Does Wharton’s book really say that?
If you just make value for the company it is a scam?
If you call it entertainment purposes I guess its fine
I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea
211–220 of 408 posts
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea
#212That 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…
This article was posted before several years ago. The whole premise is bumptious - "I can copy data out of a bunch of papers [which I am in no position to screen for quality or relevance], run a canned 'gold standard' analysis in R [the idea that there is one true way to generate valid data is ridiculous], and then go tell the professionals what they are doing wrong." He even brags that his meta-analysis for depression had more papers than the published one, as if this was a valid metric. The Cipriani meta-analysis he cites was publised in February 2018. His meta-analysis was done in July 2018, and had 324 more papers - what explains this difference, other than obviously sloppy methodology. A proper meta-analysis is a lot of work, researchers spend years on one meta-analysis. The whole concept is ill conceived, and the author is too caught up in themselves to even realise why.
Meta-analyses are a good idea, but the mere presence of a meta-analysis does not denote a useful undertaking. The literature is polluted with thousands of meta-analyses. As far as I can see this is mainly because there is software available which lets almost anyone do it, and once someone else has done a meta-analysis it is much easier to do another one because they have already found all the papers for you. The publication rate of meta-analyses far outstrips the publication rate of all papers, and shows some unusual geographic variation (Fig 2) [1].
[1] https://systematicreviewsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/...
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea
#213I'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…
But... this is peer-reviewed work by professional researchers[1]. He just tabulated them / made them searchable. [1] Given the reproducibility crisis, I'm not sure we should trust these much either, but that's a discussion for another time.
No, he did, by his own words, a network meta-analysis[1] on the results which combined the results of many studies into a single table. However this was not a mere tabulation or summary of existing results but a fairly involved statistical aggregation of results. In scientific literature this would merit it's own publication and peer-review.
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea
#214I have to say, this sounds to me like trying to market an expert system for experienced woodworkers to choose the best chisel for a particular task based on the type of wood, size of the cut, etc. Practitioners have strong opinions regarding the implements they use; they use them in concert with other implements and modalities; and the small differences that may emerge from this kind of analysis are likely to be swal…
I was reading this as a licensed professional in a different field, and trying to imagine someone without my licensure trying to sell me an app that made my decisions for me. Let’s just say this was always going to be a tough sell, no matter how good the economics looked.
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea
#215Earlier 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.
I don't have a vendetta. I used to work in sales. My first job out of school was cold-calling and I saw first hand what types of people tend to rise to the top in that environment. I quit that job as soon as I could because I was sick of manipulating people or pressuring them into buying something they didn't want. At the end of the day that's all sales is. If your customer wants your product then by definition you d…
That makes a lot of sense then honestly. "Boiler rooms" are definitely not good environments.
>If your customer wants your product then by definition you don't have to sell them.
That's a misnomer, what if they don't know you exist? That's what sales and marketing are for, to inform people that could benefit from your product that it exists, essentially. Will their business implode if they don't buy your product? No, almost certainly not. But, they might derive a massive cost savings, time savings, increased employee satisfaction, or other efficiencies by using whatever you're selling and your job in sales is to get them to listen which is the hard part.
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have a vendetta. I used to work in sales. My first job out of school was cold-calling and I saw first hand what types of people tend to rise to the top in that environment. I quit that job as soon as I could because I was sick of manipulating people or pressuring them into buying something they didn't want. At the end of the day that's all sales is. If your customer wants your product then by definition you d…
That makes a lot of sense then honestly. "Boiler rooms" are definitely not good environments. >If your customer wants your product then by definition you don't have to sell them. That's a misnomer, what if they don't know you exist? That's what sales and marketing are for, to inform people that could benefit from your product that it exists, essentially. Will their business implode if they don't buy your product? No,…
>That's a misnomer, what if they don't know you exist? That's what sales and marketing are for, to inform people that could benefit from your product that it exists, essentially.
This is a fiction that salespeople tell themselves to help them sleep at night. I use twitter not because someone from Twitter Sales sold it to me but because I sought it out of my own volition.
Only bad products need sales. Good products can thrive on marketing alone because people want good products.
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea
#217> We worked at a startup that leveraged autonomous blockchains to transfer money from naïve investors to slightly less naïve twenty-somethings.
What does it mean to “leverage autonomous blockchains”?
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea
#218The graph about the curves (escitaloprame, sertraline) seems like a joke. The curves bending upwards indicating that everybody will be worse? Looking at the raw data (points in the graph), there is really no indication for that and if I were to see that I'd prefer the raw data.
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea
#219To me at least that was an impressive amount of working your butt off for something you believed in.
Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea
#220More and more developers these days give their work away for free and create a Patreon. I don't know if it would work in this case, but if enough people got wind of the idea, perhaps it would at least equalize. Not all brilliant ideas are meant to be businesses, so why not give users the options to support something they find useful? You can easily thermometer the demand this way, and if there's a [community] need that you are fulfilling, supporters will show up. You can always hide more advanced features behind the Patreon subscription levels, too. It sounds like what you are really after is a community that vets health knowledge, and this could be one cornerstone of that.