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I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

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Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

#41

Post by ketzo »

dan-robertson wrote: post #26
nickjj wrote: post #9

That was a fun read. I wish the author mentioned how much he was trying to sell the service for. It could have been $59 a month or $599 a month and with doctors you could potentially expect the same answer. I'm not a psychologist but some of the author's quoted text came off extremely demeaning in written form. If the author happens to read this, did you really say those things directly to them? For example, Susan (p…

The conversations are surely paraphrased and exaggerated—just look at the style of the rest of the article. The position that doctors should be trying new things to improve their care sounds good but in practice most doctors are strongly biased towards the status quo and usually inaction is preferred to a slightly unknown action, even if that action has better expectancy.

I dunno. I think tech people have a tendency to assume they know for certain that they have a better solution, and their words/tone can reflect that in a way that can come off as very insulting to people who have been working in the space for literal decades.

Not everyone, and not all the time. But many people, and often enough that it's a stereotype. So I think it's worth considering, particularly when you're looking at a customer base who (by and large) really aren't used to being condescended to.

Even if you and I personally aren't offended in the slightest by what OP said on sales calls, it's possible a psychologist in the fourth decade of her career might take "Are you sure that's right?" differently than we would.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

#42

Post by ivalm »

sixQuarks wrote: post #19
rel2thr wrote: post #2

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

Exactly. This was the right path in this case. The value is for the consumer, if he could attract just 100K visitors per month, that's $500,000/year. Not only that, he would have a highly targeted group of users that he could tailor all kinds of products and services to.

You need 1mil visitors for 500k.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

#43

Post by jokethrowaway »

This was a great read!

Doctors definitely don't need your product, as they pointed out.

But consumers do!

I think you should have sold to consumers.

Having three doctors in my close family, I often found that whatever the tired doctor at the hospital is recommending is in contrast with what a doctor who care about my health (and is willing to look on their proprietary platforms) is recommending. That's why you ask different private doctors' opinions when things matter.

I found myself googling studies on what's the better treatment for $x and I would pay for better-than-a-doctor-advice backed by actual studies.

I think the problem, in your situation, is the scale of the operation.

If you want to do B2C, you often need investments and you can expect to become profitable in a few years.

Either find some funding or fix your cashflow.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

#45

Post by yunohn »

nickjj wrote: post #9

That was a fun read. I wish the author mentioned how much he was trying to sell the service for. It could have been $59 a month or $599 a month and with doctors you could potentially expect the same answer. I'm not a psychologist but some of the author's quoted text came off extremely demeaning in written form. If the author happens to read this, did you really say those things directly to them? For example, Susan (p…

You’d be surprised how many doctors neglect the state of the art in medicine... That’s also why second opinions are a thing. Medicine is a science and hence, an ever changing field.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

#46

Post by fourseventy »

This is the classic case of building a product that you hope will solve a problem instead of finding a problem first then building a product to solve it. The correct approach would have been to have those conversations with doctors before spending $40k to build the product.

I've made this very mistake myself but I was lucky enough to have enough runway to start over and talk to customers first then pivot the product to something that they actually need.

I call this the "I have an idea for a startup!" issue. You hear it all the time from family/friends. Where they tell you this great idea for a product they had. This is the wrong approach. What you want to say is something like "There is this really interesting problem that everyone in ecommerce is facing right now"

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

#47

Post by byecomputer »

syntaxing wrote: post #11
extrememacaroni wrote: post #3

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?

Even if you can avoid being liable for it, I'd think most people wouldn't want someone's death hanging over their head for reasons beyond the legal.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

#48

Post by dr_ »

gault8121 wrote: post #15

This article's thesis seems to be that medical professionals are not incentized to provide the best interventions, and as a result, wouldn't pay for this service. However, what the author fails to mention is the competitors in this space that are successful, such as Up To Date, which provides really high-quality research trial data: https://www.uptodate.com/home Rather than building a product that informs medical pro…

A hospital system is incentivized in some ways to get people discharged as soon as possible and ideally with a good outcome. A service like UpToDate is one of the tools that may facilitate that by providing valuable clinical pearls to facilitate decision making. So it's not surprising that UpToDate is largely paid for by large institutions and academic medical centers, and not as much by individual medical providers.
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