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I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)
211–220 of 336 posts
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)
#212I am sorry, but this just a good research topic... maybe some team in NCBI will do this and publish one article, and then finish. It can't generate any value for people who is not researcher
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)
#213You're an awesome writer haha do more startups please, you'll probably be able to make a decent amount of money as a writer too
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)
#214I think the takeaway from the blog post is wrong and comments focusing on building a faster MVP miss the point. Not everything is a startup. This is a research project - and should be approached that way. There should be donors, a foundation, free access to all participants, reputation-building by writing (& publishing in reputable journals / conferences) studies about its efficacy, a board of doctors actually review…
This was a startup that would have required a 2 year run way to get into the B2B sales of a tricky market. There was clearly value on the table, working out how to make money form it would have been 80% of the effort, but I suggest there's something there. He should have given it away for free. There's a 1000% chance that if all of a sudden, doctors all over the place start using a tool because they think it's useful…
Are there really any significant acquisitions happening just for some database? I don't think this happens unless the data is absolutely massive and very unique.
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)
#215Lol great read. How naive! Doctors care about money not helping people!
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)
#216I’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…
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Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)
#217I’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…
Yeah I adopted my confused face from the 'problem' statement/'killer' start-up pitch on. Have a headache and don't know which drug to buy? Come on. You have a headache and you take either acetaminophen or ibuprofen, both of which you already have. You don't buy anything.
I'm not a physician, I just take (rarely anything other than max dose) them per the label, which is different to your suggestion (1g/4h, max 4g/day) at least where I am. Ibuprofen if something seems 'inflamationy' or if I have drunk/will drink alcohol (on some sort of naïve hand-wavy basis to lighten the livery load).
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)
#218The 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…
You're not wrong at all, but this line at the end really stuck out to me:
> If I’d articulated at the beginning how I expected to extract value from GlacierMD, maybe I would’ve researched the economics of an ad-based model, or I would’ve validated that doctors were willing to pay, or hospitals, or insurance companies.
The impression I got was this failure was induced by a complete lack of planning. It looks like the author had an idea, got some positive feedback, then drove the entire project based on random inputs they got from people. At no point do they talk about sitting down and doing the boring stuff. Like feasibility analysis, market studies, and developing a very, very basic concept of where the money will come from. The fact that the project had to fail before they realized they didn't think of how to monetize it is... baffling. That should be the one of first things you consider when trying to start a business: how will it make money?
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not just say they want. Not just say they'll pay for. This is big - lots of people (on HN and other places) say that they'd pay "$x for y" but aren't actually willing to. I feel like I saw a post that had some pretty good evidence of the disconnect between those two things but I can't find it.
The MDN Plus release is probably the evidence you're thinking of.
Yes, that was the one! Some good discussion in that thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30792365
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)
#220I read this when it was originally written. I have since founded and failed at a startup. Throughout that experience, I thought about this article.
I don't even think "have a business plan" is the takeaway, because no plan survives first contact with the market. All business plans are built on the assumption that people want what you're currently building.
To me, the takeaway is you need a good 2-3 year runway for startups today. Maybe it only took a year to find PMF a decade ago, but it's much harder now. "The digital X" isn't enough. "X for mobile" isn't enough. "Uber for X" isn't enough. I think this is why web3 is partly as big as it is. It's very easy to say "X on blockchain" and get money for it.
You need to have a strong idea of the community you're serving, and those communities are becoming more and more nuanced. Once you find it, it'll take you a fair amount of time to win it over.