444 came from the “I don’t know if this is a good idea” desk at CES in Las Vegas. The early-stage startup plans to combine pepper spray with some electronics to allow it to notify friends of potential attack victims. I had to deploy defensive spray to break out of my restraints. The company is the brainchild of Logan Nash and Matt Rogan, who met at the University of Michigan and began developing the technology nine months ago.
“We called the company 444 because our target market is college-aged women between the ages of 18 and 24. A very popular trend right now is angel numbers. said in an interview with TechCrunch. “We are a self-defense company, so the name ties very well to our company and our self-defense mission.”
The company is in the very early stages of development. The prototypes shown at CES were 3D printed prototypes, early prototype PCBs, and so far closer to proof of concept than actual product. The ultimate plan is to include a pepper spray aerosol and a Bluetooth transmitter that connects to your phone. When the pepper spray is deployed, the device signals the potential victim’s phone, which sends a message to a predefined phone number along with its current location.
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“I see all these women with pepper spray devices. When it’s dangerous, they can’t make it in time.”The clip attaches directly to the user, whether it’s a sports bra if you’re going for a run or a belt if you’re walking around campus. So no matter what. , it’s at arm’s length away and you’re not fumbling around to get into dangerous times. Your location will be sent to up to 10 contacts of your choice through the apps installed on your .”
The company believes this second line of defense — texting contacts — is very important, and claims it has customer discovery interviews to back it up. The target price for the device is approximately $35 per unit. That’s far cheaper than Flare’s fashion bracelets, for example, but far more expensive than the $7 for the big, pink, bulky pepper spray that Amazon is about to replace.
Is it defensible?
Having two men at the helm of a female-targeted company was a little intriguing, but the founders say they don’t see any conflict there.
“circleI did a 3-4 month course at the University of Michigan called iCOR. We each interviewed about 15 people each week and asked them what they liked, what they didn’t like, why they used self-defense, and why they didn’t use self-defense,” says Logan, the founding team. Would it have probably made sense to add one woman or two to her? “We asked them if they were looking at each other’s locations, if they were tracking each other, etc. Our company and products were shaped by that customer discovery work.”
We can’t deter some young entrepreneurs from chasing their dreams, but given that smartphones are starting to incorporate increasingly sophisticated emergency response measures, is there really a space in the market for this? I’m wondering if…the product – on its own it can’t communicate with emergency services or friends, but it needs to be tethered to a smartphone via Bluetooth, so there’s a double reason.
As a 6’4″ martial arts trained ex-cop, I admit I could be blinded by privilege in this case. That being said, all I know about self-defense screams is “keep it simple.” A canister of $7 pepper spray and a cell phone in one hand seems more reliable than the solution 444 outlines in Vision for a Safer Future.
