Week #0
Zoom team, asparagus, onions, dromedaries, regulators, Y Combinator
Welcome to the first weekly update on Dromadis Health 🐪, our newest adventure!
We will be posting updates of this sort once per week, while we’re at EF. Comments and feedback are suuuuper welcome! That’s the only way to get better 👍.
Team
We’re a Zoom team, we still never met in person. And yes, we’re building a healthcare company together #covidStories. But hey, we’ve been incredibly productive since we started working together, so whooo caaareesss. ⚡
A tiny bit about us:
Heyya, I’m Ali 👋 – I’m a math-nerd turned entrepreneur. I love designing and building amazing user experiences for products that sound dull but are actually incredibly valuable.
Hello there, I’m Rosalia 👋! I'm a bioengineer and a travel-addict! I love to change people's life for the better using technology.
Dromadis Health
In short
Our product monitors your health, daily, with no change in your behavior. We give you snapshots of your health 365 times per year by counting specific molecules (analytes) in your body fluids (urine, tear fluid) and sending the results to your phone.
Asparagus 🥬 and Onion 🧅
We are building 2 fluid collection systems: Asparagus and Onion.
Asparagus is a device you stick in your toilet bowl. It will analyze your urine multiple times a day, every time you use your bathroom.
Onion is an AirPods-like case to throw your contact lenses in at the end of the day. The device will extract and analyze the tear fluid that sticks to your contacts.
The key here is that your behavior doesn't change: pee in your toilet as usual, throw your contacts at the end of the day. That’s it 🤷!
Our companion mobile-app allows you to look at your recent health trends, explains to you what your results mean, and alerts you if anything looks wrong.
The tech
The tech is built on top of a reliable, scalable, and affordable technology.
We produce complex networks directly on circuit boards which can host, guide, and process fluids. By integrating sensors we can detect a range of clinically relevant analytes from body fluids. Based on the fluid of choice, the sensitivity of these sensors can be tuned, and the chip can be interfaced to a different collection system.
Things we measure
Many health metrics can be tracked through urine and tear fluid:
General wellness: nutrition, sleep, minerals, exercise…
Preventive medicine: early disease markers for avoidable blindness, cancers, Alzheimers…
Disease monitoring: diabetes (glucose), Inflammatory Bowel Syndrome (uric acid), Urinary Tract Infections (nitrites, leukocytes), etc…
Week #0 accomplishments
We teamed up! 🙌
Our first video call had its awkward moments, but we immediately knew that we could complete each other’s skills and work on something we’re both passionate about. A week later, we’re a team 💥.
We applied to Y Combinator! 🎉
It’ been less than a week, yet we submitted our first application to Y Combinator 💥. Got some great feedback on it by some friends who were part of the W20 YC batch.
Really, it was an exercise to measure how productive we were as a team and to take a critical look at our business. It made us think a lot about what health data we want to track, cost estimations, go-to-market strategies, pricing models, and loads of other challenges. Overall, applying was an amazing experience.
Check out our team application video below! 👇
We set up a clear communication framework 💬
On EF’s Slack workspace, we set up a few private channels to streamline our communication, all within our Team section to keep it clear.
The #work channel is key for us: we post a stand-up twice per day, in the morning to say what we intend to do, and the evening to review what we actually got done.
We brainstormed and started prototyping stuff 🖌
We chatted a lot about Onion and Asparagus, figured out which tech we want to use at a high level, and came up with a few interesting breakthroughs:
The fluid analysis system can be basically the same for Asparagus and Onion. Saves a lot on cost, and he’s with regulation.
Asparagus: the collection device and the analysis can be completely separated, one in the toilet bowl, one outside. Significantly reduces complexity of design and cost.
Onion: no need to modify existing contact lenses, which saves us a ton of time and cost, especially with regulation. Just throw your daily contacts in a little AirPods-like box that contains the mini-lab, and we’ll handle the rest.
Rosalia got started on first prototypes, maybe we’ll show you more next week 🤷!
Discussed with regulators ⚖️
Had a preliminary discussion with medical devices regulators. Got a good estimate of timelines and costs. Seems like everything should be pretty doable, and we can get a device on the market sometime in 2021 if we play our cards well 🎉!
We set up meetings 💼
Industry experts, YC alumni, investors, regulators follow-up, smart people who can give us feedback. The game is on ✅!
We parked a bunch of domains 🌐
We set up our landing page on dromadis.com (yes, .com!!!) using Carrd. Got all the appropriate usernames on social (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.).
The big questions
We’ll try to answer these in the next few weeks
Can we stay this productive over the next few weeks? Hopefully!
The tech seems too good to be true. Is there a catch / limitation we have missed?
What is it exactly that we will have the first version of our products measure?
What’s next?
Map out all analytes that can be tracked with our tech
Interview potential customers to evaluate their interests
Explore our different go to market strategies
Follow-up with regulators
Meet in person as a team and grab drinks to celebrate this crazy week 🍻
Thanks for reading all of this, please leave a comment or question below.
See you next week 👋
Well done! good job and great team
Keep it up and stay safe😊
Great team! Love the concept!