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A Lumenator Company, or: A More Ambitious Life Trajectory
ActiveGrant
$6,000raised
$6,000funding goal
Description
Lumenators are very bright lamps (>20k lumen) that are fairly commonplace in the rationality and effective altruism community. Currently, all lumenators are constructed by individuals, at significant time and cost. However, this appears inefficient, and specialization would probably reduce the cost of lumenators and increase their quality.
This untapped opportunity was noticed four years ago already, but hasn't yet been taken: While therapy lamps exist, they are not as bright as lumenators (delivering ~10k lux only if one sits directly in front of them), and people who do not experience seasonal affective disorder do not tend to use them. Given that quite a number of people have built lumenators themselves, I assume there is a much larger contingent of people who would like to have one but don't have the time to.
My plan is to build a bright home lighting company, selling lumenators (>20k lumen, 90%+ CRI, price <$500) initially to individuals, possibly branching out to businesses later.
The customers would be mostly upper-middle class people who are interested in well-being and technology. The raw materials for a lumenator built by a hobbyist fluctuate from ~$250-$400, which would enable a $50-$100 profit per unit sold. Assuming there are ~10 cities in the European Union and North America¹ with ~10k individuals each who would purchase a lumenator, this would give $5mio. to $10mio. in total profit.
Funding
To work on this for half a year, I would probably spend ~3k€ on food and health insurance and ~4.5k€ on money for prototype materials, legal fees etc, totaling ~7.5k€. I am applying for 5k€, supplying 2.5k€ of my own savings.
Timeline
I would at the end of each month evaluate how much progress has been made, terminating the project and returning the money left if I decided that this was not a good idea anymore, spending my own money "first".
1. month: Build & compare several prototypes, discovering bulbs/LEDs, sockets, dimming that work best. Review scientific literature on bright lighting and mental health benefits.
2. month: Set up basic legal infrastructure. Likely more legal work around liability.
3. month: Figure out shipping within the EU and to the US. Set up website, payment, ordering infrastructure.
4. month: Limited announcement of the company², get pre-orders for first version.
5. month: Create more refined second version, set up medium-scale production.
6. month: Large-scale advertising³. Achieve profitability.
After achieving profitability, I would continue working on further iterations of the product, running studies with participants etc.
Most likely, these steps would not be performed in this exact order one after another, but more interwoven.
Benefits
I am a signatory of the Giving What We Can pledge, so 10% of the profits would be donated to effective organisations⁴, which in the basic scenario outlined above would be ~$500k - $1m. In the 90th percentile success, I would also start selling lumenators to businesses which care about mental health and productivity and are able to measure it, such as packaging centers, hospitals etc, returning large profits.
It seems like very bright lighting has noticeable health benefits (see Sandkühler et al. 2021). Quantifying these benefits is outside of the scope of this proposal, but I hope to be able to do such an estimate. I also hope to be able to run (non-blinded) RCTs with willing participants who might receive the lumenator later, but at a discount are willing to provide experience sampling data of mood & productivity.
Such RCTs would be necessary to provide enough evidence to convince businesses that a lumenator is worth investing in.
Finally, having a profitable company would make me financially independent, and allow me to pursue more ambitious projects in forecasting research and AI alignment. This would be especially relevant if the company turned out to be profitable, but the ceiling of profits that could be achieved were relatively low, so that it would make more sense of me to then act as a "free agent" while spending ~5-10h/week keeping the company running.
If the startup failed, the experience gained from starting an organisation might still be useful when considering starting other organisations, unless I'd have decided that I was not cut out to run organisations.
Risks
This would be my first startup, and I have little experience building physical products, my background being in computer science. I estimate a 25%-30% probability that the company would be profitable after 6 months, with most of the failure scenarios coming from worlds in which I discover that I don't have the conscientiousness to run a business, existing products already filling the niche, and from legal barriers around shipping and liability being too big. In this case, the money from the grant would be lost, although I would then continue to go on and still donate the money committed through my GWWC membership (signed as "Isidor Regenfuß").
I do not see any other risks.
Counterfactual
In the counterfactual, my plan looks something like this:
Apply to an LTFF grant for elaborating on the consequences of my (AI-alignment related) thesis work/distilling what I've found out.
Finish a previously started project related to forecasting (potentially apply to a grant for that).
Apply to SERI MATS in some stream that is related to agent foundations (will give me info whether I'm suited for alignment research).
Get 80k hours career coaching.
Apply to the Forecasting research institute, Convergence Analysis and Aligned AI (all three related to personal research).
Apply to alignment related research engineer positions (using e.g. the 80k job board).
Apply to regular software engineering/data science jobs (default back to earning-to-give-a-bit, i.e. 10%).
Try to get any job whatsoever (default back to earning-to-give-a-bit, i.e. 10%).
Despair?
I believe that most of the outcomes in those worlds would be less impactful than a successful lumenator startup. Especially further down the list of options, I believe that most of my impact would come from hobby projects I would be working on in my free time.
Some Links on Lumenators
Footnotes
¹: E.g. London, New York, Dallas, Bay Area, Berlin, Houston, Paris, Sydney, Los Angeles, Chicago, with a total of 88.81 mio. inhabitants, so 100k would be ~0.1%.
²: On LessWrong, perhaps other related communities where bright lighting is an accepted intervention.
³: Hacker News, subreddits for people with seasonal affective disorder,other social media.
⁴: My past donations have split my donations 50%-50% between the LTFF and the Animal Welfare fund.