An MVP by definition is the very base point that you can convince people to buy your wares. Whatever form that takes will depend on you and your market. The point is to get whatever you have up there in your head and put it out into the world; who cares what that looks like. Landing pages are so popular because it's the path of least resistance in getting your idea in front of a sizable audience. Going straight to a working prototype for your MVP without hitting the landing page or comparable stage first sort of misses the mark on what an MVP is all about.
Instead of thinking of an MVP as a single _thing_, we just made things easy and called everything we did our "MVP" until we started doing recurring sales.
What kind of budget are you working with? I've had success getting through customer discovery and validating demand with adwords. Basically just drove ~$100-200 to a basic landing page and decided a 20% conversion rate was worth pursuing further.
Thanks for the clarification. I'd be lying if I said I didn't deliberately use government in the title--rather than AHCJ or CMS--to garner more attention. For those unaware, CMS administers Medicare and for all intents and purposes sets the rules in US healthcare. Them enabling the publishing of these reports online is a strong show of support for the push for quality outcomes ("value over volume").
Read The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. It's quick, cheap, and provides the most actionable advice of any management book I've come across.
When you're put in a management position its usually because you're good at doing something. Good do-ers tend to want to do everything themselves because they know best, but when you're in management that can cripple you. This book will prevent you from making all sorts of mistakes right off the bat.
I think you're on the right track with Google wanting to increase their ad footprint. I tend to view every move that Google makes as an attempt to increase their ability to collect ad revenue. Even the self-driving car frees people up from staring at the boring road and offers an opportunity to look at ads.
Android can be explained in the same manner. Google saw the traffic potential the mobile web had, and they wanted to make sure they were the search engine of choice. The best way to do this is to control the software people use to access that mobile web.
The problem is I cannot see Android specifically adding to that. Specifically I cannot see the ROI. Google is in such a position that people want to use their apps/services (unlike yahoo or some other company) so I cannot see why they could not have gotten the same ad footprint with just apps instead of an OS.
I don't know if I would reduce the self-driving car to just increasing time to see ads though. Its much grander and in fact revolutionary than that.
Apple could block Google from iOS in an instant. For example, Maps just got dropped. Most of the revenue is in the default installed apps not downloadable alternatives, the mass market won't seek alternatives.
I also like the idea and look, but have you thought about a different launch approach? When your content needs to be geographically dense to be useful, makes sense to limit your launch. For a non-FB example, you can look at companies like Uber, or even today's YourMechanic launch. Yes those are both service based, but it seems like you require a lot of users in one location to be truly useful just like them.
On a similar note, I put in Madison, selected car repair, and my search didn't return any results. Just kept on loading--not sure if this is due to traffic or just no results available.
Keep it up though! I can see real potential in this, I think you just need to keep tweaking to get there. I have faith :)
Thanks a lot. Yes, we have a plan of pushing it locally first (because otherwise it was like we are trying to swallow a watermelon). We will hopefully start with it in October :-)
Although everything you say is true, there is a very clear benefit of genetic testing that exists today. Many drug interactions have a strong genetic link. Take the common blood thinning drug warfarin for example. It's considered a medical best practice to prescribe this drug to patient's with a variety of heart problems (irregular heartbeat, history of heart attack, etc). A single dosage has wildly different effects on different patients however. The same dosage can cause fatal bleeding in one patient, while in another patient have no effect at all. Without genetics, the proper dosage is a crap shoot. With genetics, it's an exact science (as it should be).
And this is just one single example. Research is revealing more genetic-drug links all the time with relatively small sample sizes. Genetic sequencing may not cure every disease like we were promised ~10 years ago, but it is saving lives and is essential to the advancement of medicine.
This really is the key point. In graduate school I worked along side many individuals with close ties to the pharmaceutical industry, and many had very similar stories to tell...
Getting a drug approved is an interesting process. Not only do you have to prove your drug is not harmful, not only do you have to prove that it does what it's supposed to, you also have to prove that it works better than all the available alternatives. I heard numerous stories where a drug would go to trial, and for some subset of the trial population it would be a miracle cure. However, the way the current approval process runs, those miracles have to be averaged out with the rest of the population, and often the end result would be "it's not better than existing drugs: denied!"
Of course, scientists being the curious type quickly figured out that what they were seeing was the consequence of genetics. Have a certain variant of gene X? Then this is a miracle cure. But only 10% of the population has gene X, so on the whole this drug doesn't appear to be better than the alternatives.
The problem is, the FDA doesn't know how to approve drugs that only work for people with a specific variant of gene X. Mostly, it's a chicken and egg problem: most drug trials don't include genetic profiling, because it would be wasted money since the FDA doesn't consider genetic profiling, because most drug trials don't include genetic profiling.
If sequencing becomes cheap enough that it can be included as part of the standard drug trial process, this could all change. Personalized medicine is the future.
Edit: Interestingly, though the name escapes me at the moment, I did hear of one drug that was approved for a specific gene variant. However, this was only because that gene variant was particularly prevalent in African American men, and demographic data is collected during the trial process. I recall there were a lot of upset scientists regarding this outcome, though, because conflating race with genetics is dangerous and irresponsible. There might be an 80% correlation (and even that might be on the high side), but that implies that there are non-African American males who could benefit but won't get the drug, and African American males that will get the drug even though it has no beneficial effect...
BiDil actually is not a great example, because... "The trial, however, was conducted only in African American patients, and the results, therefore, give the impression that BiDil works only in African Americans. This is not the case. The trial investigators themselves concede that BiDil will work in people regardless of race." The drug company just pitched it that way to get it approved by the FDA.
Source: Kahn J (2005) From disparity to difference: How race-specific medicines may undermine policies to address inequalities in health care. South Calif Interdiscip Law J 15: 105–130.
Warfarin sensitivity is one of the more concrete useful things to come from being tested. I, for instance, have a genetic increased sensitivity to it and knowing that makes me feel better in case I ever need it. Apparently I also have substantially increased odds of liver toxicity from the osteoarthritis drug Lumiracoxib. Not immediately useful, but good to know. Currently 23andMe lists 20 drug responses based on the SNPs they test and existing research.
According to this paper[1], prior work has already established that 42% of the dose variance is controlled by 3 SNPs. It isn't 100%, but 42% is not insignificant.
In January 2010 the FDA updated warfarin's label to say
that information on these variants can assist physicians in
selecting a starting dose of the drug. The agency also
provided initial dosage recommendations for patients with
different variant combinations. The FDA does not, however,
require that genetic testing be done before prescribing
warfarin.
There's actually a fairly decent chance that you do have a secure way to access your medical records online. About 38% of patients in the US have a record in an Epic (disclaimer: my employer) EMR system. If you're part of that population, chances are good that you have access to Epic's MyChart web portal [1]. Each organization brands this portal as their own so I recommend asking your doctor's front desk staff about it.
And more directly to the OP's point, Epic certainly was once a startup (3 employees 30 years ago, 5000 today) that has tackled some very big problems.
I don't refute that there are many more startups working on products that won't quite save the world, but is that such a bad thing? P.T Barnum was organizing circus acts while his contemporaries Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan were shifting the very foundation of our society (literally and figuratively). Doesn't mean Barnum doesn't have a legacy of his own though.
The industry is much different today than it was when Epic was small. Even established companies now struggle to keep their clients from migrating to Epic. Epic's ability to connect different hospitals and physician practices trumps most other functionality.
Instead of thinking of an MVP as a single _thing_, we just made things easy and called everything we did our "MVP" until we started doing recurring sales.