I’m leading a team that’s developing a minimally invasive wearable device to monitor blood biochemistry. We’ve won a National Science Foundation (NSF I-Corps) training grant to perform market research and determine an appropriate feature set before we begin developing our prototype. Specifically, we need to identify target markets by types and numbers of people who might ultimately buy the device, and which features they will most prefer.
At this point, it is too early for us to begin generating a database of potential customers but we have created a short, anonymous, multiple choice survey regarding certain aspects of your self-quantification motivation and interests, and we would be super appreciative if you would fill it out for us.
If you find our idea intriguing, please note that we can take this discussion one step further – if there is sufficient interest shown by responses to the survey, I will allocate some of our funds to sponsor a meetup in the Boston area. We can provide food and drinks (non-alcoholic only, as stipulated by our funding source), and you can tell us exactly what we need to do to earn your support.
I filled it out - I think you should allow selection of more than 3 reasons to track (at least for this group). Do let me know if you want to do something in Boston, it’s a very interesting topic.
Thanks for your suggestion @Agaricus, and thanks for filling out the form!
Per your suggestion, I expanded the number of reasons for tracking to seven, which is about half of those listed. This is to determine users’ highest priority reasons only, but as you pointed out, self quantifiers might be expected to have a larger number of high priority motivations than the broader public, for which this form was originally designed.
As indicated on the form, I am very open to sponsoring a meetup in the Boston area if there is sufficient interest. On the other hand, I can’t yet disclose a lot of details about our device design, and I’m hesitant to assemble a bunch of interested people only to ask them to talk to my team and me (although maybe they would actually be fine with that, IDK). I have some data that I do look forward to discussing, but I haven’t yet done any analysis of it, and it has nothing to do with our device (it’s heart rate data that I collected on a series of identical hill runs over a period of years).
Even from the very limited number of responses I have for each group, I see that the feedback from the QS community is distinctly different from (1) random people on the street, (2) competitive athletes, and (3) chronic illness patients that we have surveyed. That is in spite of the fact that some self quantifiers actually are competitive athletes or suffer from chronic illnesses. Then again, you’re probably not surprised by that finding. Nor am I. I felt it was important to evaluate however, because I’ve been trying to impress upon my colleagues and associates that the QS community can provide extremely valuable input regarding the design of our device, and that some may even want to serve as beta testers.