<story><title>I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea</title><url>https://tjcx.me/p/i-wasted-40k-on-a-fantastic-startup-idea</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sillysaurusx</author><text>With all the negative pushback this is getting, it’s making me think he was onto something. The exact same criticisms would apply to Airbnb, for example. “They have not the slightest idea how the hotel industry works. This is a very professional industry with a lot of legal hurdles...”</text></item><item><author>Gatsky</author><text>This article was posted before several years ago. The whole premise is bumptious - &amp;quot;I can copy data out of a bunch of papers [which I am in no position to screen for quality or relevance], run a canned &amp;#x27;gold standard&amp;#x27; analysis in R [the idea that there is one true way to generate valid data is ridiculous], and then go tell the professionals what they are doing wrong.&amp;quot; He even brags that his meta-analysis for depression had more papers than the published one, as if this was a valid metric. The Cipriani meta-analysis he cites was publised in February 2018. His meta-analysis was done in July 2018, and had 324 more papers - what explains this difference, other than obviously sloppy methodology. A proper meta-analysis is a lot of work, researchers spend years on one meta-analysis. The whole concept is ill conceived, and the author is too caught up in themselves to even realise why.&lt;p&gt;Meta-analyses are a good idea, but the mere presence of a meta-analysis does not denote a useful undertaking. The literature is polluted with thousands of meta-analyses. As far as I can see this is mainly because there is software available which lets almost anyone do it, and once someone else has done a meta-analysis it is much easier to do another one because they have already found all the papers for you. The publication rate of meta-analyses far outstrips the publication rate of all papers, and shows some unusual geographic variation (Fig 2) [1].&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;systematicreviewsjournal.biomedcentral.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;10.1186&amp;#x2F;s13643-018-0819-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;systematicreviewsjournal.biomedcentral.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>nickjj</author><text>That was a fun read. I wish the author mentioned how much he was trying to sell the service for. It could have been $59 a month or $599 a month and with doctors you could potentially expect the same answer.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not a psychologist but some of the author&amp;#x27;s quoted text came off extremely demeaning in written form. If the author happens to read this, did you really say those things directly to them?&lt;p&gt;For example, Susan (psychologist) was quoted as saying:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Oh sure! I mean, I think in many cases I&amp;#x27;ll just prescribe what I normally do, since I&amp;#x27;m comfortable with it. But you know it&amp;#x27;s possible that sometimes I&amp;#x27;ll prescribe something different, based on your metastudies.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;To which you replied:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;And that isn&amp;#x27;t worth something? Prescribing better treatments?&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Imagine walking into the office of someone who spent the last ~10 years at school and then potentially 20 years practicing their craft as a successful psychologist and then you waltz in and tell them what they prescribe is wrong and your automated treatment plan is better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>Just because people think an idea is bad is doesn&amp;#x27;t mean it&amp;#x27;s a billion dollar startup idea. Indeed, most ideas people think are bad &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; actually bad - it&amp;#x27;s only the few outliers that are actually successful. Even then I think there is a ton of mythologizing around this idea that the founders were able to see something nobody else did, usually to make the founders look like some sort of diamond-in-the-rough geniuses, when in reality what they built was just a natural evolution of tech that existed at the time (successful founders usually just execute better and faster than others).&lt;p&gt;I mean, despite all stuff I&amp;#x27;ve heard on HN about how a lot of big VCs passed on AirBnB, when I first heard of it it seemed like a very natural evolution from sites like Couch Surfing and VRBO that had existed for years.</text></comment>
<story><title>I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea</title><url>https://tjcx.me/p/i-wasted-40k-on-a-fantastic-startup-idea</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sillysaurusx</author><text>With all the negative pushback this is getting, it’s making me think he was onto something. The exact same criticisms would apply to Airbnb, for example. “They have not the slightest idea how the hotel industry works. This is a very professional industry with a lot of legal hurdles...”</text></item><item><author>Gatsky</author><text>This article was posted before several years ago. The whole premise is bumptious - &amp;quot;I can copy data out of a bunch of papers [which I am in no position to screen for quality or relevance], run a canned &amp;#x27;gold standard&amp;#x27; analysis in R [the idea that there is one true way to generate valid data is ridiculous], and then go tell the professionals what they are doing wrong.&amp;quot; He even brags that his meta-analysis for depression had more papers than the published one, as if this was a valid metric. The Cipriani meta-analysis he cites was publised in February 2018. His meta-analysis was done in July 2018, and had 324 more papers - what explains this difference, other than obviously sloppy methodology. A proper meta-analysis is a lot of work, researchers spend years on one meta-analysis. The whole concept is ill conceived, and the author is too caught up in themselves to even realise why.&lt;p&gt;Meta-analyses are a good idea, but the mere presence of a meta-analysis does not denote a useful undertaking. The literature is polluted with thousands of meta-analyses. As far as I can see this is mainly because there is software available which lets almost anyone do it, and once someone else has done a meta-analysis it is much easier to do another one because they have already found all the papers for you. The publication rate of meta-analyses far outstrips the publication rate of all papers, and shows some unusual geographic variation (Fig 2) [1].&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;systematicreviewsjournal.biomedcentral.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;10.1186&amp;#x2F;s13643-018-0819-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;systematicreviewsjournal.biomedcentral.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>nickjj</author><text>That was a fun read. I wish the author mentioned how much he was trying to sell the service for. It could have been $59 a month or $599 a month and with doctors you could potentially expect the same answer.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not a psychologist but some of the author&amp;#x27;s quoted text came off extremely demeaning in written form. If the author happens to read this, did you really say those things directly to them?&lt;p&gt;For example, Susan (psychologist) was quoted as saying:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Oh sure! I mean, I think in many cases I&amp;#x27;ll just prescribe what I normally do, since I&amp;#x27;m comfortable with it. But you know it&amp;#x27;s possible that sometimes I&amp;#x27;ll prescribe something different, based on your metastudies.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;To which you replied:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;And that isn&amp;#x27;t worth something? Prescribing better treatments?&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Imagine walking into the office of someone who spent the last ~10 years at school and then potentially 20 years practicing their craft as a successful psychologist and then you waltz in and tell them what they prescribe is wrong and your automated treatment plan is better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wartijn_</author><text>Aren&amp;#x27;t you falling for the survivorship bias trap? Sure, people have said that about Airbnb. But I think there are loads of that startups that failed because they didn&amp;#x27;t understand the industry they were in, or because of legal hurdles.</text></comment>