lilouartz

Someone on Reddit suggested to make this data available via API and license it. This is genuinely an angle I didn't even consider.

Thank you –

With regards to your suggestions about attribution:

The whole premise of Pillser is that every single health claim of any sorts is backed by research papers.

Example:

Let's say you are exploring this probiotic:

https://pillser.com/supplements/spore-probiotic-6066

It makes claim that it helps with Reduced Abdominal Discomfort:

which then links to all the research papers that establish a relationship (or no relationship) between the ingredients in the supplements and the health claim:

https://pillser.com/health-outcomes/reduced-abdominal-discom...

which then links to the actual research papers:

https://pillser.com/research-papers/effect-of-the-probiotic-...

That's the core value proposition – every claim is either backed or dismissed by medical research.

I don't know how much more credibility I can add to the site.

A lot of the innovation happened in how we analyze every supplement by extracting the ingredients, normalizing them, and then doing the same with research papers. It has been a very exciting product to work on from the technical perspective. As far as I know, we are the only database to have this level of insight about the supplement market and research. However, it all does not matter if people cannot find it and use it.

I am in between of (1) Trying to get coverage and hopefully revitalizing the SEO (However, all attempts over the last 6 months didn't move the needle) (2) Finding a buyer who would benefit from the underlying technology. (3) Just reflecting on everything I've learned and moving to another project.

I am pretty stubborn so (1) is what I am pursuing, but it is hard to ignore the monetary loses. I was not thinking about it while the project was growing (I always thought I will grow it big and then monetize using referrals or by licensing the data), but that increasingly feels unlikely.

Just need advice from someone with more experience.

OMG you've noticed!

I was so proud when I came up with it, but I don't think anyone ever commented on it until now.

and I agree. It needs to catch on!

There is interesting context here. The first version of Pillser was focused on very narrow area of supplements, and specifically, supplements sold in the shape of pills (therefore the name "Pillser" [pill search]). However, it kinda snowballed from there, and powder substances were one of the last things I've added. The evals need to be expanded to have more examples specifically around powder substances. However, that's a fix I know how to implement and will prioritize.

Thank you for sharing the example that you've found!

I know Examine.com, and I've spoken to the founder a few times. I really appreciate what they are doing.

I am very open about how the site is planning to be monetized https://pillser.com/affiliate-disclosure

That's solid advice for most people in the Western world. K2 and magnesium are sensible choices–genuinely hard to get enough of through diet alone. The bigger problem is that most supplement sales are marketing-led. That's what pushed me to at least try to make the whole process more scientific.

That's the plan. I don't intend to own any stock. I want to focus on covering the broadest range of supplements across all of the marketplaces, having the richest data about them, and then focus on the affiliate revenue.

The affiliate revenue can be anywhere from 5% to 10% depending on the affiliate partner. Considering no overhead of support, inventory, or logistics, it's a pretty good deal for me, especially for now, while I'm still a solo founder.

I don't want to, and I don't plan to. At a time when this happened, I was deep in my studies preparing for exams, and I just remember thinking to myself, "I cannot afford to pull myself into what could become a legal matter" I am now in better position to allocate time and attention should such claims be made again.

That said, the couple of brands that were removed were not brands that I would have wanted anyone to buy anyway. Not much is lost by not having them on the website from the perspective of fulfilling customers' journeys of finding a good product.

I do like the suggestion made in one of the comments informing customers why some brands are not visible on the website. That warning might on its own deter others from making such claims.

Aspirin is not a supplement; it's a medication.

Consumer Labs is definitely the furthest ahead compared to everyone else. I've been using them for many years now.

I am more of a geek than a business shark, but when I was doing market research, I couldn't believe just how big some of the supplement marketplaces are. iHerb ($2nb+), Amazong ($8bn+), GNC ($2bn+), Vitamin Shoppe ($1bn+). However, it's a market that requires a lot of investment to enter (logistic/storage/support). I'm hoping I'm going to get my foot across the door by providing the most comprehensive solution for education, as well as discovering and comparing supplements across all of these marketplaces.

When you're typing things into search, you're using a freeform search which is going to match the ingredients based on the partial match.

If you want to look for the specific ingredients, you can do so by clicking on the "Ingredients" of the product example: Here are the links for the Vitamin D and D3. https://pillser.com/vitamins/vitamin-d and https://pillser.com/vitamins/vitamin-d3

There is even a Google Sheet that is generated based on the data that we have, although I just noticed that it's not updating properly, so I need to fix that.

I appreciate you letting me know. I can see it in Sentry as well. It's odd though, it looks like it's coming directly from React. There are no traces in my own codebase. I'll try to isolate it.

I think you've mistaken Vitamin D and Vitamin D3

https://pillser.com/search?s=dfbtbc9110&q=%22Vitamin+D3%22

The cheapest price on Pillser for D3 is $0.26/mg

That's true. US is a wild wild west in that regard. However, I am working next to clearly label which supplements have COA vs which are unverified.

That's my dream!

That's where I want to take this project.

At the moment, my focus is on what I can do by aggregating and analyzing the available data. Extracting ingredients, normalizing them, normalizing quantities across every supplement, etc. This has already proven to be a lot bigger undertaking than I could have imagined at the beginning of this journey. I had learn a lot about databases, scraping, LLMs, and evals. But it has been a tremendously fun (if sometimes overwhelming) journey.

First, I need to figure out how to monetize what I've built so far. And maybe I cannot, in which case I will start over. But I am trying to find my niche that people uniquely value. So far I found that there are is a pull from people chasing deals (e.g. finding products containing specific ingredients with the highest price per mcg) and people seeking for niche ingredients. This is not exactly the target audience I had in mind when building this, but I am glad they are finding value.

Evolving into performing actual lab tests and producing our own high-quality supplements is my dream.

I would love to get your feedback on what data to prioritize and how to make it easier to browse.

I've learned from my last sprint that this project can get overwhelming. So now I am making it my priority to build a community of people I can reach out to for feedback and direction. If supplements is your thing, I would greatly appreciate being able to chat with you from time to time (even if it just a quick email!)

I am at [email protected]

That's cool Didn't know it is capable of doing it!

Hey HN,

I've been working on this for just about a year.

My idea is pretty simple – I want to bring scientific proof to the supplement shopping process.

Too many products are sold with exaggerated claims or without any science backing.

I am doing two things to fix it:

I am using LLMs to index all scientific papers that mention different supplements. I then extract insights from those papers in relation to the supplement and summarize on a matrix of effect type relative to the health outcome and effect size, e.g. https://pillser.com/health-outcomes/enhanced-disease-resista....

I then index all ingredients of every supplement on the market, and then based on the composition of the ingredients, I surface the relevant scientific evidence to back or dismiss any health claims, e.g. https://pillser.com/vitamins/vitamin-b1

People are able to search products (https://pillser.com/search) by their desired health outcomes, dietary restrictions, and other attributes important when shopping for supplements.

The business model of Pillser is the affiliate revenue from the outbound links that take people to Amazon, etc.

Pillser has several hundred regular users that use it to ask questions when researching supplements. However, otherwise, the unexpected challenge has been that getting news users is nearly impossible because ranking for related keywords on Google is nearly impossible. So the growth has mostly stalled.

It's been my life's dream to build something in intersection of my interests – nutrition and AI. So I am excited to have built a product that is serving users. However, I am also debating what's the path forward, as the original idea of building a free to use product that starts making money from a large scale of affiliate sales seems to be a foggy dream given the current Google trends.

Proud to share what I have accomplished and would also love your feedback for how to move forward.

Ended up ditching Cloudflare for this use case https://pillser.com/engineering/2024-08-26-speeding-up-your-...

When I posted this on Reddit, there were a few exchanges in the comments that are worth copying over here because they touch important aspects of this project.

I am pasting those exchanges in their entirety below.

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> I don't think taking medical advice from an LLM on a website made to sell supplements is a good idea. Outside of the usual hallucinations, there is a clear conflict of interest.

Actually, I believe my platform addresses this concern effectively.

I've extensively covered the issues of LLM hallucinations and conflict of interest in these posts: [here](https://pillser.com/ai-powered-supplement-research-and-compa...), [here](https://pillser.com/about) and [here](https://pillser.com/affiliate-disclosure).

The primary goal of my platform is to provide easily accessible and an unbiased information source. There are so many bogus claims about various supplements propagated by social media. I'm tired of being recommended one supplement or another by gym bros who base their knowledge on Instagram reels. Reducing barriers to accessing information sourced from medical journals is a step in the right direction to prevent the spread of misinformation.

Unlike websites like iHerb that sell supplements directly, Pillser acts as an aggregator, finding the best prices across multiple vendors. We do not have a direct relationship with any vendors. Our affiliate proceeds come solely from referrals, not from the promotion of specific products or brands. This approach is an intentional choice to mitigate bias and ensure our recommendations are based on objective criteria.

The risk of hallucinations in AI-driven advice is real, and I acknowledge this concern. However, if you examine the documents I've linked, you'll see that this issue is taken very seriously on our platform. Unlike typical LLMs, Pillser employs a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) method. This ensures that responses are thought through, data suitability for citations is assessed, and all information is validated against multiple sources. Every fact presented by Pillser is cited, and we encourage users to conduct their own research to verify our information.

I firmly believe that AI will revolutionize personalized healthcare, making it possible for everyone to access instant, science-backed health advice for the first time in history. This transformation is inevitable—it's not a matter of if, but when. With Pillser, my goal is to be at the forefront of this movement, laying the groundwork for a future where accessible, personalized healthcare becomes a reality for all.

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> I think you are missing one piece of vital information is that the people accessing your gpt are not trained nutritionist, I will explain again.

You touched on two very different topics, so I will address them in separate comments, to allow them evolve as distinct conversations.

I think you are missing one piece of vital information is that the people accessing your gpt are not trained nutritionist, I will explain again.

In isolation, this is a legitimate concern.

However, it ignores that our target audience are people who would already today choose to do their own 'research' rather than talk to a nutritionalist. This can be because of low intent, cost, time, etc. Unfortunately, these type of endeavors will often end up with absorbing misinformation propagated by popular science websites/socials chasing audience or people spewing knowledge they obtained from Joe Rogan podcast and such. It's these folks that we want to help steer towards the scientifically backed information, not those that already can afford and choose to work with trained health professionals.

Finally, while I understood and hopefully have addressed your intended point, I also want to highlight that Pillser is being used by regular folks and professionals. I've personally onboarded several dozens of professional nutritionalists to Pillser to get their feedback, and their feedback is largely what has been moving the product forward.

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> If gpt can access that and then advice, it would make much more sense. > > But yes kudos on the job well done, and I also understand that adding what I mentioned is difficult but if you could do it then job well done.

This is what I am calling Pillser Health Card, and it is what I am spriting towards. The goal is to create user's profile that's aware of parameters such as their age, sex, fitness level, existing health conditions, etc. and use that information to provide highly personalized health advice.

There are some unique challenges to solving this problem that are not only product and health, but legal and compliance. Therefore, it is not something that will see the daylight soon. However, this is the ultimate goal of Pillser and the reason I started this website.