Team Gold: A Minor Setback to a Golden Discovery
Our second week in the Biodesign Immersion Program was filled with activity compared to the first. We had a plethora of interviews, presentations, and meetings centered around our minimum viable product (MVP) and ways to improve it.
Presentation with Rhonda
Our week kicked off with a Tuesday meeting with Rhonda Shrader, the executive director of the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship and the NSF i-Corps programs. She received an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and partnered with our BIE cohort to help integrate the Lean Launchpad in our minds. Additionally, we were introduced to several other students from other schools led by Dr. Oscar Vasquez’s CancerMune Scholars program.
The main point that Rhonda sought to strike home was that the majority of startups fail because of a lack of customers actually interested in the product. The entire purpose of the Lean Launchpad method is to figure out what customers desire to absolutely have in their lives; it must be exceptionally popular. Throughout the presentation, Rhonda showed us different videos of startup pitches that both were successful and unsatisfactory, and was determined to explain the positives and negatives of both. At the end of her presentation, we were able to pitch our idea of vital sign monitoring in low-resource settings, and she gave us advice on how to better cater to our customer segments, encouraging us to focus on a particular segment and understand what they want completely. We realized that we would be speaking to medical doctors, for the most part, so decided to emphasize our outreach towards them when sending out emails.
Interview with the Head of General Surgery
As soon as our meeting with Rhonda ended, we decided to email more physicians to give us input on our device. We were ambitious in our choices and decided to email Dr. Hobart Harris, the chief of general surgery at UCSF, who to our astonishment, immediately responded! We set up a meeting for Wednesday and went in with the hopes of gaining invaluable advice.
We ended up receiving a slap to the face.
It turned out that our vision of targeting patients at risk of sepsis was too much of an ask because it was an initiative professionals were only beginning to target within the past couple of years. Instead of worrying about sepsis, Dr. Harris encouraged us to shift our focus to simply granting hospitals in resource-constrained environments the ability to monitor vital signs effectively. This in itself is a prevalent issue that should not be overlooked. After our interview, we were concerned about whether we should consider our model, but after analyzing our business model canvas, we realized that our only edit would be to our value proposition, and the final product would remain the same.
The Importance of the Smartphone
We had several other interviews throughout the week, one with Dr. Psyche Calderon Vargas on Thursday, and both Dr. Samson Okello and Dr. Phuoc Le on Friday. After our interview with Dr. Harris, we decided to pitch the idea of simply monitoring vital signs in low-resource settings, which both agreed to be extremely vital. Dr. Vargas described the situation she was working in — she was treating intravenous drug users in Tijuana, Mexico, and stated that there were barely any physicians present to assist her, two at maximum. She also told us that the Mexican government has complete control over what physicians are allowed to do; they once shut down her clinic just on the mere basis that they disliked her father. Many patients and clinics do not possess up-to-date monitors and computers that physicians can use to analyze data, but smartphones are heavily in use. This sentiment was shared by the other two doctors as well, as Dr. Okello exclaimed that smartphones are more common in his area of Uganda than clean water. After hearing this, it became clearer as to what our main technology would be centered around, and we seek to explore this in the coming weeks!
