Daniel A. Harper | Siren Marine LLC CEO
We’ve all heard stories of startups that grow into giant global companies. Siren Marine is not a giant quite yet, but we are doing the right things to get there.
Especially in “internet of things,” companies often start with some cool engineering idea, and then look for a pain point to fix. That’s the exact opposite approach one should take.
I found a real pain point when, after college, I spent 15 years in the yachting industry. I discovered that all boat owners worry about their boats … a lot.
When I started thinking about how to connect boaters with their unattended boats, cellphones were becoming common, and that seemed like the right technology to make it happen.
So now we had the problem identified and the technology sketched out. But we still needed a little luck, which came in the form of the cellular industry maturing just when we were developing our business plan.
The final ingredients for my Siren story were grit and hard work. It is said that it takes somewhere around 10,000 hours to master any subject, sport, skill or talent. By the time I applied for the 2012 Rhode Island Business Plan Competition, I’d been working on the technology and business for about 12,000 hours. And then we won.
Winning the competition was a big deal, but we still have to work hard every day to pull all the factors – experience, technical know-how and timing – together to make the business an ongoing success story.
