I think people are being a little too hard on the author. Startups in healthcare are hard. Been there, done that, have the t-shirt (literally, that's all that left). I even made the same fatal mistake - not identifying who the buyer really is. And when I say identifying the buyer, I don't mean it in that hand-wavey, vague way like "doctors" or "insurance companies". The starting point has to be something like "ophthalmologists in small practices (1-10 doctors) in New England who are trying to acquire new patients through social media."
And here's something that's absolutely critical for all engineers trying to build a startup in healthcare to really understand. Healthcare is so alluring because tech people are so idealistic. We think, "Wow, we we can write some code, and then save lives!" And that's sometimes true. But when you are thinking of your customer, revenue model, sales strategy - all that business stuff - the mistake we make is thinking healthcare is different and the same rules don't apply. We think if we can save lives, we can make a business. But the key insight is that you have to take a step back and just treat healthcare like any other for-profit business. Doctors and hospitals care about what generates revenue. Insurance companies want to save money. Pharma companies are looking to advertise to new customers. It's no different than other industries. The psychiatrist's reaction to the sales pitch is the classic thing a doctor will tell when you're not helping their bottom line. As I was reading the post, I could almost predict how she was going to respond.
And if you figure that business stuff out, who knows, you might just build a healthcare business that saves a life or two.
From a business standpoint, saving lives can actually be expensive. The longer someone lives, the more healthcare they consume.
Health insurance companies are very aware of this, which is why they so frequently deny coverage for various life-saving cancer treatments. If you die while waiting for treatment, not only do they save the cost of the treatment, but also the entire cost of ongoing screening / care during remission.
The longer you live the more monthly premiums you pay, so ideally they do want you to live, but they don't want you to use any healthcare services (or use less services) while you live.
> But the key insight is that you have to take a step back and just treat healthcare like any other for-profit business. Doctors and hospitals care about what generates revenue. Insurance companies want to save money. Pharma companies are looking to advertise to new customers. It's no different than other industries.
This is one of the most concise and effective arguments I have read for Medicare-For-All, Single Payer, etc.
I'm all for removing the broken system we have today, but a single payer system doesn't remove the challenge that the entrepreneur faces - it just changes it. Under single payer, you are now trying to sell to a large government organization, with all the pain and red tape that comes with that.
At risk of identifying myself, I work in this industry (or should I say, I work in the medical field) and yes... it's insane. And of course, you get that privileged peak behind the veil, you get to see how the sausage is made as it were.
It is truly humbling because there is no easy solution, there are no unified APIs; you couldn't use them even if there were, because your medical records are highly sensitive. So forget about poking around production to solve a bug, you've got to do it through observability.
You can't move fast and break things because your downtime will get the regulators involved, because peoples livelihoods are at stake. You will get official complaints through various official bodies who can and will sanction the business.
In short, it's not a fucking joke and it takes a lot more time and a lot more money to do something serious here, and for good reason.
Note that I'm not talking about low-key wearables like Fitbits that monitor your pulse, I'm talking about doctors, triage, etc.
>I think people are being a little too hard on the author. Startups in healthcare are hard.
They are hard, but this case isn't really healthcare-related. He tried pitching his product to practices without showing how it could increase their revenue, or decrease their costs. Without that, his product is just another cost-center with some marginal (and ambiguous) healthcare benefits.
This. Been through two medical device companies that pivoted from clinical trials to product and the major hardships came from not fully understanding the money trail. In the UK the 'Cathedral' of the NHS means that the benefits may not be felt by the your customer.
I still think this idea is powerful. Not because I believe it transforms healthcare, but because it informs consumers a bit more. That’s what seemed to get you excited in the first place.
There are a few paths I see still:
a. Assuming you own a database, expose your dataset as an API. Consider possible consumers. Open source it, and monitor the usage. Who’s using that data.
b. Cold message a few folks on Linkedin from pharmaceuticals that your algo says has high clinical success. Can you “recommend” them? Do they see value. Maybe you have a research tool on your hands.
3. If you can keep your website alive, focus on SEO and gain traction with more users and play that out. Write blog posts, use affiliate marketing, and grow users. But don’t add new features. Just maintain what you have. Try that for a year at least. What did you learn?
I think the toughest thing here is knowing when to stop building the product. That’s what stands out to me as your demise.
The doctor was spot on, and those are the kinds of things you want to hear. It just means looks somewhere else. Writing a doc beforehand with potential opportunities is always a good idea, but it’s never too late.
Disclaimer: I do product at MEGACORP and love product strategy.
This is a classic case of "it's not a product, it's a feature". This is true of almost everything in healthcare that's software-related: it's only useful if it's integrated with the EMR. This is why you never see software startups in healthcare.
In this case, similar functionality (drug recommendations) exist within EMR systems. Except the recommendations are issued by other doctors and medical researchers, not some ML algorithm and it works transparently with the pharmacy management modules.
Moral of the story: don't get involved with healthcare startups unless you know the structure and economics of the industry. They are very different from consumer / business tech.
There's barely anything more frustrating than a fascinating discussion on HN and then folks start kicking around lingo and acronyms that you can't even Google because they could mean a million things.
So please, have mercy and cure my ignorance and explain what EMR means.
I was thinking the same, except OP's product seems more like a feature for an EMR platform and less a standalone product.
The only downside is that sharing this information may open up the hospital to more liability - i.e. a patient takes an opiate instead of an NSAID and then blames the hospital for recommending the opiate to them because of how much more effective the opiate is at treating pain in clinical trials.
Maybe you could open source it, and with the help of people from the community get sort of grant from Google or Amazon or say digital ocean so that this could work without you having to pay for servers? All the work that contractors were doing, people could do that for free. The only thing is I’d license this thing so that it can’t be used commercially (except for research)
Another possibility: how many people would be willing to donate a few bucks a month to support it? Call it the public radio model. You won't get rich, but you might pay for upkeep and servers.
Donations are extremely difficult to make work. I tried it after getting decent traction in 2009 and didn't receive a single donation to cover server expenses. I'm guessing with Patreon things have gotten a bit easier but for a business I would highly advise against going down the donations route. In general, small payments also tend to take up a disproportionate amount of your support time compared to larger transactions so you have to be prepared to deal w/ that.
Biggest rec. is to talk to people who have done something interesting or catches your eye. I always email people asking how they did something - people usually are really friendly and willing to share.
Websites like Indiehacker, stratchery are good. Would also recommend the innovator's dilemma if you're at a big company. There are also a few videos on Youtube by CNBC on products of the past - and I've enjoyed those.
I'm so confused by the tone of this article. Obviously some of the jokes are parodying startup culture and are meant to be funny, however I think the "fantastic idea" stuff is meant seriously?
"So I built something people wanted. Consumers wanted it, doctors wanted it, I wanted it. Where did I go wrong?"
As far as I can tell, nobody wanted it except the author. The one doctor he talked to didn't, and no consumer ever saw it. I feel like the author learned a lesson, but not the full lesson.
Reading this was like watching someone you don't politically agree with doing comedy. You know they're trying to be funny, but you also know they're missing the whole point and aren't self-aware.
The funny part is, he might still be wrong about it being worthless. He talked to ten doctors? There are 1M in the US. It's kind of funny to drop all that time and 40k in then give up after ten doctors say no, especially without trying to tweak the product based on feedback.
I, as a consumer, find it worthless and they shouldn't have even started it, but now that you're here, might as well give it a bit more of shot than that. To completely bail on what you have after 10 no's is also the wrong move.
Doesn't seem like he asked the question, "well, what would you pay for?"
He should obviously be selling to clinics / hospitals
Plus when did the 'we don't have any budget' excuse stop a SaaS company? That's what you raise VC for - build the product, hand it to the customer for 'free' and charge them what it was really worth based on their usage when you threaten to take it away
Yeah. For investing so much time and money it seems like he gave up after a couple of bad meetings.
It takes years to figure out how to properly sell your product. He didn't find out that his product wouldn't work in the marketplace he just found out he didn't know how to sell it.
> Reading this was like watching someone you don't politically agree with doing comedy. You know they're trying to be funny, but you also know they're missing the whole point and aren't self-aware.
are you not supposed to laugh at the jokes of someone you disagree with politically? is it possible someone could be "self-aware" and still disagree with you?
I take the article to be written in the mindset he had at the time. When he made that quote you mentioned, he thought as he was heads-down building the product that it would be useful to those people.
He then goes on to describe the evidence specifically why doctor's DIDN'T want it. All the author was trying to do with that quote was explain what he was thinking at the time.
Ya, I'm surprised it's not just a static landing page for consumers with ads. At .50 cents per user, that's only 80k users required to break even (ignoring the time variable there)
I'm no adtech expert, but I'm pretty sure he would not be getting .50 cents per user per year - that's what WebMD, one of the top 1000 most trafficked web sites in the world makes, so I assume it can sell it's ad space at a much higher price than a greenfield site with no traffic would.
The first example the author gave with painkillers is inherently bad.
Sure, Aleve is the most powerful. But it also has the most side effects, including ulcers if used for too long. There's a lot of nuanced information when it comes to drugs. If you want to go on pain killers like Aleve for long term, you probably need to take acid blockers as well, like Nexium. So where does that fall into the analysis?
Unfortunately a lot of stuff requires medical doctors that have experience. I just went through a severe health emergency, where I was taking one antibiotic and needed to be changed to another. I needed blood tests and constant supervision for the doctor to make this decision.
Psychiatry, which is what I guess the author targeted, is likely even less reliable. My friend is a pharmacist and was on anti-anxiety medication for a year, but decided to try another one, because of the effects on her were affecting her and now she's doing much better. This requires working with a psychiatrist for a year.
I think there's value in surfacing all this information but to expect people to rush into paying for it is naive. It's a nice-to-have-tool that might be useful like a Google-type research tool but nothing someone would want to pay $5/month for since the actual benefit over a psychiatrist just going off experience is completely unknown. There no inherent home run here.
>Sure, Aleve is the most powerful. But it also has the most side effects, including ulcers if used for too long. There's a lot of nuanced information when it comes to drugs. If you want to go on pain killers like Aleve for long term, you probably need to take acid blockers as well, like Nexium. So where does that fall into the analysis?
Am I wrong or isn't solving these issues basically the service UpToDate offers?
I wish he could have invested more in the idea - I think it's an amazing concept but the creator pulled the plug too early. Sales cycles in B2B can take months, and in healthcare they can take years.
Especially the doctor's feedback, she described the possibility of changing her habits slowly as she got used to using the tool.
Unrelated:
"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?”
This line kills me and it's exactly why I hate the healthcare industry. She clearly understands that the software could improve patient outcomes, but describes it as a donation and still wouldn't change how she writes prescriptions (out of laziness, I guess?)
Sounds like there's an opportunity to have insurance companies pay for the product. This would directly align incentives and lead to overall cheaper care for the patients.
I had the same thought. The meta-customers here are the insurance companies. If you can prove that the tool improves the performance of doctors so that they get sued less when they use it then the insurance company will give discounts for doctors on their insurance for using it. Presto! We just created a market for doctors to pay for the service.
That anecdotal interaction is extremely damning for the entire US healthcare system. Physician admits she prioritizes practice revenues over patient outcomes. Other physicians express similar preference. Inventor of useful tool tosses it into the mothballs.
That tool isn't just a physician aid. If that's what doctors are really doing, it's more like a physician replacement. If they won't do evidence-based medicine, and prefer to be legal drug dealers, for profitability reasons, we should all be contributing to the creation of the auto-doc, instead of trying to help them.
That $40k would have been better spent lobbying to remove the guild protections from the practice of medicine.
If all general-practice docs do is take height, weight, pulse, BP, blood oxidation, and run a CBC with lipid panel before prescribing your drugs for the year, that doesn't seem like something only an MD or NP could do. But by law, if you want prescription-only medicines, you have to go to a prescription-drug dealer and pay them for the scrip, before going to pay someone else, again, for the actual drug.
And if they're not actually doing (what I perceive to be) their jobs? If they're just "phoning it in" to collect a paycheck? That's one job I'd love to automate out of existence.
I don't know how old you are, but at a certain point, the input of a general practice doctor becomes very valuable. Remember, the doctor doesn't even do the little tests you mentioned, like taking measurements and blood tests - they just order them, and nurses or technicians do the work. The doctor's job is to make decisions and give advice.
About a dozen years ago, my doctor caught my blood pressure shooting up in my annual exam and started treating me for high blood pressure. High blood pressure is a "silent killer" that leads to premature deaths for millions. You don't feel sick, while your heart struggles and your brain risks explosions. And treating it, once diagnosed, isn't straightforward. It took six months of experimenting with various medications to find the combination that worked for me. That's a doctor's judgment and expertise, not something for some technician with a community college associate's degree. And this summer, when a critical potassium depletion drove me to a scary ER visit, she noted that one of my BP meds could affect potassium and adjusted my dosages.
And it's not just an expert-system thing that could be replaced by a robot, either. She's not just dealing with my measurements - she's dealing with my fears, and helping me decide on best approaches. That requires a human touch.
I agree with you, but at least she was honest. Many others would say no for the same reason, but wouldn't be honest about it. A prospect who is honest about their true reasons for saying no is extremely valuable when you're pitching an early product.
I think in general, if you're building a business, expecting anyone to do something that isn't in their own selfish interest in some way is a recipe for failure, even if people in your target market might claim not to have selfish motivations. If you want someone to change their behavior (and/or their organization's behavior), you need to be able to clearly explain why it's a win for that specific person.
"Laziness" is probably unfair - but there is a lot of evidence that everyone, doctors not included, will get stuck in their ways unless forced out of them.
Congratulations on learning the hardest lesson, your next startup is now a lot more likely to succeed, so get to work!
A lot of comments criticizing what the author already knows, that the business plan was incomplete. I had the urge to do the same, but read to the very end and realized TJC clearly learned the most important lesson, and it's one I've learned myself, so I have no room to be critical.
BTW, I burned a lot more than $40k and 9 months in my own story, so maybe it helps to hear that other people have made the same mistake and gotten too convinced their idea is valuable without checking carefully enough -- without quite knowing how to check carefully. I know what it feels like to know that I'm doing the right thing, and then find out that it's not good enough.
Fun read, and an important lesson that many very bright people will still learn the hard way, even after reading a story like this. Thank you for sharing.
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.
Sell this product to insurance companies so they can recommend cheaper/safer drugs to their customers, or show the more expensive one and if it truly had better outcomes. Everyone benefits from that.
That said, the medical establishment is a tough tough domain to move.
Insurance companies already have teams of doctors and pharmacists analyzing studies to ensure they are pursuing the most effective and cost effective healthcare. They’re called Pharmacy and Therapeutics (P&T) Committeea.
I worked at a company in the early 00s that did exactly this -- natural language processing of medical records for meta analysis. Even when it worked, we couldn't sell it for much. The budget of each study was too low to really build a business around, and the low number of potential buyers didn't help things.
Eventually we pivoted the tech to a B2B SaaS play because it was too hard to sell.
The author says that they fired the contractors and closed the site. I can never relate to this. You built something that is at least somewhat useful to at least some people. Why not just keep it online forever? It can't cost more than $5/mo to host this, I have a server where I host around ten of my projects for less than $20/mo.
Why do people shut things down instead of just leaving them there, unmaintained? Even that is better than just taking it offline.
Well in the case of this particular product that offers medical advice, the info may become outdated fairly quickly. I suspect there is some amount of liability associated with offering potentially out of date medical advice that isn't worth the tiny revenue stream.
I was tempted to post this same question. I suspect the answer is that the OP just doesn't know how to scale it down; it was built by contractors and he/she might not even have the keys to the boxes, let alone know how to keep them running.
It is unfortunate. Even if the data goes stale and the product is no longer fit for purpose, it shows well and would make a great demonstration for his/her future endeavors. And you never know who might stumble across it in the future and want to revive the technology.
I've had fairly sophisticated sites running on Google App Engine for years after the company was "shut down". One ended up being instrumental as a demo when meeting a later cofounder.
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And here's something that's absolutely critical for all engineers trying to build a startup in healthcare to really understand. Healthcare is so alluring because tech people are so idealistic. We think, "Wow, we we can write some code, and then save lives!" And that's sometimes true. But when you are thinking of your customer, revenue model, sales strategy - all that business stuff - the mistake we make is thinking healthcare is different and the same rules don't apply. We think if we can save lives, we can make a business. But the key insight is that you have to take a step back and just treat healthcare like any other for-profit business. Doctors and hospitals care about what generates revenue. Insurance companies want to save money. Pharma companies are looking to advertise to new customers. It's no different than other industries. The psychiatrist's reaction to the sales pitch is the classic thing a doctor will tell when you're not helping their bottom line. As I was reading the post, I could almost predict how she was going to respond.
And if you figure that business stuff out, who knows, you might just build a healthcare business that saves a life or two.
Health insurance companies are very aware of this, which is why they so frequently deny coverage for various life-saving cancer treatments. If you die while waiting for treatment, not only do they save the cost of the treatment, but also the entire cost of ongoing screening / care during remission.
This is one of the most concise and effective arguments I have read for Medicare-For-All, Single Payer, etc.
It is truly humbling because there is no easy solution, there are no unified APIs; you couldn't use them even if there were, because your medical records are highly sensitive. So forget about poking around production to solve a bug, you've got to do it through observability.
You can't move fast and break things because your downtime will get the regulators involved, because peoples livelihoods are at stake. You will get official complaints through various official bodies who can and will sanction the business.
In short, it's not a fucking joke and it takes a lot more time and a lot more money to do something serious here, and for good reason.
Note that I'm not talking about low-key wearables like Fitbits that monitor your pulse, I'm talking about doctors, triage, etc.
They are hard, but this case isn't really healthcare-related. He tried pitching his product to practices without showing how it could increase their revenue, or decrease their costs. Without that, his product is just another cost-center with some marginal (and ambiguous) healthcare benefits.
What's the t-shirt look like? :)
There are a few paths I see still:
a. Assuming you own a database, expose your dataset as an API. Consider possible consumers. Open source it, and monitor the usage. Who’s using that data.
b. Cold message a few folks on Linkedin from pharmaceuticals that your algo says has high clinical success. Can you “recommend” them? Do they see value. Maybe you have a research tool on your hands.
3. If you can keep your website alive, focus on SEO and gain traction with more users and play that out. Write blog posts, use affiliate marketing, and grow users. But don’t add new features. Just maintain what you have. Try that for a year at least. What did you learn?
I think the toughest thing here is knowing when to stop building the product. That’s what stands out to me as your demise.
The doctor was spot on, and those are the kinds of things you want to hear. It just means looks somewhere else. Writing a doc beforehand with potential opportunities is always a good idea, but it’s never too late.
Disclaimer: I do product at MEGACORP and love product strategy.
In this case, similar functionality (drug recommendations) exist within EMR systems. Except the recommendations are issued by other doctors and medical researchers, not some ML algorithm and it works transparently with the pharmacy management modules.
Moral of the story: don't get involved with healthcare startups unless you know the structure and economics of the industry. They are very different from consumer / business tech.
So please, have mercy and cure my ignorance and explain what EMR means.
The only downside is that sharing this information may open up the hospital to more liability - i.e. a patient takes an opiate instead of an NSAID and then blames the hospital for recommending the opiate to them because of how much more effective the opiate is at treating pain in clinical trials.
Where should one go/read/listen/watch to learn more about product strategy?
Websites like Indiehacker, stratchery are good. Would also recommend the innovator's dilemma if you're at a big company. There are also a few videos on Youtube by CNBC on products of the past - and I've enjoyed those.
"So I built something people wanted. Consumers wanted it, doctors wanted it, I wanted it. Where did I go wrong?"
As far as I can tell, nobody wanted it except the author. The one doctor he talked to didn't, and no consumer ever saw it. I feel like the author learned a lesson, but not the full lesson.
Reading this was like watching someone you don't politically agree with doing comedy. You know they're trying to be funny, but you also know they're missing the whole point and aren't self-aware.
I, as a consumer, find it worthless and they shouldn't have even started it, but now that you're here, might as well give it a bit more of shot than that. To completely bail on what you have after 10 no's is also the wrong move.
Doesn't seem like he asked the question, "well, what would you pay for?"
Plus when did the 'we don't have any budget' excuse stop a SaaS company? That's what you raise VC for - build the product, hand it to the customer for 'free' and charge them what it was really worth based on their usage when you threaten to take it away
It takes years to figure out how to properly sell your product. He didn't find out that his product wouldn't work in the marketplace he just found out he didn't know how to sell it.
are you not supposed to laugh at the jokes of someone you disagree with politically? is it possible someone could be "self-aware" and still disagree with you?
He then goes on to describe the evidence specifically why doctor's DIDN'T want it. All the author was trying to do with that quote was explain what he was thinking at the time.
“Call me when you have a business plan,” I said, lacing up my Allbirds before and riding my Lime scooter into the sunset.
Sure, Aleve is the most powerful. But it also has the most side effects, including ulcers if used for too long. There's a lot of nuanced information when it comes to drugs. If you want to go on pain killers like Aleve for long term, you probably need to take acid blockers as well, like Nexium. So where does that fall into the analysis?
Unfortunately a lot of stuff requires medical doctors that have experience. I just went through a severe health emergency, where I was taking one antibiotic and needed to be changed to another. I needed blood tests and constant supervision for the doctor to make this decision.
Psychiatry, which is what I guess the author targeted, is likely even less reliable. My friend is a pharmacist and was on anti-anxiety medication for a year, but decided to try another one, because of the effects on her were affecting her and now she's doing much better. This requires working with a psychiatrist for a year.
I think there's value in surfacing all this information but to expect people to rush into paying for it is naive. It's a nice-to-have-tool that might be useful like a Google-type research tool but nothing someone would want to pay $5/month for since the actual benefit over a psychiatrist just going off experience is completely unknown. There no inherent home run here.
Am I wrong or isn't solving these issues basically the service UpToDate offers?
Especially the doctor's feedback, she described the possibility of changing her habits slowly as she got used to using the tool.
Unrelated:
"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?”
This line kills me and it's exactly why I hate the healthcare industry. She clearly understands that the software could improve patient outcomes, but describes it as a donation and still wouldn't change how she writes prescriptions (out of laziness, I guess?)
That tool isn't just a physician aid. If that's what doctors are really doing, it's more like a physician replacement. If they won't do evidence-based medicine, and prefer to be legal drug dealers, for profitability reasons, we should all be contributing to the creation of the auto-doc, instead of trying to help them.
That $40k would have been better spent lobbying to remove the guild protections from the practice of medicine.
If all general-practice docs do is take height, weight, pulse, BP, blood oxidation, and run a CBC with lipid panel before prescribing your drugs for the year, that doesn't seem like something only an MD or NP could do. But by law, if you want prescription-only medicines, you have to go to a prescription-drug dealer and pay them for the scrip, before going to pay someone else, again, for the actual drug.
And if they're not actually doing (what I perceive to be) their jobs? If they're just "phoning it in" to collect a paycheck? That's one job I'd love to automate out of existence.
About a dozen years ago, my doctor caught my blood pressure shooting up in my annual exam and started treating me for high blood pressure. High blood pressure is a "silent killer" that leads to premature deaths for millions. You don't feel sick, while your heart struggles and your brain risks explosions. And treating it, once diagnosed, isn't straightforward. It took six months of experimenting with various medications to find the combination that worked for me. That's a doctor's judgment and expertise, not something for some technician with a community college associate's degree. And this summer, when a critical potassium depletion drove me to a scary ER visit, she noted that one of my BP meds could affect potassium and adjusted my dosages.
And it's not just an expert-system thing that could be replaced by a robot, either. She's not just dealing with my measurements - she's dealing with my fears, and helping me decide on best approaches. That requires a human touch.
I think in general, if you're building a business, expecting anyone to do something that isn't in their own selfish interest in some way is a recipe for failure, even if people in your target market might claim not to have selfish motivations. If you want someone to change their behavior (and/or their organization's behavior), you need to be able to clearly explain why it's a win for that specific person.
A lot of comments criticizing what the author already knows, that the business plan was incomplete. I had the urge to do the same, but read to the very end and realized TJC clearly learned the most important lesson, and it's one I've learned myself, so I have no room to be critical.
BTW, I burned a lot more than $40k and 9 months in my own story, so maybe it helps to hear that other people have made the same mistake and gotten too convinced their idea is valuable without checking carefully enough -- without quite knowing how to check carefully. I know what it feels like to know that I'm doing the right thing, and then find out that it's not good enough.
Fun read, and an important lesson that many very bright people will still learn the hard way, even after reading a story like this. Thank you for sharing.
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.
Sell this product to insurance companies so they can recommend cheaper/safer drugs to their customers, or show the more expensive one and if it truly had better outcomes. Everyone benefits from that.
That said, the medical establishment is a tough tough domain to move.
Eventually we pivoted the tech to a B2B SaaS play because it was too hard to sell.
Why do people shut things down instead of just leaving them there, unmaintained? Even that is better than just taking it offline.
It is unfortunate. Even if the data goes stale and the product is no longer fit for purpose, it shows well and would make a great demonstration for his/her future endeavors. And you never know who might stumble across it in the future and want to revive the technology.
I've had fairly sophisticated sites running on Google App Engine for years after the company was "shut down". One ended up being instrumental as a demo when meeting a later cofounder.
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