Quartzy (YC S11) Brings Order To Science Lab Supply Cabinets | Hacker News Reader

Quartzy (YC S11) Brings Order To Science Lab Supply Cabinets

techcrunch.com

136 pointsthankuz41 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is what is used very often:

http://midas.psi.ch/elog/

hmm... 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.

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!

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

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!:)

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.

Great ideas. Esp. phdcomics! Will try it out and report back in a blog post on what effect it has.

The only problem is that university professors are just hard to sell to. If they can solve that problem, its a product with huge value.

True, 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.

Just 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.

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.

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!

Just as another data point we also tried magazine ads in a couple of different journals with lower than expected results. The experience also really made me appreciate the statistics in the online world.

Conferences have been decent, but good old word of mouth is where we are seeing our biggest success. The trick (for me at least) is being able to plant enough seeds to get the word going.

You 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.

I 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.

Hey 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).

You may want to check out http://reddit.com/r/askscience and target advertisements to it.

It seems that many researches frequent that subreddit.

Conferences (with swag, e.g. your coffee sleeves), mailing lists, Facebook. We all know how many hours per week grad students spend on Facebook... :-D

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."

I 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... :)

I'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. :)

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!

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.

Be careful to get it right, most inventory control systems in the real world depend a lot on regular manual updating. Department managers at Walmart, for example, spend an hour or more every morning updating their "automatic" inventory control system manually. Most labs, however, don't have the manpower to spend a lot of time keeping an inventory up to date, so if your system doesn't do a good job, they will just keep using the current "intermittent updating" system.

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.

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.

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.

>"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 ...

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.

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

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!

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?

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 :)

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.

Awesome job Dr. J!

YC S11

Updated, thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com