Monday, September 9, 2013


I ended one of my earlier posts about competition with a note that I should meet with Mendor, another Finnish startup working to improve the lives of diabetics. So on Friday we had a meeting.

The main goal for the meeting was, at least for me, to find out how we could cooperate instead of competing. I've waited a long time for a chance to work with something I find fulfilling and meaningful, and want to use this opportunity in the best possible way. If someone else is already doing what I'm about to do, I'd rather let them do it and concentrate on something else instead. I've got many, many ideas on how to improve the life of a diabetic. I just need to select the one I think will create the most value, and work on that.

Of course, to find out whether Mendor are planning to do what I'm planning to do, we need to be able to share our plans. But if I have a great idea for a company or for a product, is it wise to share it?

First of all, I would hate to base all my work on just an idea, and the assumption that nobody else has had the same idea. I'll much rather think that our team is exceptionally capable of executing the plan, and will come up with the best implementation of the idea. But the first goal must be to share the work between everyone interested in working in this field, and to collaborate.

Second, you need to think about what a company secret actually is. During the summer, I read Blake Masters' essay versions of his class notes from CS183: Startup, a computer science course in Stanford University, lectured by Paypal founder Peter Thiel. Peter's definition of Secret is that it's the answer to the question What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

So, to find out what Mendor agree and disagree with me on, I think it's best for me at this phase to just tell them what I think and what I'm about to do, as openly as I possibly can. I was very happy to learn that they also discussed their plans quite openly. It must be harder for them in the sense that they already have so much implemented. They are not able to ditch their main idea right away and select something else instead. However, having been around longer and having built something already also gives them an edge, they are not so afraid of competition from some fresh startup.

It turned out we shared many sentiments about diabetics, but are targeting different user groups. They believe their approach with pair measurements is the winning one, and have their hands full of work to implement Mendor Balance around that idea. I agree that pair measurements are an important first step for a majority of diabetics, but know for a fact that for a diabetic like myself that information alone is not sufficient to get the treatment to the level I want to get it.

We agreed with Mendor to keep in touch, and also already tentatively discussed the technical and commercial aspects of my solution connecting to theirs in some point in the future. It's feasible, but first I need to show there is actual demand and use case for my approach.

For me, the simplified version of the important truth very few people agree with me on is that
  1. there is a significant group of diabetics that will benefit from seeing the data of all the aspects affecting their blood glucose levels in a single user interface, and that
  2. collecting all that data can be made easy enough so that these people will actually do it.


  1. MoI!
    So with this data-centris approach, I assume you've done your competition analysis right?

    1) Some clinics in Finland + way more in Sweden use Diasend (imports data from cgms/pumps/bg meters).
    2) Glooko is moving to this direction aswell (
    3) Dexcom bought this company called sweetspot in 2012, lets see what they will do with that purchase (Original sweetspot-startup was about data sharing)
    4) And then there is this Finnish startup myHealthway, who have some cool stuff coming up.

  2. Hi Karri,

    Many thanks for joining the conversation! I would say we're still in the middle of our market research, finding out who are our competitors and who could be our partners.

    For instance, since Mendor, Diasend, and Glooko all have implemented support for reading information from multiple glucose meters and monitors, we would prefer not to do that all over again, rather get one or all of the existing implementations to share either their technology or access to the data they gather.

    I realize this may be an overly idealistic approach and we'll need to see how it plays out. But I'd really like to see all the patient provided measurement data being fed to a system like Taltioni, and then all kinds of different services using that data.

  3. Yep, mendor/diasend/glooko had to solve this data-reading problem first, as interoperability/data standards are virtually non existent in the diabetes tech world. (Scott Hanselman wrote nice blog post about this Oh yes, there is stuff like Continua blood glucose profile for bluetooth le, but there are no devices in the market that use those.

    Also, taltioni is backed-up by relational database, not sure how well that model scales/adapts with time-series data (as an example dexcom g4 generates 288 datapoints daily, pump 10-20 ..). . But Yes, you are right, once you have the data, you can do interesting things with it(=Slogan Let the data work for you;)