With most of its best-known tech companies in the defense industry, government IT and contracting, Greater Washington isn't terribly attractive to innovative consumer product startups.
What the city needs to foster those tech-forward, high-growth consumer brands is entrepreneurs who are obsessed with – and committed to – a singular product in a ubiquitous industry.
Jonathon Perrelli is one of those entrepreneurs.
The founder of LifeFuels has spent five years in Reston, Va., building a company of 50 employees and selling the vision of a smart nutrition bottle to consumers, investors and potential clients.
This week, he transitioned from selling a vision to selling a product as LifeFuels bottles launched on the market.
"Seeing all this come to life is a pretty incredible experience, but we're not patting ourselves on the back," Perrelli said. "Monday was day one."
The LifeFuels system includes an app-connected smart water bottle attached to nutritious, multi-serve flavor pods. The app lets users mix drinks in the bottle and tracks their hydration and nutrition.
The FuelPods are available in multiple flavors – including peach, blackberry acai and lemon-lime – that are paired with electrolytes, antioxidants and natural energy ingredients and can be mixed in multiple ways.
On the app, users can set and track hydration goals, adjust the flavor and strength of each beverage and see remaining levels of each pod.
It's not a cheap product – LifeFuels kits cost $180 and additional pods cost $12, or $10 with a subscription. But its benefits check the boxes of high-end consumer goods.
The 16.9 ounce bottle is durable for use by athletes and outdoor enthusiasts, and features a battery life of up to seven days. It holds three FuelPods, meaning you can craft up to 90 beverages without refilling them. And the benefits of replacing plastic water bottles is valuable to eco-friendly buyers, as is the company's focus on tracking and improving health.
Perrelli said those elements come together when a company's employees are excited about the product they're creating.
"We need to educate entrepreneurs regionally about things they're interested in building," he said. "We need all those things like drones and missile systems and cybersecurity, but engineers and design thinkers want to build something they're interested in."
Perrelli is so interested in his startup's product, in fact, that he has worn a LifeFuels t-shirt every day for the last five years and nine days. He thinks consumer technology is crucial for any tech ecosystem to attract enthusiastic engineers, which rings especially true in D.C.
"There's a lot of telecom, enterprise software and government work here, and to have a company like ours with a high-tech consumer product in the beverage tech industry is important," he said. "We have attracted talent from all over the country."
Adding to its own talent pool, the company is hiring staff in social media marketing and engineering, among other roles, to increase an employee count that jumped from 20 to 50 in the past year.
