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Quartzy (YC S11) Brings Order To Science Lab Supply Cabinets
- seto28 15y agoYC S11
- thankuz 15y agoUpdated, thanks!
- prayag 15y agoNow here's a company that's solving a real problem. Great going guys.
- jayzee 15y agoThanks! The challenge that we have is to find a way to reach these scientists. They rarely, if ever, read techcrunch or hacker news and the standard publications in that space have a long publication cycle. Ideas to reach out to life-science researchers welcome! One guerilla thing we did last week was to get coffee sleeves with "Quartzy, Caffeine for you Lab". We went to the coffee shop near the research buildings at Stanford and put in these sleeves next to the milk and sugar!:)
- thankuz 15y agoI would start by contacting major Universities in my area, or in the country, that are known for their life-science programs. Many scientists who graduate stay and work for a few years at their U, so it may be a good place to start. You may even consider talking to the professors directly. Also, maybe ask around and join their groups, forums, discussions, or any place you can go to reach your target market.
- anandkulkarni 15y agoYou want grad student mailing lists. Lab managers are often the unhappiest and lowest-ranked (or longest-lived) grad students. They'll love what you do. A simple email to their listserve and they'll use you right away. Sweeten the announcement of your service with something like a "messiest lab cabinet" contest for lab students to photograph their lab cabinet and send it in. The winners get something free, and you get tons of publicity for the product. Last: advertise on phdcomics.com. If there's one forum that reaches every single graduate student in the country, it's PhD Comics.
- prayag 15y agoThe only problem is that university professors are just hard to sell to. If they can solve that problem, its a product with huge value.
- impendia 15y agoTrue, but if their grad students tell them "If you buy this product, I will have more time to get real work done", then they would probably be willing to dip into their grants.
- jayzee 15y agoJust to be clear, Quartzy is free for scientists to use. We want to close the gap between suppliers/manufacturers and scientists. So we are making money by hosting catalogs, running deals etc. Basically charging suppliers who have deep pockets instead of the scientists who are always strapped for resources.
- jayzee 15y agoGreat ideas. Esp. phdcomics! Will try it out and report back in a blog post on what effect it has.
- aorshan 15y agoHave you considered taking out ads in popular research magazines? Everybody reads Nature, and I'm sure a well written ad would do wonders for you guys. Love the idea by the way. As a sciences student I totally see how useful this can be in labs.
- stevenbedrick 15y agoConferences (with swag, e.g. your coffee sleeves), mailing lists, Facebook. We all know how many hours per week grad students spend on Facebook... :-D
- kayhi 15y agoHey jayzee, I actually work on a start up in this space with a slightly different approach - aggregating the best deals on supplies directly from vendors. If you ever want to bounce ideas around feel free to contact me (email in profile).
- itodd 15y agoYou reached us through hacker news. I'm a software engineer (cbio now, formerly part of the operations team) at a biotech. I forwarded a link to our lab manager and COO. We have solved order management using a google form and google spreadsheet. resource management using a whiteboard or google calendar (one or the other seems to work depending on the group). We are currently looking to solve protocol management.
- malnourish 15y agoYou may want to check out http://reddit.com/r/askscience http://reddit.com/r/askscience and target advertisements to it. It seems that many researches frequent that subreddit.
- anandkulkarni 15y agoVery interesting! The real challenge for Jayant and Adam will be getting their tendrils deep into existing sales processes in labs. It's a sector that's prime for disruption - much like Octopart before them, these guys are primed to disrupt a messy space. Looking forward to recommending it to the local labs.
- nabraham 15y agoAwesome job Dr. J!
- arkitaip 15y agoLove the fact that you can try the demo account without paying or even signing up.
- jayzee 15y agoThanks! If you poke around the demo account you will see that Charles Darwin has a dissection kit in his inventory and Mendel talks about his love for peas in his profile: http://sandbox.quartzy.com/profiles/gregor123 http://sandbox.quartzy.com/profiles/gregor123 We spent way more time that we should have in making those fake profiles in the sandbox for Curie, Mendel, TH Morgan and others!
- pkamb 15y agoI'm interested in knowing how the "Science is hard. Quartzy is easy." widget at the bottom is working for you. Do people know to click that? I only figured it out after attempting to scroll down in vain several times. Why not just go with a long scrollable page?
- jayzee 15y agoGood question. We were inspired by Tumblr. We are tracking how effective the widget at the bottom is... Will report back. Our old page was: www.quartzy.com/current/ so I would say that everything from there is an improvement :)
- someone13 15y agoA startup solving a practical problem, in a niche that nobody has really dealt with before? I call that a recipe for success if I ever saw one. Best of luck, guys!
- physcab 15y agoSome brief thoughts from a researcher turned programmer. 1) At first glance, I'm having trouble discerning what this might be used for or who its targeted to. Every discipline has different terminology, so I imagine what might work for Chemists might not work for Engineers. In our lab, we didn't have very many chemicals, but we had certain instruments setup with finite lifetime values. 2) Also at first glance, I thought this was a lab notebook replacement or supplement. Now that would have been awesome. Going back over my _many_ pages of notes over the years was a pain in the ass, especially when it came down to writing proposals and papers. I'm sure there is a huge opportunity in digitizing this to make lab notes searchable, reference-able, more organized, and even more secure. 3) To reach students, I would suggest to hitting up large conferences. If you're based in SF you're in luck because most of the big conferences my colleagues and I attended were in SF, NY, or Boston.
- jayzee 15y agohmm... Interesting. Well we basically helps groups manage their orders and inventories, in decentralized settings like research labs. We started targeting life-science researchers, given our background, but we have seen some interesting uptake in unexpected verticals. For example, the Traffic Directorate for the City of London is using Quartzy for managing their assets. So we decided to go with more general copy but it is important to be on message and we will tweak it to be more clear about who could benefit.
- stevenbedrick 15y agoRe: point #2: An electronic lab notebook system (that researchers will actually use) is, literally, the holy grail of laboratory informatics. This particular grail sits at the end of a road littered with the corpses of dozens of failed attempts; all either too complex, too simple, too hard to use, not generic enough, too generic, etc. etc. etc. Someday, somebody'll figure out how to do it, and when they do, it'll be amazing... but I'm not placing any bets on when it might happen.
- jayzee 15y agoYup. We feel the same way. Electronic Lab Notebooks are a daunting undertaking and we decided to tackle a problem that we knew we could make a dent in the first pass.
- yellowbkpk 15y agoMy wife is a lab manager and says "this won't work because my lab won't take the time to walk to a computer and enter information when they want to use a chemical."
- mbreese 15y agoI setup a similar app for my lab when I was starting my PhD. It worked for a while because it was the easiest way to generate a purchase order. But over time, it became harder and harder to get people to keep using it, let along keep things up to date. It's all about how to keep things simple and to make the system easier to use than what they use now, which is likely nothing. Well, that and I never wanted anyone else touching my enzymes. Anyone that ventured into my enzyme box without telling me was harshly dealt with. I just realized that the above statement sounds strange if you're not a life sciences researcher... :)
- carbocation 15y agoI'm onboard. You know that group that "discovered" that chronic fatigue was caused by retroviruses? And how that discovery was later shown to most likely have been due to contamination of their reagents? That's the sort of shit that you fear when doing research. Although of course you avoid sharing not because of that, but because others didn't share the same superstitions when handling the reagents. :)
- jayzee 15y agoWe are busy working on an iphone app in 3 weeks and then an android app in a month. Its the most requested feature so your wife is absolutely right that some people may not want to walk to a comp to enter this stuff. The plan is to then integrate with a company like "red laser" so you can just scan the stuff into your inventory. That would be cool!
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- billswift 15y ago
- jasonz 15y agoQuartzy should look into helping labs sell used lab equipment. It's hard to find a lab that doesn't have some good, functioning lab equipment that is no longer being used. They could set up an exchange that allows the trade or sale of equipment to other labs.
- jayzee 15y agoReally good point. I have often wandered the corridors in research labs seeing equipment just lying there collecting dust. I suspect that there will be issues around selling stuff but it is something that we are definitely looking into. Once you have an engaged user base there are a few directions we could take this in.
- jasonz 15y agoYeah it might be tricky to sell equipment, although maybe between labs at the same institution might work. An interesting alternative might be "AirBnb" for lab equipment - renting out the unused time.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago>"AirBnb" for lab equipment - renting out the unused time // I'd think it would go more like renting a lab with the right equipment, though that might be even harder to organise politically. Perhaps you could usher in a new era of cross-lab cooperation and scientific misciblity ...
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- pbhjpbhj 15y agoHow about having a sticker printer print out QR codes to attach to stuff, then a smart phone could be used to check things in/out? Mind you a lot of stuff has accession [bar]codes that could may be be used for that.