Building Sollos: Research & Validation
4 min read
Research, Scientific Validation, Neuroscience, Wellness, Music, Venture Building, Startups, Sollos
Before building anything, we needed to know whether the idea stood up to scrutiny. This phase focused on separating credible science from noise and validating the effect properly.
Need to validate a complex idea properly?
Most wellness products make bold claims backed by thin evidence. From the start, we knew we wanted to approach things differently. Before building anything, we needed credible validation.
The world of functional sound gets complicated very quickly. You run into terms like binaural beats, isochronic tones, pink noise, and circadian rhythms. Some concepts show promise. Many don’t stand up to scrutiny. To move forward, we had to clearly separate signal from noise.
Through pure chance, I met Caroline Hilton, who was working on an entirely different project at Universal Music Group and happened to be completing a Masters in cognitive neuroscience at the time. She was perfectly placed to review the existing research and assess whether there was anything worth pursuing.
Her conclusion was clear. The early research was interesting, but not robust enough to support the claims we wanted to make. If this was going to go anywhere, we needed a properly designed study.
She recommended partnering with Goldsmiths, University of London to run controlled research using EEG and ECG to track genuine physiological responses to the audio.
We secured internal seed funding to make that happen and worked closely with academic partners to design a rigorous study. Analysing the data took months. External experts reviewed the results and challenged the methodology. The findings held up.
The effects were real and measurable. For the first time, we had a credible scientific foundation on which we could confidently build a product.