Aerodrop was an initiative where we gave away 100 Aerolamp Devkits: Far-UVC lamps that kill germs.
Background
Timeline
- ???: Aerolamp founded?
- ???: ACX Grants award to Aerolamp
- ???: Far-UV cabal meeting
- Jan 17: ACX Grantees meetup, ran plan by Scott
- Jan ???: Aerodrop proposal written
- Jan 24-25: Aerodrop website built, pinged to Scott
- Jan 25: ACX posted about it
- Jan 26:
- Jan 27: Hit 100 people
- Jan 29 ?: Selection emails went out
- ? First lamp shipped
What went well
- Was a lot of fun to execute on, seemed meaningful
- Executed pretty quickly, from conception to launch to fulfillment
- Done pretty cheaply
- Some minimum viable demand shown, with 250+ requests for lamps
- Very proud of the website & placard design
What could have gone better
- Sold more Aerolamps
- Finished even faster
- Raised more money to do?
Plans for next time
Questions for myself
- How does one make something go viral?
- Seek out press?
- Create evangelists?
- (Is making something viral even the goal?)
- How to shrink down time from idea to execution?
- How to shorten the loop of product sales?
- How to communicate faster, get more aligned with Aerolamp team?
- There’s always some awkwardness in this kind of cross-org collaboration. Eg who’s responsible for moving the ball forward? Who pays? Who gets to decide?
- Money didn’t really feel like a bottleneck, but what could we have done with like $500k instead of $50k? If someone’s like “I think FarUVC is something that needs a kick in the pants, I’m willing to cut a large check”, what is that thing to do?
- If we had a good proposal, could probably actually get it funded given interest in the space
- When I was talking about it with Gavriel, she seemed to think there was a vicious cycle:
- lamps are expensive because they’re produced in low quantities
- people don’t know about them
- people who do know about them may worry about safety
- people may not be doing proper cost-benefit calculation wrt air safety
- why doesn’t OP just fund a 10k lamp distribution? a: because they’re not in the business of installation, and don’t know who would actually install these
- But actually, maybe they would fund a giant distribution. We should ask!
- I’m not even much of a “safety” guy. I microwave things in their container, eat carcinogenic burnt food, drink microplastic boba.
- My interest in far-UVC is in correcting a perceived cosmic inefficiency, a societal waste
Various stats
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Update email, sent Jan 28
Thoughts on selecting recipients
My theory for why Aerodrop would be good is that, right now the important thing for Far-UVC is to get visibility; to be at the top of people's minds; to generate demand. And so we're giving them away to relatively well-off folks because these are the same people who we want to become an advocate of Far-UVC, because they'll have larger audiences, and/or have well-off friends who might buy.
I also think it'd be great to do a need-based distribution, if we could afford it! If somebody came to us and was like "I want to make it so that low-income elementary schools around my city are covered, here's $100k to make that happen" I'd be like hell yeah, let's do it. But my guess is that the best use of this set of 100 is to try and create a flywheel that leads to a lot more people learning about Far-UVC