Ask HN: How do you manage a startup that goes through a clinical trial?
I'm working with a university and government-backed NGO who want to deliver healthtech products backed by science. But the nature of the services means that they must go through 3-6 month clinical trials to prove their efficacy (and a further 6ish months of data analysis and reporting).
In startup world, we make an MVP, we test it on users, we get results and iterate, constantly testing and improving.
In psych clinical trial world, we create an intervention (let's say an app), we spend 2-3 months recruiting participants, then spend 3 months monitoring users without changing a single thing, to see whether the intervention is successful. Then we wrangle all the data and write a paper on it.
This means that you can't really change anything for months, but it also means that if you DO change things after the trial is over, there's a risk that the new product is no longer clinically valid.
Anyone dealt with this type of thing before?