This pepper spray will call your friends while you take on your attackers • businessroundups.org

From the desk of ‘I’m not sure this is a good idea’ at CES in Las Vegas 444. The early-stage startup plans to combine pepper spray with some electronics so that a potential attack victim’s friends can be notified when they’ve had to deploy the defense spray to get out of trouble. The company is the brainchild of Logan Nash and Matt Rogan, who met at the University of Michigan and started developing the technology nine months ago.

“We called the company 444 because our target group consists of college women between the ages of 18 and 24. A very popular trend right now is the number of angels. And 444 is a number that stands for protection,” Logan told businessroundups.org in an interview. “We are a self-defense company, so the name fits very well with our company and our mission of self-defense.”

The company is in the very early stages of its development; the prototype shown at CES was a 3D printed prototype and an early prototype PCB – so far more of a proof of concept than an actual product. The final plan is to add a pepper spray aerosol and a Bluetooth transmitter that connects to a phone. When the pepper spray is deployed, the device signals the victim’s phone, which then sends a message with the current location to a number of predefined phone numbers.

A spicy outing

“I see all those women wearing pepper spray devices. They are normally large, pink and bulky. They are just pieces of plastic that end up just being thrown in the backpack or in a bag. In a time of danger, they can’t get it in time,” says Logan, explaining that they designed a clip that makes it easier to carry in an available place. “The clip attaches directly to the user, whether that’s their sports bra when they go for a run, or their belt when they’re just walking around campus. So no matter what happens, it’s an arm’s length away and you don’t have to fumble to get into a time of danger. When they activate their device, not only do they have six to nine seconds of spray time, but their current location is also sent to up to 10 contacts of their choice via an app installed on their phone.

The company believes that this second line of defense — texting the contacts — is very important, and claims it has customer discovery interviews to back that up. The target price for the device is around $35 each. That is considerably cheaper than, for example the fashion bracelets from Flarebut a lot more expensive than the $7 Amazon charges for the big, pink, and bulky pepper sprays the company is replacing.

Is it defensible?

We were a little curious to see two men head up a company that targets women, but the founder says he sees no conflict there.

“We went through a program called iCOR at the University of Michigan, which was a three to four month course. We each interviewed about 15 of our target demographics each week and asked them what they like and don’t like, why they use self-defense, why they don’t use self-defense,” says Logan, asking if it might have made sense to adding a woman or two to the founding team. “We asked them if they look at each other’s current location and if they follow each other, things like that. Our company and our product have been shaped by that customer discovery work.”

Far be it from me to discourage a few young entrepreneurs from following their dreams, but given that smartphones are increasingly sophisticated emergency measures are built inI wonder if there really is room in the market for this product – doubly so considering that it can not only communicate with emergency services or friends, but must be connected to a smartphone via Bluetooth.

As a six-foot-tall, martial arts-trained ex-cop, I’m willing to admit that it’s possible I’m blinded by privilege in this case, so maybe take my criticism with a handful of sodium chloride. That said, everything I know about self defense screams “keep it simple.” A $7 can of pepper spray in one hand and a phone in the other seems more reliable than the solution 444 outlines with its vision of a safer future.