

Quartzy (YC S11) Brings Order To Science Lab Supply Cabinets - thankuz
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/08/yc-funded-quartzy-brings-order-to-science-lab-supply-cabinets/

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physcab
Some 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.

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stevenbedrick
Re: 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.

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jayzee
Yup. 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.

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stevenbedrick
Definitely the way to go, especially given that Quartzy (or something like it)
is essentially a necessary precondition for a useful electronic laboratory
notebook system, so if you _did_ decide to someday go there, you'd have some
of the plumbing done already.

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someone13
A 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!

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prayag
Now here's a company that's solving a real problem. Great going guys.

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jayzee
Thanks!

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!:)

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anandkulkarni
You 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.

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aorshan
Have 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.

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jayzee
Thanks!

We did bring out an ad in Nature a few months ago but the response was
underwhelming. The thing with marketing for a startup, we have painfully
discovered, is to try non-traditional approaches. Basically something that the
other big companies with tons of money are not doing because they are either
afraid of looking silly or would think that it would not work... Doing the
_expected_ thing doesn't work because it gets priced up to the point that it
does not make financial sense.

For example, at a recent conference we had a very simple booth. Other large
established companies had these giant booths that needed cranes with espresso
machines and what not. The only thing we did was put out a scrabble board and
gave out a Quartzy t-shirt every hour or so to the one with the largest score
in that hour. We had a line of people waiting to play the game. So silly stuff
like scrabble leader-board got people's attention.

btw, scrabble because Quartzy is the highest scoring opening word in Scrabble!

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yellowbkpk
My 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."

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jayzee
We 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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jasonz
It would be cool to somehow use a digital scale to track supplies. Each time
you weigh a reagent, the scale could enter the amount used into Quartzy.

Come to think of it, using NFC might work really well for logging supplies.
Stick a NFC sticker (I bet tagstand would hook you up) on items you want to
track.

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jasonz
Quartzy 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.

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jayzee
Really 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.

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jasonz
Yeah 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.

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pbhjpbhj
> _"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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anandkulkarni
Very 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.

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arkitaip
Love the fact that you can try the demo account without paying or even signing
up.

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jayzee
Thanks! 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>

We spent way more time that we should have in making those fake profiles in
the sandbox for Curie, Mendel, TH Morgan and others!

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pkamb
I'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?

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jayzee
Good 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 :)

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pbhjpbhj
How 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.

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nabraham
Awesome job Dr. J!

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seto28
YC S11

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thankuz
Updated, thanks!

