Tom Cleveland was suffering a mind-shattering headache when he hit on a great idea.

What does someone reach for when in pain? Tylenol? Advil? Aleve? But why? Which is the most helpful? Which is the most effective? Can Google help? No because all Google offers is a bunch of ads from the usual suspects along with an alphabetical list of medications.

Tom’s brilliant idea was to use a structured database of clinical trials to provide simple, practical answers with proven efficacy to common medical questions.

After a few hours searching domains he came up with a name. Over the next nine months he would quit his job, write over 200,000 lines of code, hire five contractors, create a Delaware C-Corp, add four doctors to his advisory board, and demo to Bay Area medical practices. He would spend $40,000 of his own savings buying clinical trials and paying contractors to enter those trials into a database that would spit out the answers.

Tom was going to make the world a better place through better code, better technology.

Long story short, Tom went through the startup hell of rising costs, burning cash and the incapacity of breaking existing user habits. As far as medical professionals were concerned, the way they were prescribing medicines was just fine. Efficacy be damned.

Tom built it. And they didn’t come. After nine months, he shut it down. He fired the contractors, archived the database and switched off the servers.

A good idea with good intentions and good code is not enough. Any business must create value for people and the planet.

Articulate that value before you spend a penny.

Reference    

“I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea” TJCX (2020)