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This reminds me of an idea I had days ago of using an AI to tell poisonous mushrooms from edible ones apart, from photos. Then I realized I don't want to be responsible for anyone's death.
I think this was posted already (a couple of years? ago) Anyway, yeah, it wasn't a good value proposition (and is it just me or GlacierMD is a bad name for this)? Because in the end, it doesn't matter much if you don't get "the absolutely best choice of drug". If it solves your problem great, if not, doctors can exchange it, but that's when the drug or dosage is bad, not "not great".
From Glacier, it's a very short mental route to Titanic. So, yeah I'd say naming your product that brings up thoughts of the Titanic is not great.
This reminds me of an idea I had days ago of using an AI to tell poisonous mushrooms from edible ones apart, from photos. Then I realized I don't want to be responsible for anyone's death.
What if you limited the range from I don’t know if it’s poisonous to X% likely poisonous vs is/is not poisonous?
"Oh, that's only 25%, it'll be fiiine."
People fork over money for IAPs by the millions per minute, because they want the results.
I think if it were truly that desirable, people would have been happy to pay for it. I just don't think it provided that much value to the customer.
Rather than building a product that informs medical professionals about effective interventions, I wonder if the creator would have had more success if he deeply explored what sources of information these medical professionals pay for now - do they pay for anything at all, such as UpToDate, and don't want to pay this because it's an additional expense? If the creator found which sources people are using, the creator could sell this database as a feature for these partners and widely disseminate this data through partner channels rather than creating a competing source of information. It seems to be a case of this being a good instance of a B2B2C model, where selling this service to other businesses that sell directly to medical professionals could be more viable than trying to sell directly to them.
Alternatively, if the creator wanted to sell to patients, rather than medical professionals, the blueprint here is all of the consumer reports companies, such as Wirecutter, which is one of the New York Times's most popular services. Here, again, a "Wirecutter for medical interventions" could be quite successful, and you could sell this service to media companies that provide consumer reports as a service that would bolster these companies.
It's bad the creator wasn't able to find traction, as getting more medical data into the hands of consumers could have a huge postive impact over time.
This reminds me of an idea I had days ago of using an AI to tell poisonous mushrooms from edible ones apart, from photos. Then I realized I don't want to be responsible for anyone's death.
Edit: Should clarify most reading I have done on mushroom ID involves taking spore prints as an essential step but it's not always the rule.
That's a charity.
> Make something people want __and will pay you for__
That's a business.
You learnt the hard way.
This reminds me of an idea I had days ago of using an AI to tell poisonous mushrooms from edible ones apart, from photos. Then I realized I don't want to be responsible for anyone's death.
I still think of ML as having a niche of "mostly right is ok" and useful for very, very large volume otherwise one or more people does better for less. That may change in time. Self driving cars are very close now they say, but i suppose we've been hearing that for a few years without getting there.
I like your idea, but I’m confused why you didn’t try the webmd competitor route.. 50c/user that webmd makes is pretty good really , with good SEO + content marketing you could scale to enough users to make things interesting
Not only that, he would have a highly targeted group of users that he could tailor all kinds of products and services to.
Amusingly enough, I've got a document that's essentially a list of ideas where the business model is spurious at best and on that list is a solution almost identical to what was built here. I appreciate that someone took the dive and then shared the process, pain and failure of seeing it through to its conclusion. The only thing missing is the attempt to raise VC money to scale it to some sort of expert system you ca…