Ask HN: How to Bring a Pneumometer to Market?
Imagine that you’d just invented the medical thermometer, in a world where they don’t exist. People feel foreheads to check fevers. How do you go from there to a world where every home has a thermometer?

That’s my company’s challenge. Except our wearable device doesn't measure temperature, it measures real-world breathing during normal daily activities. You can see it on my prelaunch page at https://pneumo.breathtechnologies.com/. We do it without tubes, masks, or restrictions to your motion. Now we’re trying to bring it to market. I’m looking for ideas on everything from pricing to marketing.

We’ve looked into a Kickstarter. Test ads for our pre-marketing strategy are about $5/lead - success requires half that. If we can’t optimize in a week, we should wait until next year to avoid holidays.

Test ads were far more successful with older people. We should be able to sell directly to people over 55. But setting up a production line wouldn’t leave us with much runway.

Top specialists told us that they wanted it for everything from ER patients, to diagnosing asthma. But our self-funding won’t cover a class 1 FDA certification. I have no experience with VCs. Who do we talk to? What should we ask for? How long will this take?

Our vision lets consumers tie our device to an open data platform for research and app development. This could enable apps that detect everything from loss of emotional control, to heart attacks. But how do we get third parties interested?

Scientists have discovered that breath is more important than they thought. How can we help the public realize this? I tried cataloging current research at https://breathtechnologies.com/research/. My attempt was incomplete, unorganized, and quickly got out of date. Can we find volunteers for an open source effort?

That’s where we are. How did we get here?

It started with articles like https://www.escardio.org/The-ESC/Press-Office/Press-releases/Shortness-of-breath-heralds-worse-survival-than-chest-pain-for-heart-attack-patients. Breathing problems can predict a fatal cardiac event?!? I found it hard to believe but the source is impeccable.

There is a lot of new research coming out about the importance of breath. It is beyond complex. Each organ is connected with respiration through multiple interactions. So your whole body is impacted by breathing problems. Also, our brains wire emotion and breath together. So you can both monitor and change how you feel through your breath.

I found lots of content about pieces of this, but nobody was tying it together. For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBkGDIeQwXo shows how breathing techniques can help treat COVID. That’s one of hundreds of content creators I’ve found online. They are divided into lots of communities that know little about each other.

Throughout, the difficulty of measuring breath in the real world kept being cited as a problem. So medicine doesn't act on what science knows. And further research is slowed.

Could a device help? My idea was the same as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37538028 - just put an accelerometer on your body. A proof of concept took 3 weeks. It worked! But only if I did nothing but lie still and breathe.

I talked it over with a good friend. We decided to go for it. She quit her job as a senior VP at a bank. I brought my life savings. I’ve been on a crazy learning curve ever since.

Our idea kept checking out. Doctors, psychologists, athletic coaches - we didn’t have to sell them. Instead they sold us on new ways to use our device! Clearly there is a market.

Even IBM said that they believed in us. They put us in their Partner Plus program, and lined up further help when we’re ready. We even had two companies try to copy us. We consider that validation, not a concern.

I will be checking back on this discussion. My email is in my profile. But I’m busy, so please be understanding if I’m slow responding.

Thanks for reading,
Aaron