171–180 of 361 posts
At first I thought this was satire. Here's this guy, who uses a pretty straightforward analysis without any prior healthcare domain experience, thinks he's found the holy grail after a few weeks of work, and then spends all of his money (without first talking to actual domain experts) before he gives up, because Healthcare.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but wouldn't talking to doctors with some mockups have prevented most of this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I get so grumpy about startup narratives. If you ask successful unicorns how they got started, they'll usually explain that's exactly what they did. Garrett Camp was just trying to hire a private driver, and realized it was too hard, there's no reason it should be so hard. Jack Dorsey saw a guy who didn't accept credit cards and realized it would be great if he could accept credit cards. If you don't real…
Couldn't the founder story still be true, but simply incomplete? E.g. Jack Dorsey may have been frustrated that a company didn't accept credit cards, but also, he was already a successful entrepreneur and may have spent months or years researching the problem before starting Square?
It's hard to say what exactly can be learned from such stories.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The funny part is, he might still be wrong about it being worthless. He talked to ten doctors? There are 1M in the US. It's kind of funny to drop all that time and 40k in then give up after ten doctors say no, especially without trying to tweak the product based on feedback. I, as a consumer, find it worthless and they shouldn't have even started it, but now that you're here, might as well give it a bit more of shot…
He should obviously be selling to clinics / hospitals Plus when did the 'we don't have any budget' excuse stop a SaaS company? That's what you raise VC for - build the product, hand it to the customer for 'free' and charge them what it was really worth based on their usage when you threaten to take it away
Find a problem, find potential buyers for a solution, figure out what they say they're willing to pay, determine other design constraints, rough design a solution matching the constraints (IE that can be sold for what people will pay), create a business plan, including estimates of how much funding is needed and a method to get that funding, build a prototype, pitch the product to faculty as though they were VCs/banks/other funding sources.
If you're trying to make a product you need to know how it will sell. If you're trying to run a business, you need a business plan! If you can't make money you're better off planning to register as a charity, and your budget will need to take that into account.
This product could maybe have been a good business, if it was aimed at someone willing to pay for the data. Mainly, the insurance companies. They want to make money, so if they could profit by denying coverage of drugs that are less effective they might pay for it.
This could also have been a good charity. Providing helpful information is what educational charities do. Making a nonprofit would save on costs, and might have been enough to make this viable (though certainly not a lucrative money-maker).
I wish he could have invested more in the idea - I think it's an amazing concept but the creator pulled the plug too early. Sales cycles in B2B can take months, and in healthcare they can take years. Especially the doctor's feedback, she described the possibility of changing her habits slowly as she got used to using the tool. Unrelated: "I always have the best interests of my patients in mind, but, you know, it’s no…
That tool isn't just a physician aid. If that's what doctors are really doing, it's more like a physician replacement. If they won't do evidence-based medicine, and prefer to be legal drug dealers, for profitability reasons, we should all be contributing to the creation of the auto-doc, instead of trying to help them.
That $40k would have been better spent lobbying to remove the guild protections from the practice of medicine.
If all general-practice docs do is take height, weight, pulse, BP, blood oxidation, and run a CBC with lipid panel before prescribing your drugs for the year, that doesn't seem like something only an MD or NP could do. But by law, if you want prescription-only medicines, you have to go to a prescription-drug dealer and pay them for the scrip, before going to pay someone else, again, for the actual drug.
And if they're not actually doing (what I perceive to be) their jobs? If they're just "phoning it in" to collect a paycheck? That's one job I'd love to automate out of existence.
Oof. The site was practically named after WebMD, and the founder didn't do any market research on that competitor to gauge how viable the business was before quitting their job? This person probably should have known that their main competitor made $0.50/user before they quit their job. Also: >It had been a bit of a working assumption of mine over the past few weeks that if you could improve the health of the patient…
I think he should target not WebMD audience, WebMD doesn't provide searchable and visualizable database of trials and outcomes, but more professional crowd: research institutions and universities, government, pharma corps, pharmacists, hospitals, and charge some subscription fee (e.g. $200/m), and it would be totally different story.
I think people are being a little too hard on the author. Startups in healthcare are hard . Been there, done that, have the t-shirt (literally, that's all that left). I even made the same fatal mistake - not identifying who the buyer really is. And when I say identifying the buyer, I don't mean it in that hand-wavey, vague way like "doctors" or "insurance companies". The starting point has to be something like "ophth…
Health insurance companies are very aware of this, which is why they so frequently deny coverage for various life-saving cancer treatments. If you die while waiting for treatment, not only do they save the cost of the treatment, but also the entire cost of ongoing screening / care during remission.
I wish he could have invested more in the idea - I think it's an amazing concept but the creator pulled the plug too early. Sales cycles in B2B can take months, and in healthcare they can take years. Especially the doctor's feedback, she described the possibility of changing her habits slowly as she got used to using the tool. Unrelated: "I always have the best interests of my patients in mind, but, you know, it’s no…
Oof. The site was practically named after WebMD, and the founder didn't do any market research on that competitor to gauge how viable the business was before quitting their job? This person probably should have known that their main competitor made $0.50/user before they quit their job. Also: >It had been a bit of a working assumption of mine over the past few weeks that if you could improve the health of the patient…
That line stood out to me also. Anyone who feels that the primary goal of healthcare in the US is to improve health outcomes is incredibly naive about how this industry (which is over 20% of the us economy) works. There is only one group in the entire industry which has an incentive to keep people healthy (insurance) and that is the most hated of the bunch!