Ooh nevermind examples of low-impact VC businesses, I like that example even more.
You can improve the healthcare of over 500,000 Americans by successfully outcompeting the nation's primary healthcare communications and recordkeeping technology: Mk1 Reprocessed Wood Pulp. If you think that glorified data entry doesn't improve healthcare, you're optimizing for sexy but not really optimizing for impact.
A similarly unsexy problem is making sure people actually come to the doctor's office by telephoning them to remind them to come to the doctor's office. (The folks who most urgently need to be at the doctor's office are least capable of successfully making that happen without outside assistance.) This is approximately 2% a technical problem, 3% a compliance problem, and 95% a sales problem.
You're welcome to your own guesstimate of whether one can hit 500,000 patients served without taking VC funding. I have my own guesstimate.
This post brought to you by the letters N, D, and A and the number $LOTS.
Changing the medium (dead wood to electrons) will not IMHO make a difference.
However the "unsexy" problem you mention is an excellent example. I wouldn't call it unsexy. It's something that would be nice and interesting, even if low on technical complexity, and there is a clear and mesurable outcome.
You can improve the healthcare of over 500,000 Americans by successfully outcompeting the nation's primary healthcare communications and recordkeeping technology: Mk1 Reprocessed Wood Pulp. If you think that glorified data entry doesn't improve healthcare, you're optimizing for sexy but not really optimizing for impact.
A similarly unsexy problem is making sure people actually come to the doctor's office by telephoning them to remind them to come to the doctor's office. (The folks who most urgently need to be at the doctor's office are least capable of successfully making that happen without outside assistance.) This is approximately 2% a technical problem, 3% a compliance problem, and 95% a sales problem.
You're welcome to your own guesstimate of whether one can hit 500,000 patients served without taking VC funding. I have my own guesstimate.
This post brought to you by the letters N, D, and A and the number $LOTS.