Human Engineering

I say "real" because in the past our product has just been us doing everything manually. Surprising how far that can take you. Now we have our own application that takes care of most of the heavy lifting!

Super excited to see how the market reacts. It's still an MVP, we've a lot more planned, but wanted to launch this as soon as possible.

This week we reached 100 people in our Facebook group CGM for Non-diabetics. The group has been an awesome tool for us to discuss with potential customers and get a feel for how they are using CGM technology.

Today we had our final one-on-one call with our first customer marking the end of her trial. We were a bit nervous about the call since a lot of things that could have gone wrong during the trial did.

To our surprise she was ecstatic about the service and ASKED OUR PERMISSION to refer her friends to us as customers as well. Crazy. Truly the type of early adopter that you want in the beginning.

Moral of the story: if the essence of your product/service is valuable to your user she will not care about the little details that are not perfect!

Never underestimate the value of content and community creation.

tldr: We slowly built a Facebook group to 60+ and got our first customers from launching there.

WE STARTED our Facebook page last year, long before we had any idea of what to build. We made it a point to share and create meaningful content around biohacking and we slowly but organically grew a following. Sharing content from our page to meaningful FB groups seemed to work the best. It's a good idea to join FB groups that are somehow related to the problem that you are trying to solve. It's great for market research as well.

THEN, earlier this year once we decided to narrow in and focus on continuous glucose monitoring we created CGM for Non-diabetics, our own FB group to facilitate conversations with other non-diabetic people testing out and trying CGM's to optimize their lifestyles. It's been incredible to see a slow but steady trickle of people just find their way to our group. Not really sure where they are coming from but I guess something must be resonating with them.

FEW DAYS prior we launched our "product" and only posted about it to our FB page and our FB group. Lo and behold we received a few applications from which today 2 converted into cold hard cash into our paypal account. Incredible feeling. Our margins are incredibly slim at the moment but its a good first step to getting the wheels turning and learning even more about how we can create value for people interested in CGM.

Getting paid to talk to users. That's the goal.

No point spending time and money building something nobody values right?

We can't code, and we aren't yet certain of where exactly we can create value for our niche. So what did we do?

We decided to launch our "product", which is really a service that ties together existing off-the-shelf products and couples it with our background knowledge in blood sugar monitoring.

This way we can:
A) gauge interest for non-diabetic blood sugar monitoring
B) if all goes well, start covering some of our costs
C) LEARN A TON from our users while doing so!!

Initially we knew we wanted to build something in biotech or wellness. There is just too many HUGE problems in healthcare at the moment to not be excited about solving them.

Our first hunch was to focus on the microbiome. We even built a tool that would help people find the right probiotics to take to help re-engineer their microbiome into better condition.

Light bulb moment for us was trying CGMs (continuous glucose monitors) for the first time. The instant feedback of seeing your blood sugar in real time was addicting.

At that moment we knew we had to pivot. The scientific understanding of the microbiome is far too early and building a feedback loop for the microbiome is extremely hard. Microbiome testing is expensive and take weeks if not months.

CGMs on the other hand are now cheap enough for non-diabetic use, and all that's needed is a CGM + an NFC enabled smartphone.