John, I think what youāre doing is great, but what Iām talking about is a reasonably professional grade iPhone/android app like youād see from a typical app startup company, and I think it would take an investment of $500K to $1 Million to create,(and test, and iterate, and test and test) and really a year or two of dedicated work by a small team (depending on time commitment).
And part of the issue is that there isnāt a really good business case for an app that gathers data on longevity and biohacker interventions. So, it has to be a non-profit type of situation, funded by a group like Hevolution.
The key challenge/issue in all of these efforts is to make something that large numbers of people will adopt and use on a regular basis so that you get a large dataset of reasonably structured information on outcomes and input variables.
And you need a large number of users because Biohacker data is well-known to be a group of people that are really hard to trackā¦the data is really ādirtyā. Biohackers tend to try all sorts of different supplements or drugs, they change their dose frequency and usage patterns of these interventions frequently, so you need a large number of people so that you can separate the signal from the noise, in finding what treatments are actually effective, and what side effects are real.
Kevin Perrott (formerly of SENS) has started a project similar to what you are doing: Open Cures
The Platform In fact you might want to talk to him and use his platform in your biohacker effort with the XPRIZE, since his is a non-profit, I suspect heād give you the data you need from his platform.
The key issue is that its web-based, its a pain in the ass to get your data into it, and nobody is going to use it (or very small numbers of people). Kevinās a nice guy, but his work experience is a family snow mobile selling business in Canada, then he got into āLongevityā and studied biology, but he has no experience developing a App / or software platform that gets adopted by large numbers of people, and is continued to be used by large numbers of people years after launch.
I have worked in the Internet field for many yearsā¦ its really hard to develop something that large numbers of people will use for a long time (think years). Think about how many apps or websites you engage with over a period of years in an intensive wayā¦ perhaps a half dozen apps, out of the tens of thousands (millions of websites). And think about how much money likely went into developing and supporting that short list of websites and apps you actually have used for years? Typically weāre talking tens of millions of dollars if not moreā¦
It takes a lot of usability testingā¦ and optimization to make it really, really easy to gather the information you need from people without making it a burden for the user. Its really hard to make things easy, and still get the data you want.
We already get 15,000 to 25,000 people a month coming to this website, doubling every 6 months to a year, of people who are interested in longevityā¦ so I think moving from this to a RapamycinNews app/website combo has some potential. But its still really hard and a ton of work getting adoption of an app. There isnāt an obvious revenue model, so its basically a non-profit effort. And most apps and website failā¦ like 98% of themā¦ so its a risky use of someoneās time and effort.
