My goal with this project is to separate fluff from science when shopping for supplements. I am doing this in 3 steps:
1.) I index every supplement on the market (extract each ingredient, normalize by quantity)
2.) I index every research paper on supplementation (rank every claim by effect type and effect size)
3.) I link data between supplements and research papers
Earlier last year, I took pause on a project because I've ran into a few issues:
Legal: Shady companies are sending C&Ds letters demanding their products are taken down from the website. It is not something I had the mental capacity to respond to while also going through my studies. Not coincidentally, these are usually brands with big marketing budgets and poor ingredients to price ratio.
Technical: I started this project when the first LLMs came out. I've built extensive internal evals to understand how LLMs are performing. The hallucinations at the time were simply too frequent to passthrough this data to visitors. However, I recently re-ran my evals with Opus 4.5 and was very impressed. I am running out of scenarios that I can think/find where LLMs are bad at interpreting data.
Business: I still haven't figured out how to monetize it or even who the target customer is.
Despite these challenges, I decided to restart my journey.
My mission is to bring transparency (science and price) to the supplement market. My goal is NOT to increase the use of supplements, but rather to help consumers make informed decisions. Often times, supplementation is not necessary or there are natural ways to supplement (that's my focus this quarter – better education about natural supplementation).
Some things that are helping my cause – Bryan Johnson's journey has drawn a lot more attention to healthy supplementation (blueprint). Thanks to Bryan's efforts, I had so many people in recent months reach out to ask about the state of the project – interest I've not had before.
I am excited to restart this journey and to share it with HN. Your comments on how to approach this would be massively appreciated.
Some key areas of the website:
* Example of navigating supplements by ingredient https://pillser.com/search?q=%22Vitamin+D%22&s=jho4espsuc
* Example of research paper analyzed using AI https://pillser.com/research-papers/effect-of-lactobacillus-...
* Example of looking for very specific strains or ingredients https://pillser.com/probiotics/bifidobacterium-bifidum
* Example of navigating research by health-outcomes https://pillser.com/health-outcomes/improved-intestinal-barr...
* Example of product listing https://pillser.com/supplements/pb-8-probiotic-663
