– 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

• 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!”