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When good ideas make bad business

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Re: When good ideas make bad business

#141

Post by StavrosK »

cosmic_shame wrote: post #138
StavrosK wrote: post #126

The author says that they fired the contractors and closed the site. I can never relate to this. You built something that is at least somewhat useful to at least some people. Why not just keep it online forever? It can't cost more than $5/mo to host this, I have a server where I host around ten of my projects for less than $20/mo. Why do people shut things down instead of just leaving them there, unmaintained? Even t…

Well in the case of this particular product that offers medical advice, the info may become outdated fairly quickly. I suspect there is some amount of liability associated with offering potentially out of date medical advice that isn't worth the tiny revenue stream.

Perhaps... Would a disclaimer help there?

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#142

Post by n4r9 »

irq-1 wrote: post #121
rjkennedy98 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> There is only one group in the entire industry which has an incentive to keep people healthy (insurance) The motivation of insurance is to keep the cost of treatment less than the income from premiums -- it doesn't have anything to do with how healthy people are.

My thoughts exactly. In fact I would modify this to:

> the motivation of insurance is to keep the cost of treatment that they cannot avoid liability for less than the income from premiums

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#143

Post by gkoberger »

jariel wrote: post #135
gkoberger wrote: post #38

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…

It's not a parody of anything, it's just his story, similar to most startups.

By parody, I don't mean the entire thing. I mean lines like this:

“Call me when you have a business plan,” I said, lacing up my Allbirds before and riding my Lime scooter into the sunset.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#144

Post by agentultra »

mwilcox wrote: post #100
mritchie712 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or try insurance actuaries. If _better outcomes_ is the goal then doctors will want to keep their premiums low by prescribing the optimal drug. If the actuaries are able to see what the doctors are prescribing and what is the better fit they might be able to increase premiums for doctors that take more risks prescribing off of the meta-analysis.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#145

Post by utopian3 »

catchmeifyoucan wrote: post #136

I still think this idea is powerful. Not because I believe it transforms healthcare, but because it informs consumers a bit more. That’s what seemed to get you excited in the first place. There are a few paths I see still: a. Assuming you own a database, expose your dataset as an API. Consider possible consumers. Open source it, and monitor the usage. Who’s using that data. b. Cold message a few folks on Linkedin fro…

> I do product at MEGACORP and love product strategy.

Where should one go/read/listen/watch to learn more about product strategy?

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#146

Post by gnopgnip »

rjkennedy98 wrote: post #66
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!

This is changing. Medicare, medicaid and to an extent tricare are switching away from pay for service models, so there is a financial incentive for providers to improve health outcomes.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#147

Post by royroyroys »

I'm surprised Big Pharma hasn't done something like this for free for doctors. They already spend tons of money marketing to doctors to perscribe their drugs and even club together and spend billions monitoring the perscription data with IQVIA (IMS Health basically). Maybe it's just that I've recently finished reading Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre, but this sounds like it's right up their street to help manipulate doctor's perscribing.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#148

Post by utopian3 »

gkoberger wrote: post #38

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…

Ya, I'm surprised it's not just a static landing page for consumers with ads. At .50 cents per user, that's only 80k users required to break even (ignoring the time variable there)

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#150

Post by anongraddebt »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #133
anongraddebt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One thing to keep in mind is that he worked for nearly a decade in product/business roles before founding Amazon.

I agree that that explains some of the difference. Not sure it means that he isn't the most impressive.

I'd also add that in his stints at different firms pre-Amazon he was quite clearly an outlier among high-achievers.

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