23 ms·

I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

• jll29 5y ago
  It is one thing to idea how the idea world should be, and quite another to develop a feasible strategy how to get there from the current state of affairs; a startup needs both. What I would do if I was you is go back to your first step: your unhappiness with Google's search for medical drugs. Have you talked to GOOG about integrating your data into their search? You might be able to sell a subset of your data and code to them for a small sum, and assist them with the integration of your idea into their universal search.
• joeman1000 5y ago
  This is an insightful, humorous and well-written post. It was a treat to read. Thanks to the author for spending time to create it.
• par 5y ago
  I mean, why not try to go the pure consumer route and raise some VC money? Get the doctors on board, add them to your pitch deck, put the site up, drive some paid traffic towards it, and raise a seed?
• parksy 5y ago
  Possibly a lot of the 40k went into branding and other fluff, but something in the core engine might have intrinsic value even if its extrinsic value wasn't properly realised or couldn't find a place in the market as a standalone product. It would be nice if there were some kind of universal project "retirement home" where these sorts of things could go to pasture, caretakers could prod at the idea and pull it apart, find the intrinsic value if any, and integrate the guts of it into some broader universal API. Such a platform of trinkets that solve tiny everyday problems that individually have little value might actually be useful in any sort of recommendation engine. API calls could be metered so the original creators of each piece get some kind of return however small. Give me 40k and some failed IPs to play with and I'll deliver a prototype in a few months...
• DeathArrow 5y ago
  I'm glad he didn't succeed. Because prescribing medication to patients (who might suffer from a serious illness) should be based on years of learning, carefully vetted information from medical peers, judicious thinking from the doctor and not some statistic models which can analyze dubious quality data. What if your model has small errors? What if the data is wrong? What if the data is good but people you've payed cheaply to enter it in the database did some small mistakes? It's not like we are dealing with consumer goods, where small mistakes might not be so important. We are dealing with people lives and health, where any kind of mistake should not be tolerated.
  • lucas03 5y ago
    I think you overestimate current state, how doctors are incentivized by pharma companies or just don't research/care enough.
• DeathArrow 5y ago
  How to make money from it: 1. do marketing: convince patients that GlacierMD is the greatest thing since the discovery of antibiotics and insulin 2. sell it to doctors: Dear Susan, this is the biggest thing to happen in the industry in the last 10 years, you don't want to be left outside, as you can lose lots of patients. Trust me, having an GlacierMD on your front door for just $99 /month is a great deal I am making to you as one of our first customers.
• mastah88 5y ago
  Sell it to examine.com
• rjmunro 5y ago
  I'd try marketing it to the Gate's foundation or the Wellcome Trust for grant support, rather than selling it for profit. Also look at other countries health systems. The UK's NHS has a department called "NHS Digital" who might be interested.
• t_mann 5y ago
  One thing I don't understand: he said he 'bought clinical trials'. What does that mean? Imho, the main thing that prevented this product from being useful was the lack of evidence that using it actually improves treatment outcomes compared to what doctors/patients already do. If he could have pointed to studies showing this, the doctors might have reacted differently. Even better, if he could have used his fancy statistics to create personalized recommendations and then demonstrated that they improve outcomes, he might have been on to something. The current tool was optimizing for the average patient, but nowadays we want personalized medicine.
• blue16 5y ago
  Its always important for there to actually be a problem that you solve, not just jumping in and trying to solve a non-existent problem
• mtnGoat 5y ago
  As someone who worked in healthcare, this outcome is not unexpected. My experience in that industry taught me to never go to a hospital, most of the staff don’t care about patient care at all. It’s just another workplace and everyone is worried about keeping their job, internal politics or money. Patients always seemed to come last. So why would they be interested in better outcomes by using a software? They aren’t really incentivized to do better in any way. Aside from gaming government requirements, wrapped around patient care, to get more money, only then do they care about outcome. Yes I’m jaded, certainly won’t go back.
• scrubs 5y ago
  I loved story. And you wanna know what? I like people with a pulse. The guy tried something out. He took a chance. He tried to make his own luck. And you co-re-discovered some foundational truths along the way that the experience has made more immediate and penetrating for him. Which helps us/me because he can convey it with conviction. I wanted to riff of a couple of points: '“Yeah okay that’s great but nobody cares about this math crap. You need doctors.” Goddamnit he was right. If nobody could be bothered with the math, then I was no better than Gwyneth Paltrow hawking vagina eggs. To build trust I needed to get endorsements from trustworthy people.' This slightly miscommunicates how it works; it's even more annoying. True you need the people usually first. But one day it will come down to math/science. And if you don't have that right the same people will roll their eyes at that too even if they can't spell math. And "Occasionally I like to disconnect from the IV drip of internet pseudoknowledge and learn stuff from books. I know, it’s weird—maybe even a bit hipster. But recently I read Wharton’s introductory marketing textbook, Strategic Marketing Management." I'm sending this in from the engineering cheerleading club: Never apologize or down play reading (a book) or writing. It's good! The other side doesn't get it? That's why you need a pulse so not to care about such things. In the alternative? Get a 12-pack and re-watch the 'Breakfast Club' with the other side. In the end we all play more than one roles and we all could use help on the way.
• amelius 5y ago
  He effectively made a search engine, but nobody wants to pay for search.
• theianjohnson 5y ago
  Way too long before testing any sort of product market fit, but I'm surprised the author didn't think to pitch to insurance companies.
  • nerdawson 5y ago
    I wonder if the founder has contemplated reviving and repositioning it?
  • nijave 5y ago
    Or drug companies
    • IMTDb 5y ago
      Yes, a good business model would have been to : - Invest (a lot of) capital to develop the product, make data more readable, refine the UX etc - Invest (a lot of) capital to market the service to doctors, offering it for free to them, with the angle of improving their patient outcome - Invest (a lot of) capital to market the service to patient, offering it for free to them, with the angle of letting them check what their doctors are doing Once everyone is using it and it becomes the de-facto source : - Market that to drug companies, asking for (a metric ton of) capital to "better manage your product reputation". Magically, the "better managed drugs" suddenly are shown under a better light than the others. Profitable ? Yes. Basically extorsion ? Also yes.
      • ipaddr 5y ago
        "Invest (a lot of) capital to market the service to doctors, offering it for free to them, with the angle of improving their patient outcome" At this point the strategy fails. Patient outcome is not the metrics to be focusing on with this group.
  • poulpy123 5y ago
    or hospitals
  • dskrepps 5y ago
• itsmemattchung 5y ago
  As a tiny little start up, dumping 40k on product development is (to me) a significant chunk of change. I do wonder if the author could've pulled in the MVP, tightened up the release cycles, before discovering that he was unable to "Make something people want".
  • bckr 5y ago
    He could have kept his day job and spent a few hundred dollars or less to have someone make some fake graphs. Hell, he could have made some fake graphs over a few weekends. Then he could have done exactly the same market research.
    • runevault 5y ago
      My one question there would be was he certain he could figure out the statistics to get to what he wanted? I feel like you need to get a rough idea of that much at least before you start pitching. Obviously you don't need every bell and whistle, all the data pipelines and so on. But basic proof would still be good to make sure you can deliver something vaguely in tune with what you're promising. But dropping all that money on contractors before you've done any REAL market research is wild to me.
      • bckr 5y ago
        > was he certain he could figure out the statistics... I feel like you need to get a rough idea of that much at least before you start pitching. I disagree. The latter is a huge investment. You're not burning any bridges by asking if something would be useful even if you don't know if you can do it yet. Of course even this is a wrong framing. Ideally he'd actually have sold the idea, by which I mean have actually taken money for the idea, before building it. Then, if he couldn't build it, he could give the money back.
• etothepii 5y ago
  I feel like I've read this exact story before?
  • Computeiful 5y ago
    Oft reposted, usually engenders an interesting discussion about MVPs though so I enjoy reading the comments everytime
  • ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
    I feel like I've done this exact story before... more than once. The problem is you don't ever make something NOBODY wants. Then it would be so easy to walk away. You make something a few people want, and a lot of people SAY they want, but they don't want it enough to pay you so much that your company can succeed rapidly, so you waste a lot of time and die slowly.
  • dna_polymerase 5y ago
    You have. It trended in early 2021. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25825917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25825917
• Dave3of5 5y ago
  I've also spent a lot of time on a side project (gravametrics.com). I never spent $40k on it but I've instead done everything myself and it appears to be a non-starter. I think you need something with a very concise value prop I'm working on that for my next thing right now. Something simple. FYI don't use AWS for these sorts of projects use something cheaper.
  • bootwoot 5y ago
    What are the cheaper options?
    • Dave3of5 5y ago
      Cheaper than AWS ? I used Scaleway. They don't offer the hyperscale that AWS does but you don't need that for a side project. Just get started then if you suddenly have 100,000 users then switch to something like AWS. Also there are no hidden costs it's like $2 a month for a tiny little server to get you started. You'll find that's enough.
  • acapybara 5y ago
    Re: "use something cheaper." For cost-effective startup/small scale infra, I love this method: - get a dedicated or colocated server (can be cheaper than you think... e.g. mini PC colo with endoffice, joe's datacenter, etc.) - install microk8s on ubuntu LTS - write yaml files and deploy to microk8s The main benefit of this is that infrastructure is very cost effective for early stage projects. Once the project needs something bigger, all of the infra is encoded in the k8s yaml files and can be deployed to a "real" k8s cluster. Of course, the yaml needs to be carefully written and made as portable as possible so that it can be deployed to other clusters in the future. Backup of state can be as simple as using HostPath volumes for state, and running syncthing as a deployment. Run syncthing on other hosts (e.g. your home machine/laptop, some other cloud node, etc.) and state will be synced in realtime. Syncthing has options for keeping older versions of files/directories, so it's reasonably protected in the case the server gets hacked or deleted by accident. This is not perfect, of course, but it's a very pragmatic and cost-effective approach. I've used/am using it and am very happy with the end result. I use cert manager, let'sencrypt, and wildcard DNS so that I can deploy new apps with their own TLS endpoints just by deploying a bit of yaml.
• avrionov 5y ago
  It was posted before multiple times and generated 2 big discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25825917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25825917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21947551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21947551
• orzig 5y ago
  Thank you for trying this, and even more for writing it up. People talk about bad startups that do happen, but not nearly enough about good ones that don’t. We should be at least as outraged at the systems that quietly steal what could have been.
• telomero22 5y ago
  This is actually a very valuable resource, similar to https://www.rxlist.com/ https://www.rxlist.com/ Can you apply that to all kinds of medication, is this is a lot of more work or can you plug it in or let a student do the data entry? It will take a while to gain traction, but if you go to conferences, add more kinds of medications, establish a brand and gain reputation, this could be very successful. The contribution to modern medicine is invaluable. How many big kinds of medications are there? For the Top20 most common cancers, IBS, Neuropathy, acne, MS, heart disease, hypertension, arthritis and you've got most of the big ones covered. You can also add beauty treatments such as hair loss, skin rejuvenation and you are already in the beauty sector with much lower barriers to entry. Might be a couple of months of data entry but then you would have this invaluable neural net no? I wouldn't work on this full-time, but sending out emails here and there, developing it further here and there could be quite fruitful with a very good time spent/impact ratio.
  • satsuma 5y ago
    i feel like it's something that, on its own isn't worth much, but could be sold to a group like goodrx or webmd or something like that for a decent payout.
    • telomero22 5y ago
      Yes it's very valuable for a big player.
• adenozine 5y ago
  I swear there was a story like this 7-8 years ago on HN where a young fella had tried to barge his way into big pharma via data science. As I recall, he had his lunch eaten and his spirit beaten, just like this one. I remember thinking about how sad it is that companies could succeed, or fail, off the basis of good, or bad, marketing. There's a weird effect where data-driven decision making becomes essentially unstoppable given a big enough sized company, and it essentially condemns companies small enough when they believe that their decision making and technical prowess alone can earn them respectful competition against the "big boys." And then they find out everything is corrupt, everything is about money, they don't have nearly enough money for the real players to even stop laughing at them for a moment, and they quit and cut their losses.
  • xyst 5y ago
    US healthcare is honestly a big fat joke right now. If we had gotten rid of this private payer situation a long time ago, many of the parasites would have just died off. It truly is a system of how much we can steal from the taxpayer/patient rather than actually providing healthcare.
• The_rationalist 5y ago
  This is a tragedy of the commons. With my years of dedicated scholars research I keep contemplating more and more how much the human condition is miserable because absurd non-allocation of financial and cognitive resources where it matters. Humans beings will keep suffering, a direct product of their buggy/broken brains.
• Barrera 5y ago
  The main reason this didn't work is that the founder didn't identify a customer willing to spend money. A lot of startups fail because they never identify a customer. Or even a problem. This one failed because before writing a line of code the founder did not take the next step and ensure that the prospective customer was willing to spend money on a solution. This is why so many failing startups try to pivot to two-sided business models like advertising. That's one of the hardest businesses there is to start. And it's what the founder did here, too. It sounds obvious stated as follows, but every startup failure I've read or heard about fails to get these ducks in a row: - problem to be solved - customer who has the problem - customer willing to spend money to solve the problem - enough customers willing to spend money on solving the problem to fuel a startup Oddly enough, many of the startup success stories gloss over these fundamental components. The net result is that there's way too much emphasis on the idea and not nearly enough on the customer.
  • andi999 5y ago
    Well, successful business means paying customers, that is almost a tautology. You could also say they didnt identify how to make money. The big question is how do you get people to give you money for your services/product. Classically people answer this with emphasis on the idea.
    • ilamont 5y ago
      > successful business means paying customers In the startup world, founders have been taught that "success" means things other than making money, such as large "valuations" that are not tied to profit or even revenue. Another founder "success" is VC or angel funding, or getting on some list ("top founders under 30!") or media coverage. "Exit" is also a "success" even if the sale is underwater or not worth much. > You could also say they didnt identify how to make money. For a time, there was a school of thought that as long as you had incredible growth/usage for your app or service, making money wasn't important because someone would buy you.
    • achillesheels 5y ago
      I believe the answer rests in offering a solution to a problem that is worth more time than money to solve on one's own, or a new solution that creates more opportunities for a customer to grow their profitability.
• nonrandomstring 5y ago
  Sad. Funny. All too familiar. Assuming too much about people's motives is a sure way to fall on your face. In the end _you_ cared about it more than even the doctors and patients who you assumed put health first. But well done for trying all the same.
• renewiltord 5y ago
  Posted many times. In case you haven't seen it, The Mom Test is great. And the audiobook is good too.
  • davidsawyer 5y ago
    The audiobook is read by the Rob Fitzpatrick, the author, and he delivers things really casually and conversationally. Really enjoyed it.
• red0point 5y ago
  I think the takeaway from the blog post is wrong and comments focusing on building a faster MVP miss the point. Not everything is a startup. This is a research project - and should be approached that way. There should be donors, a foundation, free access to all participants, reputation-building by writing (& publishing in reputable journals / conferences) studies about its efficacy, a board of doctors actually reviewing & cross-checking recommendations, a doctor-to-doctor helpline, etc. As the author found out - it's not something people want to buy, but the public. So I think if you approach it from that direction - it might just work.
  • kirso 5y ago
    The interesting lesson here is that this could have been avoided, including the building by just going and collecting cash upfront irregardless of who customer was supposed to be.
  • ceasesurthinko 5y ago
    Sure, and a faster and less bloaty MVP made in a couple of weeks and subsequently presented in front of customers as soon as possible- would've let the blog author know that their idea was very flawed, so that they could either abandon the idea and/or pivot to a different idea.
  • jollybean 5y ago
    This was a startup that would have required a 2 year run way to get into the B2B sales of a tricky market. There was clearly value on the table, working out how to make money form it would have been 80% of the effort, but I suggest there's something there. He should have given it away for free. There's a 1000% chance that if all of a sudden, doctors all over the place start using a tool because they think it's useful, and recommend it to their friends, that it would find a way to be successful. A drug company would buy that just for the data.
    • achillesheels 5y ago
      Mining proprietary data is indeed a value proposition.
• gxs 5y ago
  Out of curiosity - the author never mentioned the most "successful" drug for depression the same way the mentioned naproxen. Did anyone catch what the name of the drug for depression treatment was?
  • abirch 5y ago
    It would depend on tests. Antidepressants work in different ways. If your body is not producing enough serotonin, you'd want drug class x. Or Dopamine a completely different class of drugs.
    • gxs 5y ago
      Was just curious because he seemed to have run that analysis, but didn't provide the results the same way he did for pain killers
• itake 5y ago
  Add [2020] to the post title
• rsweeney21 5y ago
  As developers we often confuse "startup idea" with "solution to a problem". A fantastic startup idea includes a way to monetize the idea. Without a way to monetize the idea, it's a feature. Sometimes it is simple - make a piece of software so valuable, businesses or consumer are willing to pay money for it. Sometimes you have to be more creative. For example, Brex makes software for managing business credit cards. It's handy, but I'm not sure I would pay for it. But the Brex model takes a cut of credit card processing fees, so they can give their product away for free. In this case you could target consumers and give it away for free, then when someone wants a prescription for a medicine they found on your site, you can "recommend" local doctors. Doctors will pay a lot for the patient leads.
• aldebran 5y ago
  This is why PM 101 is should this problem be solved and why. This could be avoided by pretending the solution exists and asking people how they feel about paying for it. That said this can be a great not for profit idea.
• aaronbrethorst 5y ago
  We worked at a startup that leveraged autonomous blockchains to transfer money from naïve investors to slightly less naïve twenty-somethings. There are worse gigs. This reads like a parody to me. This whole thing is real, though, right?
• a1371 5y ago
  This was a fun read, but I think it came to the wrong conclusion. The real issue imo was "I had practically only weeks of runway". You just don't have time to make it happen. As a fellow start up founder, I see most of my job being just buying time for the business. Buying time to make, to talk, and to think. It wasn't like the tool had no value to Susan, maybe with a booth at her go-to annual expo, mentioning a few past lawsuits the tool could avoid, and an affinity partnership with her industry association, the tool would have become a fact of life for her. It's a lot of work, I'm not denying that. Yet, this is the sort of thing YC's idealized startup stories often fail to say. If "instant Product Market Fit" is so good, then how come practically every new high flying SV startup is using loads of VC money to "bend the market to the product"? Exciting Startups have to venture far, it's not about "we let you buy your potatoes online" anymore. Chances are you won't get deals by talking to people once. I wouldn't say that means your idea is bad.
  • abirch 5y ago
    I agree with your comment about the wrong conclusion. Google didn't have a monetization plan, it launched in 1998 and didn't do adwords(ads) until 2000. It's always better to have positive cashflow, however, enough capital lets you have more runway. At the end of the day you do need someone who will pay. Not that I dislike attorneys but they could have been a client. If you can show that a doctor didn't prescribe the best drug for their malpractice lawsuit it could bring in some money.
    • xorcist 5y ago
      Google was a research project several years before that! Graduate students wouldn't have demanded that raise only a few weeks in. (Just kidding. Or am I?)
    • fragmede 5y ago
      It's not 1998 anymore is the thing. It's obviously better to have positive cash flow but unless you come up with something that is that huge of a hit, in a market where people both understand your product, but also there aren't entrenched competitors to squash you, there's a lot of hard work to get to a place where your product is worth something your customers. Which is expensive, in both time and money. Both of which OP didn't have enough of.
• whiddershins 5y ago
  One of the oft missed benefits of seeking funding is you have someone less enamored with the idea who has to imagine how it can make money. This might be a very useful filter.
• deleted 5y ago
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• poulpy123 5y ago
  there was a huge huge problem with his startup, and it wasn't the economic model but the fact he was providing medical advice without any medical expertise. I don't know if it's allowed in the US, but it's at least ethically troublesome. And I guess the doctors had no reason to use a service made by a guy without expertise, the data coming from some outsourced workers without any third party validation (no putting the face of few doctors isn't a validation).
  • webmaven 5y ago
    It is entirely possible to provide analysis without crossing the line into giving advice: Eg. "Drug A works for more patients in your demographic¹, Drug B has fewer and milder side effects²."
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• ceasesurthinko 5y ago
  Do people even read The Lean Startup anymore?
• AlwaysRock 5y ago
  Only 40K? VC's waste more than that in an afternoon on startup ideas. Congrats on the learning experience. The next one will be better. Maybe.
• hjorthjort 5y ago
  My first thought was "you know who would want this? Insurance companies!" Doctor have a moral incentive -- often a strong one! -- to maximize your health, but they actually don't have the economic incentive to keep you healthy. Their incentives are similar to those of drug companies. But insurance companies want you to need as little care as possible. They are the ones who will sponsor your checkups, may encourage you to exercise, etc. They also tend to have some sway over healthcare providers, or at least an ability to offer helpful information. And they have loads of money. Your operational costs should be peanuts to them. My insurance company (in Europe) offer me a free hotline of 24/7 medical workers for asking minor health questions, because they want to make sure I stay healthy, and the operational cost of that staff is probably way beyond what you need. Abd private insurance companies compete on customer features, so it could actually be a selling point for them to lock up customers, who tend to stick around for a long time. I realize I'm a total armchair advisor here and what the hell do I know. But reading how this person approached potential customers I kept thinking "oh man I wonder what will happen when he talks to the insurance companies, why would they not be interested?"
  • tehlike 5y ago
    i am not sure if this is true from incentive pov. Insurance would love to tuck in as much premium as possible, and if it comes at greater cost for care, be it. https://www.healthcare.gov/health-care-law-protections/rate-review/ https://www.healthcare.gov/health-care-law-protections/rate-...
  • jrs235 5y ago
    >But insurance companies want you to need as little care as possible. Sadly this isn't true. Regulated insurance companies that must pay out a minimum percentage of premiums (in other words their profits are limited by cost plus pricing) don't care if prices stay down. They only care about stability and no surprises in a given year and are okay with prices continuing to go up and up and up. *Amount of care and prices/costs are not exactly the same thing but they are highly correlated.
• jonathan-adly 5y ago
  Like the last time this was posted, OP didn't have the right co-founder who could sell this. Drug Formulary management is a legitimate problem and a business, currently someone pays a pharmacist 6 figures to present and clean drug study data to hospitals and insurance companies who decide what to include/exclude from their drug formularies. The work flow currently is Drug A comes to market with expense X, it is competing with older Drug B with expense Y. There are no head to head trials, but an expert (usually a pharmacist) can reach solid benefit/harm conclusions. That pharmacist writes up a nice summary with a recommendation and present to a committee made up of other experts (usually doctors w/ academic background). They discuss and come to a formulary decision for the whole hospital. In insurance companies, some background financial shady stuff can take place (kickback schemes) that influence this process, but some form of honest data analysis takes place anyway. I used to do this for a while, it can work. Just have to convince the right people that your software would be better than the pharmacist. The market incentives doesn't really encourage that kind of automation/savings, so it will be an uphill battle that need experienced sales folks and good VC money.
• runevault 5y ago
  I wonder if he could have made money working with the marketing depts of various drug companies instead of trying to sell stuff to the doctors. Especially if he added the right visuals the ad depts could use in commercials/print ads/etc.
  • havkom 5y ago
    Exactly my thought!
• pandemicsoul 5y ago
  Like others below have said, this seems like the absolute wrong conclusions to come to. Someone else mentioned he didn't have enough runway and that's what it feels like to me, too. Someone close to me has terrible migraines and has spent years trying to figure out how to treat them to no avail. If this tool could have shown me data that would have helped the person I love, I would have paid a lot of money for it. I have no idea what kind of marketing he did and for exactly how long, but it feels like there's a lot of people, organizations, and companies that could have been interested here beyond a few doctors in SF. Like, not to put too fine a point on it, but how many disabled people did he talk to? How many industry groups (American Lung Association, etc.)?
• bayesian_horse 5y ago
  "What's relieving pain the most" is just not the right question. Ibuprofen for example has more severe side effects, especially when used often, than aspirin. Also other factors apply, because a "headache" is really a rather complicated phenomenon...
• europat 5y ago
  Has been discussed before. Can only find https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27231114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27231114 but there has been a longer discussion than that.
• bonestamp2 5y ago
  I loved reading the story, but it sounds like the founder targeted the wrong customer. Individual doctors are not the customer. When the incentive for the customer doesn't outweigh the investment, that's when you need to scale up the customer. The customer for this product is a business that deals with tens or hundreds of thousands of patients: health insurance companies, government healthcare purchasing departments (large market outside the USA), the sales department at the drug companies themselves, etc. These companies are all incentivized by getting better treatments for their patients because that either lowers their costs, or sells more of their drugs (when they're the best option).
• peter_retief 5y ago
  Interesting, fun also some of the reactions I got to my many ideas. I have realised that one needs some sort of monopoly to make any money. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k
• Wronnay 5y ago
  "We worked at a startup that leveraged autonomous blockchains to transfer money from naïve investors to slightly less naïve twenty-somethings." My favorite line from the post
• orangeyjuicey 5y ago
  Actually I was surprised when I read: "Make something people want. [...] The idea is that if you build something truly awesome, you'll figure out a way to make money off of it." That sounds to me like he got it backwards. Instead of building something that people want, he built something that was truly awesome. And I think that's the problem. When all those people encouraged him, I think he misinterpreted their enthusiasm at his awesome idea for a "want". Either way, I think for all the shortcomings and faults the VC and accelerator world has, this is a good example of a mistake that's much more easily avoided when following a proper development plan for your startup.
• boplicity 5y ago
  It's not clear at all that the founder had any understanding, beyond the most basic, of the market they were entering. You don't have to start out with a path to monetizing a business -- but if you don't understand the possibilities that you're opening up for yourself, then the odds of success go way down. Once money was desperately needed...the response was to cold call small doctors offices? That, clearly, shows the deep lack of understanding of the market for this type of product.
• chaostheory 5y ago
  Not a waste if you consider the regret minimization framework. Makes for a nice story too.
• daenz 5y ago
  >Make something people want. It’s Y-Combinator’s motto and a maxim of aspiring internet entrepreneurs. The idea is that if you build something truly awesome, you’ll figure out a way to make some money off of it. To me, "make something people want" is a proxy for "make something people are willing to pay for." To truly want something, you have to be willing to expend resources to obtain it. Anything less than that is people blowing smoke.
• michaelbuckbee 5y ago
  I had a founder friend in a similar spot tell me: "US Healthcare is all pain and nobody to pay." There are just lots of weird backwards incentives and deeply entrenched institutions that make it simply brutal to try and make changes.
• jollybean 5y ago
  This is a great case study in idea development. He was onto something with the doctor thing. 1) Things that help people make money are 100x more valuable, i.e. something that helps the Docs generate more revenue. 2) This was insulting: "So I’d sorta just be, like, donating this money if I paid you for this thing, right" Seriously a professional talking about a 'donation' if it didn't actually increase her revenue? What a jerk. "I care about my patients but in the end I just give them Zoloft!" I mean that might say a lot about that line of work. That said, I think they might actually use it, if it's institutionalized - i.e. they use it Med School, doctors everywhere use it, two doctors 'unsure' about something both check it etc. it becomes 'something needed' at the office and everyone is expected to have it. I suspect there's opportunity there, it's just take some time and structuring.
  • kdkirsch 5y ago
    There are already other resources which we (I’m an MD) already pay for and use to help make decisions when there is ambiguity about the best course of action. UpToDate was previously mentioned and it’s something we pay hundreds of dollars a year for (unless our hospital has a subscription). You’re not wrong about introducing these tools to medical students but the value needs to be there because it’s actually a very crowded space.
    • jollybean 5y ago
      Yes, the Elephant in the Room was how crowded this space ought to be. That said, Healthcare is 17% of the Economy and it's growing. There are lots of different spaces for lots of different things. Insurers want risk mitigation, researchers want data, MDs desperately want help, Pharmacies want automation and a bit of oversight, drug companies want ad/sales potential etc..
• deleted 5y ago
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• paxys 5y ago
  The founder pitched a great idea at the start – help consumers who don't know what kinds of common drugs to buy at the store, but then immediately pivoted to selling the service to doctors and medical practices. They should have realized that the second one would be impossible to break into. > But then I look at WebMD’s 10-Qs and start to spiral. Turns out the world’s biggest health website makes about $0.50/year per user. That is…not enough money to bootstrap GlacierMD. I’m pouring money into my rent, into my Egyptian contractors, into AWS—I need some cash soon. The take away here should have been not to pivot entirely, but raise money. You are in Silicon Valley! This is literally why this entire ecosystem exists. Sometimes bootstrapping can be beneficial, but when you have spent $40K of your money, have a good enough prototype with a clear story, and are going up against giant established competitors, forget customers for a while and sell to VCs instead. If you are really sure that the service adds value for doctors, give it to them for free for a year and prove it. Open up your service for users without worrying about AWS bills or ad revenue. A boatload of money in the bank makes all of this trivial.
  • vdfs 5y ago
    > They should have realized that the second one would be impossible to break into Why is that impossible? I had a long time idea of making a software for doctors in my country, it's not in Silicon Valley, everyone here use cash and it's hard to keep up with how many visitors they have or patient history (everything is stored in paper), my idea is to make a website for them, i can see how hard it would be to sell this but will it be impossible?
    • paxys 5y ago
      Software for scheduling, accounting, payments – sure. He was trying to sell a service which would suggest medical advice for doctors to give to their patients.
  • trutannus 5y ago
    You're not wrong at all, but this line at the end really stuck out to me: > If I’d articulated at the beginning how I expected to extract value from GlacierMD, maybe I would’ve researched the economics of an ad-based model, or I would’ve validated that doctors were willing to pay, or hospitals, or insurance companies. The impression I got was this failure was induced by a complete lack of planning. It looks like the author had an idea, got some positive feedback, then drove the entire project based on random inputs they got from people. At no point do they talk about sitting down and doing the boring stuff. Like feasibility analysis, market studies, and developing a very, very basic concept of where the money will come from. The fact that the project had to fail before they realized they didn't think of how to monetize it is... baffling. That should be the one of first things you consider when trying to start a business: how will it make money?
• Traubenfuchs 5y ago
  > We worked at a startup that leveraged autonomous blockchains to transfer money from naïve investors to slightly less naïve twenty-somethings. There are worse gigs. ... are there? I mean, I guess you got paid handsomely, but still. Leaving that aside there aren't many tech jobs I would be ashamed of having more than that one. Anyways, I wouldn't pay for this as I love doing the research myself. Google for the plebs and pubmed and more specialized websites for the patricians is usually good enough. I would pay for Doppelgänger though. I would pay more than 1 € even! Maybe 4.99! I would even consider 9.99 if the database is huge. The idea of finding my doppelganger sounds amazing.
• dcole2929 5y ago
  This was an easy pivot away from being a runaway success. The founder couldn't figure out who the right customer was and ran out of cash. This is why so many companies are venture backed. It's not that people just want to give away pieces of their company because it's cool, but that extra cash prevents you from giving up while you go through the sometimes long process of finding product market fit. Like honestly, this product could still reach that type of success. No idea if this guy still has the code base around, or is chilling in thread, but hit me up if so lol, I'll happily buy it off you. Or at least point you towards how to make this make money
• xyst 5y ago
  It's not a bad idea. Probably would have at least been self sustainable if it was sold to hospital administrators. Sell it as a "risk reducing" measure.
• Sunshadesight4 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
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• Sunshadesight4 5y ago
• chrisstanchak 5y ago
  Sounds like you gave up to early
• kubatyszko 5y ago
  Spent $40k on a great life and business LESSON!. That's not bad at all.
• yobbo 5y ago
  Given that it is actually possible to implement this idea, I imagine medicine professionals would appreciate it, and there should be enough to make his startup viable. When talking to doctors, he's not selling his idea or service - he has to first sell his own credibility, and then the credibility of his service. He is claiming that the intended/unintended effects of medicines can be coded into a big searchable table, that his "contractors" have done this, and his service is now usable and valuable. This too bold a claim, especially from "some random guy". That's why none of the doctors were interested. In his blog post, he's assuming his product actually has value, but somehow has opposing stakeholders.
• pydry 5y ago
  There's surprisingly little money to be made in truthfully and honestly informing people even though it's clearly what they want. If you can convince people to buy the higher margin drug? Yeah, there's lots of easy money to be made in that even though customers don't want that. Google for "best X" and in a ton of markets all you will get is a bunch of skeevy affiliate sites promoting the best deals for them and a good look at who is willing to lay down the most $$$ on adwords. Even for branded sites with a rep (e.g. like tomshardware) i have my suspicions that they weight their recommendations towards companies that buy advertising on their sites.
• throwaway684936 5y ago
  I'm definitely in the minority here, but I'd probably have paid up to $15/month for access to this. I care very strongly about picking something that will be maximally effective when buying OTC or talking to doctors about trying specific medication. Is there any chance of the remaining data and possibly code being released/sold?
  • JAlexoid 5y ago
    Yes, you're definitely the minority. The vast majority of people don't buy nearly enough OTC medications to justify $15 per month to recommend OTC medication
    • zeepzeep 5y ago
      I feel like this could run on donations. I signup, search a product and a day/week later get a mail "Did X Help? If so, care to donate a few dollar for the info we generated for you? If not, try Y, 7 studies have shown it works better than X in some cases."
• l7l 5y ago
  Love the idea. Why dont you talk to health insurances? At least in Europe this might work.
  • rabuse 5y ago
    Agreed. I think insurance companies would be the better customer for this idea. They're in the business of paying the least amount possible for medical care.
• b20000 5y ago
  this should probably have been pitched to health insurance orgs.
  • jomoho 5y ago
    This, or some other source of grant money focused on health. Clearly not every good idea is able to be monetized through its users.
• tonymet 5y ago
  Not just 40k, also the opportunity cost of the time spent on the startup, which is more than $30k/mo in lost income. so $40k + $270k (9 mo, estimated) = $310k lost Not saying it wasn't worth it. People should take risks. Just be sure to fully account for them.
• xwdv 5y ago
  He got lucky, he only wasted $40k. Some people waste some of the best years of their lives chasing startup ideas, paying huge opportunity costs and retarding their progress in life. He got off cheap.
• scottndecker 5y ago
  $40k learning exercise. And great job shutting it down sooner rather than later when it would have been $200k and your marriage.
• epmaybe 5y ago
  Can someone provide an example of where this would provide value? I'm not sure I understand. The examples I see in the article (picking the 'best' pain medication or antidepressant) aren't all that interesting to me. Like, of course naproxen wins, it has the longest half life of all of the listed medications...and the comparison of SSRI are well known at this point. I find it hard to believe that a board certified psychiatrist (Susan) wouldn't know which medication has better efficacy in which scenarios. Perhaps this is meant for providers that don't understand the pharmacology and evidence behind the drugs they're prescribing. If that's the case, maybe we should be asking ourselves if we should be the ones prescribing that medication or if a specialist should. And maybe it can elucidate useful findings quicker than academia, but I doubt by much. And funnily enough, there are already tools that exist to make meta-analyses and systematic reviews a lot quicker than they used to be.
  • treis 5y ago
    >I find it hard to believe that a board certified psychiatrist (Susan) wouldn't know which medication has better efficacy in which scenarios. The field of medicine is constantly changing with new drugs and studies coming out all of the time. So no Susan might not know that and if she does she learned the new information from somewhere. The problem that the guy in TFA has is that the business he wants to build already exists. Uptodate provides phsyician references, Cochrane does a lot of meta/review studies, and I'm sure there's others.
    • JAlexoid 5y ago
      I mean... Research your competition should be on the list of every founder.
• auspex 5y ago
  He could have tried to sell this to Walgreens and CVS. Have a terminal in the pain killer aisle to give people get recommendations.
• gnutrino 5y ago
  This founder is obviously book smart, but street stupid. I can't imagine any other outcome here. The fact they wasted 40k on this is amazing to me. If they had been forced to raise that money, maybe they would have been forced to answer the important questions first.
• 6510 5y ago
  > So I built something people wanted. Consumers wanted it, doctors wanted it, I wanted it. Where did I go wrong? You wanted to sell to practitioners directly. Your market is suppliers. They are in the position to sell it to doctors by the thousands for next to nothing. Go make some phone calls.
• csmeder 5y ago
  Maybe he should try to sell the service as an API to search engines. E.g. I just tried the question "what's the best headache medicine" on the front show hn article: Andi https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30832589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30832589 and the result was "the best medicine is what your doctor subscribes you"
• osigurdson 5y ago
  Were the operational costs very high? Why not just keep it going until someone buys the tech from you (like WebMD perhaps)? It seems like a good idea in any case.
• deleted 5y ago
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• halfcomputer 5y ago
  The author needs to sell to publishers and R&D firms, not direct to doctors and patients. Think: MayoClinic, Mount Sinai, and other players who are big on medical research. Health magazines and publishers.
• archhn 5y ago
  You built something that competes with doctors, not compliments them. If the medical industry was unregulated, you could pair this with a prescription service and make an automated online doctor's office. You're unfortunately dealing with an unfree market, which is why the psychiatrist tended to her nails instead of shitting her pants when you revealed tech that could potentially make her obsolete.
• runxel 5y ago
  On a sidenote I really had to smirk when I read "painkillers". So american! But let's stay on track: The thing with painkillers is that they are not really predictable (so I don't wonder that he failed). Even if a study suggests that a certain kind of medicine might help better, this doesn't mean anything. It especially does not mean, that the painkiller will help me. I've tried a lot of them, based on recommendations from the doctor, from the internet, from the pharmacist. In the end I found one agent that really helps me and I sticked with that.
  • ASalazarMX 5y ago
    I also smirked at the 40,000 USD figure. Some people has bills bigger than that for staying at a hospital a few days, in other country they could have financed a startup.
• shtopointo 5y ago
  B2B sales are hard.
• stevage 5y ago
  Sounds like he had 40k of expenses, plus at least 9 months without a salary, so it cost him a lot more than that.
• CobrastanJorji 5y ago
  I'd like to discuss one of the problems the author encountered on its own. Here a doctor was presented with a tool that would allow them to prescribe better treatments to her patients, but there was no incentive for her to adopt that tool. How could we change medicine so that such tools could be adopted? Patients probably won't individually notice any difference, and they don't control what they pay. Insurance companies might be motivated to provide something like this to doctors under the theory that better results are probably cheaper in the long term. A single payer system might perhaps provide certain solutions to doctors and hospitals in various manners, but adopting novel stuff like this from small shops might become effectively impossible. What models would allow for an inventor inventing something like this?
  • swalsh 5y ago
    You don't need a single payer system for this. We have a solution today via quality metrics. There are a number of quality metrics from places such as NCQA. They attach performance in these metrics to payments (or penalties). ACO's are one example.
    • CobrastanJorji 5y ago
      Interesting. I'm unfamiliar with quality metrics. Do they affect individual doctors? Say this one doctor's patients tend to recover from colds 50% faster or slower than other doctors. Does this affect her practice in any way?
• kdkirsch 5y ago
  I’m a physician. I really appreciate Tom’s enthusiasm, but I think that enthusiasm led him to overestimate the significance of the problem. Moreover he didn’t really understand for whom he was building this product. At first he thought it would be a consumer product. But he realized that consumers would not pay/subscribe and later learned that advertising wouldn’t work. Next he thought doctors would pay because “Doctors have money, right?” Again paying for this or any service is an expense. Its value has to justify the expense. We pay hundreds of dollars a year for UpToDate because it’s valuable. Cochrane is the gold standard for meta-analyses and they’re publishing for topics that are of clinical significance. Ultimately I doubt anyone is going to change their practice based on this product because there isn’t a compelling reason to do so. My major observation is that Tom tried to make a healthcare startup with negligible understanding of healthcare: the players, how payments work, how physicians practice, and what patients want/need. By not understanding the environment you’re not going to be able to understand the Problem which means your Solution will probably fail. This is a mistake repeated by most of the engineer founded health startups I’ve read about. Finally for anyone wondering I usually recommend ibuprofen 800mg every 8 hours and Tylenol 1000mg every 8 hours. This isn’t medical advice, just something you may find from a quick search.
  • scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
    I’ve been a PM in a small healthcare tech company run by engineers over the past few years and this 100%.
  • peter_retief 5y ago
    I am developing a non invasive diagnosis tool that uses infrared absorption, electrical activity and a few other sensors with machine learning. As it stands there are some physicians who think it has potential. I am also using it to identify people which would make it useful in its own right. My question is, do you think a quick diagnosis tool would be helpful and would someone be prepared to pay something for it?
  • BoiledCabbage 5y ago
    I agree. And what Tom didn't realize is that Doctors aren't financially incetivized to give better healthcare. There is no money in it for them. If anything, return visits because of a partial prior resolution make more money. Now clearly I'm not saying that doctors try to give bad diagnoses for profit (because they don't). But beyond a certain minimum bar, and on a purely financial basis, improving diagnostics or prescription accuracy doesn't not make a medical practice more money. And the responses here illustrte that. Now, whether that's the right/wrong incentive strucgture is a whole 'nother discussion. And I personally can't think of something better than what we currently have - but it is a truth of the current system.
• system2 5y ago
  "So I borrow my parents’ car" made me chuckle. Also, do not quit your job before you make money from any one of your side projects. Also, do not trust contractors if you cannot handle it yourself without them. I can see why so many things wrong but I believe the author also noticed these major flaws/mistakes and wrote himself. And if I called all my tiny projects or websites I built startups, I'd be the startup king of America.
  • webmaven 5y ago
    > And if I called all my tiny projects or websites I built startups, I'd be the startup king of America. Serial entrepreneurs are so yesterday. You're a parallel entrepreneur!
• ribs 5y ago
  “Over the next nine months I would quit my job, write over 200,000 lines of code” That stretches credulity. It’s, like, 750 lines of code per day, working every day.
• sxg 5y ago
  Surprised to see this pop up again. Last time it came up, it prompted me to jot down my thoughts. Basically he built the wrong product but never came to that realization even in the post mortem (https://satyam.substack.com/p/why-glaciermd-actually-wasted-40k?s=r https://satyam.substack.com/p/why-glaciermd-actually-wasted-...).
• FWKevents 5y ago
  I don't like the title. The author didn't waste the money. He learned something that cost $40k to learn. He doesn't say what he learned and would do differently next time.
• FWKevents 5y ago
  I don't like the title. The author didn't waste the money. He learned a lesson that cost $40k to learn. (Less than many failed start-ups.) He doesn't say what he learned and would do differently next time. It seems to me this is a classic case of spending too much on the tool and thinking that users will just somehow come. Too much on the tool; not enough on the marketing. A more streamlined MVP would have sufficed to see if there was a product/market fit and to figure out how to monetize it.
• guhcampos 5y ago
  I could not help the feeling he was selling to the wrong people? Shouldn't this product be sold to Healthcare providers instead of doctors? The providers have an actual interest of reducing doctor trips, cost of treatments and this type of hard optimization. Heck, someone got to sell step-counting-bracelets to health care providers.
• deleted 5y ago
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• popcube 5y ago
  I am sorry, but this just a good research topic... maybe some team in NCBI will do this and publish one article, and then finish. It can't generate any value for people who is not researcher
• catsarebetter 5y ago
  You're an awesome writer haha do more startups please, you'll probably be able to make a decent amount of money as a writer too
• bob2222 5y ago
  Lol great read. How naive! Doctors care about money not helping people!
• madrox 5y ago
  I read this when it was originally written. I have since founded and failed at a startup. Throughout that experience, I thought about this article. I don't even think "have a business plan" is the takeaway, because no plan survives first contact with the market. All business plans are built on the assumption that people want what you're currently building. To me, the takeaway is you need a good 2-3 year runway for startups today. Maybe it only took a year to find PMF a decade ago, but it's much harder now. "The digital X" isn't enough. "X for mobile" isn't enough. "Uber for X" isn't enough. I think this is why web3 is partly as big as it is. It's very easy to say "X on blockchain" and get money for it. You need to have a strong idea of the community you're serving, and those communities are becoming more and more nuanced. Once you find it, it'll take you a fair amount of time to win it over.
• eyelidlessness 5y ago
  In all honesty, I don’t think the author correctly identified his error. And I think that’s a shame. It’s right here: > Here I was, living the Silicon Valley dream: making the world a better place through technology. I don’t know how this has become a thing people believe, however widely it might be believed. But if it’s representative of SV or tech innovation at all, it’s either wildly distorted through a wealthy person’s pet futurism project—or held in the imagination of someone aspiring to that stature. SV is about making money, that’s it, that’s the whole story. The totally overlapping error here was assuming those things—making the world better, and making money—aren’t inherently in conflict. And overlapping that: assuming that a profit driven health care system has altruistic goals as such, rather than in concert with its profit-driving priorities. This project could have been successful (and could still do if the author or anyone else wants to pursue it). And it could have been a valuable contribution to society. The author would probably have realized this error if he’d considered entering a global market where health care has different economic incentives. Programs like this which help people are funded by government contracts and grants, not by payment from arbitrary people acting on their arbitrary interests.
  • TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    > I don’t think the author correctly identified his error. This is his error right here: “It had been a bit of a working assumption of mine over the past few weeks that if you could improve the health of the patients then, you know, the doctors or the hospitals or whatever would pay for that.”
    • kirso 5y ago
      Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome!
    • unityByFreedom 5y ago
      Or this tech founder isn't much of a salesperson. Sellers won't say "So you don’t think this product is useful?" and certainly won't be left speechless as OP was, > So I’d sorta just be, like, donating this money if I paid you for this thing, right? >> I had literally nothing to say to that. There may be a sales angle for the product that he could not find. Improving patient outcomes is absolutely in the interest of doctors, patients, and hospitals. The question is who to sell it to, and how.
• Evenjos 5y ago
  The incentives in healthcare aren't prioritizing healthcare. It's a systemwide problem.
• TheDudeMan 5y ago
  Dude can write.
• bspear 5y ago
  > So I built something people wanted. Consumers wanted it, doctors wanted it, I wanted it. Where did I go wrong? They didn't want it enough. More specifically, the exchange of benefits for the cost was not clear enough
• jmhmd 5y ago
  > There was this giant thing called healthcare right, and its main purpose is improving health—trillions of dollars are spent trying to do this. As a physician, lol. Lmao
• elwell 5y ago
  I'll invest energy and opportunity cost into my startup ideas, but not cash.
• LexGray 5y ago
  Sounds like Yelp for drugs. Your real profit would have been to follow the Yelp model to charge for placed ads and charge to manage reviews. Just as Yelp gets a cut of online orders you could have partnered with mail order drug companies for a percentage to order directly. If you wanted to get into really morally grey area do the doctor shopping too. Who prescribed what.
• yalogin 5y ago
  This is exactly the kind of project a google employee would do with their 20% free time. It would also fit perfectly with the hundreds of custom search options in google search. But that is it. It doesn’t fit as a business by itself. Google has spoiled our brains into thinking anything that sustains user interest is a business. It’s valuable to google not for us! It also doesn’t scale well as more papers come out they need more consultants to populate the database with it. So one option for OP was to sell to google but I dont think it scales well enough for them to buy either.
• Fomite 5y ago
  “Yeah okay that’s great but nobody cares about this math crap. You need doctors.” Well the good news is if you ever want to go be an epidemiologist, you've already heard this bit!
• duxup 5y ago
  This almost sounds like it could have been a side project that could last a while longer but rather he had contracted out work and ran out of money fast.
• stevespang 5y ago
• cloudking 5y ago
  The problem is the author built a full scale product before vetting it. He could have built a few examples with scripts and spreadsheets, put together a deck showing mocks of the product and examples of how it works, then pitch it to potential clients. This would have cost a lot less money and time, and they would have reached the conclusion earlier that this wasn't a viable product market fit.
• 3np 5y ago
  You know what would make this less of a waste? Release the source (whatever is reasonable without leaking sensitive information) under a permissive license. It could potentially provide tremendous value for someone else solving for an overlapping problem - and strengthen the recognition of the author. There are no requirements to give a single second of your time to it after that. Just dump it on some free place online. No need to provide contact details, if you prefer not to. Maybe someone will eventually rummage through the dump, find it and appreciate it, maybe not. Maybe someone will figure out a way to use parts or insights from it into a crowdsourced public good which does not rely on VCs, ads, or paying customers. There are countless valuable learnings that are lost when founders abandon their projects and just wipe their efforts from the earth. Imagine how much further and faster we could progress as a species if there was a culture to release your abandoned projects like that.
• nwmcsween 5y ago
  I work for an emr company, integrating this with an emr might have been an alternative as a value added subscription service. There are many profitable value added services on top of industry specific applications (dental, medical, etc).
• t_serpico 5y ago
  cute story, welcome to the world of healthcare.
• rahimiali 5y ago
  Here's another way to classify this mistake. Usually, engineers first get good at "technology". Then they learn to get good at "product". Somewhere in their careers, they learn about "distribution". And then they invariable wish they had learned these lessons in the reverse order: Start with the distribution opportunity, devise a product around that opportunity, and as a last resort, some times, you need some tech to build that product. I find the distribution->product->tech pipeline a more constructive way to think about building a business than "product-market fit", or "starting from a pain point". And it's a lot more productive than the reverse tech->product->distribution pipeline.
  • hcks 5y ago
    What are you calling distribution in that context ? What does it spans ?
• KingMachiavelli 5y ago
  If you don't have any legal hurdles you should consider making it open source or running a freemium version (limited by number of patients, medications, class/popularity of medication, etc.). I could imagine a few doctors and armature researchers using it and perhaps a small could be converted to paying $10/month. At $10/month you only need ~350 people to pay a years subscription to break even depending. Certainly depends on how more development is needed and what the operating costs look like. Another option is to augment the product to allow consumers to track their existing medications. Using their demographic data + current prescriptions, you could then used their self reported drug efficacy to recommend possible alternatives.
  • jimmySixDOF 5y ago
    I remember reading this story at the time (2020) and wondering if the project was released on Github in the public sphere at least as some positive net benefit of all the work that was invested. To me going into a risk environment like this you have to think, well at least if it all goes wrong then there will be this new body of knowledge available that wasn't there before so all your hard earned blood sweat tears and treasure won't just evaporate in to thin air. Not sure what this guy did but I hope e was something!
• frabjoused 5y ago
  I enjoyed reading his self-deprecating enthusiasm as he flipped from one disappointment to another before he could fall off the tip of his Dunning-Kruger joyride. At least, I hope it was self-deprecating.
• quickthrower2 5y ago
  With a moonshot idea like this, your customer is the investors, not the customer/user/people who might wanna advertise. I think the mistake was trying to make money too early? Just take a few mill from an angel, and get coding. If you want a rent-paying idea, then that looks more like a boring 'me too' idea. Yet another Pingdom clone should do the trick.