Over the last month I’ve performed some market research to better understand the potential for co2mon.nz and to help me decide whether the product I’ve built has a fit with the market or not. The key conclusions I’ve drawn from this work are:
Air quality is acknowledged as important, but monitoring it is not an urgent or pressing problem for most people.
Most of the value is seen in the hardware rather than the software service.
Keep reading to hear more about the results that lead to those conclusions.
Previously, I explained why ventilation monitoring is important, and the opportunity I see to help accelerate deployment of high quality ventilation monitoring for small businesses and organisations.
In this post, I’m going to discuss my plans to tackle that opportunity:
My journey to ventilation monitoring
I started looking into ventilation monitoring in detail last year when I wanted to ensure that the classrooms of our local primary school were well ventilated during the Omicron outbreak. That research revealed that the existing products on offer were challenging to deploy in a school environment from a cost perspective while also not providing perfect functionality.
The importance of clean, fresh indoor air is one of the most tangible takeaways of the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to being an effective risk mitigation strategy for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses, clean, fresh air is necessary to enable effective cognitive performance.
Monitoring indoor air quality is relatively easy to do, but traditionally has not been a key focus. I believe air quality monitoring should be accessible for any indoor space, and for highly occupied indoor spaces should be provided on a continuous basis. This post explores the need and an opportunity for a business that can accelerate the adoption of ventilation monitoring through the following topics: