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Six years ago I started building a recovery device in my parents' house. The short version: it combines a small wireless muscle stim pod with conductive kinesiology tape, so it delivers electrical stimulation through tape that also stays put on the body. The origin was personal, a family member's arthritis sent me down a rabbit hole trying to build something in this space.

Six years of prototyping later, I gave a unit to the owner of my gym, a competitive athlete prepping for one of the biggest competitions in his sport, and had him field-test it through his training and the event. I wanted the realest test the hardware would ever get: someone other than me, putting it through actual daily use under real conditions, where I'd find out fast what held up and what didn't.

A few things I wasn't ready for, all about the hardware:

First, durability blew past what I designed for. I built the tape to hold its function for 72 hours. He wore the same piece well beyond that, slept in it, showered in it, trained in it, and it performed the same at the end as it did at hour one. We tested it live on camera because I genuinely didn't know if it would still be functioning that far out. It was. That's a durability insight I got from real-world use, not from my own lab.

Second, qualitative feedback from a motivated user beat any metric. Watching someone actually live with the thing for days surfaced reactions and design feedback I could never have gotten from a spec sheet or a survey, how it felt to wear for extended periods, what about the form factor worked and what didn't.

Third, and this is the part that hit me emotionally: watching someone outside my circle critique the design of a product that started as something that looked like a cut-up 7UP can in my dorm years ago. I'd had the first-check moment, the first time using it myself, the first time someone close to me used it. This was the first time a relative stranger put it through real use under real stakes. That reframed who I'm actually building for.

He didn't win, and honestly the non-fairytale ending made it a better test. He went in wanting top 10, started near the bottom of the field, clawed back, took 2nd on his single hardest event, and finished 19th out of 46. Real, not staged.

The lessons I'm taking into the next phase:

1. Your earliest real-world user will find the edge case your lab never will. Get it into the field sooner than feels comfortable.

2. Qualitative feedback from one motivated user beats a hundred lukewarm survey responses.

3. The fuel of watching someone outside your circle put your product through real use is more durable than any vanity metric. Bank that for the hard days.

For anyone earlier in the journey: what's a moment a real-world user taught you something about your own product that you couldn't have learned yourself?

(Note: the device is Investigational Use Only and not available for commercial sale. It has not been approved or cleared by FDA as safe and effective for its intended use, and I'm not making any claims about what it does.)

• Mined Google reviews of trades businesses. ended up finding found specific markets/ cities with genuine labor shortages

• Scraped conference booth buyers and noticed unusual patterns where accounting firms at construction expos, e.g. PropTech companies at steel conferences. Found the people who weren't supposed to be there and built lists around them.

• Scraped public data sources across 15+ verticals and turned them into b2b chain triggers for a 12 month cycle (e.g. OHSA case violations, UCC filings, environmental breaches, PFAS exceedances). [my background is civil engineering lol]

• Built an agent that reads city planning commission meeting minutes, identifies affected businesses, researches them, and outputs an enriched prospect list. this helped me identify which areas are of interest for rezoning, bringing rezoning attorneys, civil engineers and builders into the conversation

• Built a comment bot that pulls from my own knowledge base to engage threads where my ICP is asking questions. Basically duplicated an n8n workflow without n8n and with python scripts and API. have a gateway on Telegram to check and update comments so that my comments dont sound spammy af and is actually relevant. i still have to edit myself, which takes an extra 1-2 min.

• noticed apollo's data export sucks (big cause of spam + high bounce), so used excel and claude to clean up. You would be amazed how much the initial list actually gets shortened by. 

• Also was able to build a niche list of HNW individuals, just by tracking their digital & organisational footprint across events

Anyways, I am ex-construction PM and I am super passionate about data and making reads based on the data. Out of pure frustration, i started creating agents when i realised i was doing things manually and kind of stumbled onto it (i cant explain because its a 1am thing that just happened)

In my last role, i did a lot of things (ie. generalist) and didn’t spend enough time to do things that im curious about, ie. webscraping, making reads on behaviours from digital footprints. I did manage to create campaigns that got 4% response rate and book a fair few meetings on both email + linkedin, review sales calls transcripts and optimise, built MQL and SQL sequences across 90 days for anyone that showed interest from initial advertising campaigns. but i didnt do enough of it and want to lean more into it using all the stuff i built (and keep building)

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