TO LEARN A NEW MARKET, START BY BUILDING YOUR PRODUCT

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

Othman Laraki left Twitter to build a $250 genetic test because the one that could have saved his grandmother cost $4,000. He knew nothing about healthcare but figured the technology was simple enough. After two years of talking to doctors and insurance companies, he learned that healthcare doesn't work like normal markets - even if you make something 90% cheaper, insurance companies can't buy more of it from just you because doctors want tests from specific labs, so they restrict the whole category instead. The cheap test was the wrong product anyway. Big employers who actually pay for healthcare don't want to buy individual tests, they want to cut their cancer costs by millions. So Laraki built a virtual cancer clinic instead, which is now worth a billion dollars. Most technical people think everyone before them was incompetent, but usually those people were just responding to incentives you don't understand yet.