When good ideas make bad business • Hacker News Board

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#351

Post by Data_Junkie » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:36 PM UTC

planetzero wrote: post #209

omegaworks wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

In a true Democracy nothing would be valued more by government run health care than human lives and/or human suffering.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#352

Post by moneywoes » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

utopian3 wrote: post #248

MFLoon wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no adtech expert, but I'm pretty sure he would not be getting .50 cents per user per year - that's what WebMD, one of the top 1000 most trafficked web sites in the world makes, so I assume it can sell it's ad space at a much higher price than a greenfield site with no traffic would.

Fair point. I just searched for a bit, but can't seem to find a good "average revenue per user" for ad-based SaaS products. Anyone know?

Any luck? I'm very curious

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#353

Post by moneywoes » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #77

Congratulations on learning the hardest lesson, your next startup is now a lot more likely to succeed, so get to work! A lot of comments criticizing what the author already knows, that the business plan was incomplete. I had the urge to do the same, but read to the very end and realized TJC clearly learned the most important lesson, and it's one I've learned myself, so I have no room to be critical. BTW, I burned a l…

What was your story?

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#354

Post by cal5k » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

philjohn wrote: post #299

cal5k wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because if you could prove there were cost and health outcome benefits on a national scale you would be able to convert the idea into a viable business with a single corporate sales pitch, instead of trying to sell to every doctor individually. As someone who ran a healthcare business in Canada, I can tell you that this is absolutely not the case. Single payers are outrageously conservative buyers... sure, you may…

That's a shame, in the UK we've seen some medical companies do very well by selling to GP surgeries and Primary Care Services (e.g. Egton who provide the online prescription and appointment booking service PatientAccess).

Providers are still basically private businesses (at least in primary care), so it is possible to sell to them. The problem is that each province runs its own system, unlike the UK where the NHS is universal across the country. So your addressable market is limited unless you can tailor your product to fit all 10 provinces. In practice it's very difficult, which is why almost all of the electronic health record software is owned by one of 3 large companies.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#355

Post by rtikulit » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 8:25 PM UTC

achillesheels wrote: post #350

rtikulit wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With respect to health care, you may be able to make such educated decisions, almost no one else can. There isn't enough signal, and almost no one has the ability to distinguish signal from noise, and correctly interpret it. What happens is that when given the opportunity, business will pollute the market with proxy signals (like brand trust, or fear based selling) that people instinctively respond to. These proxy si…

You assume medical bureaucracies are needed to protect from self-harm; ironically the current healthcare state is harmful! I have firm belief in the fact that the market can more efficiently aggregate medical information but above all else create more rapid responsiveness to care. Bad products and actors are always seeded out over time in a society.

I really wish that all markets worked like that. When they work, markets are an amazing mechanism for pricing, driving value creation, allocating capital, and searching the economic and technological solution space.

But they don't work like this all the time, for all goods.

Tetraethyl lead, which quite probably caused material long-term harm to entire generations, is gone because the bureaucrats banned it. The free market would never have phased it out organically in a reasonable time-frame, we know this because it didn't. The market participants fought for its continued use and obfuscated the issues to their advantage.

GlacierMD was explicitly an attempt to filter, aggregate and make available high-quality health-care information (i.e. improve the quality of the signal, which is necessary for efficient market functioning), and it did not find a value proposition in the market.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#356

Post by phonon » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 8:26 PM UTC

Honestly, it sounds more useful than https://www.ibm.com/watson-health

Product sounds fine, but not selling them 1 by 1 to doctors.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#357

Post by wayoutthere » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 10:39 PM UTC

rtikulit wrote: post #355

achillesheels wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume medical bureaucracies are needed to protect from self-harm; ironically the current healthcare state is harmful! I have firm belief in the fact that the market can more efficiently aggregate medical information but above all else create more rapid responsiveness to care. Bad products and actors are always seeded out over time in a society.

I really wish that all markets worked like that. When they work, markets are an amazing mechanism for pricing, driving value creation, allocating capital, and searching the economic and technological solution space. But they don't work like this all the time, for all goods. Tetraethyl lead, which quite probably caused material long-term harm to entire generations, is gone because the bureaucrats banned it. The free m…

> GlacierMD was explicitly an attempt to filter, aggregate and make available high-quality health-care information (i.e. improve the quality of the signal, which is necessary for efficient market functioning), and it did not find a value proposition in the market.

Except it doesn't -- what GlacierMD was trying to do is something that's currently done by humans at scale. Which he would have known if he understood the market better. This is a centralized function that is performed much higher up the chain and ends up in clinician / patient hands in the form of clinical guidelines.

This is maybe a useful tool for researchers to be used as one input in the development of clinical guidelines. But the functionality it delivers can be done manually (and will continue to be for liability reasons). In this case, the market worked. The author should be thankful he was able to get out of it only $40k in the hole.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#358

Post by utopian3 » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 12:12 AM UTC

moneywoes wrote: post #352

utopian3 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point. I just searched for a bit, but can't seem to find a good "average revenue per user" for ad-based SaaS products. Anyone know?

Any luck? I'm very curious

Nope, I must not be searching for the right keyword or acronym.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#359

Post by achillesheels » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 1:38 AM UTC

rtikulit wrote: post #355

achillesheels wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume medical bureaucracies are needed to protect from self-harm; ironically the current healthcare state is harmful! I have firm belief in the fact that the market can more efficiently aggregate medical information but above all else create more rapid responsiveness to care. Bad products and actors are always seeded out over time in a society.

I really wish that all markets worked like that. When they work, markets are an amazing mechanism for pricing, driving value creation, allocating capital, and searching the economic and technological solution space. But they don't work like this all the time, for all goods. Tetraethyl lead, which quite probably caused material long-term harm to entire generations, is gone because the bureaucrats banned it. The free m…

I’m not trying to be divisive, but allow me to counter that all markets need consumer advocacy. High fructose corn syrup has been substituted in certain soft drinks now because of the diligence of consumer activism. I take it as a mathematical certainty that bureaucrats take longer to respond than the fluidity of market economics. I just find it appalling I can’t order my methotrexate medication without having to physically see a rheumatologist, with the man-hours to get that script embarrassing for a digital society.

Re: When good ideas make bad business

#360

Post by gonational » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

wayoutthere wrote: post #347

donaltroddyn wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a shockingly uncompassionate perspective - is it satire? Assuming it's genuine, it's also misguided. Almost no-one wants to be obese, alcoholic, etc - accessible healthcare will reduce the incidence of all of these, which in turn will reduce the externalities associated with them. You also don't need further state control to discourage smoking, drinking, junk food, etc - taxation is the mechanism used globall…

Anarcho-capitalism -- er, "libertarianism" -- at its finest. It's a deeply nihilistic worldview. Almost all these things are biologically addictive, and furthermore the companies selling them have long known about their addictive qualities and then built marketing campaigns to ensure the public was not aware of the risks . Taxation is how you recognize the externalities of this behavior while maintaining a free-marke…

We’ve been taxing cigarettes at like 100% or something ridiculous for many years, yet just as many people die from tobacco-related cancers now (if not more) as did when cigarettes were much worse for you (no filters, more chemicals, etc.). Those taxes also did not help to alleviate any of the problems in the medical industry; or if they did, they were obviously offset by something else massive, since cancer healthcare expenditures have risen drastically since their inception.

Also, it’s easy to look at something like cigarettes which pretty much everybody would agree are a terrible idea, and say, “fine, tax em”, but what about when it’s sugar, then butter, then red meat, etc. Let people make their own choices instead, and just don’t put the onus on the rest of us to fix the problems of those choices. Banning smoking in public is acceptable because it’s no longer a choice that only affects yourself; it affects anyone near you in a really terrible way. But taxing cigarettes (or anything else) is no solution.