25A What's Next?

Existing Market

I think the next thing is to make a ceiling fan version of the solar powered noise machine so that I can begin to offer installation as another revenue driver and consumers can save space in their rooms.

After talking with three individuals about what I should be thinking about, I got some really good suggestions. It was recommended that I expand my business even further into other sleep related products to make sure my business is offering all the best ways to ensure a customer is going to sleep. One individual even recommended a cooling pillow so individuals don't have to wake up and flip their pillow over to the cool side since both sides would stay cool throughout the night.

I was told however that they liked my ideas for expansion with the fan being offered as a ceiling fan and it was recommended that I even make a floor fan that could fit in the corner of a room so that it is just filling dead space.

My ideas for how to continue were well received so I definitely think that is an area I would want to go with my business in the future. Expanding into different models of fans such as ceilings and floor fans will give my consumers the options they need to fit my product into their lives so that they don't have to fit their lives into my product. These new models would also open up new revenue drivers for my business as well so that my business can continue to expand.

However, my consumers seemed to want me to expand my business into multiple aspects of sleep in order to ensure my customers the overall best sleep experience in all areas. I thought this was a really good idea and would love to make the cooling pillow into a feasible design. I also think it would be interesting to see an alarm clock design that doesn't disturb the sleep cycle and doesn't make consumers feel drowsy when they wake up as a result of being woken up from deep sleep so abruptly. I may be able to build a floor fan design that has built in lights that slowly power on as it approaches one's set wake up time so that consumers wake up naturally feeling refreshed, and not drowsy.

New Market

My existing plan is B2C, but I was thinking about how my business may also be B2B and I was thinking instead of selling directly to parents and households, I may be able to sell my product to hospitals for their baby wing.

Many nurses have to take care of a large number of sleeping babies so my product would help to relax these babies and simulate the sounds of the womb, which has been proven to help babies sleep better. This would help to overall simplify the job of the nurses if the babies are more relaxed.

After talking with one doctor and one nurse, I got a lot of good feedback on my product. They thought the idea of having something to relax the babies would be a good thing to have because many of the babies get riled up by babies nearby crying. The one concern they had was that having too many of these products may create too much noise that would make it harder for nurses to hear the babies crying. They recommended having a low volume crib side version of the product that could be heard only by the baby so as not to disrupt the work of the nurses.

I was originally thinking a hospital would need multiple products given how large the baby wing of many hospitals is and how many babies they have sleeping at once. However, I did not consider that the multiple products put together may make too much noise so a hospital would not be able to buy these products at the level I expected. This market would have a chain effect since hospitals are likely to copy the formats of other hospitals, so if my product gets in one, it gets in the rest, but it would be a lot of redesign and a much more higher difficulty level to get my product in even just one than anticipated.

This new market is not as attractive as my current market. It would take a lot of work and redesign to figure out how to make a crib side product that produces such a low volume. The hospitals would also only be purchasing a few products more than a household would do to the concern that many in the same room may get too loud so the profit increase would not be worth the cost of redesign.