When good ideas make bad business

I feel like the best play would have been to spend 100% of his effort to get WebMD as the first Angel Investor.

If WebMD owned 20% of his product, for say $300k in Seed Money, he could have used that Runway to build something really cool.

And WebMD would have an incentive to promote his site and help bring free users.

That was really great writing, though :-).

But this part:

> “And that isn’t worth something? Prescribing better treatments?”

> “Hmmmm,” she said, picking at her fingernails. “Not directly. Of course I always have the best interests of my patients in mind, but, you know, it’s not like they’ll pay more if I prescribe Lexapro instead of Zoloft. They won’t come back more often or refer more friends. So I’d sorta just be, like, donating this money if I paid you for this thing, right?”

So, what's the obvious next step ? Prescribing things that won't work so patients keep coming back but not badenough that they flee to another practice ?

Realistically, while I feel that the author is on the right track with this data driven approach to evidence based medicine, the fact remains that the advantages/disadvantages between drugs within the same class of medicine tend to be negligible compared to drug costs. There are then other specific concerns that must be considered eg pregnancy/breastfeeding, liver failure, kidney failure and often what ends up is that one defaults to a standard drug per drug class with alternatives in specific circumstances.

The real benefit IMO would be marketing this to countries with a top down healthcare purchasing system (eg the UK) or as a tool to drug companies/researchers looking to make their own meta analyses (eg abstrackr). It might also be better instead to diversify into correlating symptom clusters with diseases because then the utility to the end user is bigger.

I think this is overstated most of the time, otherwise why would we have vaccines?

However, I would be on board with saying that when situations get dire, risk management begins to diverge incentives between patients and providers.

> Make something people want. It’s Y-Combinator’s motto and a maxim of aspiring internet entrepreneurs. The idea is that if you build something truly awesome, you’ll figure out a way to make some money off of it.

Nice narrative style and congratulations on achieving your (first?) failure without too much trauma.

It's possible you invested your own money prematurely, possibly without talking to enough people about the opportunity. Your metric for how much people want something is usually directly tied to revenue, or if you are using engagement as your metric, you should have figured out some way to make money off of it before you invested in development. I suggest that other engineering-minded founders think of sales like writing "hello world" -- for example, if you're doing a physical consumer product, you can start by shipping pet rocks on day one.

More than just identifying a product people want, you also want to find a network effect or viral marketing approach so you can grow with a sustainable advantage.