Comments during the 3rd Presentation:

Perhaps we should have two canvas: short term one and long term one.

@3D http://www.stemcell.com/ – a Vancouver “service provider” to industry. Have you considered providing a “service”?

@3d I have a contact at Abbott pharmaceuticals if you’re interested. my email: bpeterson@lululemon.com

3d printer service bureau. Fabrication in France and US: http://www.sculpteo.com/en

Notes from the 3rd workshop:

Customer Discovery – accept that your initial view of the world was wrong! So need to sketch, test and explain to others then learn, pivot

Customer Validation is next! Repeatable! Focus! Build Scale!

Consider the difference between the official org chart and the real one that you need to find!

Map the org chart and roles, colour coding to categorize, try and characterize other similar orgs. Be able to explain it –> sales map

How does customer view of the world look? Where do you fit? What is balance of power for negotiation? Time, effort, $%

Selling is different in new categories and at different stages: check “Selling the Wheel” 2001 but good points http://bit.ly/XK302B

Your sales model & customer relationship plan will be different from anyone else – but there are common patterns to look for.

need to shock or disrupt the conventional expectations otherwise you risk becoming part of the “wallpaper” of industry norms

I think LLL may have the opposite of “don’t be an a-hole” problem – the over-comfortable “love-in” with loyalists.

Key Q for LLL” are you targeting LLL loyalists” to cross-sell a new product OR non-LLL buyers in a new category?

– Since last night, we have received five positive response to the meeting request. We tried two new things this week that seems worked better:

• Attaching a (one page) pdf file providing an image of our system, and some capabilities
• Sending the emails after working hours!

– Eoin from the Axon group connected us to someone in Life Science BC. Thanks Eoin!

– Added graduate students/researchers/post-docs to our contact list. These people won’t be buying the system, but are likely end users and an important part of the work flow. They may be best suited to explain “pains”, experimental procedures, and help us understand how our printer could fit into their process.

– Contacted more people for booking interviews

– Updated the one pager describing the overall project

– working on the problem presentation and sketching the work flow and purchase flow (probably wouldn’t be very accurate, but hopefully we get feedbacks at the interviews)

– Updated the agenda for the upcoming interviews:

• trying to understand the work flow and purchase flow of the potential customers of our platform
• getting their opinion on how do they think the 3D bioprinting technology would fit in their work flow
• understanding their preferred adoption model, for example specific questions such as, suitable product to purchase, affordable price range and …
• to estimate the potential for future collaboration or involvement in research grant application, collaborative projects,…

A picture taken after one of the interviews. Here is the E-postcard!

The workshop:

Some notes:

• testing the problem vs testing the product
• connecting to the people through our chain
• problem presentation is not a sale pitch!
• Listening skills, if you disagree, ask yourself “is it worth it?”
• Be the dumbest person in the room when you are interviewing
• make people feel like a star
• If you don’t respect them, they won’t tell you
• Don’;t say “I knew that”
• Sketch the plan of Record
• Channels, a customer might be a channel!
• What is the cost of each channel
• Don’t get too excited about a particular adoption model!

Comments From the other groups during our presentation:

• Are you trying to tap into the DIYBio movement, for your low end? http://diybio.org/
•  3D printing of biocompatible stents – huge market! demand already exists for stents! usually metal and/or drug coated! potential market!
•  Work with Shapeways or (as you mentioned) thingverse to start to include bio-models? They already have access to users you’re looking for. http://www.shapeways.com/
•  Kinda like http://grabcad.com/  for CAD software?
•  Bio – Life Science BC represents all the pharma/biotech companies in BC. I can pass you on a contact if you think that would be useful. (enfinlay from foosler)
• @3DPrinter – I had a co-op at BC Cancer Agency, might be able to get you a contact (axon_Eoin from axon)
• I talked to them, and they are going to connect us to some local tissue engineering company as well: incubone.com and navident.ca
•  Would the 3D bioprinting “surrounding” issues similar to those of 3D Printers like Rep Rap?

Plans for the next two weeks:

– Working on the work flow and purchasing work flow

– Sketching the plan of record

–  Submit disclosure to UILO office

–  Design and flesh out openVitro.com

– Test different adoption models

– Interviews:

• Start interviewing grad students and research staff as they are ultimately the end users.
• Keep contacting and interviewing UBC academic researchers
• Update the company lists, and start contacting and interviewing them. The ones that are in our network first.
• Updating the one pager, and follow up with the grant facilitator that we interviewed last week for finding more connections.

• 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