This was a fun read, but I think it came to the wrong conclusion. The real issue imo was "I had practically only weeks of runway". You just don't have time to make it happen.
As a fellow start up founder, I see most of my job being just buying time for the business. Buying time to make, to talk, and to think.
It wasn't like the tool had no value to Susan, maybe with a booth at her go-to annual expo, mentioning a few past lawsuits the tool could avoid, and an affinity partnership with her industry association, the tool would have become a fact of life for her.
It's a lot of work, I'm not denying that. Yet, this is the sort of thing YC's idealized startup stories often fail to say. If "instant Product Market Fit" is so good, then how come practically every new high flying SV startup is using loads of VC money to "bend the market to the product"?
Exciting Startups have to venture far, it's not about "we let you buy your potatoes online" anymore. Chances are you won't get deals by talking to people once. I wouldn't say that means your idea is bad.
I agree with your comment about the wrong conclusion. Google didn't have a monetization plan, it launched in 1998 and didn't do adwords(ads) until 2000. It's always better to have positive cashflow, however, enough capital lets you have more runway. At the end of the day you do need someone who will pay.
Not that I dislike attorneys but they could have been a client. If you can show that a doctor didn't prescribe the best drug for their malpractice lawsuit it could bring in some money.
It's not 1998 anymore is the thing. It's obviously better to have positive cash flow but unless you come up with something that is that huge of a hit, in a market where people both understand your product, but also there aren't entrenched competitors to squash you, there's a lot of hard work to get to a place where your product is worth something your customers. Which is expensive, in both time and money. Both of which OP didn't have enough of.
You're right that doing a startup is expensive especially when you look at opportunity costs. Google was going up against Microsoft that was killing off competitors to the point it was on the Simpsons. There are many factors and one of them can be luck. I respect anyone who does a start up because it's easy to be a naysayer. I wouldn't have invested in GlacierMD but I wouldn't have invested in SnapChat because I still don't get it.
One thing I did notice is that he was the sole founder. This is the number one mistake according to Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html oddly enough I'm interviewing for a position that is using the same inputs as the OP but with slightly different outputs and we have a corporate buyer lined up.
This is why I don't like health related business models. In a similar scenario, who's stopping Susan from sueing over a "bad" outcome from the platform recommendation. When people's health is on the line, shit can get ugly really fast.
Getting back to the product at hand - there was no value, as much as a minor cost saving.
A semi-reliable recommendation on the medication that Susan could prescribe doesn't save nearly enough money. You should realise that medicines aren't 100% reliable and people acquire tolerances to many medications over a longer run.
Basically this product suffered from the get go - because the person who started it wasn't an SME.
As a fellow start up founder, I see most of my job being just buying time for the business. Buying time to make, to talk, and to think.
It wasn't like the tool had no value to Susan, maybe with a booth at her go-to annual expo, mentioning a few past lawsuits the tool could avoid, and an affinity partnership with her industry association, the tool would have become a fact of life for her.
It's a lot of work, I'm not denying that. Yet, this is the sort of thing YC's idealized startup stories often fail to say. If "instant Product Market Fit" is so good, then how come practically every new high flying SV startup is using loads of VC money to "bend the market to the product"?
Exciting Startups have to venture far, it's not about "we let you buy your potatoes online" anymore. Chances are you won't get deals by talking to people once. I wouldn't say that means your idea is bad.