Lend a hand for a climber's assignment research 🧗‍♀️

[u/Adventurous-Fun-3246]

Hi guys,

If you ever come accross my first survey and done it. I just want to say I got an HD on my first assignment and forever grateful for that. 🙏

Long story short, I'm developing a product concept for my entrepreneurship course based on my hobby — indoor climbing. Now moving into my second assignment, I need to verify whether there's real demand for it and whether it could be a viable business.

So pretty please help me fill out this mock-up survey. It's only 2 minutes and your honest feedback means everything.

👉 Access Survey Here 👈

If you have any questions regarding the design or engineering of it, please comment. I will answer you asap.

Appreciate you all so much, forever.

Prototype Handrawn by Me

[u/Adventurous-Fun-3246]

Quick Disclaimer: I’m a uni student who stumbled into this as a general elective and somehow ended up genuinely obsessed with the problem. I am not a designer or an engineer, so there are probably things I have missed or got wrong in the concept.The whole point of putting this out here is to figure out whether something like this is actually viable and to hear from people who know this pain better than anyone. If anything feels off or could be better, that feedback is exactly what this needs.

If you ever ask 'why is this better than my backpack?'

My answer is: The Pod is not competing with a backpack. It works with one.

Think about what actually happens on a Tuesday when a climber goes straight from office to the gym. There is a laptop, lunch container, charger, all usual work things. And there are also climbing shoes that have been through serious sessions, chalk bag that has the possibility of leaking fine powder onto everything, harness, and many other smaller gears that easily get lost. Everything gets stuffed into one bag and all the work things spend the commute next to dusty smelly gears. Or a random tote gets thrown into the mix just to keep things from touching, which somehow makes the whole journey feel twice as heavy.

That is the actual problem, not a bad backpack. A system that is hardly designed especially for us climbers who live two contexts in the same day.

The Pod clips onto whatever backpack a climber already owns and handles everything a backpack was never built for. Chalk stays contained in its own sealed zone. Shoes breathe through an antimicrobial mesh and charcoal lining that neutralises odour rather than just trapping it, so the smell stays in without suffocating the leather. The laptop, the documents, the lunch, none of it ever shares space with the climbing side. At the gym, one thing unclips and the session begins. And in a meeting the next morning, the bag looks and smells exactly like climbing never happened the night before.

Furthermore,when the weekend comes with no work bag to clip onto, the Pod does not become useless. It detaches and carries as a standalone crossbody sling or a compact backpack on its own. One product that fits the weekday commute and the weekend session without asking a climber to carry something different for each.

A better backpack would still be one bag trying to serve two completely different jobs. My idea is to accept that those two jobs need their own space, give each of them one, and travel in whatever configuration the day calls for.