recalled Tilwa of his time before becoming an i-lab member. He was amazed by the number of founders, investors, and advisors he could talk to at the i-lab, saying that the “network that the i-lab is super helpful.” He also received “invaluable advice” from i-lab advisors Peter Gladstone and Phil Green. He recalled how Green, who focuses on B2B and technology advising, encouraged Focal to “put our product out there.”
“Because it was a very new user experience and a very new kind of product...it’s really hard to get people to imagine what it could be like,” said Tilwa. “Phil’s bias was to be out there, get them to use it, and get them to pay...Phil’s orientation there was super, super helpful.”
Learning from customer pilots
When Tilwa and Pandya began developing the MVP in the fall of 2021, they had a clear idea of what they wanted to build — a simple outdoor heater that was targeted to an individual instead of a space. By that November, Focal had a working MVP and quickly shifted to “figuring out customer discovery.” They talked to a range of residential construction companies and restaurant owners who offered outdoor dining. Once their patent was filed in the spring of 2022, they were ready to start finding businesses for demos.
Tilwa and Pandya agreed to pet sit for a friend in the Mission District of San Francisco for a few weeks in June and July. After arriving, they started walking up and down Valencia Street, talking to restaurant owners about their heating solution experiences. “We learned very quickly that people were unhappy with their propane heaters — they leak gas, have an exposed flame, and are super expensive and cumbersome to operate,” said Tilwa. He gave demos to customers, and quickly a few restaurants agreed to pilots.
Refining the product and scaling the pilot
During their initial pilots, Tilwa learned quickly that the form factor and product they had designed wouldn’t work in a lot of restaurant settings, explaining, “We had a hypothesis in terms of how our product would work, but what they wanted was something different.”
After the summer of 2022, Focal refined their product based on pilot customer feedback and developed a version that uses 95 percent less carbon dioxide emissions than propane.
Tilwa shared that the revamp took eight months and involved making a smaller product with a different mount. He emphasized that taking the time to listen to customers and work through the “intricacies” of designing the next version of their MVP that met customer needs allowed the company to take a significant step forward, all while being bootstrapped.
In May of 2023, Focal raised their pre-seed capital after showing investors their newly designed product and early customer traction. Tilwa then went back to some of the customers that had participated in the initial pilot. Focal did day-long pilots with their new product in the summer of 2023, which resulted in commitments and preorders.
Today, Tilwa says, “People are using our product daily, with hundreds of people experiencing Focal in some way every week."
The feedback Focal has received from customers has been overwhelmingly positive. One guest at one of their first customers shared, “Absolutely genius. I can’t believe this doesn’t exist everywhere. I never liked to sit outside. I’m always too cold, but not the case this time!"
"People are using our product daily, with hundreds of people experiencing Focal in some way every week."
Preparing for general availability
Tilwa emphasizes the importance of Focal’s years-long pilot phase. Not only has their testing enabled them to design a commercial product that “looks much different from what the MVP looks like right now,” but it’s allowed them to gather strong customer testimonials — an essential element of marketing a larger commercial product purchase.
“We can show where we’ve already deployed, and who else we’ve been working with over the last year. We’re really excited about revealing the new product soon. And we’re only getting started.”
