L-Theanine Experiment (1 Month)

From your website:

>we want to make this clear: we are not a supplement company. We are a personal experimentation platform.

That being said, I actually like your idea. You just need to be more careful about choosing a message (and staying on message).

From a very cursory review, it appears that health claims on the packaging are quite heavily regulated by the FDA[1], but advertising for dietary supplements and foods seems to fall outside their mandate and regulatory responsibility lies instead with the FTC:

"The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulates advertising, including infomercials, for dietary supplements and most other products sold to consumers. FDA works closely with FTC in this area, but FTC's work is directed by different laws."[2]

I'm not sure what's on the bottle, but presumably the websites falls under the jurisdiction of the FTC. A brief review of their site seems to indicate a far more relaxed approach is taken. For example:

"The FTC's standard for evaluating substantiation is sufficiently flexible to ensure that consumers have access to information about emerging areas of science"

"These factors are often weighed together to ensure that valuable product information is not withheld from consumers because the cost of developing substantiation is prohibitive"

"...the FTC gives great weight to accepted norms in the relevant fields of research and consults with experts from a wide variety of disciplines, including those with experience in botanicals and traditional medicines" [3]

[1] http://www.fda.gov/Food/IngredientsPackagingLabeling/Labelin...

[2] http://www.fda.gov/Food/DietarySupplements/QADietarySuppleme...

[3] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/die...

Aside from the ethics considerations, privacy regulations (and the desire to tread conservatively) can lead to some odd implementation decisions...especially if you're coming into the industry from a general or consumer oriented tech background.

I once worked on a medication adherence project for patients in Italy where patients needed to complete bi-weekly assessments and generally track their medication adherence. We set up a secure portal/website for patients, but were prohibited from emailing them reminders when their next assessment was due.

The sponsor (aka pharma co) was extremely conservative re: patient privacy laws and more or less left it at, "well, the patient will just have to remember to return to the website, log in, and complete their survey at the appointed time." After a couple of months of sub-optimal survey completion rates, they re-evaluated their position and let us send out survey reminder emails.....which is a baseline thing to do when you need to retain participants over the life of a study.

Oddly enough, this was for a commercial project (medication was available on the market, physicians were referring their patients to this website as a value added sort of service) and the commercial side is a bit more wild west than phase 2/3 research. Well, as wild west as the pharma/clinical research industry gets :)

There are parallels between customer acquisition/retention in SaaS and patient recruitment/retention in clinical trials that are pretty interesting...but I think most folks on the Saas side would think the healthcare folks are trying to solve problems with one (if not two) hands tied behind their backs - and in some cases, wouldn't be wrong in thinking so.