Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
8,000 pre-orders, wrong product
The sleep tracker
That first product was just a cover that tracked sleep. It arrived at the height of the Internet of Things, so it connected with lights and with Nest. In customer discovery everyone said it was cool.
The question that kept coming
But the same question kept coming back: does it heat and cool? People said they fought with their partners about temperature, and the answer was the same in interview after interview.
The turn to heating and cooling
After about 100 interviews, it clicked that customers weren't just pushing back on the tracker. They were asking for something specific. Khosla Ventures led the second round that gave the company enough money to build a bed cover that regulated temperature, and the pod launched four years ago.
Why does customer discovery change product plans?
Entrepreneur Steve Blank popularized the approach in his 2005 book The Four Steps to the Epiphany, which called it customer development. Founders go out and interview likely buyers to test their assumptions before building at scale. The same request repeating across many interviews is a signal that a need is real. Y Combinator and many other startup programs now teach the method as standard practice.
Why did everything get connected around 2014?
Cheap wireless chips and smartphones made it easy to link ordinary objects to apps. Philips introduced its Hue connected light bulbs in 2012. Google's purchase of Nest, announced in January 2014 for 3.2 billion dollars, set off a wave of attention to smart-home products. The term Internet of Things had been coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton.
Why do two people disagree about bed temperature?
Comfort temperature varies with body size, metabolism, and clothing. A 2015 study in Nature Climate Change by Boris Kingma and Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt found that the resting metabolic rate used in common building standards was based on a typical man, and that women on average preferred warmer rooms. A single blanket and one thermostat setting cannot suit two different thermal needs at once.
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