As someone working in the same space, I am going to give you honest feedback that might seem harsh.
1. There are other sites doing this better and they have far more than just a landing page.
2. Are you holding user data? If so what about hippa compliance?
3. Your differentiating factor: "We scrape medical forums, blogs, twitter, facebook, etc (all the social media avenues) and add a layer of intelligent semantic analysis to bring you the best information relevant to what you have (or just the hottest news if you don't have anything)."
Simply put, I dont believe that you have one single bit of this.
4. Why would I use this and not patients like me or crohnology.com where I can find out about new things and also have them vetted by my friends that have similar conditions.
5. I dont think your newsletter could ever be better than condition specific newsletters like the ones from the CCFA or ADA? How will you deal with that?
1. Who else is in this space of content organization? Plus, in the spirit of start-ups, it's never about how many competitors you have; it's about who can ultimately provide the most value :)
2. Holding user data, but we're deidentified enough to be HIPAA-compliant (or at least our lawyers say so.)
3. Haha, you don't have to believe us. You'll see it in action when it's live.
4. We know both of those teams and they're both fantastic! Our goal isn't to replace them, just increase their awareness. Patientslikeme works fantastically for chronic diseases; Crohnology is a great start-up for Crohn's disease. But the percentage of Crohn's users who actually know about Crohnology and product updates is low. Our goal is to get the newest and best information to those who need it most.
5. Perhaps not, but there are a couple distinguishing factors here. First, the more common chronic diseases have resources like that, but many of the ones in between have little support. Second, the topics we cover are a bit different. They're focused on generating their own content and might miss out on some of the thousands of new apps being generated in this health boom. Ultimately, we'd love to provide more awareness to newsletters like that if they're really the most helpful tool.
I am a patient. Being a patient is why I am so passionate about products in this space. So the thought of someone scraping the web to find information that I might apply to managing my medical condition is scary. I have worked at CPA companies that ran things like Molocure scams, Cure diabetes now sites etc... Perhaps your technology is so advanced that it can tell the difference between valid news and scams and perhaps you will manually review everything and verify the source of the information; but im not willing to bet my health on it.
I feel ya. Having worked in healthcare for years and as a medical student myself / recently gone through rounds, I know exactly where you're coming from. In addition, I am a patient myself in the hospital once a week.
Moreover, having grown up in this era of cyberchondria, I know that the danger of self-treatment is ever present and real, but that's not the problem we're set out to solve.
Physicians know quite a bit, yes. They can tell you what medicines to take, anecdotally what they've seen, and what the latest research tells them. However, they're far removed from what the patient actually goes through in terms of daily struggles, and what is out there to help them with that.
We built our technology with the mindset to surface useful information and bury scams. We actually built a medical search engine that did just that, but it didn't take.
We interpret "apply to managing my medical condition" as directing you to the right resources (e.g. Crohnology for Crohns, WeSprout for parents) that you might not have otherwise heard of. And we definitely have safeguards against spam.
I disagree; you do not have to be a negative person to point these things out. IMHO the author was simply trying to help
anyone developing a web app avoid what he sees as a bad tool
Let's look at the four sub-headlines of the article:
>> 1. If you can't design it, you shouldn't build it.
My version of this (idiotic) axiom: Don't reinvent the wheel every time you need to pick up groceries.
>> 2. Your homepage will suck and you will have no brand.
Homepage? (What is this 1999?) Bootstrap is clearly intended for web apps. If you want to create an interesting "homepage", maybe you could try the ever-popular CopyPasta library from 37Signals...
>> You will have no new ideas.
Again, I counter this (also idiotic) axiom with another, less idiotic truism: You will stand on the shoulders of giants (or at least upon a giant pyramid of smart people). BTW, maybe someone should teach the OP how to override/alter stylesheets.
>> You will forget about information architecture.
Actually, you will leverage proven IA, and get the benefit of lots of people's opinions about what works and what doesn't. Like it or not, users' expectations drive most of what you call "UX". Bootstrap is a better-than-average collection of web app conventions. The last thing the world needs is another "innovative" navigation metaphor.
By the way, you could take every one of the OP's ridiculous arguments and apply them to, say, HTML. Should we be using Flash so that we aren't painted into the corner of HTML tags? It's such a stupid position, that it hurts my brain. I am promising myself not to spend another second on this thread...
Good job, I am working on a similar tool. There are lots of free great recipe managers on the web. What is the main differentiating factor that makes this worth 10 a month?
The important thing that differentiates this is that it is solely a replacement for a recipe box or other strategy for storing recipes. Most other recipe managers are tacking added on to recipe discovery tools. 7courses allows for sharing recipes, but is 100% focused on making it dead simple to manage your recipes.
I have been rejected 4 times and each time I learned things.
socialadmanager.com - 2x it was that my product lacked focus and the value it created was as obvious as I thought it was.
spotted.at - 1x I learned that even if I had been funded I would have failed because the product was simply not something that people would pay for.
i.crowdfunded.it - 1x I learned that I did not understand the customer / market etc... enough to complete the YC App.
The biggest lesson is that I (a single founder) have tunnel vision. If I had a co-founder it would have been easier to see all of these problems because I would have had another perspective.
I am applying this cycle and even though I won't get in I don't see it as a rejection. Instead I see it as a way to ask some of the smartest people around if they would/would not use my product and if I am articulating my value prop in a clear and concise manner.
The product I am applying with this cycle has paying users and is complete VS previous years where I just had working prototypes so the thing I am really looking forward to this time is hearing what they think of my product. I have stopped caring if I get in or not.
You have an awesome attitude, and, in my limited experience, the one required to eventually succeed. Keep at it, and I hope you find a cofounder someday!
One of the things that I have noticed about all of your examples is that they are all tools for developers. Do you have any examples of companies that solve real problems for the general consumer?
One of the reasons that I like stripe more is that they give you much more granular control ove the user experience. Users on your site never need to know that you are using stripe to process payments. Things just work. Also: PayPal customer service is a joke, they will freeze your account etc... etc...
They do that to save money. PayPal has very low losses due to fraud. Maybe if Stripe gets large enough to attract attention, or starts doing business across international boundaries, or in Eastern Europe, they'll start doing the same thing.
I was diagnosed w/ crohns when I was 16. I struggled with it my whole life; in and out of hospitals and on/off different meds. At 19 I learned about the Macrobiotic Diet and my life was never the same. It was hard to stay on the diet and make it stick so I created a tool that helps me track and balance my diet. Because I like building things I also added 450 or so other diets and it has become by permanent side project. Right now only me and a few friends are using it (web version) and the app will be in the app store in a few weeks then I am thinking about opening it up to the public to see if its something that anyone else would want to use. All of the diets I have seen mentioned on this thread are supported so if anyone would like access let me know email/city and I will try and get things up and running for you.
Not to be a troll but this really irritates me and its hapening more and more in the "start up" community. This is not a startup. Its a landing page. There is no such thing as a 4 hour startup. This is a side project.
My first though when reading the title was if it only takes 4 hours it will take a better funded competitor 2, when you prove out the market for them. Seriously unless it is some really specialized technology and knowledge, 4 hours mean the entrance barrier is just too low. Every kid in his garage will be giving it away for free.
