Week #4

£120, more market research, and… we heard back from YC 😱

Welcome to our weekly update on Dromadis Health! 👋

As usual, comments and feedback are suuuuper welcome. Email us (we got @dromadis.com emails now yay), comment on this post, or just reach out for a chat, we’re friendly people! 😁

Quick refresher

We build products that effortlessly track your health.
We’re currently focusing on Asparagus 🥬, a device to analyse your urine directly from your toilet bowl. We’re also exploring Onion 🧅, a smart contact lens case to analyse fluid from your eyes.

This week, in short

We conducted more interviews to understand the motivations and pain points behind health tracking, collected enough money to start building a prototype for Asparagus, and were invited to an interview for Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch! 🎉

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Week #4 accomplishments

🇺🇸 We got invited for an interview with Y Combinator!

Amazing team achievement! 😍🎉

We now need to focus on getting more work done, deepen our understanding of the market, become experts in storytelling, and ace the interview. Super excited for December 10!

GONG!

Context – we have a #gong channel on Slack. Every time something big happens, we post “GONG”. One day we’ll get a real gong in our office.

💬 We dove deeper into our customer interviews

Last week, we had mostly talked to Quantified-Selfers (QSers), people on the extreme right-hand side of the QS Spectrum.
This week, we moved down the spectrum, interviewing more people on the left and center (total interviews: 55). Turns out that with a 😷 and enough distancing, you can still talk to strangers in the park in 2020! 🤷‍♀️

We then spent a full day converting all our interview notes into quantifiable and analyzable data and looked for interesting insights from trends. I felt like a proper QSer!

Want a little sneak peak of our findings? We were particularly curious about why people don’t or stopped tracking their health. Here’s what we heard:

📝 We mapped out the health data Asparagus will measure

Now that we have observed evidence of interest for Asparagus, we wanted to define our offering clearly. We needed to have a better grasp of exactly what we can measure.

So, over the last few days, we dove into the literature and explored existing industry solutions.

📈 We looked into the competition, and re-tested urine strips!

As you can tell, this week we had a lot of fun with Airtable! So… we also set up a database of all our competitors.

We both used urine strips before, but I needed a refresher. So, as part of our competitive analysis, I tried using them a few times this week.

While I know I’m biased… peeing in a cup and dipping the strip was an uncomfortable experience (to say the least) and results were quite difficult to read. I still got interesting information out of it. For instance, I had no clue I was pretty much constantly in Ketosis. I also need to drink more water!

Note the photo below was taken with an old damaged strip, but the colors looked pretty 😄!

💸 We collected £120 to build our first Asparagus prototype

Last but not least: a big big shout-out and thank you to our 12 early supporters! 🎉

Next step: let’s get building! 🔧

We had a few preliminary discussions about designs, parts, suppliers, etc. More on this very soon.

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Pause. Is there really anything relevant in my urine?

“A field study carried out in seven European countries with over 11,000 urine samples illustrates the value of screening with urine test strips. A pathological urine finding (after checking for nitrite, protein, glucose, ketones, urobilinogen, and blood) was diagnosed in 16% of “normal healthy persons”, in 40% of outpatients, and in 57% of hospitalized patients.” – Roche (Combur Datasheet)

And that’s a snapshot of 6 parameters only, at 1 moment in time…

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What’s next?

✏️ Define our customer segments clearly with explicit user use cases

🧪 Run experiments to quantify demand

🎨 Design a concept Asparagus device

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Oh yes, we love our food! Seasonal pumpkin Risotto, alla Rosalia!

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Thanks for reading our update, please leave a comment or question below.

See you next week 👋