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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

#61

Post by repeek »

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…

I don't think he had the correct buyer either. While medical professionals may be the user, for this type of service you need to be selling into hospitals or health systems. They have the incentive for their providers, collectively, to improve the quality of care.

I doubt UpToDate makes their bones off individual subscriptions. The real money to keep a company afloat is from b2b enterprise contracts.

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

#62

Post by MichaelRazum »

I think the idea is good. Something like AI suggested drugs. But I guess that is hard to do the right way. On the other hand if I really care for the a new drug I take. Just using google scholar and quite often you have some summery studies which compare different meds.

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

#63

Post by danhak »

Healthcare is tough. There are few markets with more inertia and misaligned incentives than this.

With respect to pitching the product directly to clinicians, OP may have misunderstood his target market or overestimated the value proposition.

It seems like a very big request to ask a doctor to deviate from a treatment with which they already have a high level of experience.

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

#64

Post by dan-robertson »

xivzgrev wrote: post #54
dan-robertson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don’t think that was the point. The point was better healthcare doesn’t necessarily translate to more revenue. Healthcare is weird like that - you get paid a flat fee for visits. There might be an argument to be made that better prescriptions = happier patients = more retention, but it’s a stretch. If your practice is already booked full what’s the point? This biz was clearly made for consumers but yea ads are toug…

Yeah I agree that’s the point of the article. I think what I wrote would still be a reason even if it is rationalised differently.

The argument that “patients won’t know the difference so I can just do whatever” must break down at some point (hopefully before malpractice) but I think an argument of “I’ll just keep doing what I did before, it’s worked fine so far” doesn’t encourage worsening treatment or paying for more experimentation.

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

#65

Post by renewiltord »

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…

Based on the response he got, it was the right question, actually. People aren't Internet-style insecure in real-life, especially those who have high social cred (like doctors). Even accounting for the humorous exaggeration, the kind of question asked from a professional doctor is less likely to cause them to be offended and more likely for them to just tell you why not. They're not going to be "How dare you question my decades of experience?!". They'll answer like they did in the OP.

In The Mom Test, he suggests getting right to the core of a customer's pain points. This is just corollary to that.

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

#66

Post by hathawsh »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #43

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 di…

That was my reaction too. It seems like GlacierMD might have been successful if it had focused on SEO. Whenever someone types "what is the best headache medicine", GlacierMD should have been at the top of the results. The landing page would show the results of the studies for free, but would also let the user sign up so they can enter allergy and preference info and customize the results to them. Nearby doctors would advertise on the site.

So, in essence, before spending any money, I would go out and interview doctors to see if they're willing to pay for a channel of new customers. I would also try to gauge how many customers would be willing to sign up and enter their info so local doctors could advertise to them. And, of course, I would check with a lawyer to ensure I'm not bumping into HIPAA.

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

#67

Post by ddorian43 »

worldsayshi wrote: post #32
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…

If you are to proud to visit stackoverflow or Google to search for best practices you're not a very good developer. Sounds like the same rule should apply to a doctor or psychiatrist. Do they have such fragile egos that they can't have someone showing them the "new Google for doctors" without feeling offended? (Sorry if that came out a bit edgy. But this hole story irks me. It's frustrating when value can't be delive…

> Do they have such fragile egos that they can't have someone showing them the "new Google for doctors" without feeling offended?

It's very hard to understand their thinking without being yourself a patient or doctor.

TLDR: You need to spend 1K hours as a doctor, or shadowing, or something similar.

When you are responsible for people with psychosis your perspective changes. Can't play nosql games with people's lives.

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

#68

Post by Brian_K_White »

Sounds like this might work to offer it to doctors as a white label phone app or pwa, that each customer (doctor or group or clinic or hospital etc) skins and gives to their own customers or sticks on their own website.

It has the recommendation engine and the doctors marketing looks and some forms of low-friction way to contact the doctor (generate billable service) from email to video chat.

Doctor pays for the startup skinning, any feature changes or updates, and a subscription which pays for ongoing development of the engine and the datasets, maybe some related hosting.

Doctor maybe gives the app to tge users free, maybe charges if they think they can pull it off, and generates sales from the in-app "help me" buttons.

Could have a few quasi-generic versions geared to different kinds of practises that smaller practices could share.

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

#69

Post by viraptor »

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…

There are also services in non-us countries like "How to treat" https://www.ausdoc.com.au/howtotreat Which are relatively popular and used by doctors. Although it's already edited rather than raw data.

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

#70

Post by baxtr »

> But in fact everyone gave me some version of Susan's answer. "We just can't justify the cost," a pediatrician told me. "I'm not sure it's in the budget," said a primary care physician. "It's awesome," said a hospitalist. "You should try to sell this!" Ugh.

In B2B People pay either to reduce costs or drive sales. It’s as easy as that.

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