As many of you know, mk, b_b, ecib, elfassy and I started a company called Forever Labs. We made a video and I'm pretty pleased with it. The challenge was to get across how important the problem we are attempting to solve is and how passionate we are about solving it. I think the producer/director did a pretty damn good job. Feel free to share it with those that you think might be interested.
Have a great day!
Roughly 20M MNCs/ml but there is variability. In terms of CFUs, we haven't discerned a difference between the same sample when comparing a frozen aliquot to a fresh one. We can greatly adversely affect the recovery modifying our culture conditions, however.
Yes, there is, and that is the plan. You can expand what we collect to exceed the number of cells in your own body. It's my plan to expand both my blood/immune-building hematopoietic stem cells and my bone/connective tissue-building mesenchymal stem cells to ridiculous numbers, and then to freeze those in many individual chambers. As it stands, we store your cells in 3 large chambers, and 4-5 small ones, so that you can draw up a fraction of them without thawing the rest.
I'm actually about to head in to a procedure. b_b, can you reply?
The product is brilliant. I'm sold. Seriously. Gonna get my wife and I into this right away. Don't read below this line. Because, you know I do marketing for a living, and have for, oh, 15 years or so? So I have OPINIONS. And I'm going to give you my marketing feedback on your video. Still reading? Ok. You asked for it! :-) Three things: 1. The product name needs to be on-screen throughout the entire video. Do not make the person who says FUCK YEAH! TAKE MY MONEY! wait until the end to get the URL. 2. The video is 30 seconds too long. 3. It has the wrong soundtrack. Too long: At about 1:30, you start repeating what was already said earlier in the video, and pretty much everything between there and the money-shot at 2:09 can be cut without losing any of the core message. (Broadly speaking.) Stand back and think "What is the purpose of this video? What ACTION do I want the viewer to take?" The only call-to-action in the video is "go to this URL". So you need to hit them with your idea, why the viewer should give a shit, and then hit them with the URL. At 2-plus minutes in length, nobody but your friends and family are going to watch the whole thing... and the money shot (or "money-quote") is buried at 2:09. Music: The music REEKS of Kickstarter, which makes me think of you as a hokey couple of amateurs with a half-baked idea that you haven't fully fleshed out. You have a BIG idea. An HISTORIC idea. That is going to deeply affect people's LIVES. This has IMPACT. And you are ALREADY open for business with PAYING clients. So (just quick googling while I'm at work) I found this, and 40 seconds into this track as examples. That's my constructive feedback. But remember, in the end, what you have is excellent. My suggestions are changes to an already high-quality product.
These are all valid insights, I really appreciate it. I will pass them on to th team that created it. They will hate you. I love you :) Also, if you are serious about signing up for the procedure, PM me. Don't just signup. You are a friend of ours and will get the friends and family plan.
Man, I have been in that position a LOT. You do some really hard work for someone, slave over a hot computer until the early morning hours, hack through hours of footage trying to carve a story out of all the clips, finally get it mastered with a soundtrack, normalized audio levels, exported via a shitty codec and downsampled to hell so you can post it anywhere without it being a 3gb upload... ... and the first person to watch it points out that you spelled the company name wrong. (Or whatever.) I've been in their shoes. Many times. HOWEVER, what makes a true professional, is the person who knows that there will be an iteration after it is "done". You have to test-run it against a hostile audience, to understand how it will actually "land" when released to the mass market. You, the customer, are too close. They, the producers, are too close. Filmmakers, writers, car designers, architects... everyone knows this. But when you come to marketing video producers, people seem to think the production rules that everyone else knows, don't apply to them for some reason. When I used to go into recording studios with my bands, I'd take a rough mixdown of our work and put it in the car tape deck, and drive down the freeway. It's amazing how different things sound when you aren't listening on reference monitors in an audio-neutral room! So yeah. They'll hate me. They'll rage. They'll question my skills or authority to levy an opinion. But in the end, after a week of these comments nagging in the back of their heads, they'll agree. Because, in the end, they are professionals. They have the same goal you have. And they know "good" when they see it. They just may need to back up a few feet to get some perspective first. Will do. Thanks, my friend. They will hate you.
Also, if you are serious about signing up for the procedure, PM me.
Well, I'm sold. It's a great and informative video. I have a question, though. In Poland we have a DKMS Fundation (Dawcy Komórek Macierzystych i Szpiku - Donors of Stem Cells and Bone Marrow) that performs a procedure that seems similar to what you guys are doing (here are the details in English). Is it actually similar or am I confused due to my layman knowledge of medicine?
We use an aspiration, which is a direct draw of a small amount of bone marrow. Mobilization (the process used by DKMS) is more expensive and time-consuming, and doesn't capture the entire bone marrow niche. That said, if you are donating marrow for a transplant, you want a large number of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), and without expanding them in a lab, mobilization is an easier way to get a large enough number. It's our goal to collect and store a sufficient number of cells (HSCs, but also bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells, endothelial progenitor cells, and others) that can be expanded for many different uses in the future. You could take what we collect and use it for a BM transplant, but it may require expansion of the HSCs first, or a longer engraftment period.
Very clever that BM (for bone marrow) written in Braille and turned upside down is your company logo. You guys thought of EVERYTHING! Seriously awesome guys. Been a follower since day 1. I already have a bag of stem cells in a freezer in Norway. I like to think of a magic potion, ready to save my life (again) someday!
Wow, if I was based in the USA I'd buy this - although I suspect it is slightly too expensive for me... I wish you the best with the business!! I'm in the UK, this kind of treatment would not be covered by the NHS in a million years. When you open a clinic here, make sure to tell us ;)
That's amazing! Truly we are living in the future. Some day you'll have to expand to Europe and then I want to sign up! I love that mk's painting of his daughter was in there.
The kids are mine ;-) the ones playing piano with me. Other kids are stock reel, actors.