Flux Health Forum

Hair Loss Pilot Study 2023

Other Interesting Applications
#82

Well, it really does take a lot longer than people realize to create a genuinely new product, so I think it is important to manage people’s expectations. The expectation of a new product every few months or even every year is a marketing trick used on all kinds of stuff: smart phones, personal computers, cars. It keeps everything fresh and exciting. It keeps consumers engaged.

The sneaky marketing trick is that new products take years to develop (if they are genuinely new), so the illusion is created by marketers using two techniques:

1- Resell stuff that is not really much different and hype it as new. Just a new color, a new catchy name, just one new feature, that’s enough to fool most consumers into thinking they have a fresh new product.

2- Hide the real development time: develop several new releases at the same time, but only drip-feed them out one-at-a-time while the real work is going on in the background, usually for years.

But you know me by now: boring old Bob. I’ll just buck the trend and tell you the truth.

The hat insert is really a new type of PEMF product, and we are even discovering a few things along the way about this application of PEMF, how it seems to work, and how to optimize it. Plus, juggling all the stuff that has to be done, the “complex wedding”, to get a new product to market, avoiding all of the traps, failures, and pit-falls, honestly 18 months or more is lightning fast.

1 Like
#83

You should then sell the M1 in a new color every year or add “special editions” with blue coils, pink cables or the like. Or even signed cardboard boxes where the M1 comes in. :rofl:

P.S.: This was not meant serious :sunglasses:

#84

Better yet, change the connector type every several years so your accessory business takes off until the EU mandates compliance with an international standard and the gig is up.

*sarcasm.

#85

@hcf, @TajD, solid suggestions! You have great potential as technology marketers!

My favorite (not) marketer “add-nothing-and-charge-for it” trick was when I was in grad school, MS Excel removed several graphing and analysis resources that I had been using for my doctoral dissertation, selling it as “sleeker and better!”. Actually, it was just “less”. Then about a year later they added back in those same functions that you could pay for with the newest version of MS Office.

If you extend the definition beyond on-line platforms to include all consumer products, I think this process is called…

#86

Dr. Dennis, could you reach out to the people at Enliven to either convince them to resume selling their various caps and wraps, or perhaps given the the high demand and market, maybe they would sell or license their product designs to you to manufacture and distribute?

#87

Hi Anthony,
Well, actually the demand for these accessories is really very low, only a dozen or so per month, not nearly enough to support the business effort. Enliven was only able to sell a few dozen, and it never made any money, and that is a failed business. This was not the first to fail, it was the third attempt by others to provide garment accessories for ICES-PEMF products. All of them failed, basically for the same reasons: not really enough demand.

This is why:

When you want to make garments, you have a few options:

(1) Make them in the free world, where the cost includes a lot of factors, is way higher than consumers are willing to spend, and the resulting products get crushed in the market by low-cost competition.

(2) Hire services from a sweat-shop in Bangladesh, but then you need to order quantities of 10,000 per batch and you need to turn a blind-eye toward inhumane work conditions.

(3) learn to sew.

None of those really work for ICES-PEMF accessories because we do not sell them in huge volumes, but we also do not make garments, and when you do the math with the available options, offering accessory garments would essentially double the price of our PEMF systems, and no one would benefit from that. Added to that is the fact that ICES-Accessories need to fit all sizes and shapes of humans, in every anatomic location, so it involves a lot of different garments. And trying to force the issue by trying to be a low-sales-volume garment manufacturer would basically bankrupt me and I would end up having to live in a cardboard box with my children.

so the deal I offer is this:

I provide the one thing that evidently no one else on Earth is willing to provide: efficient, effective, reasonably-priced wearable ICES-PEMF systems plus excellent customer support.

To use our products, you simply need to find a way to hold them where you need them.
People on this forum discuss how they do that all the time.

2 Likes
#88

I can attest to that on all counts @Bob !

#89

Me, too. Me, too !!! :sunglasses:

Fun beside, its really that way and @Bob is still highly engaged in direct customer support here in the forum.

When I had, 30 y ago, my side business going on, developing a software product that I used by myself, I was also doing direct support via a newsgroup. Only by using my software myself and having direct contact to customers, I understood the problems of my customers and could develop / prioritize the product features according to real needs.

Bigger corporations do not have that direct coupling. Its totally abstract and the goals are directed, for example, by the bonuses of your bosses or weird strategies. I know that, too, because I worked for a very large corporation for over 10 years, too. Would never go back, makes you crazy if you want to be efficient and do real stuff that helps real people.

2 Likes
#90

@hcf is exactly correct.

#91

Yes, I work for a global engineering conglomerate, and I concur that the decision makers are largely decoupled from end users. In my experience that only changes temporarily, whenever sales drop off sharply…

#92

Dr. Dennis:
Just to follow up, beat a dead horse and clarify; I realize that the “primary” purpose of the hat prototype was focused on prevention/treatment/reversal of alopecia. However, given the obvious proximity and relationship of the hat to the brain, as well as the aging population and growing interest in mitigating various age-related neuro-degenerative conditions, such as parkinsons, dementia, etc., many forum users appear to have expressed an interest in experimenting with the hat additionally for various neuro pathologies, in addition to alopecia. So from a purely technical/engineering/empirical viewpoint, what is the difference in the PEMF/ICES energy delivered from the standard, traditional coils, vs the coils in the prototype cap? As a non-EE, but given that the same ICES generators are used for the different coil types, (C5, M1, etc), would it be a correct presumption that the basic protocols and waveforms would be identical, and that the difference lies in field depth and area? When treating alopecia, it would make sense to me that field area would be more important than field depth, because obviously, for the energy to reach the brain it would have to penetrate deeper through the scalp/cranium, whereas in treating alopecia, treating a wider area, albeit with a more shallow depth, would be preferred for alopecia uses.
If my conjecture is true, then would you postulate that there could be techniques/protocols/montages/placements which A)Standard coil users might use to maximize alopecia therapy, and vice-versa B)prototype cap users might use to maximize neuro-focused therapy? So for example, presuming that the “cap” delivers an inherently more shallow/wider depth of penetration than the regular coils, could/would increasing the “intensity” level, increase the depth of penetration level, to where the cap would deliver energy further into the cranium/brain, compared to the normal intensities which might be optimal or sufficient for alopecia use?
-Thanks for all you do.

#93

maybe…
we don’t know…
I just took an educated guess at how the coils should be configured based on three decades of focused experience with bio-magnetic effects.

We just took my educated guess, tried it, adjusted the design a few times, and it seems to work pretty well for most aspects of hair retention, thickening, growth, etc

The sample size for the first set of tests was small, only about 11 people total, so we can not draw any firm conclusions yet.

The design has not been optimized, and basically you can’t model or calculate your way to the configuration we are using, simply but categorically because no one on Earth really understands why this type of application of pulsed magnetic fields work at the biophysical level.

I really do not want to discuss design details or strategies because it is a new product that needs patent protection, etc. If I say much, someone somewhere will make a crappy copy and ruin the market for everyone.

So, the answer for this and all future questions like this unfortunately will be:

We don’t know.

The hat product will be released whenever it is ready, but probably in the EU before the US due to regulatory differences… probably somewhere between 6 and 36 months from now.

We are not ready to share technical details specifically to protect your rights to be able to eventually purchase a properly designed and tested one.

So… as always: when using ICES PEMF in an attempt to get any biological effect:
if you want to try to repeat these results using currently standard and available ICES-PEMF products and coils, then: start low and slow, it is done by trial and error:

Try, observe, adjust, repeat.