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Show HN - We just built a site that saves lives

462 points by chaseadam17 14y ago

Watsi is the first global crowdfunding platform for medical care. We'd love your feedback on the site. We just launched it today!

asdfprou 14y ago
Great work! Landing looks clean and within 15 seconds I know exactly what the core message and values are. I appreciate the work you guys have done to make it as transparent as possible as I know that is a major point of contention when it comes to crowdfunding. Small nit: Is it just me or is the "email" button on the profile page actually popping up the share modal on hover?
- finalcut 14y ago
  not just you - it definitely pops up the share modal.
  - chaseadam17 14y ago
    Yes, it is. We need to change this. We just added those social features last night, and we still have some work to do.
pepve 14y ago
I'm a bit uncomfortable with this. Who picks the people that get our help? Is it better to pick a few and fix their lives, or should we aim to slightly improve the lives of many?
- dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  Well, I can sort of understand what you're saying. But, it's like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, which actually is a common theme in many of the criticisms. There are people with real problems that need help now or they could perish; I don't see how providing ways to help them could ever be a bad thing. The other alternative is to fund nebulous water projects that might get off the ground in 1-5 years or something like that -- no that there's anything wrong with that but I don't think it is a mutually exclusive thing.
bezaorj 14y ago
brilliant idea, specially with the update on the outcome of the treatment. hope this succeeds
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Thank you bezaorj! We've all donated our time to build this, and its been a year in the making. We're excited to see how it goes!
  - bezaorj 14y ago
    I think this has a lot of potential, you just need a good catalyst to accelerate this beginning process would be a retweet by a person with lots of followers... an indie musician that I know got retweeted by howard stern (5+ million followers) and his song (that was really good) went viral. The idea of the website is really good as well, people just need to discover your website. I would look for any musician, actor that has 500k+ followers and try to get a retweet from him and then move to bigger fishes...
    - chaseadam17 14y ago
      Totally! We need to get a few big names to help jump start our growth. We're going to start reaching out to people today. We'd love to fund all these treatments our first day live!
gregalbritton 14y ago
A very successful launch with an incredible objective (one profile already funded today). This is exciting stuff!
bgraves 14y ago
One of the most powerful "About" pages I've seen: >>The instant she opened the folder everything came together. There was a full-sized photograph paper clipped to the inside left cover and a document stapled to the right. The photograph showed a young boy with an incision across the width of his iodine-stained chest. The document to the right outlined the patient’s medical condition. The young boy was her son.
- ricardobeat 14y ago
  Not as powerful if you have seen that same scene performed by a scammer before :( Thinking of it, it would be just as amazing (and ironic) if the woman's story was a scam too. Something about fate/karma or nature balancing itself.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Thanks! We really appreciate the feedback. It's been a year and eight months since that day on the bus, and we've finally got the platform up!
brador 14y ago
Great idea! Questions: how do you select who gets on the site? What protections are in place to prevent scammers listing fake illnesses? What proof is required before funding is handed over? Is funding handed to patient or doctor or someone else??
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  All great questions brador. 1) We work very closely with our Medical Partners to identify the lowest-cost, highest-impact profiles possible. Their Doctors identify the patients based on our criteria, and then we verify and accept the profiles as we receive them. 2) We only deal with our Medical Partners. Funds are sent directly to the partner to pay for the cost of treatment, and NEVER sent to the patient. The patients don't even know we exist until the Doctor tells them that they have been selected as a candidate for Watsi funding. 3) We require a full written profile from our Medical Partner's doctor, a photo, and a signed release waiver. After the treatment is provided our Medical Partners send us proof of the cost of treatment for our records. 4) We never deal with patients, only with our Medical Partners. As you can tell, a lot of trust is placed on our partners, and that is why we only partner with the best. You can read about the partners on our site, but currently they are: a) Dr. Rick Hodes (CNN Hero Finalist) http://rickhodes.org/ http://rickhodes.org/ b) Nyaya Health / Partners in Health (Givewell rated them as top 1% of all non-profits) http://www.nyayahealth.org/ http://www.nyayahealth.org/ c) Wuqu' Kawoq (featured on ABC) http://www.wuqukawoq.org/ http://www.wuqukawoq.org/ Beyond just partnering with the best, we have personal relationships with each one of our MP's. Feel free to learn more in our FAQ: http://watsi.org/faq http://watsi.org/faq and on our transparency document: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ah3wJ9CRQzyHdDZSaEF1X1JsRm1yZ251d0RQZ0VmRGc&output=html https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ah3wJ9CRQzyHdDZ...
  - justindocanto 14y ago
    This breakdown needs to advertised more on the site. i browsed around a little and didn't know this is how it works. youre going to have a challenge of people trusting you... and this breakdown really helps get past that.
  - 14y ago
nickfrost 14y ago
So awesome! :)
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Thanks Nick!
brittohalloran 14y ago
The one thing you need to focus on above all else is transparency and preventing scams. Video of the actual person who needs the treatment would go a long way, as would video updates along the way. I'm thinking an Android app that the locals could use to document the process. If you solve that properly, this will really take off and do a lot of good. Also, you're going to eventually need to take a very small cut of the donations to pay living expenses for your volunteers. 100% to the patient sounds great, but for my donation, I'd prefer to know that there is someone dedicated full-time to the cause and overseeing the process, and receiving a reasonable salary for it. Of course, be 100% transparent about those salaries as well.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Great points. Transparency is huge, and we have done everything possible to put as much info on our site as we can. We love the app idea, and building an app for the MP's to document the entire process (patient work up, waiver, profile info, provide updates, track recovery, etc.) as easily as possible is one of our next steps. We definitely need to make some money to keep this thing going. But right now we are still just looking for proof of concept. If we fund these treatments, then our goal is to go out and raise money to really expand the organization. We have tons of financial sustainability ideas, a few are: 1) a "tip" jar where donors can add to their donation to cover overhead 2) Grants and competitions 3) Co-branded CSR programs for companies Hope that helps to answer your questions!
  - stephengillie 14y ago
    Your operation could maintain 2 sets of cash flow: one for patient care, and one for administration. Maybe you could qualify for NGO status and get some government to fund some of the administration side. This would be somewhat similar to Costco's model, where most (all?) of employee wages come from membership card fees, not product revenue. With this model, you could still let people donate 100% of their funds to the patient if they wanted. You could even make a slider with an animation that displays the percent which goes to each part of your business - so 10% or 15% of the donation could goto administration. I love your idea, it's tremendous. Good luck!
zbruhnke 14y ago
This is awesome, So glad people are out there doing good deeds like this. I immediately thought to myself, wow this is really cool. If you guys do nothing else in your careers you'll still be able to say you've made a difference. That is truly awesome. Congrats!
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Thank you!
mborries 14y ago
Amazing non-profit and website! Truly for a great cause.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Thank you!
salman89 14y ago
Awesome site, congrats on making the world a better place. I would suggest that you integrate directly with reputable organizations - it will place an abstraction between you and potential backlash for scamming. Also allows you to provide aid where you don't have direct reach already. Another idea would be to integrate with hospitals/care givers directly, so you know the money is being spent properly. Hospitals/care givers will be less likely to scam you, as they can benefit in the long term and do have something to lose if caught scamming.
- salman89 14y ago
  Also, the feedback cycle you have in place is also very exciting. I don't want to downplay what you are doing by likening it to gamification, but positive feedback is key for repeat donations. From a consumer standpoint, my main qualms when it comes to donations are (1) Control over where my money is spent, and (2) Knowing that my money spent is being put to good use. You guys have the opportunity to knock both those problems out.
  - chaseadam17 14y ago
    Agreed! The update loop is going to be really big for us. We are also considering some other features that would add to the gamification of the site (karma points for donating/sharing, becoming an ambassador for a particular profile, etc.) but those are still all in the brainstorming phase. Like I said above, transparency is the single most important thing to us, and we spent more than a year establishing our partnerships. If you have any specific questions about transparency and accountability, I am more than happy to field them here. We also have a ton of info on our FAQ: http://watsi.org/faq http://watsi.org/faq
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Totally. This is actually what we are doing. If you look on the patient profiles, you will find information about the Medical Partners (the healthcare providers). The thing I am most proud of is that our Medical Partners are absolutely unbelievable. We have a Partners in Health Clinic (Paul Farmer's Organization), an amazing doctor in Ethiopia who our team doctor worked directly with (Dr. Rick Hodes), and a great NGO in Guatemala (featured on ABC).
imjared 14y ago
Looks good. Minor minor minor nit-pick: Twitter logo needs to be updated :) https://twitter.com/logo https://twitter.com/logo
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Ah! You are totally right. We will get on that. Thank you!
adriand 14y ago
This is excellent. The funding process is fast and seamless. It took me literally less than 30 seconds to fund a treatment. Kudos for an amazing idea and excellent execution.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Adrian, you rock. Thank you so much! If you are ever in San Francisco PM me and I'd love to buy you a beer (or a tea or a juice or whatever)!
  - adriand 14y ago
    I really appreciate the offer, but just to be clear, I didn't fund the whole treatment! (I'm a beer drinker, but I live near Toronto and won't be near San Francisco any time soon - but if plans change, will do.) I know you've had a ton of ideas thrown at you in this thread, but I've been thinking about your site since donating and I think what would be really amazing, if you can accomplish it somehow, is a way to encourage people to donate regularly. There are probably many ways you could do this, but here's one: allow people to donate a sum of money, up front, that is not assigned to a particular person who needs treatment. Periodically prompt this person to fund treatments using some portion of this sum. Alternatively, support subscription billing where each time the money is withdrawn, the person is notified and asked to assign the money that was withdrawn to a particular person who needs it. I really feel that a recurring process of some kind could both vastly increase the amount of money you raise, and also benefit donors by giving them a periodic uplift in their mood and level of happiness. It could become, if this word is not too misplaced, addictive.
    - chaseadam17 14y ago
      Those are awesome ideas! We had never thought of loading up on Watsi Credit (with a large, one-time donation) and I think that's a super cool option to offer donors. No doubt we are going to see a major decrease in traffic after this HN post, and working on ways to retain donors is going to be our next big challenge. Thanks again for the feedback and support, we all really appreciate it! (And if you do come to SF, the beer offer still stands :)
jblock 14y ago
I'm in love with the idea, but the frequency that payments get bounced via Kickstarter bothers me when the funds are applied directly do medical procedures like this.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
swalkergibson 14y ago
Does it get any better than this?
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  :)
manuscreationis 14y ago
Bravo You are doing a great thing, and I applaud you
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Thanks, we really appreciate the love!
tsahyt 14y ago
All in all this is a really great idea! Keep going and keep improving!
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Gracias!
avinash88 14y ago
You guys are fantastic! Thank you for finding a way to save those that are sometimes overlooked!
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Thank you!
Mizza 14y ago
Just got an email - "Thanks to you, Sushil's medical treatment has been funded!" Now that's CRM! I can't think of a single possible better way of making a customer happy. I'm telling everybody I know about this. The payment process was seamless, the design is lovely and the cause, well, of course. You guys are amazing.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Haha. Thank you~!
mehulkar 14y ago
I'm typically against organizations that need to live off donations. I think it's an impractical and unsustainable model. Your cause is very close to my heart and I would love to support it, but I'm a creature of convenience. I could make one donation now, but would fail to continue making donations. The two solutions I have seen that are successful at solving this problem are: 1) Automation. E.g. in the movie Office Space they take shavings off transactions (amounting to a few cents or less at a time) and pool them together. Another example: Auto-rounding up my grocery receipt, etc. 2) Recycling funds. I don't see how this would work in a donation based system where cash-flow is one directional, but it works really well for something like Kiva where funds are returned and the option to recycle is extremely easy. If any non-profit is to be sustainable, they must put in a HUGE amount of effort to obtain large enough recurring funds or make it really easy to provide funds. Since you are targeting individuals, it's going to be difficult to do the former. The latter will take a little more thought. All this said, I wish you the best of luck.
- nollidge 14y ago
  They could offer a subscription model, and then make it a monthly "game" of deciding where your money's going to go. Lots of people are willing to become sustaining members of charities. Or, I'm a member of a meta-charity called Foundation Beyond Belief, in which my contribution is distributed to various nonreligious charities based on priorities I set (e.g. 25% of funds to environmental causes, 50% human rights, 25% poverty, or whatever). So for Watsi, maybe I could predefine, say, types of medical treatment, country/region, etc. and then the system heuristically determines where to disburse. And now that I think about it, Kiva optionally does something similar, so that loan repayments don't just sit stagnant in people's accounts because they haven't gotten around to manually distributing them.
  - nowarninglabel 14y ago
    We (Kiva) are also adding monthly donation subscriptions as well, or at least I'm trying to this week for my innovation iteration project.
    - 14y ago
alexshye 14y ago
Nice! Totally awesome that you might literally save lives. I agree with the others that the transparency thing is the most important.
jc00ke 14y ago
In case anyone couldn't get to the site for a bit, our hosting provider Heroku was seeing some issues with apex/naked domains: https://status.heroku.com/incidents/421 https://status.heroku.com/incidents/421 Hopefully it's resolved now. I cranked up another dyno just in case. Thanks for all the love!
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  You ROCK Jesse!
aurelijus 14y ago
Awesome guys, really nice and fast funding process (though if payment fails you are stuck with plain red message in blank page, you could improve on that one). The advice I can give you - steal best parts from Kiva, they have great and successful site. One of the things I missed was "tip" donation along with the treatment donation.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  We love Kiva, and we hope to implement a "tip" option very soon. We just need to head out into the real world and raise some cash from grants, philanthropists, whatever, so we can pay to build all the features we want!
runako 14y ago
Awesome site! One point of feedback: the PayPal workflow is so bad it almost made me stop my donation. It would be much easier with a standard CC payment option. Good luck!
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  We hope to switch away from PayPal asap. Trust us, that's the first update we're going to make. Braintree is looking pretty good right about now.
  - buster 14y ago
    Please keep it as a choice, though. It's easy for me, i'd prefer Paypal over CC.
  - brittohalloran 14y ago
    Look at Stripe also -- very easy API to work with. I hear good things.
    - runako 14y ago
      Having had a little experience with both, I'd concur that Stripe is probably going to be easier to integrate. (Although my Braintree experience is more limited and dates back 2 years or so.)
  - hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
    Maybe you can partner with Stripe? They could provide some lower fees in exchange of increased brand awareness.
beggi 14y ago
Hi, I just tried to donate and logged in through Paypal but I get "Something went wrong": http://cl.ly/image/0Z0H0n3i1f0q http://cl.ly/image/0Z0H0n3i1f0q
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Thanks for supporting us, and I apologize about that. We are going to look into it ASAP.
buster 14y ago
Wow, that's awesome. I felt bad having to decide between them and funded all 3 that still need funding :) p.s.: unfortunately i still have a "bad feeling" because the internet is full of scams, i guess that will be your hardest fight, convincing people you are not a scam
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Hey Buster - Gaining trust is our single greatest challenge, as well as our top priority. We really appreciate your support, and I'd love to hop on the phone with you and answer any/all questions you have. Feel free to email me at Chase (at) watsi (dot) org and I will send you my number. Or, if you are in San Francisco, I'd be happy to meet in person! Thanks for your support!
FrackieTV 14y ago
Beautiful. This site works on the same principle as ChildFund (Christian Children's Fund), but actually delivers the money where it implies it does. When faced with actual real people that are in need, it is difficult not to donate, especially that the donation process is so smooth and seamless. Not only made me reach for my wallet, it made me register on HH and comment, and that's much harder. Bravo! Keep on making this world a better place for all.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Thank you so much!
missing_cipher 14y ago
Does adding a "monthly subscription" type option make sense? It does add another level of complexity(user accounts and whatnot), but I think people would like the convenience of automatically donating. Maybe having the option to split their donation as they see fit(1/3, half and half, 100% to just one, etc). Good luck with the site. :)
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  We can't wait to enable recurring donations. It's at the top of our list!
vegasje 14y ago
It would be even better if you integrated some way to fund sustainable projects related to the health and wellbeing of these people. Saving someone's life is an amazing thing. Helping a community develop programs to saves lives into the future is on another level.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Excellent point. I am so glad you brought this up. One thing we want to do is partner with microfinance organizations and enroll all of our patients in financial literacy courses, as well as have them open up savings accounts, so they can better prepare for medical emergencies.
sergiotapia 14y ago
This made me really misty eyed. It's a really good idea that will change peoples lives. I'm going to share this to everyone I know. Please share this on Reddit as well and make it viral. Nothing brings me down like seeing children with medical conditions and parents that can't afford treatment. It's so sad.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  I suck at Reddit and I apparently shared in the wrong subreddit and got downvoted. We would love help from any Reddit experts out there. Feel free to post!
fmavituna 14y ago
Great idea, seems like well executed as well. It might worth trying to get in touch with give well (http://www.givewell.org/ http://www.givewell.org/) to get a review, so transparency aspect of it will be much better documented.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Yes! We plan to. They recently rated our Medical Partner, Nyaya Health, as being in the top 1% of all non-profits for accountability and transparency. http://blog.nyayahealth.org/2011/12/10/nyayahealth1/ http://blog.nyayahealth.org/2011/12/10/nyayahealth1/
bmajz 14y ago
I imagine a lot of people will be reading the FAQ page, so you might want to correct this typo: In order to be eligible for Watsi funding, patients must be inflicted with an illness that meets the treatment criteria and subsequently be unable to afford the required medical treatment as a result of poverty. You surely mean "afflicted" rather than "inflicted"
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Good catch. We are going to change that ASAP. Thank you!
- jc00ke 14y ago
  Good catch! Pushing the change now. Thank you!
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  We just pushed the update. Thank you!
iandanforth 14y ago
On the 'location' section I'd love to have a link that says 'Learn more about health care in this country.' Or something like that. I have a fairly good handle on how these situations could occur in the US but in Canada they would be unthinkable! Why, in this specific country, is this person not being taken care of? As many other have said, best of luck. This is a truly Good endeavor.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Great point. We'd love to have a lightbox that describes the country with a map, some info, and all that fun stuff. A quick note: there are approximately 200 countries in the world, and only 40 have a formal healthcare system. Pretty crazy...
buster 14y ago
May i suggest a "I just funded <person>'s medical treatment with XYZ$ on http://watsi.org http://watsi.org Facebook-share option? Or "<Person> just got new medical treatment from watsi.org", with a name and picture of that person.. Something like that to encourage people more to do the same as their friends do :)
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  We have a share option, we just don't have the pre-populated copy. We will work on that!
  - buster 14y ago
    Yes, i was just thinking.. what instantly got me was the personal link/story/background/picture to the people you fund on the website. That get's lost with the normal sharing, doesn't it? :)
__alexs 14y ago
> 100% of your donation directly funds treatment! ITYM 98.6% - 96.6% - £0.20 GBP of your donation directly funds treatment! Or is there some awesome charitable PayPal fee structure that you are using?
- rkwz 14y ago
  I think PayPal does take a cut. Look at their transparency doc: https://docs.google.com/a/cordys.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ah3wJ9CRQzyHdDZSaEF1X1JsRm1yZ251d0RQZ0VmRGc&output=html https://docs.google.com/a/cordys.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ah...
  - chaseadam17 14y ago
    Yes. PayPal takes 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. This usually amounts to about 5% because of the low average donation amount. We hope to lower this. If anyone knows someone at PayPal, hook it up!
youngdev 14y ago
Guys, truly a great service. I was thinking of start something similar or join an forces with existing service like yours. But I wanted to do it truly at non-profit level where we don't take a single penny out of donations. how are you guys funding your operations? Are you taking a % of the donation?
TWAndrews 14y ago
This is really cool. I would love an option for a repeating monthly donation. Maybe send me an email with candidates either based on random draw, treatments which just need a bit more to get over the top, or something similar.
TomGullen 14y ago
Absolutely amazing, love the idea, love the way you implemented it. I'll definitely be signing up and making some donations. My main concern though is as this scales (which I'm sure it will because it's awesome) you will run into the scammers.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Scale will be tough, but our goal is to partner with a few large organizations (Doctors Without Borders for example) that can provide a lot of patients. That will help alleviate a lot of risk as opposed to working with 1,000 smaller clinics.
whit537 14y ago
I'd love to find a way for Gittip (http://gittip.com/about http://gittip.com/about) to help you fund Watsi.org. The "public benefit corporation" sounds like what I was aiming at with open companies: http://blog.gittip.com/post/26350459746/the-first-open-company http://blog.gittip.com/post/26350459746/the-first-open-compa...
dan-g 14y ago
Any way you could add a brief synopsis of your organization to your "site unavailable" page? I (and I'm sure others) would be much more likely to keep the tab open/check back soon if that were the case.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  We got rid of that page ;)
jcoder 14y ago
Great work. I would suggest tweaking the <title> text when there are zero or one fundings going on to encourage me to donate still.
limeade 14y ago
I think that it may be the case by law that the donor cannot select the individual recipient of a donation if the organization wants to retain tax exemption.
aidos 14y ago
And...looks like everything's fully funded now. Between this and the Tesla museum crowdfunding has given me optimism about the world we live in these days.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  This has been a little crazy. Way more traffic than we anticipated! We are working on loading our reserve profiles now!
  - radio4fan 14y ago
    RSS feed of profiles should be high on your priority list. Easy to implement, and bound to be very effective.
bmajz 14y ago
All treatments are fully funded. Wow, that's an awesome job folks (both Watsi and Hacker News)
needcaffeine 14y ago
This is brilliant! What a great cause. I have a few questions for you on the technical side: - What did you code this in? - How many developers did you have? - How long did it take you? - What kinds of problems did you encounter on the way? Congrats on the launch.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Thanks for the kind words. - Ruby/Rails/HTML5 - 1 dev + some freelance assistance on the front-end - Took a while since we are all working part-time as volunteers. About a year total. Probably a few months of solid dev time. Setting up operations took a lot of time. - Hardest part is working as volunteers. Everything takes 5x longer when people aren't being paid. Thank you!
alexanderh 14y ago
This is "Death panels" in a fancy suit. Bid on life saving medical treatment from a thumbnail? By someones looks? and a possibly fabricated story? So now we the internet get to decide who lives and dies? Who has a healthy fulfilling life and who lives with disease and disability? Idk about this idea. Its well intentioned, but oh so wrong all at the same time. This type of charity should be first come first serve to be fair. Not some bidding war over who's the most sickly (but still cute) looking child, or who has the most compelling story. A human is a human. The good intentions are there, but something about the way this website presents itself is twisted. Why should any of these people receive preferential funding over any other of them? Why should I get to choose? I'm not an expert on their medical conditions, or who needs more help than others. If this gets people to give money to a good cause, thats fine. But Idk. Still seems odd. Sorry if this is the kind of "negativity" hacker news is trying to avoid these days, but this is genuinely what I feel.
- tkahn6 14y ago
  I also found it genuinely disturbing for the same reason. The 'you decide' aspect of the site seems very sick to me. I think the moral dilemma could be solved easily by just having a single fund that you pay into. The money is then distributed among the people who need treatment. No input from the giver.
  - lincolnq 14y ago
    The problem is that you get fewer donations if you do it that way, because people prefer to donate to a story.
- snowwrestler 14y ago
  How is this a "death panel"? These people are currently not receiving treatment they need, and this site helps give it to them. Nothing is being denied to anyone here.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  We are bummed out that the site makes you feel this way, but we genuinely appreciate you voicing your opinion. We're here to listen to the public, and if people disagree with what we are doing, we will shut down immediately. That said, I'd like to point out a few things. 1) This is not a bidding war. We won't remove a profile until it is fully funded. This is why we only post a few profiles at a time (and not hundreds) - to ensure they are all funded in a reasonable amount of time. If the patient needs treatment before the profile is funded, we will front the cost of care. 2) Humanity has always decided who lives and who dies, and it sucks. It makes me angry, but it's a reality. The only difference is now, because of how connected the world is becoming, this reality is a little harder for those of us that are the most fortunate, to ignore. 3) We aren't first come first serve. That wouldn't make sense, because our Doctors identify patients, they don't identify us (that would lead to fraud). Instead, we are lowest-cost, highest-impact first. Every profile is reviewed by at least two independent doctors (usually more) to determine which cases are the best ones to fund (and I assure you that "cuteness" is not a criteria these Doctors use to make a decision). See our FAQ for more info on treatment guidelines. We feel terrible that our site presents itself in a way that you think is twisted, and we would love to make whatever changes we can to improve it. Feel free to reach out to me directly at chase (at) watsi (dot) org with any other thoughts. We've spent a lot of time thinking about this (and even consulted with a medical ethicist), but we always have a lot more to learn. But perhaps the most important thing - the internet funded 11 medical treatments today for people that wouldn't have had access to them otherwise. You guys literally changed (and saved) 11 lives. I don't know how that can be a bad thing.
mtrimpe 14y ago
I once developed a similar application for a large charity which included the ability to place a widget to donate to the 'current charity' on your site/blog and had an associated leader board of who collected the most donations. That project was never launched due to the cost of integrating with their ERP, but the idea might be worth considering for Watsi as well.
amalakar 14y ago
This is brilliant idea and one that is perfectly executed. I would love to contribute whichever way I can and the way it brings down the barrier to contribute is remarkable. I would love to contribute in a personalized way than to donate to an organization where I don't have any clue what happened to the money. Wish you all the success!
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Thank you!
markthien 14y ago
We just built an app that saves asses
thuffy 14y ago
Does it bother you that you are subsidizing defective genetics and thus making humanity less fit and thus increasing the average level of suffering? You might think you are being nice by decreasing the suffering of an individual, but you are also dooming consciousness to suffer being born into a defective host that otherwise would not have happened if not for your subsidization of defective genetics. I am curious as to what the higher than average enlightened readership of HN thinks on this? Of course it is very taboo to say what I did as the medical industrial complex is on the side of causing this problem as they are then guaranteed not just one more customer, but a new lineage of customers.
- mjohn 14y ago
  I have never commented before, but I had to reply to this. I assume you are being serious, but hope you just have a twisted sense of humor, or perhaps you have just read too much Schopenhauer recently. I believe that just because someone is born with a disadvantage or have health issues does not mean they are defective. Everyone has as much a right to life as anyone else. In support of your beliefs, I would be interested to know your responses to the following questions: At what point does a person's suffering cause a sufficient decline in the global "average level of suffering" to imply they should not be allowed to reproduce or continue living? Should all sick people be left to die? Should we serve the depressed arsenic instead of offering counselling and medication? Should we just execute people of higher than average IQ, since ignorance is bliss? We all have defects, should we all die to spare the planet? How do you calculate average suffering? What is the unit of measure? Does the momentary joy of seeing the birth of a child outweigh years of chronic pain?
  - thuffy 14y ago
    No, I am not joking at all. This is a serious mater. Unless you want humanity to eventually degenerate to beyond even the point where everyone is dependent on multiple surgeries simply to live past just being born, then this is something that needs to be though about, discussed, and rectified - no mater how difficult a subject. Some of your questions appear to me to be purposely absurd in order to make the topic seem absurd. To answer your first question though, which is a reasonable one: It may not be a simple answer of some point is too defective, but the answer there must obviously be something other than the current idea that no level of defectiveness is too defective to be aided to breed more unfortunate burdened souls. My personal feeling is that the line has to be somewhere around being too defective to live without medical intervention beyond childhood or perhaps better is the point before one is otherwise able to have children and raise and support them to the age where they are self supportive. Your pointing out that the issue is a complex one with no easy answer does not justify the continued destructive course that humanity is treading down. Regardless of how hard an issue it is to solve, it must be recognized that the current setup of unlimited medical intervention to keep people alive and breeding, no mater how defective, in fact results in a degenerating gene pool, a downward spiral of suffering. This is the true reason why medicare costs keep increasing to the point now where it is the majority expenditure of any western nation (even in America, it is greater there than how much is spent on the military). Again you can see why the medical industrial complex is set on continuing this trend. If not for the limits of economics, this would eventually consume all resources of the world just to keep itself alive with medicine. In some countries this has led to the talk of not providing medical intervention for some groups of people who need it to survive. Unfortunately the talk is always around not giving it to the old people in order to save money. While they may seem less important to save, it is actually the wrong group to withhold intervention from, as saving old people is not destructive to the gene pool. They need to start talking about withholding it from the opposite end of the age spectrum.
ryanmolden 14y ago
Definitely get the 501c3 info up as well. Some employers will match employee charitable donations. Mine does and I love to use it to "stick it to the man". I would be interested in giving and registering you as a charity eligible for donation matching. Donations can be money, time, software, etc... It can be a great way to "leverage up" your giving.
revorad 14y ago
Wow, thanks for making this! I just shared this on Facebook but the FB auto summary thing didn't pull up an image as it usually does for links. You should look into fixing that because having a powerful image (as you do on the homepage) will definitely increase visibility and click-through rates.
marquis 14y ago
I love this, I use Kiva and the rewards are wonderful as is their way of keeping my money in circulation. But I'm not a U.S. citizen so I only donate a small amount because it's not tax-deductable in my country. You know what I would love? Some one to build a global non-profit money distribution center, so I can donate a lot more in my country and the money can go where I choose. Right now I keep my donations limited in price unless it's a local charity to my tax country and I'd like to see that change.
dragthor 14y ago
http://hopemob.org/ http://hopemob.org/ clone?
adnanofsteel 14y ago
This is absolutely great. Spread the love on twitter.
autophil 14y ago
One suggestion: please get a copywriter to write your headlines and subject headings. The current "we just built a site that saves lives" is epically bad. You are leaving money on the table when you make ambiguous, poorly written copy.
- autophil 14y ago
  That said, it's a beautiful website and a beautiful idea. Sincerely.
vmialik 14y ago
Glad to see you guys take part in GSVC. Really miss this competition, and the social enterprise community at UC Berkeley. Being a non-profit I bet it was pretty tough to survive with competitors who focus on for profit or non/for profit hybrids that scale.

462 points by chaseadam17 14y ago

Watsi is the first global crowdfunding platform for medical care. We'd love your feedback on the site. We just launched it today!

asdfprou 14y ago

Great work! Landing looks clean and within 15 seconds I know exactly what the core message and values are. I appreciate the work you guys have done to make it as transparent as possible as I know that is a major point of contention when it comes to crowdfunding. Small nit: Is it just me or is the "email" button on the profile page actually popping up the share modal on hover?

finalcut 14y ago
not just you - it definitely pops up the share modal.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Yes, it is. We need to change this. We just added those social features last night, and we still have some work to do.

pepve 14y ago

I'm a bit uncomfortable with this. Who picks the people that get our help? Is it better to pick a few and fix their lives, or should we aim to slightly improve the lives of many?

dinkumthinkum 14y ago
Well, I can sort of understand what you're saying. But, it's like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, which actually is a common theme in many of the criticisms. There are people with real problems that need help now or they could perish; I don't see how providing ways to help them could ever be a bad thing. The other alternative is to fund nebulous water projects that might get off the ground in 1-5 years or something like that -- no that there's anything wrong with that but I don't think it is a mutually exclusive thing.

bezaorj 14y ago

brilliant idea, specially with the update on the outcome of the treatment. hope this succeeds

chaseadam17 14y ago
Thank you bezaorj! We've all donated our time to build this, and its been a year in the making. We're excited to see how it goes!
- bezaorj 14y ago
  I think this has a lot of potential, you just need a good catalyst to accelerate this beginning process would be a retweet by a person with lots of followers... an indie musician that I know got retweeted by howard stern (5+ million followers) and his song (that was really good) went viral. The idea of the website is really good as well, people just need to discover your website. I would look for any musician, actor that has 500k+ followers and try to get a retweet from him and then move to bigger fishes...
  - chaseadam17 14y ago
    Totally! We need to get a few big names to help jump start our growth. We're going to start reaching out to people today. We'd love to fund all these treatments our first day live!

gregalbritton 14y ago

A very successful launch with an incredible objective (one profile already funded today). This is exciting stuff!

bgraves 14y ago

One of the most powerful "About" pages I've seen: >>The instant she opened the folder everything came together. There was a full-sized photograph paper clipped to the inside left cover and a document stapled to the right. The photograph showed a young boy with an incision across the width of his iodine-stained chest. The document to the right outlined the patient’s medical condition. The young boy was her son.

ricardobeat 14y ago
Not as powerful if you have seen that same scene performed by a scammer before :( Thinking of it, it would be just as amazing (and ironic) if the woman's story was a scam too. Something about fate/karma or nature balancing itself.
chaseadam17 14y ago
Thanks! We really appreciate the feedback. It's been a year and eight months since that day on the bus, and we've finally got the platform up!

brador 14y ago

Great idea! Questions: how do you select who gets on the site? What protections are in place to prevent scammers listing fake illnesses? What proof is required before funding is handed over? Is funding handed to patient or doctor or someone else??

chaseadam17 14y ago
All great questions brador. 1) We work very closely with our Medical Partners to identify the lowest-cost, highest-impact profiles possible. Their Doctors identify the patients based on our criteria, and then we verify and accept the profiles as we receive them. 2) We only deal with our Medical Partners. Funds are sent directly to the partner to pay for the cost of treatment, and NEVER sent to the patient. The patients don't even know we exist until the Doctor tells them that they have been selected as a candidate for Watsi funding. 3) We require a full written profile from our Medical Partner's doctor, a photo, and a signed release waiver. After the treatment is provided our Medical Partners send us proof of the cost of treatment for our records. 4) We never deal with patients, only with our Medical Partners. As you can tell, a lot of trust is placed on our partners, and that is why we only partner with the best. You can read about the partners on our site, but currently they are: a) Dr. Rick Hodes (CNN Hero Finalist) http://rickhodes.org/ http://rickhodes.org/ b) Nyaya Health / Partners in Health (Givewell rated them as top 1% of all non-profits) http://www.nyayahealth.org/ http://www.nyayahealth.org/ c) Wuqu' Kawoq (featured on ABC) http://www.wuqukawoq.org/ http://www.wuqukawoq.org/ Beyond just partnering with the best, we have personal relationships with each one of our MP's. Feel free to learn more in our FAQ: http://watsi.org/faq http://watsi.org/faq and on our transparency document: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ah3wJ9CRQzyHdDZSaEF1X1JsRm1yZ251d0RQZ0VmRGc&output=html https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ah3wJ9CRQzyHdDZ...
- justindocanto 14y ago
  This breakdown needs to advertised more on the site. i browsed around a little and didn't know this is how it works. youre going to have a challenge of people trusting you... and this breakdown really helps get past that.
- 14y ago

nickfrost 14y ago

So awesome! :)

chaseadam17 14y ago
Thanks Nick!

brittohalloran 14y ago

The one thing you need to focus on above all else is transparency and preventing scams. Video of the actual person who needs the treatment would go a long way, as would video updates along the way. I'm thinking an Android app that the locals could use to document the process. If you solve that properly, this will really take off and do a lot of good. Also, you're going to eventually need to take a very small cut of the donations to pay living expenses for your volunteers. 100% to the patient sounds great, but for my donation, I'd prefer to know that there is someone dedicated full-time to the cause and overseeing the process, and receiving a reasonable salary for it. Of course, be 100% transparent about those salaries as well.

chaseadam17 14y ago
Great points. Transparency is huge, and we have done everything possible to put as much info on our site as we can. We love the app idea, and building an app for the MP's to document the entire process (patient work up, waiver, profile info, provide updates, track recovery, etc.) as easily as possible is one of our next steps. We definitely need to make some money to keep this thing going. But right now we are still just looking for proof of concept. If we fund these treatments, then our goal is to go out and raise money to really expand the organization. We have tons of financial sustainability ideas, a few are: 1) a "tip" jar where donors can add to their donation to cover overhead 2) Grants and competitions 3) Co-branded CSR programs for companies Hope that helps to answer your questions!
- stephengillie 14y ago
  Your operation could maintain 2 sets of cash flow: one for patient care, and one for administration. Maybe you could qualify for NGO status and get some government to fund some of the administration side. This would be somewhat similar to Costco's model, where most (all?) of employee wages come from membership card fees, not product revenue. With this model, you could still let people donate 100% of their funds to the patient if they wanted. You could even make a slider with an animation that displays the percent which goes to each part of your business - so 10% or 15% of the donation could goto administration. I love your idea, it's tremendous. Good luck!

zbruhnke 14y ago

This is awesome, So glad people are out there doing good deeds like this. I immediately thought to myself, wow this is really cool. If you guys do nothing else in your careers you'll still be able to say you've made a difference. That is truly awesome. Congrats!

chaseadam17 14y ago
Thank you!

mborries 14y ago

Amazing non-profit and website! Truly for a great cause.

chaseadam17 14y ago
Thank you!

salman89 14y ago

Awesome site, congrats on making the world a better place. I would suggest that you integrate directly with reputable organizations - it will place an abstraction between you and potential backlash for scamming. Also allows you to provide aid where you don't have direct reach already. Another idea would be to integrate with hospitals/care givers directly, so you know the money is being spent properly. Hospitals/care givers will be less likely to scam you, as they can benefit in the long term and do have something to lose if caught scamming.

salman89 14y ago
Also, the feedback cycle you have in place is also very exciting. I don't want to downplay what you are doing by likening it to gamification, but positive feedback is key for repeat donations. From a consumer standpoint, my main qualms when it comes to donations are (1) Control over where my money is spent, and (2) Knowing that my money spent is being put to good use. You guys have the opportunity to knock both those problems out.
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Agreed! The update loop is going to be really big for us. We are also considering some other features that would add to the gamification of the site (karma points for donating/sharing, becoming an ambassador for a particular profile, etc.) but those are still all in the brainstorming phase. Like I said above, transparency is the single most important thing to us, and we spent more than a year establishing our partnerships. If you have any specific questions about transparency and accountability, I am more than happy to field them here. We also have a ton of info on our FAQ: http://watsi.org/faq http://watsi.org/faq
chaseadam17 14y ago
Totally. This is actually what we are doing. If you look on the patient profiles, you will find information about the Medical Partners (the healthcare providers). The thing I am most proud of is that our Medical Partners are absolutely unbelievable. We have a Partners in Health Clinic (Paul Farmer's Organization), an amazing doctor in Ethiopia who our team doctor worked directly with (Dr. Rick Hodes), and a great NGO in Guatemala (featured on ABC).

imjared 14y ago

Looks good. Minor minor minor nit-pick: Twitter logo needs to be updated :) https://twitter.com/logo https://twitter.com/logo

chaseadam17 14y ago
Ah! You are totally right. We will get on that. Thank you!

adriand 14y ago

This is excellent. The funding process is fast and seamless. It took me literally less than 30 seconds to fund a treatment. Kudos for an amazing idea and excellent execution.

chaseadam17 14y ago
Adrian, you rock. Thank you so much! If you are ever in San Francisco PM me and I'd love to buy you a beer (or a tea or a juice or whatever)!
- adriand 14y ago
  I really appreciate the offer, but just to be clear, I didn't fund the whole treatment! (I'm a beer drinker, but I live near Toronto and won't be near San Francisco any time soon - but if plans change, will do.) I know you've had a ton of ideas thrown at you in this thread, but I've been thinking about your site since donating and I think what would be really amazing, if you can accomplish it somehow, is a way to encourage people to donate regularly. There are probably many ways you could do this, but here's one: allow people to donate a sum of money, up front, that is not assigned to a particular person who needs treatment. Periodically prompt this person to fund treatments using some portion of this sum. Alternatively, support subscription billing where each time the money is withdrawn, the person is notified and asked to assign the money that was withdrawn to a particular person who needs it. I really feel that a recurring process of some kind could both vastly increase the amount of money you raise, and also benefit donors by giving them a periodic uplift in their mood and level of happiness. It could become, if this word is not too misplaced, addictive.
  - chaseadam17 14y ago
    Those are awesome ideas! We had never thought of loading up on Watsi Credit (with a large, one-time donation) and I think that's a super cool option to offer donors. No doubt we are going to see a major decrease in traffic after this HN post, and working on ways to retain donors is going to be our next big challenge. Thanks again for the feedback and support, we all really appreciate it! (And if you do come to SF, the beer offer still stands :)

jblock 14y ago

I'm in love with the idea, but the frequency that payments get bounced via Kickstarter bothers me when the funds are applied directly do medical procedures like this.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

swalkergibson 14y ago

Does it get any better than this?

chaseadam17 14y ago
:)

manuscreationis 14y ago

Bravo You are doing a great thing, and I applaud you

chaseadam17 14y ago
Thanks, we really appreciate the love!

tsahyt 14y ago

All in all this is a really great idea! Keep going and keep improving!

chaseadam17 14y ago
Gracias!

avinash88 14y ago

You guys are fantastic! Thank you for finding a way to save those that are sometimes overlooked!

chaseadam17 14y ago
Thank you!

Mizza 14y ago

Just got an email - "Thanks to you, Sushil's medical treatment has been funded!" Now that's CRM! I can't think of a single possible better way of making a customer happy. I'm telling everybody I know about this. The payment process was seamless, the design is lovely and the cause, well, of course. You guys are amazing.

chaseadam17 14y ago
Haha. Thank you~!

mehulkar 14y ago

I'm typically against organizations that need to live off donations. I think it's an impractical and unsustainable model. Your cause is very close to my heart and I would love to support it, but I'm a creature of convenience. I could make one donation now, but would fail to continue making donations. The two solutions I have seen that are successful at solving this problem are: 1) Automation. E.g. in the movie Office Space they take shavings off transactions (amounting to a few cents or less at a time) and pool them together. Another example: Auto-rounding up my grocery receipt, etc. 2) Recycling funds. I don't see how this would work in a donation based system where cash-flow is one directional, but it works really well for something like Kiva where funds are returned and the option to recycle is extremely easy. If any non-profit is to be sustainable, they must put in a HUGE amount of effort to obtain large enough recurring funds or make it really easy to provide funds. Since you are targeting individuals, it's going to be difficult to do the former. The latter will take a little more thought. All this said, I wish you the best of luck.

nollidge 14y ago
They could offer a subscription model, and then make it a monthly "game" of deciding where your money's going to go. Lots of people are willing to become sustaining members of charities. Or, I'm a member of a meta-charity called Foundation Beyond Belief, in which my contribution is distributed to various nonreligious charities based on priorities I set (e.g. 25% of funds to environmental causes, 50% human rights, 25% poverty, or whatever). So for Watsi, maybe I could predefine, say, types of medical treatment, country/region, etc. and then the system heuristically determines where to disburse. And now that I think about it, Kiva optionally does something similar, so that loan repayments don't just sit stagnant in people's accounts because they haven't gotten around to manually distributing them.
- nowarninglabel 14y ago
  We (Kiva) are also adding monthly donation subscriptions as well, or at least I'm trying to this week for my innovation iteration project.
  - 14y ago

alexshye 14y ago

Nice! Totally awesome that you might literally save lives. I agree with the others that the transparency thing is the most important.

jc00ke 14y ago

In case anyone couldn't get to the site for a bit, our hosting provider Heroku was seeing some issues with apex/naked domains: https://status.heroku.com/incidents/421 https://status.heroku.com/incidents/421 Hopefully it's resolved now. I cranked up another dyno just in case. Thanks for all the love!

chaseadam17 14y ago
You ROCK Jesse!

aurelijus 14y ago

Awesome guys, really nice and fast funding process (though if payment fails you are stuck with plain red message in blank page, you could improve on that one). The advice I can give you - steal best parts from Kiva, they have great and successful site. One of the things I missed was "tip" donation along with the treatment donation.

chaseadam17 14y ago
We love Kiva, and we hope to implement a "tip" option very soon. We just need to head out into the real world and raise some cash from grants, philanthropists, whatever, so we can pay to build all the features we want!

runako 14y ago

Awesome site! One point of feedback: the PayPal workflow is so bad it almost made me stop my donation. It would be much easier with a standard CC payment option. Good luck!

chaseadam17 14y ago
We hope to switch away from PayPal asap. Trust us, that's the first update we're going to make. Braintree is looking pretty good right about now.
- buster 14y ago
  Please keep it as a choice, though. It's easy for me, i'd prefer Paypal over CC.
- brittohalloran 14y ago
  Look at Stripe also -- very easy API to work with. I hear good things.
  - runako 14y ago
    Having had a little experience with both, I'd concur that Stripe is probably going to be easier to integrate. (Although my Braintree experience is more limited and dates back 2 years or so.)
- hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
  Maybe you can partner with Stripe? They could provide some lower fees in exchange of increased brand awareness.

beggi 14y ago

Hi, I just tried to donate and logged in through Paypal but I get "Something went wrong": http://cl.ly/image/0Z0H0n3i1f0q http://cl.ly/image/0Z0H0n3i1f0q

chaseadam17 14y ago
Thanks for supporting us, and I apologize about that. We are going to look into it ASAP.

buster 14y ago

Wow, that's awesome. I felt bad having to decide between them and funded all 3 that still need funding :) p.s.: unfortunately i still have a "bad feeling" because the internet is full of scams, i guess that will be your hardest fight, convincing people you are not a scam

chaseadam17 14y ago
Hey Buster - Gaining trust is our single greatest challenge, as well as our top priority. We really appreciate your support, and I'd love to hop on the phone with you and answer any/all questions you have. Feel free to email me at Chase (at) watsi (dot) org and I will send you my number. Or, if you are in San Francisco, I'd be happy to meet in person! Thanks for your support!

FrackieTV 14y ago

Beautiful. This site works on the same principle as ChildFund (Christian Children's Fund), but actually delivers the money where it implies it does. When faced with actual real people that are in need, it is difficult not to donate, especially that the donation process is so smooth and seamless. Not only made me reach for my wallet, it made me register on HH and comment, and that's much harder. Bravo! Keep on making this world a better place for all.

chaseadam17 14y ago
Thank you so much!

missing_cipher 14y ago

Does adding a "monthly subscription" type option make sense? It does add another level of complexity(user accounts and whatnot), but I think people would like the convenience of automatically donating. Maybe having the option to split their donation as they see fit(1/3, half and half, 100% to just one, etc). Good luck with the site. :)

chaseadam17 14y ago
We can't wait to enable recurring donations. It's at the top of our list!

vegasje 14y ago

It would be even better if you integrated some way to fund sustainable projects related to the health and wellbeing of these people. Saving someone's life is an amazing thing. Helping a community develop programs to saves lives into the future is on another level.

chaseadam17 14y ago
Excellent point. I am so glad you brought this up. One thing we want to do is partner with microfinance organizations and enroll all of our patients in financial literacy courses, as well as have them open up savings accounts, so they can better prepare for medical emergencies.

sergiotapia 14y ago

This made me really misty eyed. It's a really good idea that will change peoples lives. I'm going to share this to everyone I know. Please share this on Reddit as well and make it viral. Nothing brings me down like seeing children with medical conditions and parents that can't afford treatment. It's so sad.

chaseadam17 14y ago
I suck at Reddit and I apparently shared in the wrong subreddit and got downvoted. We would love help from any Reddit experts out there. Feel free to post!

fmavituna 14y ago

Great idea, seems like well executed as well. It might worth trying to get in touch with give well (http://www.givewell.org/ http://www.givewell.org/) to get a review, so transparency aspect of it will be much better documented.

chaseadam17 14y ago
Yes! We plan to. They recently rated our Medical Partner, Nyaya Health, as being in the top 1% of all non-profits for accountability and transparency. http://blog.nyayahealth.org/2011/12/10/nyayahealth1/ http://blog.nyayahealth.org/2011/12/10/nyayahealth1/

bmajz 14y ago

I imagine a lot of people will be reading the FAQ page, so you might want to correct this typo: In order to be eligible for Watsi funding, patients must be inflicted with an illness that meets the treatment criteria and subsequently be unable to afford the required medical treatment as a result of poverty. You surely mean "afflicted" rather than "inflicted"

chaseadam17 14y ago
Good catch. We are going to change that ASAP. Thank you!
jc00ke 14y ago
Good catch! Pushing the change now. Thank you!
chaseadam17 14y ago
We just pushed the update. Thank you!

iandanforth 14y ago

On the 'location' section I'd love to have a link that says 'Learn more about health care in this country.' Or something like that. I have a fairly good handle on how these situations could occur in the US but in Canada they would be unthinkable! Why, in this specific country, is this person not being taken care of? As many other have said, best of luck. This is a truly Good endeavor.

chaseadam17 14y ago
Great point. We'd love to have a lightbox that describes the country with a map, some info, and all that fun stuff. A quick note: there are approximately 200 countries in the world, and only 40 have a formal healthcare system. Pretty crazy...

buster 14y ago

May i suggest a "I just funded <person>'s medical treatment with XYZ$ on http://watsi.org http://watsi.org Facebook-share option? Or "<Person> just got new medical treatment from watsi.org", with a name and picture of that person.. Something like that to encourage people more to do the same as their friends do :)

chaseadam17 14y ago
We have a share option, we just don't have the pre-populated copy. We will work on that!
- buster 14y ago
  Yes, i was just thinking.. what instantly got me was the personal link/story/background/picture to the people you fund on the website. That get's lost with the normal sharing, doesn't it? :)

__alexs 14y ago

> 100% of your donation directly funds treatment! ITYM 98.6% - 96.6% - £0.20 GBP of your donation directly funds treatment! Or is there some awesome charitable PayPal fee structure that you are using?

rkwz 14y ago
I think PayPal does take a cut. Look at their transparency doc: https://docs.google.com/a/cordys.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ah3wJ9CRQzyHdDZSaEF1X1JsRm1yZ251d0RQZ0VmRGc&output=html https://docs.google.com/a/cordys.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ah...
- chaseadam17 14y ago
  Yes. PayPal takes 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. This usually amounts to about 5% because of the low average donation amount. We hope to lower this. If anyone knows someone at PayPal, hook it up!

youngdev 14y ago

Guys, truly a great service. I was thinking of start something similar or join an forces with existing service like yours. But I wanted to do it truly at non-profit level where we don't take a single penny out of donations. how are you guys funding your operations? Are you taking a % of the donation?

TWAndrews 14y ago

This is really cool. I would love an option for a repeating monthly donation. Maybe send me an email with candidates either based on random draw, treatments which just need a bit more to get over the top, or something similar.

TomGullen 14y ago

Absolutely amazing, love the idea, love the way you implemented it. I'll definitely be signing up and making some donations. My main concern though is as this scales (which I'm sure it will because it's awesome) you will run into the scammers.

chaseadam17 14y ago
Scale will be tough, but our goal is to partner with a few large organizations (Doctors Without Borders for example) that can provide a lot of patients. That will help alleviate a lot of risk as opposed to working with 1,000 smaller clinics.

whit537 14y ago

I'd love to find a way for Gittip (http://gittip.com/about http://gittip.com/about) to help you fund Watsi.org. The "public benefit corporation" sounds like what I was aiming at with open companies: http://blog.gittip.com/post/26350459746/the-first-open-company http://blog.gittip.com/post/26350459746/the-first-open-compa...

dan-g 14y ago

Any way you could add a brief synopsis of your organization to your "site unavailable" page? I (and I'm sure others) would be much more likely to keep the tab open/check back soon if that were the case.

chaseadam17 14y ago
We got rid of that page ;)

jcoder 14y ago

Great work. I would suggest tweaking the <title> text when there are zero or one fundings going on to encourage me to donate still.

limeade 14y ago

I think that it may be the case by law that the donor cannot select the individual recipient of a donation if the organization wants to retain tax exemption.

aidos 14y ago

And...looks like everything's fully funded now. Between this and the Tesla museum crowdfunding has given me optimism about the world we live in these days.

chaseadam17 14y ago
This has been a little crazy. Way more traffic than we anticipated! We are working on loading our reserve profiles now!
- radio4fan 14y ago
  RSS feed of profiles should be high on your priority list. Easy to implement, and bound to be very effective.

bmajz 14y ago

All treatments are fully funded. Wow, that's an awesome job folks (both Watsi and Hacker News)

needcaffeine 14y ago

This is brilliant! What a great cause. I have a few questions for you on the technical side: - What did you code this in? - How many developers did you have? - How long did it take you? - What kinds of problems did you encounter on the way? Congrats on the launch.

chaseadam17 14y ago
Thanks for the kind words. - Ruby/Rails/HTML5 - 1 dev + some freelance assistance on the front-end - Took a while since we are all working part-time as volunteers. About a year total. Probably a few months of solid dev time. Setting up operations took a lot of time. - Hardest part is working as volunteers. Everything takes 5x longer when people aren't being paid. Thank you!

alexanderh 14y ago

This is "Death panels" in a fancy suit. Bid on life saving medical treatment from a thumbnail? By someones looks? and a possibly fabricated story? So now we the internet get to decide who lives and dies? Who has a healthy fulfilling life and who lives with disease and disability? Idk about this idea. Its well intentioned, but oh so wrong all at the same time. This type of charity should be first come first serve to be fair. Not some bidding war over who's the most sickly (but still cute) looking child, or who has the most compelling story. A human is a human. The good intentions are there, but something about the way this website presents itself is twisted. Why should any of these people receive preferential funding over any other of them? Why should I get to choose? I'm not an expert on their medical conditions, or who needs more help than others. If this gets people to give money to a good cause, thats fine. But Idk. Still seems odd. Sorry if this is the kind of "negativity" hacker news is trying to avoid these days, but this is genuinely what I feel.

tkahn6 14y ago
I also found it genuinely disturbing for the same reason. The 'you decide' aspect of the site seems very sick to me. I think the moral dilemma could be solved easily by just having a single fund that you pay into. The money is then distributed among the people who need treatment. No input from the giver.
- lincolnq 14y ago
  The problem is that you get fewer donations if you do it that way, because people prefer to donate to a story.
snowwrestler 14y ago
How is this a "death panel"? These people are currently not receiving treatment they need, and this site helps give it to them. Nothing is being denied to anyone here.
chaseadam17 14y ago
We are bummed out that the site makes you feel this way, but we genuinely appreciate you voicing your opinion. We're here to listen to the public, and if people disagree with what we are doing, we will shut down immediately. That said, I'd like to point out a few things. 1) This is not a bidding war. We won't remove a profile until it is fully funded. This is why we only post a few profiles at a time (and not hundreds) - to ensure they are all funded in a reasonable amount of time. If the patient needs treatment before the profile is funded, we will front the cost of care. 2) Humanity has always decided who lives and who dies, and it sucks. It makes me angry, but it's a reality. The only difference is now, because of how connected the world is becoming, this reality is a little harder for those of us that are the most fortunate, to ignore. 3) We aren't first come first serve. That wouldn't make sense, because our Doctors identify patients, they don't identify us (that would lead to fraud). Instead, we are lowest-cost, highest-impact first. Every profile is reviewed by at least two independent doctors (usually more) to determine which cases are the best ones to fund (and I assure you that "cuteness" is not a criteria these Doctors use to make a decision). See our FAQ for more info on treatment guidelines. We feel terrible that our site presents itself in a way that you think is twisted, and we would love to make whatever changes we can to improve it. Feel free to reach out to me directly at chase (at) watsi (dot) org with any other thoughts. We've spent a lot of time thinking about this (and even consulted with a medical ethicist), but we always have a lot more to learn. But perhaps the most important thing - the internet funded 11 medical treatments today for people that wouldn't have had access to them otherwise. You guys literally changed (and saved) 11 lives. I don't know how that can be a bad thing.

mtrimpe 14y ago

I once developed a similar application for a large charity which included the ability to place a widget to donate to the 'current charity' on your site/blog and had an associated leader board of who collected the most donations. That project was never launched due to the cost of integrating with their ERP, but the idea might be worth considering for Watsi as well.

amalakar 14y ago

This is brilliant idea and one that is perfectly executed. I would love to contribute whichever way I can and the way it brings down the barrier to contribute is remarkable. I would love to contribute in a personalized way than to donate to an organization where I don't have any clue what happened to the money. Wish you all the success!

chaseadam17 14y ago
Thank you!

markthien 14y ago

We just built an app that saves asses

thuffy 14y ago

Does it bother you that you are subsidizing defective genetics and thus making humanity less fit and thus increasing the average level of suffering? You might think you are being nice by decreasing the suffering of an individual, but you are also dooming consciousness to suffer being born into a defective host that otherwise would not have happened if not for your subsidization of defective genetics. I am curious as to what the higher than average enlightened readership of HN thinks on this? Of course it is very taboo to say what I did as the medical industrial complex is on the side of causing this problem as they are then guaranteed not just one more customer, but a new lineage of customers.

mjohn 14y ago
I have never commented before, but I had to reply to this. I assume you are being serious, but hope you just have a twisted sense of humor, or perhaps you have just read too much Schopenhauer recently. I believe that just because someone is born with a disadvantage or have health issues does not mean they are defective. Everyone has as much a right to life as anyone else. In support of your beliefs, I would be interested to know your responses to the following questions: At what point does a person's suffering cause a sufficient decline in the global "average level of suffering" to imply they should not be allowed to reproduce or continue living? Should all sick people be left to die? Should we serve the depressed arsenic instead of offering counselling and medication? Should we just execute people of higher than average IQ, since ignorance is bliss? We all have defects, should we all die to spare the planet? How do you calculate average suffering? What is the unit of measure? Does the momentary joy of seeing the birth of a child outweigh years of chronic pain?
- thuffy 14y ago
  No, I am not joking at all. This is a serious mater. Unless you want humanity to eventually degenerate to beyond even the point where everyone is dependent on multiple surgeries simply to live past just being born, then this is something that needs to be though about, discussed, and rectified - no mater how difficult a subject. Some of your questions appear to me to be purposely absurd in order to make the topic seem absurd. To answer your first question though, which is a reasonable one: It may not be a simple answer of some point is too defective, but the answer there must obviously be something other than the current idea that no level of defectiveness is too defective to be aided to breed more unfortunate burdened souls. My personal feeling is that the line has to be somewhere around being too defective to live without medical intervention beyond childhood or perhaps better is the point before one is otherwise able to have children and raise and support them to the age where they are self supportive. Your pointing out that the issue is a complex one with no easy answer does not justify the continued destructive course that humanity is treading down. Regardless of how hard an issue it is to solve, it must be recognized that the current setup of unlimited medical intervention to keep people alive and breeding, no mater how defective, in fact results in a degenerating gene pool, a downward spiral of suffering. This is the true reason why medicare costs keep increasing to the point now where it is the majority expenditure of any western nation (even in America, it is greater there than how much is spent on the military). Again you can see why the medical industrial complex is set on continuing this trend. If not for the limits of economics, this would eventually consume all resources of the world just to keep itself alive with medicine. In some countries this has led to the talk of not providing medical intervention for some groups of people who need it to survive. Unfortunately the talk is always around not giving it to the old people in order to save money. While they may seem less important to save, it is actually the wrong group to withhold intervention from, as saving old people is not destructive to the gene pool. They need to start talking about withholding it from the opposite end of the age spectrum.

ryanmolden 14y ago

Definitely get the 501c3 info up as well. Some employers will match employee charitable donations. Mine does and I love to use it to "stick it to the man". I would be interested in giving and registering you as a charity eligible for donation matching. Donations can be money, time, software, etc... It can be a great way to "leverage up" your giving.

revorad 14y ago

Wow, thanks for making this! I just shared this on Facebook but the FB auto summary thing didn't pull up an image as it usually does for links. You should look into fixing that because having a powerful image (as you do on the homepage) will definitely increase visibility and click-through rates.

marquis 14y ago

I love this, I use Kiva and the rewards are wonderful as is their way of keeping my money in circulation. But I'm not a U.S. citizen so I only donate a small amount because it's not tax-deductable in my country. You know what I would love? Some one to build a global non-profit money distribution center, so I can donate a lot more in my country and the money can go where I choose. Right now I keep my donations limited in price unless it's a local charity to my tax country and I'd like to see that change.

dragthor 14y ago

http://hopemob.org/ http://hopemob.org/ clone?

adnanofsteel 14y ago

This is absolutely great. Spread the love on twitter.

autophil 14y ago

One suggestion: please get a copywriter to write your headlines and subject headings. The current "we just built a site that saves lives" is epically bad. You are leaving money on the table when you make ambiguous, poorly written copy.

autophil 14y ago
That said, it's a beautiful website and a beautiful idea. Sincerely.

vmialik 14y ago

Glad to see you guys take part in GSVC. Really miss this competition, and the social enterprise community at UC Berkeley. Being a non-profit I bet it was pretty tough to survive with competitors who focus on for profit or non/for profit hybrids that scale.