[kylen]

There was a reddit thread about this article yesterday and it was filled with people who were suddenly able to find their medication for orders of magnitude cheaper. This meant that for some it made an immediate and significant financial difference to their lives, and for others it meant access to medication they could not previously afford. In some cases reading this article was being described as "life saving".

This is very interesting but not because Cuban's business model is unique. It suggests that this group, who are probably a bit more net savvy on average, were not aware of other similar businesses like GoodRX.

This implies that there is a highly in demand product (cheap medication) but the problem is awareness, so it's a marketing challenge. Cuban is very well positioned to solve this problem by using his personal brand and tools like these PR articles.

This is a good thing! He has the brand, marketing chops and resources to drive it forward. It will increase the size of the market, meaning more people have access to life changing affordable medication. This may spawn more clones of the business model, further increasing the market size, rinse repeat. If this market gets big enough maybe it will apply pressure for change upstream? That would be a great thing.

Here on HN we are heavily weighted in our thinking towards the value of product in business (which is normally undervalued) and that is great, but examples like this reveal a real blind spot. Sometimes the value of something like marketing is forgotten or even worse dismissed. But they're extremely powerful tools when used correctly. Apply good marketing to a good product and you have Apple.

[lelandfe]

> were not aware of other similar businesses like GoodRX

There are folks in this thread alone finding CostPlus prescriptions for significantly less than GoodRx.

Your tone is dismissive - how confident are you that Cuban’s pricing is not actually cheaper, and is just glitz?