“Zooming” Out of the Building

This week went off to a rough start. We had not scheduled or conducted any interviews beyond our first two launch interviews with last year’s senior capstone member Amanda and our clinical client Dr. Kim. Our strategy over last weekend was to cold email 15 neurosurgeons listed on the UCSF department of neurosurgery directory, as well as about 15 device procurement personnel on a UCSF staff directory. Unfortunately, we were not able to schedule or complete any interviews by Monday.

On Monday, our iCorps instructor Darren Cooke grilled us for our seeming lack of progress but encouraged us to find ways to increase our email response rate and schedule more interviews. We posted on Hydrocephalus support groups on Reddit and Facebook to find hydrocephalus patients and their parents to share their experiences with the disease. We also scoured the website of the Hydrocephalus Association, where we emailed many neurosurgeons and staff they had on the website directory.

So far, we’ve contacted over 80 people and completed 16 interviews, with 9 more scheduled. Our dramatic improvement in response rate came from making our emails more specific by explaining that our program was NIH funded and that the interviews were for educational needs-finding purposes rather than sales pitches. Effectively targeting people who were passionate about, interested in, or directly affected by hydrocephalus didn’t hurt either.

We spoke with various stakeholders in the field of hydrocephalus: neurosurgeons, patients and their parents, an engineer in a hydrocephalus pressure sensor startup, and a neurologist.

In addition to learning about the methods and difficulties that come with treating and diagnosing hydrocephalus, we peeked into the worries, struggles, and coping mechanisms of patients and parents of patients. From Rhaeos, a hydrocephalus pressure sensor startup, we learned about the engineering design process, the FDA approval landscape, and how they formulated their business model.

This week has been a whirlwind of interviews. Our next steps are to synthesize and digest all the information we have gathered (a daunting task at the moment), update our Business Model Canvas, formulate new hypotheses and questions to ask our customer segments and continue conducting interviews to gain additional insight.