The best way to launch your startup [video]
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My goal is to simplify healthy eating and improve nutrition habits.
I asked people outside various grocery stores and most folks do not know how to read nutrition labels nor identify healthy foods. My dad was able to practice some healthier eating habits and get his BP from hypertension to normal.
Please feel to reach out if you have any questions or advice for me. I’m new to this so I appreciate your message.
YC videos have been instrumental for me as someone who is a self taught engineer and wants to build useful software.
Assuming you have a normal diet are the recipes it generates pretty healthy?
In my deep dive into the world of low carb, I learned that elevated levels of fructose/uric acid reduce the synthesis of nitric oxide, a known vasodilator, among other mechanisms (did you know that the explosive nitroglycerin is an effective vasodilator?). High blood pressure is reversible by reducing the amount of insulin spikes and ingested simple sugars, and low carb is the most effective method.
Yet most apps tend to pride themselves in "medically approved science here!", which means the usual story of eating less meat and saturated fat, and exercising more. "Leafy vegetables!"
The problem is that medically approved science that your GP offers tends to be about 25 years out of date, so we're at least a generation away before we have apps that tell you to stop eating bread, cereals for breakfast and heaping bowls of fruit, but instead eating real, non-sugary foods and not to shy away from saturated fat.
Now I am 50kg overweight than my first hypertensive diagnosis in my early 20s, and I have better blood pressure in about 2 weeks of eating fewer carbs than I did at the time when I was fit as a trout, but with tight arteries.
And don't get me started on cholesterol and statins, because I'll be here all day.
A link to get you started, if you want to base your app on up-to-date research: https://youtu.be/KlHPmJTihBc
Edit on initial reply: “Keto gets its benefit from avoiding low simple carbs , not from avoiding complex carbs or consuming high saturated fats.“
tl;dr: statins don't do much apart from reducing a single metric of an entire systemic disorder, and have terrible side effects, LDL is positively correlated with longevity in healthy subjects, high levels of blood sugar destroy a "marker" protein on LDL cells, they stop being recognised and reabsorbed by the liver but instead they go and accumulate under artery walls. Atherosclerosis is not caused by dietary fat, but high levels of dietary fat paired with high levels of blood sugar.
In general, high levels of sugar alone are worse by all metrics that high levels of dietary fat, and very recent research seems to suggest mitochondria work better burning fatty acids than glucose (to be clear, the chemical pathway is exactly the same, but fatty acids skip a couple steps and produce fewer free radicals)
What about the type of carbs in oatmeal, those are better right?
People will focus on their individual experience as a proxy for generalizing others way too much.
While there are some universal principles, extremes around eating both bad and eating healthy can be confused with eating simple or eating clean.
If someone has a cashew allergy, the practice of veganism can be life threatening where it’s used so much.
If you come from a certain area of the world, your genetics might be a little more used to benefiting from eating certain things than not, too. A negotiation for might be nice for me but for someone who’s being eating it well for a few generations..
How do you know how to identify healthy foods?
What is a "healthy" food?
My approach: healthier products aren't wrapped and don't have nutrition labels on them.
I'm not launching anything anytime in the upcoming future, but I often dabble on side projects for fun with a dream of "launching something, someday", and I thought this was helpful / encouraging, especially early in the video where founders-wanting-to-be-perfect-to-launch was discussed!
I think suggestions like this are great to be sharing with the community. Thanks YC!
Now there is a section that goes over the types of launches, but perhaps that should have been first in the presentation and go over what exactly is a launch and when do you do it?
Launches originate from the idea of a boat that's ready for sailing, and the first launch comes out of the dry dock. But even in that case, ships need many more months before their first sea trials (a different kind of launch), and then something else before ready for whatever their purpose is.
Like many other YCombinator videos, I think these assume much more understanding of terminology, lingo, and perception than the audience might actually have.
Also, I have a major problem with launching to "friends and family". In my experience, friends and family provide very poor advice and they're much more prone to be encouraging or want to provide emotional or moral support, without actually telling you if your business idea sucks. I burned years doing something that sucked, and when I stopped doing it, my friends and family told me they never thought it was a good idea. I asked them why they didn't stop me. And they said it would have been not nice to be completely honest. Ever since then, I've ignored friends and family and focus where it matters: on the customers who I want to buy stuff. I don't get why the recommendation for the 2nd launch after an MVP landing page is Friends and Family launch.
Once you start taking money, congrats you've launched.
I did found an ad powered business when I was 16.
You build a site. You create content. You spam the site wherever you can. You get organic traffic. If you're lucky you get SEO gods to pick you up and if you have a good product people will share it.
You can put -ads- whenever you want, but that will have consequences.
I wouldn't choose to build an ad-powered business in 2023 tbh, I hope ads die some die in the future as the lies they mainly are.
Also if you're doing that, you're probably prepping up your initial users to be sold as cattle to your future enterprise customers. Not cool.
My one piece of feedback is in the diagram for your system with the two boxes (“choose project”, “start coding”) I felt an urge to press the “choose project” box to see what templates you have.
You could leverage that, make the box actually go there if someone presses it. Of course leave the normal call for action that’s at the bottom of the page.
Have a link, is it here? https://www.ycombinator.com/library/9h-how-to-get-your-first...
You'll need to spend more time on lighting than anything else to reproduce the overall feel.
You can clone an existing app, and make it more scalable, more UX friendly, more extensible,...
That being said, for bootstrap projects, side hustles, and other projects, I've really come around to your way of thinking. For those projects where being another alternative does have good economics, "copy first, innovate later" is a solid strategy.