Entrepreneur Club Attracting Fat Cat Inventions
For Heidi Goehring of Madison, the path to being an inventor began with one fat cat.
Five years ago, she took in the younger of her two cats for its one-year check-up and found it weighed a hefty 15 pounds.
“The vet said, ‘If you want this cat alive you need to drastically reduce the diet,’” Goehring recalled. At the same time, her older cat was quickly losing weight, presumably because its feline companion was eating all the food.
Goehring scoured pet stores and the Internet for a device that would separate her cats’ food, or at least keep the chubby kitty from eating more than its share. There was nothing.
“I had to develop something,” said Goehring,
Five years later, Goehring has filed a patent for her design, which uses radio frequency identification to ensure a food dish opens only for the pet approved to eat out of it.
But she’s also found that being an inventor is risky and slow: She’s living off a loan from refinancing her house, and developing a prototype and connecting with the right resources has been a struggle.
What’s kept her going, she said, is her membership in the Columbia and Sauk Entrepreneurs and Inventors Club, a collaboration between the two counties’ economic development corporations at which budding entrepreneurs network with each other and learn the basics of starting a small business.
The club started in April 2004 as a spin-off from the successful Juneau County I&E Club that Economic Development Director Terry Whipple launched there a year earlier.
Photo by MSDesigns.
No comments yet.
Leave a Reply