I spent a few years trying to bootstrap an app for independent pharmacies. The basic idea was a kanban board for patients whose prescriptions were coming due for refills. Pharmacists would use it to coordinate calls out to patients to proactively refill their prescriptions a few days before they were due to run out. This gave them time to fix insurance snafus, get renewals from doctors, etc, and they could lower their inventory costs by only stocking drugs when they knew patients would come to purchase them. Moreover, most insurance companies are following Medicaid in implementing a program where they rate pharmacies based on the degree to which their patients are adherent to their prescribed medications and use this rating to adjust how much they paid the pharmacy for the drugs they issued. So the product also helped to pharmacies improve this rating by ensuring patients picked up their medications on time (which is the only means whereby these agencies know if patients are adherent).
I could go on and on about the problems:
1) I (and the two other programmers I was working with) had a job. The pace at which we rolled out features and bugfixes was glacial, even when customers were clamoring for them. And this statement is just about improving the app; it doesn't even consider the other tasks involved in running a business, on which I was even less excited to spend effort.
2) Pharmacy management software is a fragmented market, and almost every player is impossible to integrate with. Since our product didn't do the insurance, billing, inventory management, etc. it meant we had to integrate with them. We started out by telling people to run them side by side and manually make changes to both our app and that of their vendor. Not a great pitch. Looking back, I wish I'd invested in this from the get-go, instead of trying to do it after building the app.
3) The product required pharmacies to change their entire workflow to even realize the benefits. Which is fine, but we sold it as a software thing that worked magically, and didn't invest at all in helping customers use it successfully.
4) Our cofounders (pharmacists) were not interested in running a SaaS company. They viewed the app as their strategic advantage in their own pharmacy, and dragged their feet on the customer outreach we hoped they would take ownership of. I felt like they were actively working against me. This was the biggest issue, and what caused me to finally decide to close it down. Someone else in this thread made a statement of "I went from the prototype guy to the only one who cared." and that statement really resonates with me. In retrospect, I had the opportunity to structure the deal as more of a product/customer one than a cofounder one, and I wish I had been smarter about that.
I still think it was a great idea, and we built a slick app. I just failed on the sales and customer outreach side of the business. The app still exists in a zombie state, and a few customers still use and pay for it. I haven't done anything on it other than renew SSL certs since 2019.