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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

#171

Post by gault8121 »

dr_ wrote: post #48
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…

A hospital system is incentivized in some ways to get people discharged as soon as possible and ideally with a good outcome. A service like UpToDate is one of the tools that may facilitate that by providing valuable clinical pearls to facilitate decision making. So it's not surprising that UpToDate is largely paid for by large institutions and academic medical centers, and not as much by individual medical providers.

Yes, that's an interesting point. It seems like an individual medical provider is incentivized for repeated care where a large facility is incentivized for a fast outcome.

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

#173

Post by stevewodil »

renewiltord wrote: post #161
stevewodil wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Makes sense, you're typically not cold calling or emailing engineers which is presumably the majority of hacker news users

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

#174

Post by gault8121 »

gzer0 wrote: post #88
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…

https://opensourcemed.com It's a crudely built version of UpToDate from 2018 as it was on April 2018. Useful for 98% of the population still. Edit: definitely works better on mobile, and the search needs to be fixed.. this isn't my website but a resource that I've been passed down/told about by medical students.

Wow, that's really interesting. Did UpToDate publish their entire content library as of April 2018 under an open access license?

There seems to be a ton of good data here that you could use to build some type of WebMD competitor.

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

#176

Post by sixQuarks »

yaboy wrote: post #72
saaaaaam wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Which what 100k per month comes to, give or take :)

You’re both wrong. 100k visitors per month ≠ 100k unique users per month. Very different things!

You're being super nit-picky. It should have been assumed 100K "visitors" meant uniques, but I knew someone like you might make this comment. 100K * 12 = 1,200,000 visitors. I added a 20% margin to account for return visitors.

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

#177

Post by stevenkkim »

SMAAART wrote: post #167

> 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…

Yes. There's also a huge difference between what people want and what they are actually willing to pay for. I bet many of the people interviewd by the author would have be happy to use the product on occasion if it had been free.

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

#179

Post by dugmartin »

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…

My million dollar medicine idea: print the dosage info in huge type on the bottle (e.g. "Take 2 every 8 hours") with more detailed info in smaller type on the back side of a peel away label.

The only time I use headache medicine is when I have a headache and that is the exact time I don't want to be trying to read a huge block of 6 point type to see how many I should take. (A couple of times in the past I've written the dosage in Sharpie on the piece of masking tape that I wrap around the bottle but I'd rather it was done for me as I'm lazy)

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

#180

Post by wolco5 »

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…

And you back it up with proof but you hear I don't care about better treatment I care about prescribing what I feel works best and what pays best. Science be damned.

There in a nutshell is the problem with healthcare. Doctors care about different outcomes. Doctors have this image that they care about your best health outcome but they would always trade an extra dollar over any patient outcome as long as they are legally within guidelines.

As a developer. I went to school for a period of time. I have had a 20 year career of sucessful development jobs/projects.

If someone walked in without any experience but showed me a better way to develop a project through understandable datapoints I would listen and not ignore them because I was somehow all knowing. I may even buy. Why are Doctors different?

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