When good ideas make bad business • Hacker News Board

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#41

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

Dayshine wrote: post #30

elliotpage wrote: post #28

It's a shame this project was shuttered as what screenshots are posted look amazing. Better data aggregation is desperately needed in medicine and sadly I think the creator has walked face first into the horror of cost merely to access clinical trials. Plus, the cost of paying contractors to extract the actually useful information from those trials. These are key reasons why Open Science and Open Data are so critical…

He might not have succeeded in getting rich, but he can still turn this into an incredibly effective $40k donation to public health research. I'm sure there is a researcher out there who can find hosting for this service, and maybe continue to keep it up to date with new trials.

[deleted]

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#42

Post by symlinkk » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

I don't see how ads weren't enough to keep this afloat.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#43

Post by wizzwizz4 » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

ageyfman wrote: post #29

iabacu wrote: post #18

You should market this to insurance companies, not individual doctors. At their scale, they can use the data to drive their costs down, and can build a business case for paying you something.

Insurance companies have very little/not at all influence over prescribing patterns of physicians. If you could tie this improved outcomes, then there is a business model here.

So the insurance companies fund it as a donation to physicians.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#44

Post by lonelappde » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

ageyfman wrote: post #29

iabacu wrote: post #18

You should market this to insurance companies, not individual doctors. At their scale, they can use the data to drive their costs down, and can build a business case for paying you something.

Insurance companies have very little/not at all influence over prescribing patterns of physicians. If you could tie this improved outcomes, then there is a business model here.

Insurance companies dictate what treatments they will cover for which conditions.

However, insurance companies are perversely cost conscious, because they are paid as a percentage of medical costs, not as surplus between premiums and costs.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#45

Post by fyp » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

I have had life long headaches that I have given up on fixing. Occasionally when I switch to a new doctor I will mention it just to see if they have anything new to say.

They usually just put me on a concoction of various pain killers (e.g., migraine specific stuff like sumatriptan). These prescriptions actually work great. But so did OTC aleve/advil/tylenol too.

The problem was that I didn't really care for more effective pain killers. What I really want is to fix the root cause and stop having these headaches.

So yea, I can totally see why something like this would fail. If the solution is still qualitatively the same, a small percentage improvement is just micro-optimizations that most doctors and patients won't care much for.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#46

Post by arrosenberg » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #33

That was really great writing, though :-). But this part: > “And that isn’t worth something? Prescribing better treatments?” > “Hmmmm,” she said, picking at her fingernails. “Not directly. Of course I always have the best interests of my patients in mind, but, you know, it’s not like they’ll pay more if I prescribe Lexapro instead of Zoloft. They won’t come back more often or refer more friends. So I’d sorta just be,…

The obvious next step (if there is one) is to get the insurance companies to pay for it, since they are the ones who would theoretically reap the benefits.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#47

Post by professionalguy » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

iabacu wrote: post #18

You should market this to insurance companies, not individual doctors. At their scale, they can use the data to drive their costs down, and can build a business case for paying you something.

Or R1 research universities

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#48

Post by CPLX » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

This could have worked. It would have been possible to sell an integration with a major health insurance company or provider network (or a few) as a tool available to their members.

Like as a United Healthcare sponsored portal that helps you pick OTC drugs, or similar. Those guys love stuff like this. And I've actually worked in this space so I'm not just making things up.

With that said, the way to do that would be to make it a destination with a growing userbase and then approach them for partnership. Which would have cost money and taken a while to ramp up, so you'd need some runway. Also it's not a strategy to actually get rich, that wouldn't lead to tens of millions in revenue or valuation probably.

But it was in fact a good idea and there were some paths forward you could have taken. Had you done so there's an excellent chance you would have discovered some interesting and perhaps lucrative product extensions along the way.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#49

Post by tylerrobinson » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

Hi Tom, thanks for sharing this. I work for a company in the evidence based medicine space that would have become your competitor had you continued to pursue this idea. Send me a line (email in profile), it would be interesting to get introduced.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#50

Post by codewithcheese » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

If you don't know how to monetize, you need investors...duh :) Then you can spend some millions working it out! And if you still cant monetize make sure one of your investors is deeply in the hole on this investment and you control the voting shares and make them buy you out.