The final Pitch

We're ready for the pitch! We are working in the last details and are excited to present the Tuesday. See you soon!

The Pitch Prep

We have completed the following so far:

• Patent explanation and understand
• Basic pitch presentation
• Financials
• Business model and sales strategy

This week we focused on finalizing our business plan, creating our P&L statements and refurbishing our pitch to create a bigger impact on the investors. After the presentation of investor psychology this week, we as a team realized that it was much more than completed the set of tasks assigned to us. Rather, we needed to target our product to “wow” them, not logically, but excite them for something big.

Our session with Rick

During our short catch-up with Rick, we dramatically changed our presentation. While discussing our strategy with him, he suggested that dramatization was missing. After all, if you’ve been following so far, our technology allows a breakthrough that revolutionizes the way smart devices are worked. In a more casual and science-fiction tone, it allows you to ‘read minds’. He suggested we present the investors with a movie scene, to really showcase the science-fiction nature of our project and how it’s not so much of “fiction” anymore. Referring to X-Men, he gave us the idea of showing a clip of Professor X trying out Cerebro for the first time - a technology that allows him to mentally connect with our mutants. It sounded bizarre at first, but we realized that it would capture the investors attention and allow us to build a rapport with them. After this, we all got thinking about how we need to market this product to truly distinguish its capabilities.

Distribution

Primarily, we were thinking of selling our technology online or through other retailers of such products, however during a team meeting, we noted that our technology needs to stand unique. If we sell with other smart devices, we don’t distinguish it as something revolutionary that needs to have a place of itself. So from B2B2C to evolved into B2C. Even though that sounds extensive, that’s how we must fascinate our consumer base. Hence, we decided to instead set up distribution centres in populated cities that allow an interactive experience with our product. This is similar to VR technology showcased in Microsoft in their store in Westfield Mall, San Francisco. We hoped to start showcasing in Silicon Valley and gradually extend to Dallas, New York, Seattle, etc. As our product gains traction and the recognition it needs, we will begin online sales through pre-order. Essentially, it’s all about creating the hype.

P&L

We struggled to understand the requirement of financials during the pitch. How much do we talk about it? How do we ensure to keep the investors engrossed while we do? How deep should we go in our analysis of profit and loss? After a short email interaction with Rick, we realized we were getting ahead of ourselves as the requirements of this were more basic than we expected. We were able to create a narration of how our product would evolve, our break even timing, and our ask for the investors.

Now, we are working more closely to create a timeline for how we expect to see our business grow and when the investors can expect a return. It’s been challenging to try and balancing something realistic but also something that’s inviting an investment. Additionally, we’re working on creating a pseudo-prototype to allow us to have a physical object to showcase. We were advised that having the device in front would make the vision much more realistic and allow interaction with our product. We will keep you updated on how this develops.

Understanding our Business

Up to this point, this is what we have been able to do

• Understand the patent.
• Play with different business model ideas.
• Play about different potential products that could be done with the patent.
• Do market research through surveys and interviews.

This week we focus in consolidating this knowledge and focused our energy on the product we want to offer. We were able to structure all of this to rebuild our business model canvas and create the draft of our first pitch. 

During a long time we considered working B2B2C, but we finally decided going B2C. We're planning to offer the Decode Device directly to our customer through our own store.

Key Partners

A key point of the product is also the relationships with developers as partners. As Amazon Alexa, we consider it is a good opportunity to create an easy to use API that allows other developers to add the capacities of the Decode Device. This would allow other companies to integrate their apps with the Decode Device. Why would they do that? We're offering a new way of interacting with the devices. We're offering huge value to the users, and many companies would be able to increase their value with this.  Another key partner would be a manufacturing company that would help scaling the production. Other potential partners are game development studios.

Value Proposition

We're offering a novel way of human-computer interaction. We allow a hands-free way of controlling the devices through an experience in which all your data is private. 

Customer Relationships

• Privacy. We want to offer a private experience. We need to develop user-centric privacy policies. We would also need to separate employees from customer data.
• 24/7 Technical support related to the device.
• Allow developers to create their own capacities using the API.

Why did we structure it like this?

Doing our market research we found a lot of discomfort with the current non-touch technologies and many cases in which touch-based technology should not be used. Even if we present an error-free device that allows to interact with your devices in a new way, privacy is a main issue in the market segment.

Other than that, we achieved our objective of doing the first draft of our pitch. We need to refine a lot of it, but we expect to have something interesting for next week!

Interview and Surveys Analysis

At this point we have done 15 interviews and over 100 survey responses.

Survey Analysis

We tried to did a representative survey to be able gather information from different segments of the population. The objective of doing the surveys is to understand the concerns of our market and try to make it more specific.

Demographics 
Most of the people that we surveyed were persons between 20 and 51 years old. In our information, we have a gap in the group between 25 and 30 years.

Age Range	Total
Unwilling to share	4.80%
Under 15 years old	0%
15-20 years old	1%
20-24 years old	32.70%
25-30 years old	1%
31-40 years old	14.40%
41-50 years old	30.80%
51 years old or olde	15.40%

The information we gathered was representative of the people we were searching. We should try to find more people in the 25-30 years old range to survey them, but we still consider this being a good numbers. Half of the persons we surveyed identified themselves as employed. There is also a good amount of students and self-employed. The information we gathered was from people in different ranges. The amount of people using wearables is around 20%. People using other devices like smart glasses, smart cars, and smart houses cover over 15% of the population we surveyed. This is the people that would be more interested in using non-traditional devices like the one we're presenting with our patent.

Experience with Other Technologies

We surveyed about the experiences with non-traditional technologies. This allowed us to understand which issues the customers face when dealing with technologies that are not phones, tablets or computers. Around 40% of the people we surveyed had experiences with gesture technology. In the same way, around 40% of the people prefer to use voice than touch technologies. Also, even if we interviewed people from different demographics, 50% of our representative sample use entertainment technologies daily.

We asked about their issues when they dealt with voice technologies, and this are the ones that predominated:

• Not understanding, normally due to the accent. 
• Poor support for other languages.
• Noise interference. 
• Static content. People don't feel this technologies are intelligent or offer them something to use them constantly. 

We asked about their issues when they dealt with touch-based technologies. A lot of people mentioned the lack of problems, but some of the problems that were mentioned are:

• Physical problems to use it: Wet hands, worried about dropping it, using gloves, etc. 
• Hard to multitask. It could be faster just to dictate.
• Can be slow. 
• Bad precision. 

We also asked if people would feel comfortable in using brain signals to control their applications. Surprisingly, 65.4% of the people answered with an affirmative answer. We asked about which problems they would foresee, and this were the problems mentioned:

• Misinterpretation.
• Ethical and privacy problems.
• The device to be used. People were worried about using an uncomfortable headset.
• Lack of control of what is being done.

Interview Analysis.

We interviewed a total of 15 persons in the 19-25 years old range. Part of the interview was focused in asking about the apps they normally use and which type of games they play. This is a way of being able to further understanding our users and their daily life. We asked about their opinions about voice-controlled technologies. Some of the issues mentioned were similar to the ones in the surveys, but some of the persons interviewed feel positive about them.

• Prefer touch technologies. 
• Voice-based technologies don't understand certain accents. 
• It is better when you don't want to use your hands, offers accessibility. 
• More efficient procedures and easier multitasking.

We then asked if their phones felt limited compared to other gaming consoles. The opinions varied a lot.

• Gaming is limited in phones, specially because size of screen.
• Lack of input options.
• It is better in the phones because you can do other things at the same time.

The next question was related to the inconvenience of using a phone in certain situations: "In which situations (for any kind of app) do you feel it’s an inconvenience to be using your phone/having it out ? (Example: Being at a dangerous place and being afraid to take your expensive phone out to call an Uber)". The next situations came to the conversation:

• Situations in bank.
• Walking at night.
• When someone says contact information, it is tedious to take the phone out.
• When driving to navigate and when walking or in the gym.

To solve this situations, most of them simply don't use the phones or use basic voice commands. People also mentioned inconvenient things about their phones like battery, unlocking the phones, screen too big, how limited the touch screens can be, and risks related to damaging the device. 

The second part of the interview was focused in understanding the interaction between the users and the technologies. We asked them to walk us through the last time they interacted with a non-touch technology. We also asked if they felt that the innovation in mobile or laptop tech has stunted, which most answered affirmatively. People also have a lot of confidence in the future of virtual reality tech.

After this, we told the idea of the project to the persons being interviewed and asked them about their opinion. The major concern mentioned is the difficulty of using it. A lot of things go through our minds, and people, even if they're really interested in learning more, are worried that it won't work. Another thing that worries the persons we interviewed was that you cannot control thoughts in the same way that you can control voice.

This was just a small part of all the data we gathered. Having this info is great, because now we understand much better how our potential customers think. We also have a better understanding of what issues we'll have to deal to be able to use our project and penetrate in the market.

Week 8

Our team is called Decode and we are currently working on a patent which uses ECoG technology to measure activity electrodes in the brain and translate thoughts or mumbled speech into writing. This patented technology, which can be paired with an iPhone or other electronic devices has many potential applications. The three broad categories we identified and chose to explore were neuroprosthetics, speech translation for those with speech disabilities, and alternative entertainment uses (such as for video games or phone applications).

Our team was split between these three potential routes for the patent and initially wanted to pursue all of them rather than narrowing down on one customer segment.
Therefore, we in the beginning stages of this project, we incorporated all three of these uses when sizing our market rather. However, what we learned from this is that failing to specialize and capture one market not only made our job more difficult, but made our product less effective. This is because our markets were simply too different. For example, the entertainment market, we would need to use the patent technology to develop an external device which could be paired with iPhones and video game consoles. This device would allow people to control phone apps and video games with their minds. On the other hand, for the purpose of speech disorders, we were looking into the patent’s implanted technology, rather than an external device, since this was proven to be the most effective ECoG method for the purpose. We realized from this distinction that it made no sense to try to develop a company catering to both of these markets, because this would require two vastly different products with very different needs.

Therefore, now we are focusing on trying to pick a specific route to pursue. The issues we have with this are that we are unsure which market would be most profitable. Our team is very interested in working on the speech disorders technology. However, on concern we have about this route is whether customers would be willing to get an invasive procedure done (especially because this is a new technology). We are also unsure how to collect data and interview customers to determine the answers to these type of questions, because this would require interviewing patients with speech disorders and/or their families. Ultimately, we worry that our lack of expertise in the medical field would make it too difficult to pursue. Similarly, the entertainment market route also has its complications. While the entertainment industry is one of the largest markets in sheer size, it is also very saturated. We are unsure how effective our product would be as it is contingent upon partnering with big companies and apps to penetrate the market.

As for now, we are still researching the pros and cons of each of these markets. We are going to continue with customer interviews and hopefully find answers to some of our concerns before finalizing which path we will pursue.

- Originally sent March 9th

Week 10

What did you want to do?

We wanted to do a higher number of surveys and interviews. Gathering this additional data will allow to do further analysis and understand our market needs and concerns better. Having this information will allow us to focus the MVP and test it with a specific group.

What did you learn? Issues?

We were able to to do 14 interviews and over a hundred surveys. We asked about the people's opinion about gesture touch technologies, and most of them prefer touch based technologies. The biggest concerns about brain signals applications are related to ethical issues and misinterpretations. A lot of the people surveyed did not know much about this kind of applications, which makes it clear that we're breaking into a new market. To introduce this project in the world, we would need to invest in marketing and give a really specific focus to this project. We explained our idea to the people during the interviews. Some of them had concerns about how this would work and which would be its limitations, but most of them showed a lot of interest.

What are you going to do?

We need to carefully analyze the data we gather and see which would be our most important market.

Week 9 Post

What did you want to do?

We wanted to narrow down our focus onto a single market, choosing between entertainment and medical approach for our brain signal patent


What did you learn? Issues?

Through communication with another group, which talked to the patent holder, we learnt that the technology is still growing, with limited accuracy and speed currently. It was estimated that the medical approach for the technology might take more than 5 years to be ready


What are you going to do?

Our group decided to focus on the entertainment approach. We have drafted up surveys and interviews to gain a better understanding of the market.

- This was originally sent March 15th