Anyone who has tried to get a new product into elder living, whether by selling it, funding it or studying it, meets the same few obstacles every time: the pilot that runs for a year and ends without a decision, the buyer who wants evidence from another buyer before there is one, the sale that takes longer than the money in the bank, and the request to connect with a building's existing systems that arrives after everyone thought the deal was close. None of the four is a secret, and a problem that arrives the same way every time is one that can be prepared for.
On September 23, about fifty founders, vendors, investors, researchers and a few operators spent an evening at the KITE Research Institute in Toronto preparing for them, at one of the AgeTech Connect Toronto gatherings that bring the people working on elder living together every couple of months. Instead of a panel, the room split into eight tables, each took one of the four obstacles as it shows up in Ontario, and each spent half an hour writing down what it would do about it and in what order.
The tables worked on four different problems, and when their sheets were read side by side, the advice on each had the same shape. The tables on pilots wanted the decision date, the measures and the person who would decide settled before the first day. The tables on proof wanted trust built, person by person, before anyone asked for a pilot. The table on runway planned its milestones around the operator's budget year rather than the company's, and the table on integration wanted the connection questions answered before the first demo. In each case, the advice was to do the hard part earlier than it usually gets done.
That is the opposite of how a young company naturally works, which is to build the product, find someone willing to try it, and deal with the hard questions when they arrive. In most markets that order is fine. In this one the hard questions arrive a year in, from a buyer who was never going to raise them first, and by then the money that would have paid for the answers is gone. In this market, most of the work that decides a sale is done before the part that looks like selling.
The full write-up from the evening follows below, with a before, during and after checklist for pilots, a path from a first conversation to being ready to ask for a pilot, milestones for each stage of funding, and two lists of questions about connecting to an operator's systems, one to be ready for and one to ask.
