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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

#241

Post by steve_taylor »

> 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 patients then, you know, the doctors or the hospitals or whatever would pay for that. There was this giant thing called healthcare right, and its main purpose is improving health—trillions of dollars are spent trying to do this. So if I built a thing that improves health someone should pay me, right?

> I said goodbye to Susan and tried to cheer myself up. I had ten more meetings with doctors all over the Bay Area—surely not all of them were ruthless capitalists like Susan. Maybe they would see the the towering genius of GlacierMD and shell out some cash.

This is pretty accurate, unfortunately.

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

#242

Post by ufmace »

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?

I've dealt with enough types of data that I feel super skeptical that you can just dump numbers from hundreds of studies into some data store programmatically, do statistical calculations, and get valid results. It's very difficult to believe that there aren't a ton of variations in how the data is gathered, filtered, and presented that need to be accounted for before any comparisons can be made. I'm not going to trust the law of averages to negate the effect of completely out of whack data when peoples' health is on the line.

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

#244

Post by LurkerAtTheGate »

analyte123 wrote: post #34

It sounds like GlacierMD not only presented results from meta-analyses, they made a platform to make them easier to do and did their own but didn't publish them. If you built a platform to make doing meta-analysis easier, you could collaborate with medical researchers and institutions who are publishing meta-analyses. Maybe give it to them for free at first, maybe get an author credit, some PR, and more sales leads.…

Precisely what I was thinking - a tool to analyze medical studies, compare, and provide easily digestible results is a tool for pharma, not providers.

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

#245

Post by ZephyrBlu »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #123
stevewodil wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on your tonality when you say it. In either case, saying "Are you sure increasing your user retention isn't worth something to you?" is just going to be met with another "No, we don't need it" from the other end. "So you have perfect user retention then?" is a better question because you know for a fact that they can't have 100% user retention and they know that as well so it forces further dialogue…

i guess this is why I'm not a salesperson. If it works it works, but I'm having trouble accepting that it's not demeaning, which was the original contention. Because it's not really a question at all, it's a sarcastic question. Maybe being demeaning gets sales, sure.

> Because it's not really a question at all, it's a sarcastic question

It's not sarcastic, it's serious and that's the point.

Obviously they don't have 100% retention, so this question might open them up to talk about their retention instead of saying "no, it's fine like it is".

It doesn't matter how good your retention currently is, if the product can boost it even by a couple of percent it would probably pay for itself many times over.

I think you could make the argument that saying "no, we don't need it" before even trying to understand the value prop is just as demeaning.

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

#246

Post by dehrmann »

iandanforth wrote: post #232
Luvnit wrote: post #230

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.

Or the incentive systems in the US are completely screwed up when it comes to healthcare.

I was going to point out Kaiser, an HMO that provides both insurance and services. It's reputation is mixed. HMOs like that, or maybe the VA, would be perfect customers because their interests are mode aligned. Private practice doctors, not so much.

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

#247

Post by t_swapnil »

Just an interesting thought, wouldn't the medicine companies be the better place to market this product? This fits the marketing principle of 'benefit to all' the author has highlighted. They could have probably used it to analyze how their product fares against their competitors.

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

#248

Post by ufmace »

stevewodil wrote: post #86
_ofdw wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you're on a sales call selling a product that increases user retention and someone says "no we don't need that", you would often reply with "So you have perfect user retention then?" to probe them and re-open the conversation. Assuming that I didn't initiate the call, if I tell some sales punk that I don't need their product and they come back at me with "So you have perfect user retention then?" my answer is goi…

I'm sure that happens occasionally as well. I get it, sales people can be annoying but it really only hurts your business (in this hypothetical case) if you have a user retention problems and are actively fighting against people trying to help you solve that problem with a mutually beneficial business agreement. They will call the next person on their list, I'm sure it won't matter much.

We're talking about the context of a cold call here. It's extraordinary unlikely for something that is genuinely beneficial to me to come to my attention via a cold call. Maybe your product is actually good, but there's a wave of pushy salesmen trying to sell snake oil via these types of channels. At best, you've got a very tough job to make a sale to a business under those conditions. I don't know about the typical business, but that kind of talk isn't going to keep me on the line.

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

#249

Post by fra »

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…

The most important lesson in startups: sell it, then build it. Engineers have a bias for building, and tend to do it backwards.
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