The founder pitched a great idea at the start – help consumers who don't know what kinds of common drugs to buy at the store, but then immediately pivoted to selling the service to doctors and medical practices. They should have realized that the second one would be impossible to break into.
> But then I look at WebMD’s 10-Qs and start to spiral. Turns out the world’s biggest health website makes about $0.50/year per user. That is…not enough money to bootstrap GlacierMD. I’m pouring money into my rent, into my Egyptian contractors, into AWS—I need some cash soon.
The take away here should have been not to pivot entirely, but raise money. You are in Silicon Valley! This is literally why this entire ecosystem exists. Sometimes bootstrapping can be beneficial, but when you have spent $40K of your money, have a good enough prototype with a clear story, and are going up against giant established competitors, forget customers for a while and sell to VCs instead.
If you are really sure that the service adds value for doctors, give it to them for free for a year and prove it. Open up your service for users without worrying about AWS bills or ad revenue. A boatload of money in the bank makes all of this trivial.
You're not wrong at all, but this line at the end really stuck out to me:
> If I’d articulated at the beginning how I expected to extract value from GlacierMD, maybe I would’ve researched the economics of an ad-based model, or I would’ve validated that doctors were willing to pay, or hospitals, or insurance companies.
The impression I got was this failure was induced by a complete lack of planning. It looks like the author had an idea, got some positive feedback, then drove the entire project based on random inputs they got from people. At no point do they talk about sitting down and doing the boring stuff. Like feasibility analysis, market studies, and developing a very, very basic concept of where the money will come from. The fact that the project had to fail before they realized they didn't think of how to monetize it is... baffling. That should be the one of first things you consider when trying to start a business: how will it make money?
> They should have realized that the second one would be impossible to break into
Why is that impossible? I had a long time idea of making a software for doctors in my country, it's not in Silicon Valley, everyone here use cash and it's hard to keep up with how many visitors they have or patient history (everything is stored in paper), my idea is to make a website for them, i can see how hard it would be to sell this but will it be impossible?
Software for scheduling, accounting, payments – sure. He was trying to sell a service which would suggest medical advice for doctors to give to their patients.
> But then I look at WebMD’s 10-Qs and start to spiral. Turns out the world’s biggest health website makes about $0.50/year per user. That is…not enough money to bootstrap GlacierMD. I’m pouring money into my rent, into my Egyptian contractors, into AWS—I need some cash soon.
The take away here should have been not to pivot entirely, but raise money. You are in Silicon Valley! This is literally why this entire ecosystem exists. Sometimes bootstrapping can be beneficial, but when you have spent $40K of your money, have a good enough prototype with a clear story, and are going up against giant established competitors, forget customers for a while and sell to VCs instead.
If you are really sure that the service adds value for doctors, give it to them for free for a year and prove it. Open up your service for users without worrying about AWS bills or ad revenue. A boatload of money in the bank makes all of this trivial.