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And here’s where the legend really begins ...
At exactly 2:38 a.m. on his daughter’s 8th birthday in 2016, Deurloo said he woke up with an idea: a stormwater filter that could be installed just about anywhere in the world, a filter that could be easily serviced and successful in stopping stormwater pollution - without causing any urban flooding. Less than 10 minutes later, he was in his garage building a prototype - which is proudly displayed at Frog Creek Partners HQ. By 4 a.m., he was at Walmart buying more supplies to tinker with his prototype. A few weeks later, he was one of the winners of the Wyoming Technology Business Center’s Startup Challenge, earning seed money, mentorship and office space in the business center for a year. “I have a good talent for spatial orientation in my head, ‘’ Deurloo said. “I can throw things around in my head, move gears and see how things work. By like 5 a.m., I pretty much had a working prototype. Over the course of a month or two, I filed like three provisional patent applications - I was working 18, 20 hours a day, but I didn’t have a job - and I told my wife, ‘Honey, I need you to be 100 percent behind this - and she was.’ “Then I won the challenge, got some grant money, got an office and, well, here we are.” Here we are, indeed. In 2021, Forbes chose Deurloo, and his business partner/Chief Financial Officer Christopher Tippie, as one of the “Next 1,000, a Forbes list of entrepreneurs from across America with less than $10 million in revenue or funding.” “Brian is a little like a mad scientist,” Tippie said. “Ideas and innovations come to him constantly. While killing time on one long business trip, I was telling him about a documentary I saw about origami. He got ‘that look’ on his face and about two hours later he outlined how we could incorporate origami into our products by creating hand-foldable stainless steel components.
The original Gutter Bin in its final production design.
“His steel origami idea resulted in significant reductions in manufacturing costs and created massive shipping efficiencies as our bulkiest products now ship flat. “Brian is a creator at heart and is driven to solve problems,” Tipple added. “But not in a duct tape and baling wire way. He’s driven to find the best, more straightforward and lasting solution to any problem. He’s always thinking many years past the immediate fix.”
What Frog Creek Does
“The idea is really pretty simple,” Deurloo said of his original Gutter Bin concept. “We like to think of it as a coffee filter, but for storm drains.” While not the only catch basin in production, Frog Creek Partners employs a patented Mundus Bag water filter (Latin for “clean world”). So the
