How Can Entrepreneurs in Age Tech Validate Their Problem and Solution?
In order to build a successful age tech startup, it is critical to include older adults and other stakeholders in the design and development process. However, not all companies that make products and services that are meant to serve the older population actually do so. These days, when we live in a digital world in which video chat is in daily use, even for older adults there’s no excuse not to. There’s also no reason to build an entire product/ company based only on one’s grandmother’s life experience, without validating that many other older adults share it.
Also – getting feedback from your grandmother on whatever it is you’re building will almost certainly lead you to think your solution is the best thing since sliced bread. It’s very likely she will tell you what you want to hear. In order to get validation that the problem you’re solving actually exists, and that your chosen solution is actually useful (and worth buying), you will have to get input from older adults who aren’t family. For many young entrepreneurs, getting access to a large number of older adults and other stakeholders (family caregivers, for example) is a challenge in and of itself.
What Can You Do?
The go-to solution in many cases, is to partner with a senior living community or a home care provider, and if you can find one that has a director of innovation – you’ve hit the jackpot. This means they probably have a process for partnering and piloting with startups, and also the patience to deal with imperfect early-stage products and provide feedback.
Partnering with a localized care provider has its benefits, especially if you have a physical product you want to get in people’s hands and give you feedback on. You get access to large numbers of older adults who live in one location and you are referred to those older adults by a trusted source. However, it’s important to keep in mind that senior living is a sheltered environment with 24/7 staff, so residents who live in senior living communities might experience the challenges of aging differently than those who live in their own home.
Other Ways to Reach Older Adults and Family Caregivers
Tech Enhanced Life’s Longevity Explorers are a unique community made up of older adults and their friends, families, and caregivers. What they do is to leverage the insights of older adults to accelerate the emergence of tech-enabled solutions to some of the challenges of aging.
The main service Longevity Explorers offers companies is called Sponsored Explorations & Co-creation, with the goal of helping useful products and services to market – products that older adults and caregivers actually want, need and are willing to pay for.
“Some of the Longevity Explorers like to engage with companies who are developing products for people like us — to help ensure they develop a product that meets an important unmet need we actually care deeply about, and that we are likely to want. Sponsored explorations have the goal of helping companies bring to market products and services useful to people like the Longevity Explorers.”
Revolution55 is Age of Majority’s community of active people aged 55 and over that can help companies capture consumer insights, ideate and evaluate new products, validate new concepts and support strategy.
Foresight 50+ is a new initiative by AARP and NORC. It is the largest survey panel on the 50+ demographic, combining the expertise of AARP (the American Association of Retired Persons) with the scientific rigor of NORC (a research organization at the University of Chicago). They partner with researchers and decision-makers to survey older Americans, and offer insight into the views and behaviours of Americans aged 50 and older.
Foresight 50+ recruits diverse panel members that represent every segment of general population of 50+ year old Americans – even those who are hard to reach, such as rural and lower-income households. They also help with survey building and conduct both remote and in-person interviews.
Segmented Panels for Surveys and Interviews
Who doesn’t know SurveyMonkey? This popular service offers access to a general-population panel of 144M+ people across 130+ countries. You can use this service to survey large numbers of people who fit specific demographics variables, such as age, employment status, living arrangement and even tech ownership and use. Each response only costs a few dollars, so this is a fairly affordable basic option for getting responses fast.
Another service that I’ve used in the past and have really enjoyed is User Testing – you can use this service to recruit test users based on certain criteria that you chose, and get their feedback on any product/ user experience. Your deliverable is a video of each and every user using your product and answering a set of questions. They even provide a transcription and analyze the sentiment of what was said (whether it’s positive or negative). You can also use this service to schedule live interviews – so you can talk to users yourself, and ask whatever questions you want. This is obviously more expensive than regular surveys, but it’s definitely worth it if, just make sure you’re asking the right questions and not inserting bias (read “The Mom Test“).
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