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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

#161

Post by renewiltord »

stevewodil wrote: post #138
na85 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 d…

If you have a vendetta against sales people you can just say that. We are talking about a completely hypothetical situation here, I don't see how you're now implying that the lead generation isn't good enough.

On HN, people hate cold emails. In real life, I've found that most people will respond or ignore. Like a tiny minority will act like you killed their mother, but that's life.

I know you know this, if you're in sales, but I, like many other engineers who read this forum was overly cautious when I first started speaking to people because I anticipated that 99/100 would be upset at having to talk to me.

The truth was that 99/100 were willing to speak to me and listening to HN and Reddit set me back farther than I expected until I unlearned that lesson.

So I'm saying this for the benefit of all those other engineers like me.

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

#162

Post by [deleted] »

loceng wrote: post #105
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.

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 unprofession…

[deleted]

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

#163

Post by loceng »

james1071 wrote: post #122
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…

He had not the slightest idea of how doctors prescribe drugs. The typical doctor has minimal training in evaluating medicines - that is not their job. They defer to so-called opinion-leaders, who are the experts on particular diseases. These people are the targets of drug companies' marketing - think scientific conferences in 5 star hotels in exotic locations. The cost of influencing them would be millions. So,the au…

Part of regulatory capture and the industrial complex, why medicines like MDMA and psychedelics have been illegal for decades due to them not being patentable - and being competition that most recent research shows is far more effective and without the "side" effects of many big pharma's drugs.

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#165

Post by throwaway2245 »

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.

If that is the problem, this is not a great solution.

I don't care if the medicine is perfectly optimal in terms of standard deviations above placebo (which I don't trust, since the data is not likely to be reliably comparable); I care if it sufficiently solves my issue with least hassle (side effects/access/cost/works for me personally). Placebo might just be fine, in some cases.

If I am not able to identify what medicine to take, I ask my doctor, who has years of training for that, already knows what Google sources are good, and can look it up in a reference manual.

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

#166

Post by Haegin »

This seems like it might be more valuable to a health insurance company or a government health agency than to doctors. Basically the tool tells them what to prescribe to be most effective so customers don't have additional future claims, and this saves the insurance company money. They can also offer it to doctors who have agreements with them as an incentive to sign on etc.

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

#167

Post by SMAAART »

> Make something people want. It's Y-Combinator's motto and a maxim of aspiring internet entrepreneurs. The idea is that if you build something truly awesome, you'll figure out a way to make some money off of it.

> So I built something people wanted. Consumers wanted it, doctors wanted it, I wanted it. Where did I go wrong?

There's a HIUUUGE difference between what people say they'll do and what they will actually do.

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

#168

Post by intricatedetail »

sxg wrote: post #159
intricatedetail wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some doctors use expert systems. They select symptoms and computer spits out possible list of treatments and then doctor picks one. If it doesn't work asks to come back and tries the next one. It's kind of like a human in today's self driving cars. Especially when it comes to mental health and anti-depressants. Essentially tests on production.

This isn't even close to how doctors prescribe medications. You don't prescribe meds without having a working diagnosis. Once you have that, you use the knowledge gained in med school and residency to pick the first line drug. If there are contraindications due to comorbidities (which there often are), you have to figure out what other meds you can use. You can consult online resources (e.g. UpToDate) to look up seco…

This is what I saw my doctors were doing. Also I saw cardiologist comparing my diagnosis using Google images.

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

#169

Post by hereme888 »

Why not ask funding from the NIH, or sell access to the companies doctors use to get their suggestions, like UpToDate.

I can see why doctors themselves wouldn't pay for the service; it's a net loss of money in the business sense, and they already believe they're prescribing evidence-based treatments, maybe just not THE best evidence-based Tx.

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

#170

Post by gault8121 »

repeek wrote: post #61
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.

Yes, exactly - it's though big enterprise contracts that generate revenue, but they are hard to close as a startup. Selling this service to companies that already have those contracts is a faster way of creating value for those customers.
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