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Hey I'm Nick and I'm making my own pair of custom hearing-enhancing wearables in my bedroom because I hate my hearing aids. The postman just came and I've just received the first prototype with electronics in!

Once we've done a bit more tweaking with the electronics and put them inside one of these shells, I'm finally going to have my own working pair of custom hearables.

Now, over the last months I've been focussing on making these for me. But as I've been blogging each step of this journey, people have been leaving comments on the videos and emailing saying that they should be wearing hearing aids but they hate how they look, and asking if they can have a pair of these, too. And this is really highlighting just how much of an unsolved problem this is.

Worldwide there are 400 million people who could benefit from hearing technology. But the stigma associated with hearing aids is arguably the biggest reason why 83% of them don't. That's hundreds of millions of people.

And for the few who do, it takes an average of 10 years for people to go from the point where they find out they could benefit from hearing tech to actually getting it. And as someone who also avoided hearing aids for 10 years because I hated what it meant to wear them, I completely get it. But I also know how hearing technology and being able to hear has completely transformed my life and the way I socialise.

I think it's so unfair that this technology that can give you so much more out of life is just so poorly designed and stigmatised that millions of people don't want to use it and have to go through a weird 10 year phase of denial and acceptance that you don't have to go through with any piece of consumer technology that improves your life.

So Gray and I have been talking and we are going to take Butterfly Audio which is currently a personal project, and we want to make it something bigger. We're to make these available for everyone who's asked to have a pair too. We're putting some finishing touches on a design that we think you're gonna love. And we're going to be releasing the new Butterfly Audio website soon where you can join the waitlist for the these and even be a part of the testing process too.

So sign up for my newsletter which I'll leave in the comments, and you'll be the first to know when waitlist opens.

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