Architect Gone Rogue - Zinc Week 16

For myself, friends, family, former colleagues, future colleagues, clients, collaborators, acquaintances, investors, interested bystanders picked up on the way and other generally nosey people...

This is a journey of an Architect gone rogue and trying something different.

Traction

Following a disruptive end to week 15, this week we devised a plan to build on our product vision and tackle the feedback received from Zinc during our stocktake meeting, namely working on 'product' - qualitative interviews with more niche and targeted user groups.

A hunch as well as our research led us to the hypothesis that there are certain groups of people who would be interested in better understanding and pursuing home health solutions. We identified these as:

1. Health Sufferers - Someone like Marjo Palanee , who already owns a number of sensors / devices to monitor her internal environment. More broadly, those who have an acute pain point due to a health condition triggered or amplified by their home e.g. those with asthma ??
2. Homeowners - Someone like Dan Shone , who wants evidence-based answers on what can be done to improve his home. More broadly, those keen to understand the holistic health, condition and efficiency of their home beyond what a simple homebuyers survey, individual sensor or smart meter will tell them ??
3. Wellness Enthusiasts - People like Bernadette Behnke , who is pondering signing up to ZOE . More broadly, those keen to understand and optimise their lifestyle and their overall health e.g. someone interested in wellness or perhaps already using a wearable to monitor other forms of health??
4. New Parents or those planning a family - someone like new mum Naomi Eszter Danos or one of the number of private architectural clients I have worked with attempting to create an optimal nursery, or are specifically concerned about the domestic environmental exposures which their family are living in????
5. Gadget lovers - someone like my electrician Rudi, who does not exist on LinkedIn, but who loves tech has just about every smart home under the ?? and loves tech like the Home Assistant community??????

Pivot

All of the startup books I'd read prior to joining the Venture Builder programme had told me that I would inevitably have to 'pivot' - change path in response to user feedback. From some of the feedback received so far, the first significant pivot of this journey was encountered when considering the triggers that might lead people to want to measure their internal environments i.e. what is the need for people to monitor their domestic environments and create a realisation that home exposures may be linked to their health?

We're now exploring whether or not there are merits in first facilitating health tests of people, and then arranging simple Home Health test kits that can be sent in the post to detect for the presence of allergens, as an example.

User Research

Thanks again to those of you who filled out the Typeform survey on Home Health! We used this for an Affinity Mapping exercise, which sorted responses into broad categories, enabling us to determine what is most important, to whom and why, and to facilitate the next batch of user research. Results below:

From the survey responses, the most important features in a Home Health detection and monitoring system apparently are:

1. ?? Security - a need to protect data
2. ?? Integrations - a need to work with existing owned devices
3. ?? Personal exposures - a curiosity about what we're exposed to at home and insights / actions to mitigate risks

Thanks

Akash Singh for the 3D printer rental ???

Richard Holliday for the lowdown on trademarks and IP ??

Hani Salih for introducing the work of the Quality of Life Foundation ??

Piers MacNaughton, ScD for agreeing to be an advisor ??

Thought of the Week

Don't treat anything as a given!

Other Zinc VB7 Bloggers

Donna Egan - Late Career Entrepreneur here

Louise Thomas - Air Aware Labs here

Natalia Baltazar - A Founder in the Making here

Guy Naor - Time for a Redesign here

Pavandeep Rai - The Road to Entrepreneurship here

Marjo Palanee - HealthTech Founder's Story here