🐿️ The Optimised Optometrist - The Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter

Originally published 1st April 2024

After years of post-pandemic “really-shoulds”, I finally got my eyes checked last week by Richard, my optician. Unlike the dentist, who gently chided me for staying away so long, Richard just got on with various tests and measurements that told him all about my eyesight: peering at my retina with a bright light, checking the extremities of my vision by having me look up and down and right and left, puffing air onto my eyeball to check I hadn’t depressurised like a 737. He measured the breadth and width and depth of my eyes and told me that unsurprisingly, their shape had changed with age, so my glasses prescription was going to be different from last time. But what he did next, while totally routine, suddenly struck me as superfluous: he gave me about 100 different pairs of specs to try on.

Now of course Richard didn’t actually manufacture frames and grind glass for each option; he used a device called a phoropter.

Richard’s phoropter wasn’t this slick and mechanised–it was more like the Inspector Gadget version, fragile and handheld–but it served the same purpose, letting him switch among many subtly different lenses in quick succession, asking me each time which one gave sharper vision. When he wanted an even finer variation than the gizmo offered, Richard used a simple hack: he held another lens between my eye and the screen to change my eyesight further. I saw only a blurry smear with the first few combinations, but as I tried one solution after another, he adjusted to my feedback and rapidly converged to an option clearly better than my current specs. The phoropter let Richard race around the OODA loop at a dizzying pace and build a custom pair of glasses that worked perfectly for me–but then I realised that surely all this experimentation was a total waste.

After all, Richard had measured my eyes very carefully and precisely when I first walked in, and optics is an exact science these days. We have telescopes in space that we adjust by the nanometre, so undoubtedly the problem of choosing eyeglass lenses is just a matter of applying the right formulas and expertise–that is, it’s complicated rather than complex.

Therefore, I’m pleased to announce that I will soon open my own chain of phoropter-free optician’s shops. We’ll capture customer requirements by inspecting their eyes and recording every measurement, every tiny variation from the norm. Then using well-known optical design methods, we’ll create high and low level designs that reflect exactly what the client needs based on the shape of their eyes, and manufacture to that specification, perhaps with cheap overseas labour–after all, we won’t need any particular skill or customer understanding in actually making the product! I admit our precision approach may be a touch slow, but the results will be predictable, and customers will be delighted when they receive perfectly-fitted glasses right on schedule, just a few months after their first visit. And the best part is that we’ll never have any returns or complaints because we’ll get everything right at the beginning.

Strangely, I haven’t yet managed to convince Richard to join my exciting new venture, but I’m sure he’ll come around once he sees how efficient my new methods are. (There was a moral to this tale, but I seem to have temporarily mislaid it.

This first appeared in my weekly Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter which is received as part of the Squirrel Squadron every Monday, and was originally posted on 1st April 2024. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com/