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I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

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Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

#281

Post by just_steve_h »

ironmagma wrote: post #277
encryptluks2 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money doesn't allow people to live, shelter, food, water and friends are what allows people to live. Do you think that you plant dollar bills in the ground and they grow food?

You can't grow enough food for everyone, house everyone's friends, and keep them alive without money. You could maybe do one of those without money, but at the expense of the other two. The money is a critical part of keeping track of how much of each thing you can do without running out of resources. There are too many resources in the world to keep track of them all in your head.

Money doesn't "keep track of resources." If it did, the Fed would not have been able to create $2 trillion in "Quantitative Easing."

It's an imperfect analogy, but I think dollars are more like inches - useful to measure and compare things, and subject to redefinition at the whims of power. (Imagine a carpenter telling you he can't finish building your bookcase because he's "run out of inches." They are not the things they measure.)

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

#282

Post by quickthrower2 »

With a moonshot idea like this, your customer is the investors, not the customer/user/people who might wanna advertise. I think the mistake was trying to make money too early? Just take a few mill from an angel, and get coding.

If you want a rent-paying idea, then that looks more like a boring 'me too' idea. Yet another Pingdom clone should do the trick.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

#283

Post by ironmagma »

just_steve_h wrote: post #281
ironmagma wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't grow enough food for everyone, house everyone's friends, and keep them alive without money. You could maybe do one of those without money, but at the expense of the other two. The money is a critical part of keeping track of how much of each thing you can do without running out of resources. There are too many resources in the world to keep track of them all in your head.

Money doesn't "keep track of resources." If it did, the Fed would not have been able to create $2 trillion in "Quantitative Easing." It's an imperfect analogy, but I think dollars are more like inches - useful to measure and compare things, and subject to redefinition at the whims of power. (Imagine a carpenter telling you he can't finish building your bookcase because he's "run out of inches." They are not the thing…

The fact that the underlying number of resources changes dynamically is not related to whether money keeps track of those resources. The quantitative easing is akin to when an OS overcommits memory and starts doling out more memory than actually exists in response to malloc() calls.

This works because people (programs) aren't going to start using the money/memory right away, or even necessarily at all. Yet, it prevents the system from locking up (or crashing). The fact that not that much memory exists doesn't mean that your malloc() call doesn't let you keep track of how much memory you are allocated. You can't just start writing to memory that hasn't been allocated to you, in essence. The memory (and money) put a bounds on what kind of behavior you can do, what kind of resources you can use.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

#284

Post by ironmagma »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #279
ironmagma wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't grow enough food for everyone, house everyone's friends, and keep them alive without money. You could maybe do one of those without money, but at the expense of the other two. The money is a critical part of keeping track of how much of each thing you can do without running out of resources. There are too many resources in the world to keep track of them all in your head.

Money doesn't keep track of resources. It is a fake system that has no correlation to how many resources are available to each person, and in fact it is ripe with abuse to hoard resources for those that don't actually need them. Computer systems and databases are what keeps track of resources, as well as communities. This idea that we should focus on money rather than morals or value is absurd and part of the issue t…

But it does track the relative allocation of resources between all parties, which is all you need to grow food, etc. (and yes, that balance can be changed by printing money, but again, it is simply changing the relative allocations). Communities cannot really keep track of how many plots of land that Corporation X has bought, especially if they are a national establishment buying plots all over the country. You would have to have a distributed mechanism for tracking that, which would somehow involve each district protecting its own data sources very carefully. Luckily, people already carefully guard a data source: dollars. So we don't need this.

Of course we should focus on morals and value. But value is something that cannot be measured accurately using any real world metric, so we only have approximations, of which money is one. As for morals, I'm not sure where you got the idea I said we shouldn't focus on them. One moral I have is that keeping people alive is good, and in the industrialized world, money is the only way to do that, whether you earn it or steal it.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

#285

Post by jimmont »

kdkirsch wrote: post #191

I’m a physician. I really appreciate Tom’s enthusiasm, but I think that enthusiasm led him to overestimate the significance of the problem. Moreover he didn’t really understand for whom he was building this product. At first he thought it would be a consumer product. But he realized that consumers would not pay/subscribe and later learned that advertising wouldn’t work. Next he thought doctors would pay because “Doct…

> By not understanding the environment you’re not going to be able to understand the Problem which means your Solution will probably fail.

Yes it boils down to politics. Having built a platform for accelerating routine histocompatibility analysis (providing customers a profit from the start) I got to see this firsthand. Risk aversion across the industry, small armies of established technicians working manually, administrators making purchasing decisions with no understanding of the science or impact, the myopic insular bent of academics, the massive gap between healthcare and modern technology. One could pay labs to save time, improve outcomes while reducing risk and they still wouldn't use your product if it doesn't map onto their political priorities.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

#286

Post by jll29 »

It is one thing to idea how the idea world should be, and quite another to develop a feasible strategy how to get there from the current state of affairs; a startup needs both.

What I would do if I was you is go back to your first step: your unhappiness with Google's search for medical drugs. Have you talked to GOOG about integrating your data into their search? You might be able to sell a subset of your data and code to them for a small sum, and assist them with the integration of your idea into their universal search.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

#287

Post by jollybean »

kdkirsch wrote: post #182
jollybean wrote: post #79

This is a great case study in idea development. He was onto something with the doctor thing. 1) Things that help people make money are 100x more valuable, i.e. something that helps the Docs generate more revenue. 2) This was insulting: "So I’d sorta just be, like, donating this money if I paid you for this thing, right" Seriously a professional talking about a 'donation' if it didn't actually increase her revenue? Wh…

There are already other resources which we (I’m an MD) already pay for and use to help make decisions when there is ambiguity about the best course of action. UpToDate was previously mentioned and it’s something we pay hundreds of dollars a year for (unless our hospital has a subscription). You’re not wrong about introducing these tools to medical students but the value needs to be there because it’s actually a very…

Yes, the Elephant in the Room was how crowded this space ought to be.

That said, Healthcare is 17% of the Economy and it's growing. There are lots of different spaces for lots of different things.

Insurers want risk mitigation, researchers want data, MDs desperately want help, Pharmacies want automation and a bit of oversight, drug companies want ad/sales potential etc..

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)

#288

Post by ironmagma »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #280
ironmagma wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's make this simpler: If money disappeared, a lot of people would die. I don't care how long you make the transition period; even if it's a change spread across 20 years, without a database of resources and how many belong to each person (which is what money is), you aren't going to be able to coordinate people well enough to feed billions of people each day. How would the deletion of the database serve anyone?

Let’s make this simpler still: > But I wasn’t even advocating for eliminating money.

You claim that "making the world better and making money are inherently in conflict." My understanding of this sentence is that one cannot make money while making the world better. It follows then that it is bad to be making money, since it makes the world worse. If it is bad to be making money, it would be better to not be doing so. If money is not being made, this is the same as money being eliminated, as it ceases to serve its purpose.

Please tell me where you disagree.

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