Doug Hirsch is one of the founders of DailyStrength. He used to be the VP of Product at Facebook and General Manager of Yahoo entertainment. He is currently the owner of another meaningful startup, AboutMyBaby.

For entrepreneurs with startup ideas not focused on revenue but rather, how they can impact people’s lives, what advice can you give to entrepreneurs on how best to build their startup?

You need to do something that you are passionate about and have a personal interest in. A startup is all consuming. With passion comes motivation.

A variety of skill sets are needed so you will need to have a solid team and partners to realize the idea.

For example on our team, we have a therapist, a mommy, and a growing group of advisers.

We believe in fostering personal relationships with not only professionals in the field but also people who understand the internet and believe in the power and impact of open sharing.

Founders that I have spoken to has told me on more than one occasion that with the advent of Web 2.0, it provides an inexpensive way to build your startup and does not require venture funding. On this note, do you have any remarks?

Initially, DailyStrength was self-funded by me.

There is enough open source software out there to test your idea really quickly by building an inexpensive site and testing the response from users. Only after you have touched upon something that resonates with users that you should start building your team and spending more money.

DailyStrength is one of the most meaningful sites I’ve seen on the internet today in how it aims to help people. A website as purposeful as this should be told to as many people as possible. How is DailyStrength letting the world know about what you guys are trying to do? How do you market?

Word of Mouth. As a social networking site, we put power in the hands of the people that use it. By building a support network of people that have similar medical conditions online, we believe that word of who we are, what we do, where we do it, why we do it, and how we do it can be proliferated to the masses.

Do you see DailyStrength as also being an avenue for introducing the effectiveness of alternative medicine such as acupuncture?

Absolutely. In fact, acupuncture is one of our more popular treatments.

We have a list of treatments. Treatments that people have had the most success with will bubble to the top.

We first started out thinking of building a database of treatments, types of surgery, and prescription drugs for specific conditions, but I realized that we were going about this the wrong way. We wanted to also build a community that could discuss the effectiveness of not just western medicine but also consider moving into other areas of healing such as eastern medicine, that may prove useful in certain cases.

In your search engine capabilities, does DailyStrength have the goal of sorting new members by communities and location? In other words, in the next 3-5 years does DailyStrength intend to also provide a medium whereby people within similar communities can meet?

Yes and wholeheartedly. At the end of December, we intend to launch a recommendations section. Where members, of their own accord, can provide their recommendations and locality.