IoT Bird Feeder Let Bird Watchers Take Bird Selfies for Collectible Game and Conservation Tool

Small innovation with big impact. An inspiring idea that combines the love of bird watching with the study of bird migration data.

The challenge to innovate for sustainability is that we lack creative ideas that serve the interest of bigger than human problem (to be more specific, bigger than individual humans’ problems). We are trained to solve problem in a linear fashion with direct causality, i.e. if I do A for B, B will get C, so if we know that C is what B wants, we find innovative way to do A. There is always a KPI attached to C, or how well A converges to C. This is our motivation to innovate. However, the desired outcomes of sustainability are D, E, F or more, and besides the performance of the green bonds, where do we attach the KPIs and who owns them??

Take Bird Buddy as an example: my conventional product manager thinking will be - if I create a gamified bird feeders for bird watchers, I will sell loads of bird feeders and bird watchers will have fun collecting and watching birds, that increases stickiness and LTV of the Bird Buddy platform. Hence my valuation increases.

To call for more impactful sustainable actions, we need to be creative about the motivational factor. And not surprisingly, forcing ourselves to think of the “possibility of data, for purpose beyond individual needs” sparks all sorts of creativity. What if we add an angle of conservation to Bird Buddy? What if we send these data of bird diversity together with the geolocations of the Bird Buddy to the local university lab that is studying the linkage between migration pattern and climate change??

There are still a lot of missing links but some great learnings from the Bird Buddy Kickstarter campaign:

- Find the “love of nature” element in every hobby or the niche market (if the opposite is true, that shouldn’t be a market to go after anyway, profit for the profit sake is outdated)

- Look for any collaboration opportunities with scientists and researchers (but more understanding is required as to how the academic community incorporates data from the commercial sector? Data integrity for “real science”)

- Kickstarter community showed that the thought and the conservation tie-in can be rewarding in terms of sales and price

- On one hand, consumers are willing to pay more, but they also demand more for the companies to show that they’re more than just greenwashing. What if the Bird Buddy team also set up an (open) data effort and make the data available to platform like AWS Data Exchange? Noted, there is extra efforts involved for the product team to maintain and operate these data and seek data partnership, so any chance we can make it easy for them to manage the data?

- At the end of the day, how will these extra efforts be recognized? Do VCs recognize indirect ESG effort? How to factor the efforts for auxiliary sustainability benefits in the valuation calculation?

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Bird Buddy. This post is inspired by their recent KB campaign https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mybirdbuddy/bird-buddy-a-smart-bird-feeder and a AWS community project, Backyard Birder: https://aws.amazon.com/deeplens/community-projects/Backyard_Birder/

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