The Wait for Wavio
Last year, we were fortunate enough to raise more than $100,000 of outside funding from two angels.
My latest creation, Wavio, was built to ensure deaf and hard-of-hearing homeowners don’t miss out on sounds that the hearing population may take for granted — a doorbell ringing, running water, a smoke alarm, or a child crying — any and all ambient sounds in a household environment.
To that end, we designed an wall wart plugged into an electrical outlet, takes in environmental sounds and precisely identifies them with local processing. We then use the cloud to send push notifications to registered users’ devices.
One critical piece to a market-product fit is the founders. We don’t often see founders building products with market-product fit. Sometimes you have the wrong founders working on wrong ideas. In our case, we have the founder-market fit. I’m Deaf and I come from the very market my company is targeting; therefore, I’m proudly obligated to design a product that flawlessly fits my community.
With our first round of funding, we completed development of our functional alpha iOS/Android apps to manage Wavio sensors and receive notifications from them. We also finalized the hardware and our in-house custom electronic board powered by Samsung’s Artik, and improved Wavio’s sound recognition engine to recognize popular types of doorbells & smoke alarms.
But there’s more work to be done before the product can be brought to market — work that requires additional funding.
Meanwhile, communication with potential investors can be a barrier for me, as evidenced by a presentation I gave at the 2016 New York Business Plan Competition. I signed from the stage while a team member interpreted for the judges and audience, but half the judges later admitted to thinking my interpreter was the presenter and I was the interpreter.
I couldn’t get my message across.
In another instance, I was presenting to potential investors when an inexperienced interpreter made a mistake. The interpreter insinuated that I couldn’t answer a simple question: Who is your customer? In fact, I had simply paused to pull up a slide to present exact numbers. The interpreter said, “Let me look that up for you,” making itseem like I didn’t know the answer to my company’s most important question and was trying to Google it up.
The investor ended the call early.
Our initial target market is 48 million deaf and hard-of-hearing people in the US, including the elderly. For some investors, that audience has proved too small, but I understand the product’s potential for a much broader reach. Universal design was my answer.
Applications in industrial, residential or business security, as well as the government — relative to cognitive computing — are possibilities. We visualize Wavio has the capability to perform advanced sound recognition in video clips critical to security personnel. We also strive to have Wavio capable of recognizing the make or model of a vehicle based on the sound it makes as it passes by.
This grabs the investors’ attention.
It’s my dream to shift the earth by .00001%, knowing that my team has created an impact on how accessible technology can benefit from the massive growth potential of the Internet of Things (IoT). We’ll have created a model and platform where an IoT access technology is widely available to those who need it the most.
The idea, though, is to start small.
We could go big right away, but that’s not the reason we are here. My passion is to serve my community first, and this is where my heart lies. We use our passion as the fuel to create a quality product and service. Those who understand our story can see how Wavio applies to bigger markets down the road.
With the next round of funding, we hope to outsource significant parts of the work to experts in iOS/Android and backend infrastructure development and scale up our marketing team. Future funds will also allow us to add more sounds to the Wavio engine.
A number of companies have requested a final prototype. The goal is to acquire contracts with interested companies to bring in revenue.
Hearing loss associations in Canada and England, as well as a medical device distributor in India, have also expressed interest in getting their hands on the product.
Word has gotten out fast. I felt bad telling the Indian distributor that I wasn’t able to help. India is a very underdeveloped country; Wavio would be able to help a lot of people, but not yet. As a representative of this community, it can be very frustrating when people want this but things are moving so slowly.
Hopefully, the wait will be over soon.
