Live data from Hacker News

When good ideas make bad business

tjcx.me

91–100 of 361 posts

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#91
It is easy to be an armchair expert, but I saw that this is not a viable idea: almost nobody would pay for it, for 99% of the cases patients and doctors already know the medication that is good enough and good for them (ibuprofen for me, acetaminophen for my friend because Ibuprofen upsets her stomach etc). And remaining 1% will most likely require serious medical attention, not just rando site. Let alone the fact that this is borderline dispensing medical advice which is a highly regulated activity!

One way to look for a similar business is examine.com (disclosure: I do not use them but read their write ups and articles about them on indie hackers-like sites and podcasts). It is a site that gives information about supplements. The supplement landscape is much more wide than that of painkillers, they are hard to compare, and supplements are usually chosen by consumers themselves, and supplement information is unlikely to be treated as a medical advice.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#92

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.

Hey is there a way for patients/caregivers to get involved? I'm particularly interested in finding ways to collect data on trials that are in progress but haven't published results yet. Secondarily trying to build an evidence-based approaches to selecting low-risk adjuvant therapies that hasn't been directly proven in clinical trials.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I get so grumpy about startup narratives. If you ask successful unicorns how they got started, they'll usually explain that's exactly what they did. Garrett Camp was just trying to hire a private driver, and realized it was too hard, there's no reason it should be so hard. Jack Dorsey saw a guy who didn't accept credit cards and realized it would be great if he could accept credit cards. If you don't real…

The most realistic founding story so far is Bezos explanation for how he founded Amazon. It was always a business-first mindset in an area of high growth. That one short video filmed in 1997 should be a masterclass by itself.

This. Say what you will about Bezos, but he seems to be the most impressive tech founder out of any of FANG and any of the large unicorns founded after Facebook.

Such an impressive list of deft moves that he made (in a range of different areas) one after another between '94 and 2000 to set Amazon on a path to meteoric growth.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#94
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…

It seems like a flaw in the system though because those micro-optimizations are what usually drives the free market and accumulate to become huge. If all buying decisions were just made on the same coarse decision making then the useful competition-by-endless-small-improvements would be replaced with competition-by-insidious-marketing, which I guess is the state that pain medicine is in.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#95
I think the original poster made the same mistake I did, and took the wrong lesson from the situation.

The startup idea sounds great and I would enthusiastically start working on it right now as a cofounder.

The problem was spending money before having a sense of how to get more.

That’s all.

If the startup could have been run entirely without paying contractors or incurring other serious expenses, the poster could have run it for longer, and iterated on models longer, until the product/market fit got dialed in.

There just wasn’t enough runway, enough iteration.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#98

At first I thought this was satire. Here's this guy, who uses a pretty straightforward analysis without any prior healthcare domain experience, thinks he's found the holy grail after a few weeks of work, and then spends all of his money (without first talking to actual domain experts) before he gives up, because Healthcare.

> autonomous blockchains

It just _has_ to be satire, though!

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#99

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.

Maybe in a small independent pharmacy you have this issue, but biggest pharmacies in the World (CVS, Walgreens, Walmart) the pharmacists will not know the margins of over the counter drugs and have nothing to do with purchasing them.

>Maybe competent but certainly not unbiased.

I suppose they have a bias in the form of legal liability and professional licensure which guide their recommendations. That is, they can be sued for negligence, malpractice and otherwise potentially lose their license to practice. Tech startups are notorious for placing profits before users, and lack accountability in the same way as licensed professionals. In a worst case scenario they fold up shop and move to the next industry to "disrupt".

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#100

I'm so confused by the tone of this article. Obviously some of the jokes are parodying startup culture and are meant to be funny, however I think the "fantastic idea" stuff is meant seriously? "So I built something people wanted. Consumers wanted it, doctors wanted it, I wanted it. Where did I go wrong?" As far as I can tell, nobody wanted it except the author. The one doctor he talked to didn't, and no consumer ever…

The funny part is, he might still be wrong about it being worthless. He talked to ten doctors? There are 1M in the US. It's kind of funny to drop all that time and 40k in then give up after ten doctors say no, especially without trying to tweak the product based on feedback. I, as a consumer, find it worthless and they shouldn't have even started it, but now that you're here, might as well give it a bit more of shot…

He should obviously be selling to clinics / hospitals

Plus when did the 'we don't have any budget' excuse stop a SaaS company? That's what you raise VC for - build the product, hand it to the customer for 'free' and charge them what it was really worth based on their usage when you threaten to take it away

Post reply on HN