IEOR 185 Private Blog

The entrepreneurial journey this semester has been quite a ride so far. At the beginning of the semester, we started out by focusing on the CRISPR patent before jumping towards wearables, which we have been working on for quite some time now. Before taking this class, I had liked to believe that the journey of building a startup might have been quite formulaic: you have an idea, you get funding, you build your company, you succeed. After the last few months, it's quite obvious that there is in fact no formula for success. The only thing that is constant in the startup process is the human factor - you. As long as you keep working as hard as possible, you may or may not get funding, your product could be a success or a flop, your company may fail or live, but you will unequivocally be more equipped for the future. Though your company may not survive every hurdle you put yourselves through, you will, and I think that's what people mean when they say that startup founders must ...

This week, we conducted a lot of market research regarding our product and found out some good and bad news in our field. On one hand, we have received lots of valuable information from UC Davis that allows us to really get into the finer points of developing our product, but on the other hand, we have found out that there are some existing companies in this field that do similar work. One of the companies that we are particularly worried about is Empatica. They develop a wristband that uses similar sensors as our wearable to measure emotions (note their name - empathy). However, while we may target Autism or the general population, Empatica targets patients with epilepsy specifically. As such, though our products are similar, it is possible we could outmaneuver Empatica by focusing on a different market or by championing the technology for the public at large. In order to become presentation-ready, I think we need to focus on how our company is different from the rest of the comp...

For this blog post, we have been asked to answer the question: What keeps us up at night regarding our project? I think the factor that keeps me up the most at night regarding our project is how to properly go to market with our product. As our patent relates to Autism, one of the paths we can take is to market the wearable towards individuals with ASD. One of the problems with this path is that it severely limits our potential market base, and also may begin to stigmatize our product. This would be quite unfortunate, as the purpose of our product is to help people understand their emotions, not to make them feel cornered into a medical prognosis. An alternative that we have discussed is making the product available for children with ASD in schools. While this does in fact limit our market further, the smallness of this market may serve to help us as it makes it easier for us to establish milestones and quickly expand to corner the entire market. Other options that we have discuss...