This post goes against most every theory this forum promotes!

[Homebody]

Having been in the medical industry for about 30 years now, I am dying to know what your idea is. If has something to do with bar reading, that is already being done to input charges, or patient demographics into the computer. The radiology dept uses a bar code before the doctor dictates and the info pops up for us to transcribe.

Cuirouser and curiouser....

[greedy4chips]

Your an idiot. Period.

Start the blog. Please do. Tell me what it is. I want to watch you crash and burn like this idiot: iamfacingforclosure.com

You dream big but your plan lacks a lot. You also put a date on your failure. Lets assume that you've got the best program in the world, it takes time to adopt and implement new programs. This requires shifts in business logic, etc. I would give yourself more time for success.


Good luck! Please create a blog!

This is the type of response I expected. I have read thru his website before and I would agree that I could face a similar outcome. My family is financially able to have no income besides my long term disability of $4k per month. In addition we have about 9 months of living expenses in savings that will not be touched for the purpose of funding our business.

Yes I do dream big, but that is only in relation to the unbelievable response from the industry about our product. I cannot explain it fully to you, yet. I can only say that we have a product that the medical industry needs, wants, and is already asking us for it.

The timeframe is simply a window of opportunity for us. If for whatever reason we cannot get everything in place to run our business properly then we will try to sell the program (concept) to a company/buyer.

We have a software company in town that started 20 years ago very similar to us and they are willing to help us with whatever we need. They do software for schools, but the owner thinks we have a great idea.


Homebody-- I will certainly let you know exactly what our program does when we are ready. I will also talk to disneysteve to see what exactly he does in the medical field.


Thanks everyone for your responses, good or bad they are respected.

[Ini_g]

Dream Big! Take action with care.

[Ini_g]

The money

Money is a dangerous issue, for now

[Ima saver]

Well, I certainly could live on an income of $4000 a month, so live your dream!! Good luck!!

[cbmeeks]

Too much risk.

Granted, risk is sometimes what you have to do but as a programmer myself, can't you work a "normal" job and do the medical gig on the side?

And I would NEVER take cash on a CC for a startup (or anything...we are CC free now). You miss ONE payment towards the end of that 10 months and they can back-date all interest. Then that $5000 becomes MUCH more. Why not take the real job and save $5000 towards your company?

best of luck!

cbmeeks

[greedy4chips]

Why not take the real job and save $5000 towards your company?

Trust me that is and has been a huge consideration. The real job is 9 hrs per day plus 15 minutes commuting each way Mon thru Fri. Get home eat supper and spend some time with the kids before bed and that leaves me with about 2 hours per day to work on this program.

Real job requires me to learn another language and their coding standards, which they expect some outside of work learning to be done.

I have around $80k that could be put towards this business tomorrow if I had to. Our problem is my partner (who had the original concept) has virtually no cash and only a 581 credit score (she has done almost everything in her past with cash only and just purchased a house for $67,000). The bank said her credit score will jump quite abit in 1 year, but we don't believe we have 1 year to wait.

Financially my wife and I are set to make our payments for many many months before we would need a "real job". We accomplished this by paying off all our debts except the house and saving a pile of cash along with my $4k/month disability income.

At this point in time we believe we have a product that is very sellable and we need to take it to market. In fact we have not heard of one person in the medical industry who is convinced our product is not viable and sellable.

I am in the process of finalizing the project so that we can demonstrate it to potential customers/investors. We are also looking at installing it into to clinics so they can "test" it. I can "test" it all day, but having two clinics attest to its usability and cost-effectiveness is our goal. Programmers and users have two completely different views on what is the most beneficial way to capture data and our testing will help catch any concerns from the user's perspective.

[autoxer]

This is the point where you all cringe!

We plan to finance our start up by securing 2-$5000 CC at 0%. We are counting on this to sustain us until we are able to get our first sale, additional funding (bank), or we simply go bust! My partner will continue to work in the medical field and I will be our only "employee" until more are needed.

I have around $80k that could be put towards this business tomorrow if I had to.

It doesn't seem as risky knowing that you don't need to charge it on your credit card.

Good luck!

[saver25]

starting a new business - health insurance issues

Good luck with your new venture. Although, I agree with some of the other posters that it could be a little more prudent to put in some long hours at first while working 2 jobs before you go solo (without having made 1 sale).

That being said - don't get discouraged and work hard!

As for your health insurance options - you may want to inquire if you will be offered COBRA health insurance or maybe even be HIPAA health insurance eligible as those are things that you will need to know (especially if anyone in your family has health issues that would prevent them from being approved for a regular individual health insurance plan).

Here is also a good self employed health insurance article that goes over some of the basic things that you need to ask yourself before you take the big "self employed leap". Good luck!

[cbmeeks]

Trust me that is and has been a huge consideration. The real job is 9 hrs per day plus 15 minutes commuting each way Mon thru Fri. Get home eat supper and spend some time with the kids before bed and that leaves me with about 2 hours per day to work on this program.

Not trying to be a "one-upper", but I work from 7:30 - 5:30 (9 hours), 1 hour commute (30 each way), get home, clean, cook, spend time with family and I get on my computer between 8 - 9 PM M-F and stay on about 2-4 hours. It's very hard but nothing worth having is easy.

Real job requires me to learn another language and their coding standards, which they expect some outside of work learning to be done.

At work, I use C#, T-SQL and ASP.NET. At home, I am learning PHP,MySQL and Python. For hobbies, I am active in 6502 ASM and SX ASM. I love learning languages. :-) And, I'm pretty good at most of them (not to brag...lol)

I have around $80k that could be put towards this business tomorrow if I had to. Our problem is my partner (who had the original concept) has virtually no cash and only a 581 credit score (she has done almost everything in her past with cash only and just purchased a house for $67,000). The bank said her credit score will jump quite abit in 1 year, but we don't believe we have 1 year to wait.

Credit score, schmedit score. I have no idea what my credit score is and I could care less. I am starting my new business as well. Last month, I paid $28 in my business expenses. I take advantage of open source (Python, etc) and cheap computers (for servers). You CERTAINLY don't want to do any kind of co-signing or lending money. If I had $80k (in CASH) I would plop 100% of that towards debt.

Financially my wife and I are set to make our payments for many many months before we would need a "real job". We accomplished this by paying off all our debts except the house and saving a pile of cash along with my $4k/month disability income.

Well, sounds like you are on the right track. Why not pay off the house or close to it? Out of that 80k, I would take all but 6-10 months of living expenses and devote to debt. If you have ZERO payments, it won't take long to build up that 80K.

At this point in time we believe we have a product that is very sellable and we need to take it to market. In fact we have not heard of one person in the medical industry who is convinced our product is not viable and sellable.

I am in the process of finalizing the project so that we can demonstrate it to potential customers/investors. We are also looking at installing it into to clinics so they can "test" it. I can "test" it all day, but having two clinics attest to its usability and cost-effectiveness is our goal. Programmers and users have two completely different views on what is the most beneficial way to capture data and our testing will help catch any concerns from the user's perspective.

For every product that is sell-able, there are one million that are not. I know I'm being the pessimist here, but I just want you to hear some "argumentative criticism".

Now, don't get me wrong, there is a great glory in taking a huge risk and seeing the giant rewards. And I certainly wish you the best. I'm just hoping you won't loose your shirt. :-)

So please, don't take offense. I assume if you didn't want my kind of "opinion" then you wouldn't have asked in a public message board. :-)

I think I would give it a year, work full time and grow your business part time. Or, at the least, take a part-time job at night or weekends so that you have SOME cash coming in.

Let me tell you a QUICK story. I worked for a small computer company that was stable, but not growing. We did networking and repairs and barely paid the bills. My boss (the owner) decided to merge with some retired CFO that had some money to toss around. They started a web-based company. They had NO FREAKING IDEA how to run a web based company. Maybe I don't either, but I know you can't charge $18,000 for a 10 page static website!!! (the poor sap actually paid them that kind of money).

Anyway, the CFO started flinging cash around. New furniture, new this, new that. One year later the company closed it's doors. I was out of a job and the new owners just labeled it as an "acceptable loss".

So, unless you have lots and lots of money where you can consider a year's pay as an "acceptable loss" then I would grow the business slowly.

Anyway, that's just my advice...one programmer to another. :-)

And remember, my advice is sometimes worth what you paid for it. lol

cbmeeks

[mom-from-missouri]

If no one went after their dreams, we'd have no electric, no phones, no cars, no modern medicine..
Go for it!