Hi, I’m trying to figure out which is the best category for my first post (apart from this one). My team is creating a minimally invasive wearable device to monitor blood biochemistry. Over time, we hope to get a lot of input from the QS community, because we want our product to be great! For now though, we just have a Google Forms survey with a dozen questions that we hope will help us figure out good sets of features to best meet users’ wants and needs. The survey doesn’t collect names or contact info (or household incomes). Is it OK if I include that link? If so, in which category?
Hi Rick - I think “Apps and Tools” is the right spot. Minimally invasive blood tests are very interesting to people on this forum, so you could probably get quite a bit of feedback. However, I don’t think a Google survey is going to be an effective way to elicit it. You are welcome to post the link, but from observing this done many times previously I predict only 1 to 5 responses. It’s just not rewarding to fill out anonymous surveys. However, if you want to talk blood tests, have concrete and well researched knowledge to share, and invite people to talk about their needs, you could probably get a conversation going. The important thing is to offer some of your own expertise, so that it is a reciprocal exchange.
-Gary
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Thank you for your input, @Agaricus – I will use “Apps and Tools” for posts about our device.
I appreciate your other thoughts, too. Filling out online polls is definitely no fun, even when they’re just a quick set of checkboxes with little or no typing. Clearly, an important aspect of my work will be to communicate the value of the un-fun stuff to the community. In my excitement about my project, I routinely forget that others don’t already share my enthusiasm, and that unless I tell them, they don’t know that our work is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
To your point about starting conversations, we recently started conducting detailed (20 - 45 minute) interviews of relevant domain experts and thought leaders. I have identified seven from the QS community (including you) that I likewise wish to interview. I have reached out to a couple of them (but not you yet) with mixed results. I started with those to whom I already had some connection. Maybe I need to re-prioritize that list! 
At the same time, we’re also running a much quicker (~5 minute) poll of potential customers that are not necessarily experts. Our goal is to assess the potential size and level of engagement of the market for this product. We’re asking the poll-takers about their health issues of greatest concern/interest, and trying to guess at their likelihood of actually using the product when it becomes available. We started with some university students, but now I would like to expand that polling to self-quantifiers, who will (I believe) find the product inherently interesting/exciting, and won’t care whether it’s the latest fad or fashion accessory. Because our poll asks a couple of potentially sensitive health questions, it is important that it be anonymous.
The way we’re going about this market research, and the questions we’re asking are based on training that my team is getting from the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program. The process is designed to limit the risk of us leading interviewees to say what we hope to hear. If our ideas sound good but will nonetheless not lead to a commercially viable product for self quantifiers, we need to know that sooner rather than later.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot to offer the QS community regarding blood testing. I do not (currently) test my blood because the tests available today wouldn’t tell me what I want to know. I do have some N=1 data about my HR while running a brutally hilly eight mile course this year vs seven years ago. Unfortunately, finding nice, quantifiable patterns in the data will require a lot of analysis that I don’t have time to do right now. 