1. Money. You need a lot to buy equipment necessary to do the experiments, you also need to know how to run, upkeep, and service every instrument. If you don't have redundant equipment, losing one piece stops your workflow. Your user base by definition are DIYBio folks, which for the most part...want to do it themselves, or if not, 99% are just general population people, and I'd say it's safe to say, most of us aren't rich.
2. Science is hard. It costs money (your own - someone else's if you're lucky) every time you run an experiment, whether it succeeds or fails, you still eat the cost. Since most do DIYBio for pleasure, it's an expense, not an investment. Some are business/product minded though, so the ends justify the means.
3. Long past the point of wanting to know everything about everything. Accepted you can be ok at a lot of things or really good at a few things. It's 100% worth paying someone else to run experiments for you if they're better at it, and know how to get you want you want. You get what you pay for.
4. More times than you could count. NMR, HPLC-MS, NanoDrop, UV/Vis, particular plasmids, particular restriction enzymes, MALDI-TOF, Sequencing, Microscope, laminar flow hood, bio-reactor, spray-dryer...this list could go on forever. If there's a real need, you look on eBay, then dumpsters, then local lab-resellers, then ask local colleges.
5. Isolating Penicillium from citrus fruit. Isolating endophytic fungi from plant tissue.
6. This is hard, the lines between DIYBio work and daily science work is now blurred for me. I never made more than $35k my first few years out of college at my job, but I'd say ~$5k a year on used equipment and reagents was typical. Luckily being around Boston, you can find some very generous benefactors and supporters, for donated equipment, free samples from NEB for enzymes, etc.
As a note, being a CRO sucks, from what I've seen and experienced working at one, unless you're reaaaaaaaally good at what you do, or you're the only one that does it, or you came from Industry or Academia where you were trained at length on someone else's dime.
People rent out time on their machines already, there are some websites that do that, it's a market you can list your equipment and an hourly fee or sample fee, with or without data analysis.
Not saying you have a bad idea, just hard to execute to make a profit. Prove us all otherwise!
Think of your end customer...for the most part, an amateur, with little experience, little money, and not entirely sure what they want. That's fine, we all start as amateurs.
What I'm saying is there's a reason Emerald Cloud caters to the pharmaceutical market, because they have a shitload of money. If they built Emerald Cloud (which is top tier equipment and talent) for a customer base of DIYBio people, they'd already be bankrupt, because that's a poor target market.
On Sat, May 30, 2020 at 2:03 AM Andrey Samokhvalov <andrew.shvv@gmail.com> wrote:
Hey, all!--
I am thinking about bio cloud laboratory[1] targeted on the do-it-yourself bio community, a bit naive, but anyway I am curious what you think about it.
I would appreciate it if you share with me your concerns.
Also, I have prepared some questions, which might help me orient the idea in a proper direction. Pick one if you have a good mood :)
- What is the biggest risk why it will not work from your point of view?
- What is the biggest frustration/problem you have in DIY bio? Why it is a problem?
- Is hands-on experience is essential for you, or you are more motivated by seeing the end result?
- Have you been in a situation when you didn't have the required equipment/reagents and weren't able to buy it? Which one?
- What were the first one/two experiments you did?
- (optional) How much do you spend on DIY per year? Sorry for such a personal question, I am asking because such a project might require heavy investments, and I somehow need to calculate the market and stuff.
[1] Biology cloud laboratory - is an automated physical laboratory, which has access to it over the browser user interface, where you could design and execute the biological experiment remotely, and receive/see a resulting data over user interface or ask for resulting material to be shipped to your home. Examples include Emerald Cloud Lab, Transcriptic, and others, but as far as I am aware they are targeted on the pharmaceutical market. I tried to get access to their user interface, but they haven't replied : (
Thank you, and have a good day/night!
P.S. I am literally the first day here, so my apology if that was already discussed, or I violated some community rule.
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