Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

blog.tjcx.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 336 posts

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

#201

Post by paxys »

vdfs wrote: post #194
paxys wrote: post #88

The founder pitched a great idea at the start – help consumers who don't know what kinds of common drugs to buy at the store, but then immediately pivoted to selling the service to doctors and medical practices. They should have realized that the second one would be impossible to break into. > But then I look at WebMD’s 10-Qs and start to spiral. Turns out the world’s biggest health website makes about $0.50/year per…

> They should have realized that the second one would be impossible to break into Why is that impossible? I had a long time idea of making a software for doctors in my country, it's not in Silicon Valley, everyone here use cash and it's hard to keep up with how many visitors they have or patient history (everything is stored in paper), my idea is to make a website for them, i can see how hard it would be to sell this…

Software for scheduling, accounting, payments – sure. He was trying to sell a service which would suggest medical advice for doctors to give to their patients.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

#202

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

Gatsky wrote: post #176
Barrera wrote: post #15

The main reason this didn't work is that the founder didn't identify a customer willing to spend money . A lot of startups fail because they never identify a customer. Or even a problem. This one failed because before writing a line of code the founder did not take the next step and ensure that the prospective customer was willing to spend money on a solution. This is why so many failing startups try to pivot to two-…

The main reason it didn’t work was because the idea was bad. See salient comments from previous posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25827610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25829290

One of the comments was

>With all the negative pushback this is getting, it’s making me think he was onto something.

Or maybe the idea is bad. I see this line of thought all the time sometimes implied by the misattributed Gandhi quote.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

#204

Post by randomdata »

IanCal wrote: post #189
randomdata wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proving what needs to be proven is the role of the prototype. That can also be an important step on your journey, but the MVP is about building a product that is considered viable. Literally. If you don't yet know what is viable in the market, how could you even begin to build something that is viable? You don't yet know what viable means.

I've had this argument before, from the same side you're coming at it from, and I was wrong. It's really not about building a viable product in that sense - the Dropbox demo video is the classic example of an MVP that isn't a "product" as such.

The Dropbox demo video was a prototype at best, and probably more accurately thought of as an advertisement. Definitely not a product, let alone a viable one. MVP meaning "something I did to make my business successful" isn't meaningful. The first version of Dropbox that landed into users hands and started to generate revenue could be accurately thought of as an MVP. It didn't do everything imaginable, but did just enough that customers wanted to pay for the service, allowing the business to grow into something more.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

#206

Post by FWKevents »

I don't like the title. The author didn't waste the money. He learned a lesson that cost $40k to learn. (Less than many failed start-ups.) He doesn't say what he learned and would do differently next time.

It seems to me this is a classic case of spending too much on the tool and thinking that users will just somehow come. Too much on the tool; not enough on the marketing. A more streamlined MVP would have sufficed to see if there was a product/market fit and to figure out how to monetize it.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

#207

Post by guhcampos »

I could not help the feeling he was selling to the wrong people? Shouldn't this product be sold to Healthcare providers instead of doctors? The providers have an actual interest of reducing doctor trips, cost of treatments and this type of hard optimization. Heck, someone got to sell step-counting-bracelets to health care providers.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

#208

Post by antattack »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #199
kdkirsch wrote: post #191

I’m a physician. I really appreciate Tom’s enthusiasm, but I think that enthusiasm led him to overestimate the significance of the problem. Moreover he didn’t really understand for whom he was building this product. At first he thought it would be a consumer product. But he realized that consumers would not pay/subscribe and later learned that advertising wouldn’t work. Next he thought doctors would pay because “Doct…

I agree. And what Tom didn't realize is that Doctors aren't financially incetivized to give better healthcare. There is no money in it for them. If anything, return visits because of a partial prior resolution make more money. Now clearly I'm not saying that doctors try to give bad diagnoses for profit (because they don't). But beyond a certain minimum bar, and on a purely financial basis, improving diagnostics or pr…

He actually received a clue from 'Susan', one of the doctors he demonstrated his application to: "in many cases I’ll just prescribe what I normally do, since I’m comfortable with it"

He should have sold his tool to sales and marketing at pharmaceutical companies who would use it to convince doctors to prescribe their product.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

#209

Post by CobrastanJorji »

swalsh wrote: post #200
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #190

I'd like to discuss one of the problems the author encountered on its own. Here a doctor was presented with a tool that would allow them to prescribe better treatments to her patients, but there was no incentive for her to adopt that tool. How could we change medicine so that such tools could be adopted? Patients probably won't individually notice any difference, and they don't control what they pay. Insurance compan…

You don't need a single payer system for this. We have a solution today via quality metrics. There are a number of quality metrics from places such as NCQA. They attach performance in these metrics to payments (or penalties). ACO's are one example.

Interesting. I'm unfamiliar with quality metrics. Do they affect individual doctors? Say this one doctor's patients tend to recover from colds 50% faster or slower than other doctors. Does this affect her practice in any way?

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

#210

Post by SQueeeeeL »

simulate-me wrote: post #124
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertisers want eyeballs, and will pay for it on the spot. People aren't the customers of Reddit/Facebook, they're the product, that's why social media has such negative effect on mental health, the users aren't a concern beyond how many minutes they dump in for advertisers to pay for.

But would you come up with the idea for Reddit if you approached it from an advertisement perspective? Probably not.

They have and it's called Tik Tok, basically just make a platform more addicting
Post reply on HN