I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

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 to something that they actually need.

I call this the "I have an idea for a startup!" issue. You hear it all the time from family/friends. Where they tell you this great idea for a product they had. This is the wrong approach. What you want to say is something like "There is this really interesting problem that everyone in ecommerce is facing right now"

Uh no. He had a problem - how to choose a medicine - and built a product to solve that problem. The issue was that solving the problem isn't something people wish to pay for, not that the problem doesn't exist.

To be fair, when he started he didn't know he wanted to talk to doctors. That was after a pivot.

Also, $40k is downright cheap compared to most failed projects to improve medicine. If it were someone else's money, that is.

> Uh no. He had a problem - how to choose a medicine...

Did he though? He even mentions that customers generally pick whatever (because they don't really care what's the perfectly optimized headache pill they should take) and doctors thought it was neat, but no one really wanted to pay for it. Their solution (e.g. prescribing what they would typically prescribe) was good enough.

It doesn't really sound like there's a problem there.

Solving your own problem and then saying "Oh I found someone interested in my solution" isn't really what they mean by finding customers though.

I don't think most doctors or customers would even consider this to be a real problem. For some specific, rare conditions sure. But for Tylenol? Come on. No one is going to pay for that.

In other words, "solve a frequent, burning problem".

Tom Blomfield worte about how during YC S11 they had trouble growing at all. He chanced upon a customer who fit their product's user persona to a tee but at the end of a 20m conversation Tom realised the it wasn't really a burning problem for them at all.

And so they pivoted...to GoCardless.

https://archive.is/8IDcl

To be more accurate, you want to find a problem that people will pay (money, time, etc) for. He never tried to test that until it was too late. To be fair, this is a very, very common failure mode and I can imagine most people reading this story can identify with it.

True, but he didn't talk to consumers before spending the $40K either.

Also I don't think $40K is cheap for an MVP. He could have used static HTML mock-ups, or even a few Power Point slides to see if his potential customers would have paid for that service.

If that is the problem, this is not a great solution.

I don't care if the medicine is perfectly optimal in terms of standard deviations above placebo (which I don't trust, since the data is not likely to be reliably comparable); I care if it sufficiently solves my issue with least hassle (side effects/access/cost/works for me personally). Placebo might just be fine, in some cases.

If I am not able to identify what medicine to take, I ask my doctor, who has years of training for that, already knows what Google sources are good, and can look it up in a reference manual.

> He had a problem - how to choose a medicine - and built a product to solve that problem.

No, he didn't have a problem.

He proposes that OTC is the target. The reality is, the problem is not very deep here. Without access to prescription medications, you basically have a handful of options that are more of less the same. It's like walking onto a rental car lot. You need to know what category you need, but everything in that category is pretty much the same.

He isn't solving anything for the physician market. His recommendations are very naive and lack the clinical backing to support actual usage. A physician isn't going to buck their go-to's because a random tool suggests something else. This tool needs to provide scientific backing for it's recommendations and why that recommendation is better.

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

He had a problem, but then decided to solve a completely different problem. The process of an end user picking an OTC drug for a headache vs a doctor prescribing something are worlds apart. I'd personally love a site which compared all generic + branded medication available over the counter and ranked them based on some criteria. I'm sure there would be a ton of advertising and affiliate marketing potential for a successful one as well.

Yes, this is a problem that a heavily regulated free market actually solved pretty well.

I go to my local grocery store and look at the painkillers they have. There are generic aspirin and Tylenol available for a price almost anyone can afford. There are branded versions which are still reasonably priced. There are reasonable variations such as with caffeine or with decongestant, again priced perfectly fairly. If you want to pay $2 extra for awesome marketing you can. In some stores you might find a 'natural' remedy - essentially a placebo, again priced ok.

Everything on sale is basically safe. Nothing has a business model that relies on addiction. Nothing costs hundreds of dollars. Nothing is adulterated or counterfeit. It's easy to get information about everything available. The vast majority people would be able to choose something to match their own needs (for example, they might be allergic to aspirin, or need to avoid Tylenol because of a kidney condition).

If you bought the worst painkiller on sale in the store, it would be fairly effective and not too expensive. The experience in most stores in large parts of the world would be very similar.

He still has the DB, so it should be possible to generate a static site based off of it with advertising.

Right, it also seems more monetizable than WebMD since it's more shopper-oriented, so ads / affiliate model should not be dismissed out of hand.