TestYourWaterForLead.com
Modernizing how citizens test their drinking water for a toxic element with no safe levels of consumption.
As a project during my sabbatical year of 2017, a friend and former colleague of mine (@ZacharyCohn) and I went out to test a business idea.
We ran lean, beginning with a hypothesis:
As awareness of the problem grows, people will increasingly demand a modern user-friendly way to test their home drinking water for lead.
So there were two things to test: The awareness and the "modern user-friendly" demand. The latter was built on our own experiences trying to test our water for lead. It's really complicated, involves city governments, utilities, scientific jargon, and is different in every county in America.
- We set up a blue-apron like service:
- We mail you an empty bottle.
- You fill the bottle and send it back.
- We email you results and recommendations.
This wasn't supposed to be the most "innovative" solution with the most advanced cutting edge technologies. It was meant to be the most obvious and practical solution to a problem that few others seemed to be paying attention to.
We ran this through our discovery and early testing phases. We interviewed various people, focusing on first-time parents who lived in communities with local headlines highlighting lead problems in their area. We ran ads and monitored user-traffic. We adjusted on the fly with each insight gained.
We partnered with a laboratory in Virginia who offered both excellent customer service as well as a reasonable price for testing water samples.
We sold a number of products (about 50), helped a number of them figure out how to address their water issues, and figured out some fundamentals in business, shipping, branding, and messaging.
We discovered a couple problems: One is issue is not a burning one right now for most people. And thus advertising, baring another Flint-like situation, was going to cost more than we anticipated. This dramatically increased our CAC (customer acquisition costs), reduced the barely viable margins to negative numbers even at higher volumes.
The other problems we found were on our side of the equation: We had bootstrapped ourselves to this point. We were sort of at a go-big or go-home moment, and we decided we weren't set up well for success. We lived in different cities at the time, and we knew that with a logistics heavy company, we'd need to be co-located. Plus, there were a few other direct competitors that were about a year ahead of us (though, naturally, we found flaws in each of their approaches.)
Entrepreneurship + Public Health
In this effort, I was able to really put into practice the startup methodologies that I deployed and taught within a government environment. It turns out: The principles hold true! I have a much more nuanced understanding of the phrases Human-Centered Design and Lean Startup and other buzzwords that often represent these principles.
This experience also gave me incredible exposure to a significant problem: Our water infrastructure is, like the rest of the nation's infrastructure, aging. Only most of this infrastructure is underground, out of sight.
As problems resulting from decades of under-funding gain more and more attention, we'll need smart people to build sustainable and focused solutions for specific populations.
The intersection of these worlds is where I hope to continue to spend more time.
A 23andMe for your home
This, actually, was the big idea. Beyond just testing your water for lead, could you test your home for everything?
Water: There are many things beyond just H2O in our water. From heavy metals, like lead and cadmium, to trace pharmaceuticals and industry run-off.
Soil: Heavy metals, including lead, are an issue but also phosphates and other elements can tell you more about your soil quality which can be helpful if you want to grow food. You are what you eat. And you eat the environment that your food grows in.
Air: From mold that may be hiding in air conditioners to dust hanging out in old filtersto VOCs that emanate from furniture. It's invisible but it's there and impacts our health.
I still think this is a really important idea. Our health is driven in large part by our environment. And the environment in which we spend the most time is our home.
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