BriteBulb the Smart Light Bulb

This project was through 3 Day Startup — a program to ideate, research, prototype, and pitch to investors all in just three days. I intended to use their program to help find a co-founder for Sibi. That didn’t end up happening; however, it was still a great experience.

BriteBulb is a smart light bulb with a speaker & microphones to allow users to control lights, music, phone calls, & more via a connected device or voice input throughout their entire home.

Step 1: Ideate

Picture a room full of approximately 40 people with ideas for what to work on for the weekend. Each person posts their idea on the whiteboard. Next, we form groups based on which ideas people think are the best and with whom they think they might want to work.

Amazingly, my idea was picked!!

Step 2: Research & Validation

Our first step in understanding how our idea might make its way into the world was to get it in front of as many people as possible.

We had a group of four, so we decided to divide and conquer. Two people (myself included) went to Best Buy and Home Depot while the other two people went to Target and Lowes. Our mission was to interview customers shopping for light bulbs, speakers, and smart devices like Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod to understand features and price points that were desirable for customers.

At the end of each interview, we told them about BriteBulb and asked them how likely they would be to purchase our product and what price they thought was reasonable.

Step 3: Competitive analysis

Thanks to the internet, this step was relatively easy. We created a matrix of features & price points for various competitors that were active in the space. To our surprise, there weren’t any companies that were direct competitors.

A quick note on price. The feature we were adding was relatively cheap from a hardware perspective and free from a marginal cost perspective (open APIs), so we knew that the price point we chose for BriteBulb was reasonable. 

Step 4: Prototype

We had a challenge in front of us: we needed to create a prototype to capture the imagination of investors with only one day remaining. To accomplish this, we approached the challenge from two different directions.

First, we created a physical proof of concept that proved we could power a light bulb and have it make noise. This prototype involved a speaker, a light bulb, a basic chipset, an on/off switch, and some fancy soldering.

Second, we created an ideal experience using animations Keynote that walked the investors through “a day in the life” with BriteBulb.