It’s not hard to find startups touting their mission to “change the world” by making it 4% easier to find a book you’ll love or reducing the time it takes to add inane content to the webs from 40 seconds to 31 seconds. No value judgement here… just an observation that “changing the world” may be a lower bar than you might think. For all those book lovers who love to find books they love, a 4% improvement over a life time of reading is a worthwhile innovation.
One of my favorite “changing the world” stories is the one about Steve Jobs insisting that making the Macintosh boot 10 seconds faster would save dozens of lives. With 5 million users, Jobs claimed, that 10 seconds would equate to 50 million seconds… or dozens of lives. He got the math wrong but the idea was cool.
Thinking about the math of changing the world, I wondered about how much better my daughters and I were going to make the lives of dog owners through our Wise Walker invention. You can learn all about the Wise Walker at http://rjc3.co/ww (Hurry if you wanna get a Wise Walker… our Kickstarter project closes in about 50 hours, i.e., 9am PST on Tuesday, 11/25.)
So here we go… with correct math.
If you walk your dog twice per day, seven minutes in the morning and 12 minutes in the afternoon, that’s 6,935 minutes per year.
Assuming your dog gets his business done in the first four minutes on each walk, that leaves 4,015 minutes (~67 hours) of carrying that nasty bag around each year.
Your Wise Walker should last at least three years (probably a lot longer!), giving you 12,045 mins, or 201 hours of relief from handling that bag over 2,190 walks. At a $25 pledge amount, that’s 2/10 of one cent per minute of relief, or about one cent per walk.
If we deliver 400 Wise Walkers through our Kickstarter, we’ll bring 4,818,000 minutes of relief from carrying around nasty bags of dog “business” in just the first three years. That’s something we can be proud of. 😉
VoxDigitas 
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