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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

#221

Post by SkyPuncher »

ihumanable wrote: post #108
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…

I'm grateful for this comment because it put into words the thing I couldn't. I'm reading the epiphany part of this post, to quote: You have a mind-shattering headache. You're standing in the aisle of your local CVS, massaging your temples while scanning the shelves for something—anything—to make make the pain stop. What do you reach for? Tylenol? Advil? Aleve? Most people, I imagine, grab whatever's cheapest, or clo…

Also, the author completely missed the fact that different people react differently to different treatments.

It's basically akin to looking at Google Analytics and trying to predict what your next website visitor will do. You'll have an idea of what someone's going to do, but you can't perfectly predict it.

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

#222

Post by sova »

Gatsky wrote: post #212
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…

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 depressi…

Statistically speaking, isn't it sound to throw all the papers into the mulcher and see what comes out the other end? We do use the term "outliers" a lot in statistics, do we not? I understand that the quality might not be up to snuff for some, but won't the law of averages take care of that?

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

#224

Post by preommr »

webel0 wrote: post #125
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…

> Imagine walking into the office of someone who spent the last ~10 years at school and then potentially 20 years practicing their craft as a successful psychologist and then you waltz in and tell them what they prescribe is wrong and your automated treatment plan is better. As I understand it, this is exactly what new pharmaceutical sales reps are asked to do?

No, the sales rep is selling the outcome of the knowledge of the medical experts within the company.

In the same way the author was selling the outcome of the knowledge of their algorithm.

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

#225

Post by bastawhiz »

I can't see this being useful for consumers directly. I'm not going to pay to optimize the efficacy of the pills I get for a headache or heartburn or bloating or whatever. If I choose one brand/compound over another and it's 20% better...what's that worth? $5/year? Maybe?

I can see this being useful for problems that are not trivial. Heart medication. Cancer drugs. HIV medication. The sort of stuff where a 20% difference in efficacy is not the difference between me having an extra cup of coffee or not—it's the difference between an extra year on medication and worse side effects or not (or even life and death).

But even then, you're not selling to patients—it seems super unethical (or at least immoral) to profit from folks with serious illness who want to know what's best going to keep them from dying. You sell this to the healthcare industry. But like the post says, doctors don't...really care. Not that they shouldn't care, but they don't benefit personally, and the patients aren't going to pay them more for it, and the industry will (slowly) get better on its own in the long term. That doesn't feel great.

So to me, it seems almost obvious that the customer here is the pharmaceutical companies. They've got money to burn. They pay HUGE amounts of money for display ads and instagram stories which literally don't even tell you what the damn drug does. During Ru Paul's Drag Race this past week there was an ad for a medication which didn't mention what it treats or who could take it.

Make the data free to consumers and doctors. Hire someone to call every cardiologist and HIV specialist and oncologist and whoever else in eastern standard time. "Hey, I've got this thing that will tell you what's likely the best drug for patients. It's free to use, and we'll send you a free mug after you use it 100 times." Then you call up every pharmaceutical company you can find and say "Hey friends. We'll put up a profile page for each of your drugs and make sure they're represented with independently verified data. We've called X thousand doctors who will be using this. Pay us $Xk/year and we'll make this happen."

You could probably do the same thing for healthcare companies (e.g., Kaiser): "pay for a license for all of your doctors and you'll have better health outcomes for your patients."

This is obviously untested, but if you exclude the doctors and the patients as potential customers, you're left with a pile of companies with a lot of money. I would love to hear from OP why this wasn't something they pursued.

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

#226

Post by perl4ever »

ddorian43 wrote: post #67
worldsayshi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are to proud to visit stackoverflow or Google to search for best practices you're not a very good developer. Sounds like the same rule should apply to a doctor or psychiatrist. Do they have such fragile egos that they can't have someone showing them the "new Google for doctors" without feeling offended? (Sorry if that came out a bit edgy. But this hole story irks me. It's frustrating when value can't be delive…

> Do they have such fragile egos that they can't have someone showing them the "new Google for doctors" without feeling offended? It's very hard to understand their thinking without being yourself a patient or doctor. TLDR: You need to spend 1K hours as a doctor, or shadowing, or something similar. When you are responsible for people with psychosis your perspective changes. Can't play nosql games with people's lives.

One has to be accepting that medical professionals are not superhuman and don't have magic bullets for chronic illness. But I don't know where you are coming from with such a pompous statement about being "responsible" for psychosis. The minimum "responsibility" that I can imagine being taken for a patient who has a crisis would be to move a regular appointment up after (or before) they land in the ER, and in the healthcare system I'm familiar with, it doesn't appear to happen. Are you used to something different? Or maybe you have a different idea of responsibility?

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

#227

Post by SkyPuncher »

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.

> He had a problem - how to choose a medicine - and built a product to solve that problem.

No, he didn't have a problem.

He proposes that OTC is the target. The reality is, the problem is not very deep here. Without access to prescription medications, you basically have a handful of options that are more of less the same. It's like walking onto a rental car lot. You need to know what category you need, but everything in that category is pretty much the same.

He isn't solving anything for the physician market. His recommendations are very naive and lack the clinical backing to support actual usage. A physician isn't going to buck their go-to's because a random tool suggests something else. This tool needs to provide scientific backing for it's recommendations and why that recommendation is better.

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

#228

Post by perl4ever »

eightysixfour wrote: post #124
PeterisP wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waiit - "You have a mind-shattering headache. [..] What do you reach for? " - isn't this where you're supposed or even required to ask the pharmacist? You know, the person who has the years-long training to know drug effects, limitations and interactions with other drugs?

I'd say yes but the last time I was truly sick (flu) my roommate went to the store and asked the pharmacist what to give me and came back home with a bunch of homeopathic sugar pills. My trust in other humans is pretty low for this sort of stuff.

For some reason, people seem to have evolved to consider nicotine products (for instance) more opposed to the abstract mission of a drugstore than homeopathic products.

I have never smoked or vaped or anything, but it's the homeopathic OTC meds that viscerally upset me, that they should be allowed on the shelves.

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

#229

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

sova wrote: post #222
Gatsky wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 depressi…

Statistically speaking, isn't it sound to throw all the papers into the mulcher and see what comes out the other end? We do use the term "outliers" a lot in statistics, do we not? I understand that the quality might not be up to snuff for some, but won't the law of averages take care of that?

Have you ever used a mulcher to chop up some yard waste, only to accidentally put in some dog shit, and then the whole thing stinks to high heaven?

In all seriousness, with meta-analyses it's still "garbage in, garbage out". It only takes one or a few egregiously bad studies to throw off your results if that study has a large sample size but something fundamentally wrong with its methodology or implementation.

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

#230

Post by Luvnit »

You say “ So I built something people wanted. Consumers wanted it, doctors wanted it, I wanted it. Where did I go wrong?”

The fact that the people giving you the money I.e doctors / hospitals didn’t want to pay for your product proves you built something no one wanted. Wanted enough that they were willing to pay you money for it. Or go out of the way to find the budget for it.

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