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When good ideas make bad business

tjcx.me

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Re: When good ideas make bad business

#61

Post by throwaway_tech »

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 have very little/not at all influence over prescribing patterns of physicians.

Walk into any physician office and ask them how many faxes they get everyday from pharmacists requests the Dr. change their prescription. Then ask the pharmacists what triggers them faxing requests to the Dr.'s requesting change in therapies...hint: insurance companies dictate to the pharmacists their recommendations for Docs.

Edit: I should have noted the "tips". When a pharmacist faxes a Doc a recommendation the pharmacy gets a "tip" and if the Doc actually makes the change, then the pharmacy gets a 2nd "tip." In my experience the Doctors have no idea pharmacists are paid by insurance for recommendations and changes.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#62

Post by 2pointsomone »

Thank you for your vulnerability and sharing your story with such honesty!

There are easy businesses, and there are hard businesses. Your business fell in the latter category, but your tactics to succeed were based on easier businesses. I still think you could have succeeded if you persisted and weren't so eager to get sales and play startup.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#63

Post by scottmsul »

While not a unicorn, this could potentially succeed as an indie-hacker sized project. One potential business strategy could be a high-level information hub - a weekly blog + podcast for example. Each week look at a different drug or illness, look at all the relevant papers, do a short statistical analysis, and summarize. Then get some patreons, run ads, maybe sponsorships for particular drugs, etc. I think there's a lot of math geeks out there that would find this useful/interesting enough to follow on a regular basis, even if just to see what's going on in the healthcare space.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#64

Post by pascalxus »

It's an excellent write up and there's great lessons in there for all of us. And, it's great that he started talking to actual doctors, if only he had done that first. I know i've made that mistake many times.

As for the medical industry: the idea is to keep people sick as long as possible. You can't make money from people who get better or people who die.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#66

Post by rjkennedy98 »

leggomylibro wrote: post #9

Oof. The site was practically named after WebMD, and the founder didn't do any market research on that competitor to gauge how viable the business was before quitting their job? This person probably should have known that their main competitor made $0.50/user before they quit their job. Also: >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 patient…

That line stood out to me also. Anyone who feels that the primary goal of healthcare in the US is to improve health outcomes is incredibly naive about how this industry (which is over 20% of the us economy) works. There is only one group in the entire industry which has an incentive to keep people healthy (insurance) and that is the most hated of the bunch!

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#67

Post by sjg007 »

fyp wrote: post #45

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 eff…

What’s your blood pressure? I had bad tension headaches from time to time and after starting a bp medicine they’ve basically disappeared.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#70

Post by heisenbit »

throwaway_tech wrote: post #54

Its kind of sad picturing the customer with a headache needing a app to tell him what medicine to buy at CVS...while there is a pharmacist right there. I do like the quip at the end about lacing up all birds and jumping on the bird scooter. This makes me think how badly I need allbirds to join the sharing economy...how great would it be to have allbirds scattered all around your city sidewalks so you have a paid on d…

> while there is a pharmacist right there

who has a very clear understanding of the margin of the various products in the shelf. Maybe competent but certainly not unbiased.

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