With the battle for funding complete, Red Button Design is ready to launch its innovative water collection device, Midomo. Co-founder Amanda Jones is aiming to provide investors with a decent return

It’s a stock question for entrepreneurs, but always revealing: with perfect foresight, would they still have started the company? Amanda Jones, co-founder of social enterprise Red Button Design, simply sighs and says no. “Not because I wouldn’t have wanted to, but if I’d honestly known how hard it was going to be, I would have underestimated my ability to be able to do it."

It’s a slightly unassuming answer, at odds with the scale of her achievement. After a three-year funding and development phase she describes as “hell”, Red Button, the humanitarian design firm Jones started alongside friend James Brown, is at last on the brink of launching its first product, Midomo, a water transport and purification product for the developing world.

Midomo will be pitched to aid organisations as a time-saving, sanitation device for people in developing countries who have to spend large parts of the day collecting water. Although most communities in developing countries are built between one and two kilometres away from surface water, carrying enough water for a whole family requires repeat trips. “Women are spending about 11 hours a day collecting water,” says Jones. “You spend all this aid money on schools, which only boys can go to because the girls are collecting water all day.” And all too often, that water isn’t clean enough to drink. “Every eight seconds a child dies from a water-related illness, which is utterly preventable,” says Jones.

Midomo is designed to deal with both problems—efficiently transporting and purifying enough water for a whole family in one trip. “It’s brilliantly simple,” she says—so simple, that she never believed they’d get a patent. The technology relies on two tanks separated by a filter. As you pull Midomo along, its wheels rotate, powering the gears, which pump the dirty water through special tubes, where it is squeezed into a ceramic filter. “The further you pull the trolley the more water you can filter,” explains Jones. The tank carries 50 litres. “If we can get 50 litres of water purified in 1.5km, which is enough for a whole family for a day, we can allow them to do a 3km round-trip once a day, rather than a 12km round-trip three times a day.”

While the product’s development was completed on a shoestring budget by Brown, Jones tried in vain to attract investment. “We were essentially unfundable,” she says. Charity funds aren’t interested unless you have charity status, she says, while venture capitalists appeared unmoved by the prospect of a social return: “VCs don’t believe you can make [a financial] return by doing good. ‘You’re doing something worthwhile, therefore you can’t exploit it enough to get the return we need.’”

On a whim, and without a prototype, Jones applied to appear on the BBC investment show, Dragons’ Den. She was surprised to be accepted, and overwhelmed to receive an offer from all five dragons, at her original valuation. The problem was, she recalls, that all five dragons had never joined forces before. “Three months later they finally agreed a term sheet.” It was full of strings. “It basically meant that if my laptop died I would need two dragons to sign off getting a new one. Hugs and kisses but no,” was her answer.

Despite all the frustration, Jones believes that pulling a company up by its bootstraps has an energising effect. Poorly-funded social entrepreneurs tend to possess the single-minded determination to succeed, she says. Jones is nonetheless relieved Red Button is finally beginning to stand on its own two feet. “I’ve gone through weeks where I scheduled meetings within walking distance because I couldn’t afford the bus fare. I’ve done pitches for half a million quid where I had to walk there and back.”

With funding now in place—Red Button is backed by a syndicate of 12 individual investors, most of whom have offered their time as well as money—Jones and Brown intend to build the business ethically: Red Button will "design against dependency”. It’s a principle that Jones believes will help value to spread to the very edges of the supply chain, where it is needed the most. “Our products will be locally manufactured and assembled, which means they can be locally maintained. Nothing we’re doing is sealed. You can disassemble. We are building it open source.”

Although Red Button will hang on to the intellectual property in an attempt to ensure quality control—and also to help attract investment—garnering a social return remains a more important goal than profit maximisation: “We don’t want to be the only supplier of this,” she says.

Red Button’s model is the antithesis of most design-led innovation, where the pressures of ROI force product marketers to squeeze every last drop of value from the supply chain. “A dependency cycle doesn’t fix anything,” she says. “It maintains an industry… but our idea is to design dependency out. Look at the iPod. You are dependent on the designer. I can’t change the battery. I can’t mess with the software. As someone who has purchased the rights to this physical thing I am utterly dependant on Apple to look after it for me.”

Profit is nonetheless important—and not only for Red Button’s investors. A financial return remains crucial for reinvestment in R&D, says Jones. “We make a cut on every unit above our operating costs. We are talking real profit, as opposed to that fluffy social enterprise profit, which really means ‘not operating at a loss’. We’re going to give our investors a reasonable rate of return, better than the banks, but not as good as the next tech start-up.” Jones pauses to consider the deal. “But they get to sleep at night.”