I shut down my startup. Here's the honest truth | Hacker News Reader

I shut down my startup. Here's the honest truth

medium.com

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> Companies rarely fail for a single reason, and looking back, there are certainly choices I would have made differently. But here’s the simple truth: despite our progress, we ran out of time (and money) before we could crack the unit economics to meet venture-funded standards. We couldn’t bridge the gap to a viable, software-centric business model that was less reliant on expensive physician time, and that ultimately led us to wind down.

Armchair QBing this thing with practically no info, but I wonder if this isn't the type of idea that should target specific places with incomes that can support higher prices and demographics that are educated enough to be looking for/open to this type of service and expand/scale once established.

Meaning, target affluent blue suburbs first. And then use those as beach heads to scale to lower income areas over time. This could have been tried for all I know, but I think if you do it in a controlled manner like that you can also build deeper local connections with care providers so that people have someone they can talk to in person, which I sense is also important for users of this service. Also, I don't really like the name. It tells me nothing about the service. This is also something that I'd be open to as a girldad.

As someone who spends a lot of time in healthcare tech, the overwhelming problem in care navigation is you need an employer to pay you a low PMPM fee and then a higher fee for usage as most people who need this can’t pay for it on there own.

Payors may have some kind of care coordination program but generally they are looking at higher fee patients they are trying to soften their spend.

It is a hard problem when there are people who need help but you have to pay every speciality you see even if they don’t alleviate the problem.

But... why the reliance on investors? Why not bootstrap a startup, and grow organically? Are the running costs really so prohibitively high?

I don't think the founder is a software engineer. And what they built is much more complex than what one could do.

That's interesting - it turned out markets, as distorted by Obamacare and so on as they are, weren't off by a lot.

He couldn't find services he needed and decided to build it himself. But after many years of trying he couldn't build a sustaining biz that provided such service.

If you wanted to project an appearance of having read the article before injecting your opinion, you failed wildly.

The author appears phenotypically female (https://medium.com/@abi_75893/about) and writes early on that a motivating factor was her severe menstrual pain. I'm very confused how you decided to use male pronouns here.

It's possible "antisocialist" was commenting to push their own agenda without actually caring about or engaging with the actual article.

>But after many years of trying he couldn't ...

she

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