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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

#101

Post by notahacker »

sneak wrote: post #14

I think that people are probably misleading themselves if they say they want it, but aren't willing to pay for it. People fork over money for IAPs by the millions per minute, because they want the results. I think if it were truly that desirable, people would have been happy to pay for it. I just don't think it provided that much value to the customer.

Mostly they're being polite (and showing they understand perfectly well how they could use it, so no need to explain its purpose any further thanks). They're not really misleading themselves...

Ultimately the author's problem is that he was showing Susan a clever project that looked much more attractive than notes she'd usually consult rather than asking her how many times a year she wasn't sure what to prescribe and how difficult it actually was for her to get a sound recommendation from a source she trusted.

Even if he was trying to demo a finished product rather than figuring out if it should exist, asking those questions would still have been more likely to put her in the frame of mind where she asks about or spots the really difficult to ascertain info that has professional liability repercussions rather than just liking the UI and being impressed that this programmer is citing the Hamilton Rating Scale for depression)

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

#102

Post by na85 »

robocat wrote: post #92
_ofdw wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you're on a sales call selling a product that increases user retention and someone says "no we don't need that", you would often reply with "So you have perfect user retention then?" to probe them and re-open the conversation. Assuming that I didn't initiate the call, if I tell some sales punk that I don't need their product and they come back at me with "So you have perfect user retention then?" my answer is goi…

HN guidelines: “Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”. I would presume that sentence is a quickly typed paraphrase. If you presume they are a competent salesperson, you can also presume that they say it less antagonistically in real life. Edit: Or perhaps they have found that antagonism is the most profitable sol…

>HN guidelines

The comment to which I'm responding explicitly argues that the phrase, verbatim, is a good sales tactic.

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

#103

Post by dvt »

ummonk wrote: post #98
fourseventy wrote: post #46

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…

Uh no. He had a problem - how to choose a medicine - and built a product to solve that problem. The issue was that solving the problem isn't something people wish to pay for, not that the problem doesn't exist.

> Uh no. He had a problem - how to choose a medicine...

Did he though? He even mentions that customers generally pick whatever (because they don't really care what's the perfectly optimized headache pill they should take) and doctors thought it was neat, but no one really wanted to pay for it. Their solution (e.g. prescribing what they would typically prescribe) was good enough.

It doesn't really sound like there's a problem there.

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

#104

Post by dewey »

ummonk wrote: post #98
fourseventy wrote: post #46

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…

Uh no. He had a problem - how to choose a medicine - and built a product to solve that problem. The issue was that solving the problem isn't something people wish to pay for, not that the problem doesn't exist.

Solving your own problem and then saying "Oh I found someone interested in my solution" isn't really what they mean by finding customers though.

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

#105

Post by loceng »

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.

Psychiatrists are simply experimenting on each person they prescribe medications to. The status quo is indoctrination, and in this case, the psychiatrist wasn't even willing to use actual research based data to improve the treatment of their patients - even referencing that they won't make anymore money because the patient won't come back more often or refer more patients because of it. This is abhorrent unprofessional behaviour - but it's likely the attitude of 90%+ of the field.

Edit to add: if you think a practitioner putting their own revenue/profits above providing quality care, then something's wrong with you.

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

#106

Post by woeirua »

ummonk wrote: post #98
fourseventy wrote: post #46

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…

Uh no. He had a problem - how to choose a medicine - and built a product to solve that problem. The issue was that solving the problem isn't something people wish to pay for, not that the problem doesn't exist.

I don't think most doctors or customers would even consider this to be a real problem. For some specific, rare conditions sure. But for Tylenol? Come on. No one is going to pay for that.

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

#107

Post by na85 »

stevewodil wrote: post #86
_ofdw wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you're on a sales call selling a product that increases user retention and someone says "no we don't need that", you would often reply with "So you have perfect user retention then?" to probe them and re-open the conversation. Assuming that I didn't initiate the call, if I tell some sales punk that I don't need their product and they come back at me with "So you have perfect user retention then?" my answer is goi…

I'm sure that happens occasionally as well. I get it, sales people can be annoying but it really only hurts your business (in this hypothetical case) if you have a user retention problems and are actively fighting against people trying to help you solve that problem with a mutually beneficial business agreement. They will call the next person on their list, I'm sure it won't matter much.

>I get it, sales people can be annoying but it really only hurts your business (in this hypothetical case) if you have a user retention problems and are actively fighting against people trying to help you solve that problem with a mutually beneficial business agreement.

Oh please. Not every product that's applicable to a given business would necessarily be beneficial to that business.

I get it, sales people have to drink the kool aid, but some humility is needed. Your product isn't right for everyone, and the sooner you understand that the sooner you can improve the quality of your lead generation.

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

#108

Post by ihumanable »

eightysixfour wrote: post #30

I remember reading this the last time and it was posted and I still think the core failure is that the author didn't actually recognize the issue he was solving. He thought the problem was choosing the most effective medicine when the real problem was decision fatigue looking at endless shelves of things that all seem to do the same thing. Those two problems sort of look the same, but the latter cannot be resolved by…

I'm grateful for this comment because it put into words the thing I couldn't.

I'm reading the epiphany part of this post, to quote:

You have a mind-shattering headache. You're standing in the aisle of your local CVS, massaging your temples while scanning the shelves for something—anything—to make make the pain stop.

What do you reach for? Tylenol? Advil? Aleve?

Most people, I imagine, grab whatever's cheapest, or closest, or whatever they always use. But if you're scrupulous enough to ask Google for the best painkiller, here's how your friendly neighborhood tech behemoth would answer:

[Screenshot of Google Search Results]

Oh thanks Google that's just all of them.

---end quote---

The author immediately identifies that this isn't a real problem, by their own admissions that "Most people, I imagine, grab whatever's cheapest, or closest, or whatever they always use." Yea, most people when they have a headache and know that most painkillers on the market will result in about the same degree of relief, don't bother to cross reference a medical meta-analysis, because they have a headache and if the $0.01 worth of aspirin doesn't make it feel better they will just take a second pill and eat the penny.

I like the author's conclusion about how to quickly validate business ideas, but even in the title the author still holds firm to the belief that this was a "fantastic startup idea" even though reality seems to think otherwise. Was this such a great idea, do most consumers actually want to review a meta-analysis when picking their OTC medicine, or do most people just try a few things, get influenced by advertising, and purchase the most reasonably priced medicine they think will help. I am just a single data point, but I don't normally feel naked and unscrupulous when I just read the symptoms that a medicine treats and pick one, and that strategy generally works just fine.

Solution in search of a problem and also in search of humans that act in this weird atypical fashion.

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

#109

Post by dkarl »

I'm kind of concerned that people read this as satire but miss the most important part, namely the absence of concern about the safety and validity of the results. You know, the part where he stuck some statistical software in front of a database populated by a "motley crew" of contractors and wanted doctors to use it as a shortcut for making patient care decisions. The part where he implicitly compares the HTML spit out by his system to peer-reviewed work by professional researchers. The part where he is proud of "beating" a "record" for least discriminating meta-analysis.

Reading this story and talking about his marketing and product development process feels like watching Lovecraft Country and then then only talking about the time travel physics of it. There's something real and awful here, hopefully presented in a fictionalized or highly exaggerated form. The people in my social circles who mistrust tech and despise startup culture -- this is exactly how they see us.

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