What the Solar Panel Playbook Can Teach You About Launching a New Product Category

02:00 - How Aquaria's technology actually works and what it takes to deliver whole-home water from the air

04:00 - The personal story behind Brian's decision to pursue air water technology

09:00 - Why Aquaria started in Texas and how they find customers who already know they have a water problem

11:00 - Building for a hundred hardcore believers instead of a thousand casual followers

17:00 - Positioning a new product category by borrowing from the solar panel playbook

22:00 - Why seeing is believing still matters and where AI fits into customer experience

28:00 - What has changed about innovation in 2026 and why creativity is now the bottleneck
 

Brian Sheng is the Co-Founder and CEO of Aquaria, an Austin, Texas-based company building air water infrastructure for homes, communities, and cities. A Princeton graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Brian founded the company after a personal connection to water contamination drove him to explore alternative water technologies. Aquaria has built the first homes in the world where residents can shower, cook, and drink using water harvested entirely from the air.
 

Aquaria's product is roughly the size and shape of a battery pack or HVAC system. It uses a series of heat exchangers and proprietary materials to capture humidity from the surrounding air and convert it into clean water that flows directly into the home's taps. The water is microplastic and PFAS free.
 

The concept is not entirely new. Air water generation has been used by the military for years to guarantee water supply for troops in the field. But those systems were expensive, bulky, and built for a narrow use case. Brian saw the opportunity to take that core technology and make it affordable, compact, and integrated enough for everyday residential use.
 

The idea behind Aquaria is personal for Brian. His grandmother came from a city near Mongolia once known as the City of a Thousand Springs, a place with abundant natural groundwater. Over time, industrial pollution tainted the water supply, and his grandmother passed away from stomach cancer. That loss motivated Brian to study water technologies while at Princeton.
 

His early research led him to fog nets, simple mesh structures that capture moisture from mist and collect it as clean water. The insight was that while most of the water industry was focused on the ground, there was an enormous untapped resource in the air. That idea, refined over many years and product iterations, became Aquaria.
 

Aquaria launched in Texas, and the decision was deliberate. Brian did not start in New York, where the municipal water supply is generally fine. He started where people already know they have a water problem. In parts of Texas, Florida, and other regions, awareness of water quality issues is built into daily life. Residents deal with hard water, residue, and inconsistent supply without needing to be convinced that a problem exists.
 

That means Aquaria's marketing does not have to create demand from scratch. The conversation starts with possibility: did you know this exists? Brian says the answer is almost always no, and that is where the curiosity begins. The product sells on awareness of the technology, not on persuading people they need better water.
 

Beth asks Brian how he markets a product that almost nobody has heard of to a very specific audience. Brian reframes the question. In the early stages of a novel product, you do not need broad reach. You need a small group of people who genuinely love what you have built.
 

Aquaria focused on finding homeowners and builders who had real, felt water quality problems: slimy showers, residue in cooking, the constant cost and waste of buying bottled water. Once those early customers experienced the product, the enthusiasm spread on its own. Brian describes it as spreading like wildfire. The strategy was not to market broadly, but to find the right hundred people and let their experience do the work.
 

Aquaria did not start with a whole-home water system. The first version of the product was a countertop unit that produced two to three gallons of water per day, positioned as a replacement for bottled water. The value proposition was simple: clean drinking water without the jugs from Costco, free of microplastics and PFAS.
 

The company decided to go bigger. The current product delivers enough water to supply an entire home, including showers and cooking. Brian says the ambition goes further still. Aquaria is working toward supplying entire communities and cities with air water. But the product evolution followed a deliberate path: prove the technology small, then scale it up as the market and the product matured.
 

One of the biggest challenges for any new product category is that buyers do not have a mental box to put it in. Beth calls this one of the most common killers of good products in the building materials space. If a customer cannot quickly categorize what you are offering, they move on.
 

Aquaria solved this by borrowing from a category that has already been validated: residential energy independence. Solar panels, backup generators, and battery systems are familiar to homeowners and builders. They are widely understood, increasingly mandated in some states, and often more expensive than Aquaria's system. Brian positioned Aquaria as the water equivalent. You already have energy freedom for your home. This is the same thing for your water supply.
 

That analogy gave buyers a framework to understand the product without needing a technical education. It also anchored the value proposition to something people already trust and are willing to invest in. Beth calls this the "same but different" strategy, and she considers it one of the most effective ways to accelerate adoption for genuinely innovative products.
 

When asked about the biggest lesson from bringing Aquaria to market, Brian is clear: seeing is believing. He watches the reaction every time someone sees the product in person and drinks the water for the first time. Videos and digital content help, but the physical experience is what turns curiosity into conviction.
 

Brian sees a broader shift happening. After a decade of over-indexing on digital, he believes companies are coming back to the physical world. The experiential side of marketing is becoming more important, not less, precisely because digital overload has made it harder for any single piece of content to break through.
 

Beth connects this to Venveo's own experience. As a digital marketing agency that works with physical product manufacturers, she sees the same thing. Factory tours, in-person demos, and hands-on product interaction create a kind of trust that digital alone cannot replicate.
 

Brian's second major lesson runs in the other direction. While physical experience matters more than ever, Aquaria has also found that AI tools allow a small team to deliver a level of customer service and customer success that would normally require a much larger organization.
 

He does not frame this as replacing human interaction. He frames it as using technology to handle the repetitive, lower-value work so that his team can focus on higher-quality engagement. For a startup competing against companies with billion-dollar payrolls, that leverage is essential.
 

Beth asks Brian what people misunderstand about innovation. His answer is that the bottleneck has completely flipped. It used to be that having a good idea was the easy part. Execution, the engineering, the testing, the iteration, was what took years and massive teams. Today, the feedback loop from idea to execution can be as short as ten minutes. What used to take a team of engineers and two weeks now happens in a fraction of the time.
 

That means the real constraint is no longer execution. It is creativity. How many good ideas can you generate? How many creative ways can you think about a problem? The companies that can produce better ideas faster will compound their advantage, because everything ships so quickly now that the volume and quality of ideas is what separates winners from everyone else.
 

When Beth asks for Brian's advice to manufacturers who want to bring more innovation into their organizations, he pushes back on the traditional playbook. Focus groups and user testing panels served a purpose, but there are faster and more direct ways to validate ideas now.
 

Brian points to direct channels: hosting live sessions on social platforms to get real-time feedback, using equity crowdfunding to pre-validate ideas, building communities around the product, and inviting customers to visit manufacturing facilities. He believes manufacturers underestimate how compelling their own factories are. Most customers have never seen one, and the experience of watching a product get made builds a kind of loyalty and understanding that no marketing campaign can match.
 

His broader point is that the gap between manufacturer and end user has never been smaller. The tools to reach niche audiences, gather feedback, and iterate quickly are all available. The question is whether manufacturers are willing to use them.
 

Brian can be reached on LinkedIn. He welcomes conversations from anyone in the building materials space who heard him on the podcast.
 

The Smarter Building Materials Marketing podcast helps sales and marketing professionals find better ways to grow leads, sales and outperform the competition. It gives insights, examples and shares stories about how to create a results-driven digital marketing strategy for building products and construction companies of any size. SBMM is co-hosted by Venveo’s Founder, Zach Williams and Venveo’s CEO, Beth PopNikolov.
 

Thanks for tuning in! If you enjoyed this episode and want to catch future insights, be sure to like and subscribe to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing podcast wherever you listen. Got questions or suggestions about today’s episode? Drop us a line at podcast@venveo.com—we’d love to hear from you!