Biz Op: Medical Supply Inventory Tracker

Discussions
#1

Hey Everyone,

Me again. Like in my first two posts here’s a business op that I thought the community might find interesting to discuss.

In the customers own words:

"I work in Health Care.

The biggest problem i have is searching for certain medical supplies. What departments have recently ordered said supplies, where i could find them.

I would 100% pay. Out of my own pocket even. As finding specific items, under urgent circumstances is definitely a pain point.

Typing the name of a specific item, medical supply, equipment into a computer. And a search coming back of what departments recently received or ordered such items. This would be instrumental in me searching, locating, acquiring a useful piece of equipment i would otherwise wouldn’t have been able to locate in time."

What do you think? Any ideas on how to execute?

Thanks,
Justin

2 Likes
#2

Justin’s on a roll. :slight_smile:

Great posts, man!

1 Like
#3

I always try to be cautious about suggesting something is a bad idea because you never know what might be unearthed with a little more digging. With that caveat in the bag however let’s rip!

My concerns here are

  1. How would you get the data required? Possibly there is a way you can get this which can be automated but I suspect there are myriad ways they order things done via a variety of untrackable methods (fax, phone, etc). If it is available and automatable is that going to be consistent between customers or will you need some custom work for each customer?
  2. How would you get future customers and is that something you want to do? Probably my personal preference for not wanting to spend time cold calling medical professionals trying to sell them something like this. Or indeed maintain it if it was installed locally. But is that how this would scale ultimately? And do you want to do that, or grow a team of people doing that?
  3. How much would they pay per month? I suspect the amount they would pay may be relatively low for the amount of effort involved in finding these customers. If you want to hire an inside sales team I think the monthly price needs to be around the $300 mark minimum (this is from a hazy memory rather than a source I have to hand)

If you wanted to validate this further I suppose you should dig in on the pricing and try to find out where the data is which you would need access to.

1 Like
#4

Thanks for your thoughts Robin, really good questions you’re asking there. I don’t have the answers, but one thing jumps out at me:

finding specific items, under urgent circumstances is definitely a pain point

If I was researching this op I would really dig into this to see what stakeholders this applies to and how much time/money it can save them.

For example, maybe it saves insurance companies thousands of dollars in avoiding complications. Maybe it saves hospitals law suits, etc.

Although not obviously bootstrap-able, perhaps it is an interesting funded (or at least investor backed) op.

#5

That’s a good line to focus on actually. I must admit I missed that as I kind of wrote the thing off as there were too many red flags for the sort of business I think I’d be happy building. Some part of my brain switches off when that happens :slight_smile:

It would be interesting to see how far up the organisation that pain was felt, it would certainly be nice to know you could charge the business for the cost of what you supply rather than have the individual offer to pay for it from their own pocket.

Looking forward to the next podcast to find out where you’ve been getting all these ideas from. And I take it this means you’ve got some time to spend on bootstrapping again?