
Eloquis: Early in the market and targeted the wrong customer segment - nicoserdeir
https://failory.com/interview/eloquis
======
hbosch
I don't know if there is a lot of useful information to glean from this post,
but I did enjoy guessing about a few things that were (domain) name-related.

Under "What would you do differently?"

> I would definitely not put a lot of emphasis on domain name or invest a lot
> of money without researching the potential of the name.

I was tickled by this, because at the outset I was actually interested in
reading an article about the failure of a highly-marketed blood thinner of the
(almost exact) same name. I guess this guy probably learned it's hard to win
mindshare & SEO points when you're up against Pfizer, who owns Eliquis.com.

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jchallis
Not going to lie - first thought from headline was "how does a blood thinner
target the wrong customer segment?? Have you ever been to a coumadin clinic?"
And then I realized the issue.

~~~
roynal
Yes, hard lessons and the funny thing is we were oblivious to that name and
paid a lot to acquire the domain name.

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devit
After reading the article, I can't figure out what their product does at all
in practice.

Apparently it turns "hello user" into "Hello Bob, it’s great to meet you on a
wonderful December day" but it's not at all clear how that's packaged into
something that's useful and non-trivial.

That seems like it could have been one of the main problems.

~~~
roynal
Well, the example is a very simplistic one for the purpose of this interview.
The vision, if you could call it that, was to package other signals e.g.
weather, geography, and demography into personalizing a message. Having come
from a background of e-commerce I definitely know personalization has a
positive impact on cart values, engagement, and conversions. Considering all
of that our hope was that we would be that kind of a personalization software
for mobile apps.

~~~
devit
But how does that work in practice?

Does their system determine those signals or are they fed to it as input?

How can it possibly provide a generic solution to "personalizing a message"
that works across all apps and is not just something trivial like the example
in the interview?

On the web the kinds of "personalization" I can think of are public account
profiles, targeted advertisements, recommendation engines ("you may also
like...", "products like this...", etc.), algorithmic newsfeeds and history-
sensitive search. If their software does any of those, maybe they should just
say what it does.

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ravitation
> Our brand name was a disaster and most of the traffic that we got, for free,
> was looking for an alternate name called “Eliquis” a drug from Bayer. There
> was no way we would win the SEO game. We had no SEO strategy or any other
> ecosystem strategy to piggyback our marketing on.

First thought was definitely to the blood thinner... Which is an interesting
commentary on the state of direct to consumer pharmaceutical marketing in the
United States...

~~~
roynal
Absolutely the blood thinner won and it's a hard lesson that we learned.

~~~
ravitation
My point was not so much about losing a battle over name recognition, that's
something that happens relatively all the time. I mean specifically losing it,
even to the general public that isn't on blood thinners (like myself), to a
blood thinner. In a lot of developed countries, where direct to consumer
pharmaceutical advertising isn't legal this obviously would not have
happened...

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notyourday
If I may be so bold:

TL; DR: "I spent 20k on writing code"

Why?

Because there's not a single sentence that I read addresses the most important
question for any bootstrapped $THING:

* why would anyone want to pay me for this $THING.

~~~
roynal
You bring up a good question. The $ amount while painful was spent over
getting some design work,domain name etc... The value we thought the product
would add was to make apps more engaging. Personalization is a big deal in
e-commerce world and I naturally translated that as a consequence to mobile
app - I do realize that was a mistake. So yeah, we definitely expected to get
paid for such a service.

~~~
notyourday
> Personalization is a big deal in e-commerce

That's a claim that is not backed up by anything. Most personalized service
one can get is in boutique non-ecommerce companies. Those companies are
struggling.

That in turn means that personalization at this time is a _gospel_.

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akanet
To the interviewee: Having learned these lessons, why are you uh, making the
"Product Hunt for Marketing Tools" next? Have you applied your learnings from
the failure of Eloquis? This seems like an even harder segment to make money
in.

~~~
roynal
Yes the lessons learned here were translated. As of now the product hunt for
marketing is a place for discovery and we realize that our new model will
build a community and we have to build active monetization around value-based
product around the same premise - yes product hunt for marketing won't make
money by itself.

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boffinism
I hadn't come across failory.com. Like autopsy.io - with multiple sites like
this around, it seems like we rather like revel in failure...

~~~
icebraining
I believe the father of them all is
[http://fuckedcompany.com/](http://fuckedcompany.com/) by
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud)

Reading how others failed is a good way to avoid failing the same way. At
least your failure will be original!

------
lettergram
Interesting, he recommends the book:

> The Black Swan - The Impact of the Highly Improbable: Achieve deep thinking
> and not arrive to simplistic explanation.

When I first read that in 2013 it spurred my interest, which eventually lead
to my current company:

[https://projectpiglet.com/](https://projectpiglet.com/)

The goal of which is to actually "identify" black swan events. The premise of
a black swan is that you can't predict it, but I'd argue that quite often in a
world of several billion people - someone has predicted it (typically those
most in the know).

Anyway, it's a good book and I've actually been using the system I built
([https://projectpiglet.com/](https://projectpiglet.com/)) recently to watch
the decline in hype around cryptocurrencies. Which just goes to show, as the
author notes - you can often be too early (or late) to the game and it makes
all the difference.

