• Scheduled two meetings/interviews for tomorrow
• Discussed and agreed on an organized way to update the blog
• Registered our website: openvitro.com
• Talked to a senior biology lab manager – he introduced us to his boss, but an in-person meeting has yet to be arranged – he expressed his own interest in printed tissues and the growing interest within the greater academic community

– The day started with making a list for the phone calls, and a list for the Emailing.

– Called several UBC professors in biology, pharmacy, physiology to schedule a meeting. Most of them didn’t answer. Will try again in the morning, and may yet get replies to voice mail.

– We prepared an Email to be sent to the potential researchers at UBC, and sent it to 10 people. still waiting for replies to book a meeting.

– Started contacting our collaborators at CDRD to get introduced to the potential researchers.

– Contacted two of the groups that we have been already in contact, and asked to have a meeting this week. Hopefully, we will get introduced to new colleagues through them.

– Assigned tasks and responsibilities for preparing the disclosure form, and the Friday workshop: Updating the SAM/TAM, getting to know our competitors, patent review, getting to know other researchers and players of the field, finding future applications, disadvantages and limitations of our system, and how to overcome them

• Disclosure to UILO, and discussing the appropriate level of disclosure
• IP differentiation: What are the main competitors? what are the specs for their system? What would be great improvement to their systems? How would our system .
• Customer interviews: Academic researchers as well as the companies.
• Communicating with IRAP
• Website names and company names

Our mentors are Andre Marzili and Dylan Gunn. Our first meeting with them could have not been better. Here are some notes:

Short term:

• Our target customer segment should be proportional to our SAM/TAM estimates.
• We should pursue both companies and researchers as the early adopters.
• Finding out how the IP is differentiated, and how to protect it.
• Having  a customer in the company could be beneficial.
• Customer interviews: what features would you like? Would you buy it if we have it ready? How much would you pay for it?
• Contacting the users of other bioprinters and interviewing them about the shortcoming of the systems that they have purchased.
• Market size estimate: using web of science to identify the main authors of the field, and trying to interview them, and have them as lead clients.
• Recommendation for contacting some of the people from our list
• Visiting Boreal Genomics

Long term:

• Being on campus and ease of access to the facilities
• Keeping things in the lab as long as possible
• Staying self/government funded as long as possible
• SR&ED
• IRAP: They do free market research in addition to other resources. Andre could help with the introduction.

Also some very memorable quotes from Andre:

“We can solve all the technical problems. What we can’t solve is the customers not buying the device.”

“That sounds like a great idea is not the same as we would pay 50K for it!” 

We are introduced to our mentors, and scheduled the meeting with them on Thursday. We thought before going to the meeting, we should make an agenda to get the most out of it. We thought although mentors have received our slides, they might not have had a chance to go through them. So here is our agenda:

1-     To have a short presentation for them (the same as the Friday one), and particularly get their feedbacks on the value proposition and customer segment parts of our canvas.

2-      Maybe check our initial list of potential customers with them, and see if they can connect us with any of them.

3-      Discuss our strategies that we discussed on the  Monday meeting regarding how to make the list, how to approach the customers, and how to interview them. Particularly, get their feedbacks on our strategy to target academic researchers as “early adopters”.

4-      For the contacting potential customers, should we target individual researchers (bottom to top) in the organizations like CDRD and BC Cancer agency, or start lobbing from the administration level (top to bottom).

5-     People will be more receptive if we can contact them through the mentors than if we ‘cold-call’..

6-      The importance of the patent submission, and their experience with that regard.

Just discovered some fantastic bio-tech networking events!

http://www.thesbn.ca/Events/Events%202012-2013/networking-night-29Jan13

http://www.thesbn.ca/Events/Events%202012-2013/biotech-expo-2013#timeloc

http://www.techvision.com/bpn/program/

The goal for the next two weeks: “interviewing 10 potential customers”

Agenda:

Creating potential customer list: Our customer segments at the moment are the pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers. Since each one of these segments requires their own communication strategy, we thought perhaps we should focus on one of them for the next two weeks.

Approaching the customer: We need to come up with a strategy for approaching these potential customers. The Email seems to be the most convenient way. However, considering the period of two weeks, people might not get back to us in time. So we might need to find some other ways to approach people. On that note, accessing the research staff, postdocs and grad students might be easier, however, most of the times they are not the people who make the final decision on purchasing a device. If we agree on the Email, we have to decide what to put in the Email to get them excited and increase our chance of getting the interviews.

Customer meeting agenda: Obviously, we need to have a very clear agenda for our meetings. Creating a questionnaire could be an option. We should also decide on the tools that we are going to use (powerpoint, sketches, lab visits,…). To provide some context, and since we don’t have a publication yet, it might be helpful to have a collection of scientific articles on the 3D tissue cultures.

Another issue is that although we are targeting UBC researchers in the next two weeks, we need to develop a plan for getting a interviews with academics outside UBC, and pharma companies. Setting up some of these interviews might need more time that two weeks. Therefore, we need to plan it in advance, and have an ongoing process for it.

Disclosure: At this stage we are not sure what level of disclosure is appropriate as we are restricted by UBC policies.

Notes from the meeting:

• – As we have better access to “academic researchers at UBC”, and we are more experienced in communicating with our colleagues, we decided to start with them. Sheng and Ali were assigned to crate a list of researchers in the related field at UBC.
• – We should create a one pager to have with us at the interviews, send with our email, and post on our website. Simon will take care of the one pager.
• – The most important issue is the disclosure, and as long as we have not submitted the invention disclosure form to UBC, we will be limited in our customer discovery.
• – As recommended by UILO, we have to start doing a patent search to avoid infringing. Sheng, Simon and Tamer were assigned to do a patent search in the related topics.
• -We also decided to choose a name for the company and the website. Everyone was assigned to send their top 5 candidates.