When good ideas make bad business

So you would search like "Mirtazapine", and then it would create a word-graph where the drug was in the middle, and it would be connected by things like:

    Mirtazapine --> Reduces --> Anxiety/Depression

    Mirtazapine --> Increases --> Hunger

It was meant to be a tool for clinicians and prescribers to be able to enter a medication and get an easy overview of its effect.

Do you have any interest in pursuing this further?

I know a few investors who I think might still be interested in this.

What problem are you trying to solve? Googling "what is the best pain killer" is a very "average user" question. It's also 99% useless.

Pain killer for what? Headache? Muscular pain? Nerve pain? You have a partially severed limb that's bleeding profusely? Oh you mean an OTC pain killer?

Ok do you have stomach problems? Liver problems? Kidney problems? Diabetes? "Oh I don't know" oh well...

"But I'm just trying to get the best drug for your situation" yeah, that doesn't exist. And there are personal preferences (doctor), personal preferences (patient), limitations, marketing pushes, etc.

Finding out drug X is more efficient than drug Y in 5% is just background noise. Hence why the doctor didn't see much value in this.

What would be valuable is finding which drug X to try if drug Y didn't work or can't be used (though doctors usually have that in their heads).

Insurance is one of the oldest industries in the US, which means they have accumulated many (probably well meaning, but ultimately stupid) regulations over the years.

For example, to be taxed as an insurance company (e.g. avoid paying tax on premiums that will partially be paid out in the future), most states assign a maximum profit margin.

That means, in order to make more money as an insurance company, it's perversely in their best interests to increase the cost of medical care as much as possible. Medical care is not like cat bonds that might wipe out your risk pool, so it's just a cashflow game.

That's not to say there isn't any downward pressure. On a day to day basis, individual claimants eat more into that margin than was budgeted, so a company might have to raise rates higher than their competitors (essentially they have some pressure to deny claims), but there is very little systematic pressure to reduce overall costs. Also, marketing budget does not count towards profit, which is why insurance companies are in this rat race of brand advertising to steal customers from each other. With auto insurance, for example, upwards of 40% of your premium is just going out the door as ad spend.

Anyway, I would assign a lot of blame in this perverse incentive scheme to poor regulations.

I'm currently working on an idea that has no business plan in the near future. It's a cryptocurrency. I hope to make money from in the future by either selling my stash or providing software and services. But in the meantime, I'm running it as a fun/side-project. The project is picking up steam. I've seen interest growing, some coin trading on an exchange.

I don't expect to make money soon. So I do everything myself. I spend little money on the project, 3-5k per year. I enjoy working on it and learning. It helps me learn not only about my project but also about other cryptocurrency. I think that I will make some money, eventually.