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When good ideas make bad business

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Re: When good ideas make bad business

#201

Post by rossdavidh »

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…

Another possibility: how many people would be willing to donate a few bucks a month to support it? Call it the public radio model. You won't get rich, but you might pay for upkeep and servers.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#202

Post by jimbokun »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #165
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…

He also seems to have misread Susan. In the story she describes the project as "fun" before he asks what she'd pay. At that point he probably should have picked up that she was being kind and was not in fact seeing a product she was interested in buying. He probably could have figured that out by asking doctors before he built the thing.

> He probably could have figured that out by asking doctors before he built the thing.

Which is the entire point of the article, made very explicitly.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#203

Post by amitmathew »

jimbokun wrote: post #194
amitmathew wrote: post #166

I think people are being a little too hard on the author. Startups in healthcare are hard . Been there, done that, have the t-shirt (literally, that's all that left). I even made the same fatal mistake - not identifying who the buyer really is. And when I say identifying the buyer, I don't mean it in that hand-wavey, vague way like "doctors" or "insurance companies". The starting point has to be something like "ophth…

> But the key insight is that you have to take a step back and just treat healthcare like any other for-profit business. Doctors and hospitals care about what generates revenue. Insurance companies want to save money. Pharma companies are looking to advertise to new customers. It's no different than other industries. This is one of the most concise and effective arguments I have read for Medicare-For-All, Single Paye…

I'm all for removing the broken system we have today, but a single payer system doesn't remove the challenge that the entrepreneur faces - it just changes it. Under single payer, you are now trying to sell to a large government organization, with all the pain and red tape that comes with that.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#204

Post by nitwit005 »

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!

Imagine you have a chronic condition, and every month your insurance writes a substantial check for your care. A new treatment comes along that might fix your condition permanently. Surely they'll leap to pay for it?

Unfortunately, they probably won't want to. People frequently change insurance, so the most likely outcome is they'll have to pay for an expensive treatment, but never see the savings.

This is currently playing out for some new expensive new gene therapies.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#205

Post by justingreet »

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…

I take the article to be written in the mindset he had at the time. When he made that quote you mentioned, he thought as he was heads-down building the product that it would be useful to those people.

He then goes on to describe the evidence specifically why doctor's DIDN'T want it. All the author was trying to do with that quote was explain what he was thinking at the time.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#206

Post by dumbfounder »

This would be a useful feature of Google, but it won't be a real company without an innovative business model. 9 months to build a company AND THEN innovate a business model is nowhere near enough time, especially since you probably spent the vast majority of the time on the product. If you had a partner that was equally talented working on the business side since day one you still wouldn't have something in 9 months, but maybe 2 years. And maybe something HUGE. That's the gamble you make going into a startup, and 9 months simply isn't long enough to find that out.

Or maybe you could have been a small acquisition target for Google to incrementally increase their search superiority. I imagine they would be able to monetize eyeballs with searches like these at (very) roughly 100x the rate of WebMD.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#207

Post by jimbokun »

eightysixfour wrote: post #174
mwilcox wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 he should try selling it to CVS as a in-the-store tool for OTC products, where his original need came from in the first place.

Interesting, could be a differentiator from other pharmacies.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#208

Post by relaxing »

amitmathew wrote: post #203
jimbokun wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the key insight is that you have to take a step back and just treat healthcare like any other for-profit business. Doctors and hospitals care about what generates revenue. Insurance companies want to save money. Pharma companies are looking to advertise to new customers. It's no different than other industries. This is one of the most concise and effective arguments I have read for Medicare-For-All, Single Paye…

I'm all for removing the broken system we have today, but a single payer system doesn't remove the challenge that the entrepreneur faces - it just changes it. Under single payer, you are now trying to sell to a large government organization, with all the pain and red tape that comes with that.

Thanks for refocusing the conversation back on the people that really matter.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#209

Post by planetzero »

omegaworks wrote: post #187
wayoutthere wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a business standpoint, saving lives can actually be expensive. The longer someone lives, the more healthcare they consume. Health insurance companies are very aware of this, which is why they so frequently deny coverage for various life-saving cancer treatments. If you die while waiting for treatment, not only do they save the cost of the treatment, but also the entire cost of ongoing screening / care during rem…

This is precisely why we need universal healthcare. The incentive structure of private markets don't properly value human life.

"This is precisely why we need universal healthcare. The incentive structure of private markets don't properly value human life."

Government-run healthcare isn't a panacea that will 'value human life' any more than the insurance companies. You are still a number in a database somewhere.

Most new drugs come out of the US and socialized governments create generics at a fraction of the cost, because they don't have to put any money into R&D.

The US is the back-bone of the medical system for the rest of the world and also has the best medical schools and best quality hospitals (the majority of people with money come to the US for life-saving surgeries..this has to tell you something).

We need to push the true costs of things to the patient, which will force the price down...not replace the existing inefficient layer of the insurance companies with an even more inefficient layer called the government.

This has worked with many cosmetic surgeries, which used to be very expensive, but aren't covered by insurance.

Insurance should only cover rare surgeries that can't use the free market to reduce the costs.

I can't think of anything that the government runs better than the private sector. Healthcare is no different.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#210

Post by war1025 »

nitwit005 wrote: post #204
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!

Imagine you have a chronic condition, and every month your insurance writes a substantial check for your care. A new treatment comes along that might fix your condition permanently. Surely they'll leap to pay for it? Unfortunately, they probably won't want to. People frequently change insurance, so the most likely outcome is they'll have to pay for an expensive treatment, but never see the savings. This is currently…

Shouldn't it still work out in the aggregate? Assuming people move both in and out of the provider?
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