
Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup? - ThomPete
Instead of always looking for ideas, lets try and ask this:
What problem in your industry would be a successful startup if someone decided to solve it?
======
darksaints
Anybody who can solve fully international import and export customs regulatory
compliance will be an easy multi-billionaire.

The market size for international trade logistics is staggering...you have at
least a hundred global logistics providers with market caps over $10B, and
more than a handful of which are in the $>100B territory. And they have
trillions in revenue combined. And they are in a capital intensive industry on
low margins, and they dump tens of billions every year buying companies that
can give them slightly better competitive advantages. And they ALL suck at
regulatory compliance.

But here is the bigger secret: The _direct monetary cost of compliance isn 't
the big pain_. What these companies pay for is delay reduction. Customs delays
can drastically affect end-to-end SLAs, have a huge impact on customer loyalty
(If your shitty compliance led to my product being held in port for a month, I
will never use you again), and they have massive impacts on capital
utilization due to how difficult it is to plan in the face of seemingly random
customs delays. For an industry that is judged on Wall Street almost purely
based on capital utilization (return on capital), you can bet your ass that
every single one of those companies will be throwing as much money at you as
they can.

~~~
thedogeye
We started Flexport.com (YC W14) for exactly this reason. It's a very hard
business but we've found that we're surrounded by boundless opportunity to
solve important problems in every direction. Would love to connect to learn
more about your experience and see if there's an opportunity to get you
involved in some way. Email me: ryan@flexport.com

~~~
meat_fist
My father just started a consulting company relating to logistics, he has 20
years experience in high volume transport. Would you be interested in speaking
with him? I can shoot him an email to see if he'd be interested in working
with you.

Just a thought.

~~~
thedogeye
Sure, would love to meet your dad. Please intro.

------
gargarplex
One-to-many supplier registration.

We manufacture ductwork products for heavy industry (sugar mills, power
generation). Each company has its own supplier registration process for
procurement, usually it involves entering our company's basic financial info,
customer and project references list, etc. into some kind of custom Java web
application.

There should be just one place that asks us to enter our DUNS number, our tax
id, upload our W8BEN form, our ISO certificate, our company contacts, our
references, our company financials, etc. and then mass-submit to all supplier
registration forms within the industries we want to target.

This is a really simple business problem with a clear technical solution.
Honestly you could just solve it by:

\- WuFoo form to collect the company's information

\- Excel spreadsheet to list the vendor registration portal URLs for each
company, with different industries in different tabs

\- Human labor to go through and find the data from WuFoo and plug it into
each supplier registration webapp.

You could make money on a pay-per-registration model. All that would be
required would be a simple portal for users to see the progress of each
supplier registration application. It's basically CRUD.

Maybe some ambitious company would try to innovate by building the One
supplier portal to rule them all, but for now, this is an opportunity for a
quick win & a business that could be run for cash.

~~~
roneesh
I'll second this, before becoming a programmer I was a mechanical engineer in
piping, we have tons of inefficiencies like this still. Partly it's that the
people who run these industries are comfortable to keep using fax and e-mail,
but another issue is that companies often don't have access to good technical
knowledge to pick the right tool or develop better ones. Huge opportunity
here.

~~~
ZoFreX
I've looked into this issue specifically for piping, as it happens. From my
perspective one of the issues with 'solving' this is basically:
[https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

At the place I worked we had 3 different supplier databases, each one having
been introduced to replace the last, which was never fully phased out.

~~~
roneesh
Definitely an issue! We try half baked things and they just stick around. On
the other end of the spectrum, once something works, it's kept around forever.
It's interesting, this industry seems ripe for disruption, but it hasn't
happened yet. I think maybe because we think any tool will do, when in reality
we need a 10X tool like any other industry. Also, your customers are people
who are far less computer savvy than other groups, so UI/UX issues are
paramount.

------
valarauca1
Big Data in the Automotive Test Industry

Ever log every single sensor output (as well as 200 more) every 50ms of a
vechile over an 18 hour road test while recording audio and thermal video from
2 dozen different points? How about on fleet of 40 vehicles daily, for 2
months, in the middle of Alberta or Death Valley.

Have a good way of querying, analyzing, processing, and securing all this time
series data in a way that can handle literally getting >100TB per hour? And
can keep up with the expected geometric growth? (I've got a decent solution
for this actually currently needs to be vetted). (Also security has to
provided on a per-channel basis, not per-test, T1/T2 companies need access to
their test data, but not global data).

Contact me. I'm a member of the ASAM standards committee that recently met to
discuss how basically every auto-producer and tier 1 has NO CLUE how do
implement this. And easily 2 dozen companies are just waiting to throw money
at this problem.

Currently one doesn't exist, and the solutions that do exist manage paths to
raw data blobs, not actual records/data points.

~~~
luckydata
I could go on for hours about all of this, but long story short, I'm the head
of product of a company that builds a data system designed exactly to handle
this kind of scenarios (we provide data collection services to Pioneer to
mention one).

Feel free to get in touch.

~~~
luckydata
forgot to add a link:
[https://vimeo.com/122691639#at=0](https://vimeo.com/122691639#at=0)

~~~
valarauca1
Called into the company, and I suggest looking into an operator. If you press
0, you just keep repeating the same menu. Submitted an information request.

------
bradfa
Knowing what certifications are required and optional for a given physical
product and how much it is going to cost to get said product certified for
sale in a given country (like FCC, CE, CCC, etc) and how much optional
certifications cost (UL, ETL, etc).

Right now the process is pretty much that you (or someone you pay) have to do
a ton of reading and become an expert in import/export and RF law for any
given country which you wish to sell or distribute a physical product in. Then
you have to get written quotes from a few vendors who you find that actually
do said testing and generally the test houses are just test houses, they don't
necessarily know the laws of each country they just know how to run the tests
and issue you a report, which can take weeks, at best (or you just go to the
local place and it costs what it costs). But _you_ have to know what tests to
ask for.

There should just be a simple one-stop online form that you fill in your
product's information and get an instant quote back with each country in the
world and what's required for your product along with instant quotes (price
and lead time) for each of those certifications. Then, you can check box all
the certifications you want right now (likely with discounts if you pick more
than one, so a live-updating pricing matrix will be useful here, and a live
world map highlighting countries which you can sell in) and pay via credit
card for the certifications themselves. You get in return a mailing label to
ship your prototype device to the testing company along with instructions on
how the testing company uses your device so they can test it.

The actual testing can be contracted out to 3rd parties. This could just be a
broker, but it would have to be a broker that knows the rules of the world and
can express those rules in a straight forward way along with instant pricing.
The prices don't need to be _the best_ prices, they just need to be straight
forward and competitive.

~~~
compumike
As an engineer & founder going through this process right now for our product
[https://www.pantelligent.com/](https://www.pantelligent.com/) , I understand
the pain acutely. (We'll be doing a blog post about our experiences; just
waiting for the testing & certification to wrap up.) It feels a bit like
incorporation lawyers before
[https://www.clerky.com/](https://www.clerky.com/) existed -- something that
should be a fairly standardized process for 10^2 dollars rather than a mostly
custom process for 10^4 dollars.

However, my experience with the test house has been different: (1) they
actually do provide the knowledge and experience with regards to your specific
product and needs, (2) it takes a bunch of conversation and bi-directional
education to get the manufacturer and the test house on the same page, and (3)
it's still fairly unique to each product. For example, we had to build custom
firmware and custom hardware _just for the testing process_. (Remember, this
isn't dealing with an efficient marketplace; this is dealing with multi-
country government regulations that are designed by big companies to erect
barriers to entry for smaller competitors.) And the volumes and willingness-
to-pay from small hardware startups are low, and the test houses make most of
their money from bigger companies that do more product variations, more
iterations, etc., which requires relationship building, rather than a one-stop
online form.

So, while I'd really like your version to exist as a customer, unfortunately I
don't believe it's a match for what most of the hardware testing market looks
like.

~~~
bradfa
In my experience, the hard part isn't contracting for testing to be done (so
long as you know what tests you need, hence chicken and egg so providing what
tests are usually needed is key), it's solving the problems which present
themselves during testing. Just getting the right tests quoted for 80% of
products out there can fit into a page or two of drop-downs and check boxes.
Most things fit into some reasonable categories, but maybe another service
this broker could provide would be that if you select something that could
open a can of worms (like if you are making a radio transmitter in a non-ISM
band) that it presents a big yellow warning with tons of info on the traps
you're about to fall into.

Obviously the broker I describe can't know everything about your product and
market segment and customers and said laws that would apply, but 80% of the
time, there's nothing unique to a product from a regulatory point of view,
someone already has a product which falls under very similar guidelines. For
example, if you don't have a radio transmitter, the types of tests you have to
do for FCC are pretty straight forward. And if you do have a radio transmitter
in an ISM band, again the tests are pretty cookie cutter. And if you aren't AC
mains connected and don't have any voltages above X VDC then UL low voltage
testing is easy. Lots of products would fall into these categories.

It's when you venture out into niche market segments with radio transmitters
that you really need to know what you're doing and not rely on a test house or
broker (besides, your company is liable no matter how much info the test house
or broker can provide you with).

Yeah, if you're making a cell phone or fancy internet of things radio device,
this isn't a necessarily a service for you. But if you're taking an arduino-
like prototype and turning it into a real product or making a new USB charger
or a keyboard or computer input device or ..., then it could fit quite well I
think.

------
jakejake
Having dealt with health problems this past year, I would love to see somebody
write something that simplifies the voodoo going on between health care
providers and insurance companies. Even though they both have online portals
these days, trying to reconcile and make sense of the two systems is
infuriating.

~~~
Wonderdonkey
Related to this, I was listening to an NPR program recently that tackled the
question: If your pet's doctor can give you a list of pricing options before
you decide on treatment, why can't your own doctor do that for you?

The answer was that our doctors are disconnected from the costs of treatment
because they can't be expected to know every possible charge for every
different insurance plan (what the patient would have to pay for procedures,
medicine, support staff [anesthesiologists who are out of network, for
example], devices [pacemakers, wrist splints, artificial hips, etc.], lab
fees, etc.). So why not something that can bring that information to them?

This would be a benefit not just to consumers but to insurance companies as
well, and that's where the money would be.

Feel free to cut me in on the action.

~~~
thetylerhayes
Directionally correct but slightly off. Vets don't memorize all that either;
they also use EMRs.

The difference is in insurance: 1\. You pay directly for your pet's care. Your
vet gets the money. No in-between to obscurify the money. 2\. You pay
insurance for your own care, and your doctor bills your insurance. Your
doctor's EMR might know the insurance cost, but that cost can still change.
And there are lots of middlemen in billing processing in healthcare, so it's
not an accurate representation of reimbursement anyway.

There are quite a few startups trying to remedy this in various ways. Most of
them focus on data transparency; they try to aggregate and publicly list all
the direct pay costs for different doctors. The problem with that remains the
same: most people don't have the precedent in their head of paying for
healthcare, so they don't want to pay direct.

Not impossible to fix. Someone certainly will. Probably orthogonally, like how
Slack is unbundling email. But the tech barrier is small compared to the
social barrier.

Would be pretty sweet if someone was able to map out all insurance costs
though, even to 90% consistency. Hooo boy that would be sweet.

------
fillskills
Advertizing - Everyone is trying to get more and more information about the
users without their permission by building free services or hacking it with
cookies etc. So users can be better targeted with useless ads.

On the other side, its very hard to find good products online since the search
results are full of SEO optimized junk.

If only there was a way to combine these two together. e.g Users could enter
what they are looking for in an app and they only get very targeted
advertising from business big or small inside that app. Matchmaking algorithms
help make the initial connection. Think of a combination of Magic and Tinder.

~~~
metaphorm
I get recruiter spam pitches for ad-tech companies trying to build what you're
describing every single day. they all go out of business within a year. I
don't think anybody actually wants this product. I think it just sounds good
(to VC's anyway) on paper.

~~~
omouse
Some of them are lucky enough to get acquired by bigger ad-tech companies; I
was interviewed at one of those and it was funny because they looked like they
were ramping up in revenue (over 30% growth year over year) and then _bam_
acquired. Might as well have gone out of business since only the few founders
got equity.

~~~
metaphorm
> Might as well have gone out of business since only the few founders got
> equity.

I think that's the actual business model for these companies. there's a reason
I don't accept those pitches.

------
Yeri
For EU mainly, US had some alternatives like these, but they seemed to be shut
down due to legal issues.

A place where I, or anyone trying to contact me, can send snail mail to. These
then get scanned and forwarded to mail mailbox and/or dropbox and/or stored
online with an OCR PDF.

This would allow me to a) send my bills, invoices there b) able to move house
more easily without having to keep track of address changes.

~~~
addandsubtract
This exists in Germany: [https://www.dropscan.de](https://www.dropscan.de)

~~~
Yeri
That's really cool! Are there alternatives for other countries?

------
mrfusion
How about advertising for small businesses? With the death of local newspapers
and phone books, I'm not sure what effective ways to advertise are.

Facebook doesn't seem to work too well, and adwords felt like a black hole.
And besides these methods seem to require experienced consultants to run an
effective campaign.

~~~
davemel37
The problem is, why would you build a startup for a business that can't afford
to pay you for the value you create.

I have seen dozens of business start off this way and than eventually become
enterprise only platforms or worse, programmatic advertising providers marking
up CPMs by ridiculous ripoff margins.

(see: boost media, dispop, etc...)

------
baakss
Integrated settlement / closing software for Title companies.

The market leaders right now are God awful. Market leaders include Adeptive
(Resware software), ISGN (Gators software), and Ramquest (Closing Market
software).

Their platforms usually include a desktop app (not really necessary), in most
corporations accessed via Citrix, or installed locally (host of issues with
versioning), and an accompanying database and web application. The web app
usually offers a very limited view into orders, and some limited ability to
place orders and is customer facing. The desktop app is usually internal to
the title company.

The amount of money spent supporting these applications is staggering. In one
company I know, it's ~$3mil a year in application support alone. That cost
alone would make a strong case for switching to something more intuitive. The
worst part, however, is that they're also extremely glitchy. When someone
misses a closing because of this software, it's a huge deal. That's somebody
in a hotel somewhere, and a very unhappy bank.

Some of them suffer from insanely limited UI's, application design that is
prone to database blocks, and various bugs such as accounting data updates not
being wrapped in transactions and failing to update 2 tables when needed (so
you get 'half' of a payment and your ledgers are out of sync).

In practice, here's all these boil down to: It's a task list (provides user
with a list of tasks to complete) that has some attached functionality to help
you do the task, and is customizable. The reason most are desktop apps is
because the most used functionality is document preparation, which seems to be
universally done in Microsoft word using templates by all these companies.
They're also horribly dated.

If this could be a web app, work well, and port data over from the current
market leaders into your schema, you would not have to work hard to convince
title companies to switch.

~~~
nemild
I'd love to talk to you about this. Is there an easy way to contact you?

~~~
baakss
Drop me a line at plonn1999 at gmail dot com.

------
knodi123
We need a DBA in a box.

I'm setting up a brand new postgres solution to replace an existing highly-
tuned MSSQL solution, and the pain points are all down to differing
performance profiles. I have an SeoKeywordsProfile query that takes 3.5
seconds in MSSQL, and >12 hrs on postgres. Clearly there's an index that would
solve my problem, but the query is 3 pages of SQL with no whitespace!

There's
[https://github.com/cohenjo/pg_idx_advisor](https://github.com/cohenjo/pg_idx_advisor),
but it only works on one specific release of postgres and not on any other.

I'd like something that could just monitor my database for a fixed period of
time and tell me what indexes _aren 't_ being used, what indexes _ought_ to be
used, and make any other suggestions that might help (partition this table,
vacuum that table, etc).

~~~
dekeract
Run an explain on that three page query, with analyze after some changes so
you don't have to wait 12 hours. Put it into
[http://explain.depesz.com/](http://explain.depesz.com/) to see it in a
prettier format, especially with analyze.

Set up pgBadger
[https://github.com/dalibo/pgbadger](https://github.com/dalibo/pgbadger) and
see
[https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Index_Maintenance](https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Index_Maintenance)
for more information about your indexes.

~~~
knodi123
> Put it into [http://explain.depesz.com/](http://explain.depesz.com/) to see
> it in a prettier format

I tried that....
[http://explain.depesz.com/s/22H5](http://explain.depesz.com/s/22H5)

The problem is, I'm unsure how to read this. I can explain, but I can't
explain analyze, since it's too slow. Can you make heads or tails of it?

~~~
thorin
I guess stuff like this:

Hash Join (cost=78,396.37..2,150,742.13 rows=24,442,180 width=40) (actual
rows= loops=) Hash Cond: (buyclicks.offer_id = offers.id)

if you can filter down number of rows in these cases or maybe only return
columns present in the index and/or add an index where required you will speed
up. Watch out it doesn't affect insert/update too much though if you add an
index. You have created fk indexes right?

~~~
knodi123
Thanks for the tip. I'm not so worried about insert/update, since this is a
reporting database and the only inserts are done by backgrounded processes.

Yes, we have fk indexes.

I don't see how we can filter down the number of rows, since the purpose of
the outer query is to get a count of how many buyclicks there were for each
offer. But I'll see if I can create a covering index that reduces the join
cost.

Thanks again!

------
w_t_payne
I want somebody to take on PTC and Rational and do for ALM what git did for
VCS.

More than that ... I want somebody to make an open and hackable ALM _platform_
that I can build my own tools on top of.

The product should be license-free (ideally but not necessarily FLOSS), so I
can put it on my CI servers and VMs without worrying about license files and
license administration. (Flat-fee site licenses would be OK, but anything that
stops me from freely cloning VM build-machine images is a big no-no).

I want diff-able plain-text-backed requirements management, defect tracking,
and project planning, with everything (or its hash) co-versioned alongside the
source, so I can use my VCS to provide a coherent, branch-able, change-
oriented view of project state and project history.

I want the text-based backing files to be a simple, accessible format like
JSON or YAML, so I can write quick hack-tastic Python scripts to build my own
development analytics and reporting tools.

I want all this because I am fed up with having to do it myself ... and
because I would rather spend my time writing tools to analyze classifier
performance and tune algorithm parameters without having to do so much book-
keeping with difficult-to-automate requirements management and configuration
management tools.

~~~
jm3
WTF do those acronyms mean? #ALM #PTC #FLOSS

~~~
mdda
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_lifecycle_manageme...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_lifecycle_management)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTC_%28software_company%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTC_%28software_company%29)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_terms_for_free_sof...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_terms_for_free_software#FLOSS)

------
ThomPete
I have a theory that there are a lot of interesting and successful businesses
that could be build on insights that people have gathered over the years.

For example, I would love to talk to a series of very experienced (read older
people) people working in various industries what they consider the biggest
problems they have to deal with. People who are on the verge of retiring.

This is why I asked the question this way, so far some really good problems to
tackle.

------
ThomPete
This is not an industry I am in per se but it is a problem me and my family is
facing every year.

Finding trustworthy travel destinations for families that don't like all
inclusive but prefer smaller boutique hotels that are family friendly.

Despite all the online travel sites that are out there its still often hit and
miss how great the places we go are.

~~~
cylinder
Why are smaller boutiques family friendlier? I assumed the big all-inclusive
resorts were more family friendly because you can just let the kids roam
around in a contained environment.

~~~
ThomPete
They aren't normally thats the point :)

We are looking for those that are but without the tediousness of the all
inclusive crowd.

~~~
vasilipupkin
What you are looking for is simply called very expensive hotels :)

~~~
ThomPete
Hehe if it only was that simple. :)

I have stayed on many expensive hotels but that is not what we are looking
for. We are looking for hotels that are family friendly so other families go
there but without it being a family hotel.

We will pay whatever it cost but it's not so easy to find that the balance.

------
ef4
A meta-problem for many startups: selling to SMBs at scale at a reasonable
cost.

Lots of small businesses can unlock significant value with better software,
and could be convinced to pay for it. But the upfront cost of acquiring those
customers is too high to make it worthwhile.

If you could offer a highly-curated marketplace, you could spend the customer
acquisition cost once and sell to them over and over again, so they're buying
all their IT through you, trusting you to vet the products and get over their
risk-aversion. You could sell bundled solutions that are guaranteed to
interoperate out of the box, lowering per-transaction integration costs.

~~~
nickfromseattle
Appdirect.com is working on something similar. From my experience with cloud
marketplaces there is still a high cost to support onboarding unsophisticated
SMBs post-sale - this includes initial setup / integration, migrating from
legacy platforms, end-user training, etc.

SMBs are price sensitive, so charging what it costs you to deliver this will
decrease adoption and subsidizing this cost can take too long to recoup.

A good example of this is Office 365. Let's say your profit margins are
$2/user/month and you spend 3 hours onboarding a new 10 seat customer at a
cost to you of $1/minute on the phone. It will take you 9 months to recoup
your onboarding cost ($180 in cost / $20/profit/month).

Self service adoption can be possible depending on the product if there is no
need for integration or legacy data migration, however products that require
these activities see a high rate of drop off in the self-service channel
because SMBs often times aren't sophisticated enough to solve these challenges
themselves, don't use the service and churn out after a couple of months.

Additionally, if the customer has a poor onboarding experience with the first
product they've purchased you lose their trust and it makes it very hard to
cross sell and upsell other services.

------
vasilipupkin
Can someone please build a good IoT solution for the home. For example, my
sump pump backup battery beeps incessantly when it runs out of distilled
water, sometimes in the middle of the night. I just want to have an app on my
phone or laptop, showing me status/integrity of all my home devices, turn them
on/off, etc.

------
lifeisstillgood
Trustworthy "clued up" onsite engineer callouts. One of the hard things to do
is manage hardware that is in the field. Quite a few companies have awesomely
great ideas but need in-field engineers to go and fix / replace / repair.

If something is going to be plugged into the wall, it will be badly fitted,
upside down, unplugged by the night cleaners for her Hoover and when you are
on the phone to the engineer he won't know his arse from his elbow.

Get good young people in a dozen countries - give them decent wages, half
decent travel options and a training and upgrade path.

------
no_gravity
Outsourcing small digital tasks. In Europe, no service like Amazon's
Mechanical Turk exists. And MT does not accept customers from outside the US.

~~~
tpett
MTurk itself is not perfect and could use many improvements. Amazon has been
absent from the project itself for a long time and provides minimal support
and there is a lot of criticism over them changing their fee structure in a
few weeks that may or may not lead to a decrease in tasks and/or pay.
[https://requester.mturk.com/pricing](https://requester.mturk.com/pricing)

------
new_user_name
Logistics in India. If you solve this, Flipkart, Snapdeal and everyone else
will buy your services. The reason for this varying state tax laws and shitty
bureaucrat

~~~
ThomPete
Varying taxes issue is also something in the US. Wouldn't it be possible to
solve it by creating a giant spreadsheet and just mapping it all out and then
turning that into a service?

~~~
bdavisx
If you're just talking taxes, then probably; if you're talking about logistics
in general, then a spreadsheet isn't going to work.

~~~
ThomPete
Yeah I was talking taxes purely.

------
songshu
Some kind of trust system or network to allow assured, secure outsourcing for
large financial institutions which would in turn mean lots of little start ups
doing lots of little things well. Currently large banks, funds etc spend huge
amounts doing back/middle office processes internally, or best case by
outsourcing to similarly inefficient very large service companies. Costs are
way too high. Financial experts with MBAs spend hours emailing each other
spreadsheets instead of conducting their core business. The industry needs
stronger mediation than that provided by simple contract law/service standards
to enable outsourcing and general break up of supply chain that they are
missing out on.

------
cabad79
In my industry creating digital solutions for the construction sector is
really a problem that constructor have to be more profitable. Construction is
a sector that hadn’t changed so much in more than a 100 years, we still use
steel, concrete and others to build things, and hire worker to do most of the
activities related to that. So it will be interesting to see startup
disrupting the sector with * Online blueprints * Budgeting tools * Materials
marketplaces * Logistics tools * Machinery renting * Marketplace for workers *
New sustainable materials. * Shared Economy solutions for the sector *
Crowdsourcing solutions for the sector

~~~
henrythe9th
Thanks for sharing and the construction industry is definitely dated. However,
as an outsider, it's hard to know where to begin or even to dive in. Do you
have some examples of the strongest painpoints or the lowest hanging fruits?

Thanks

------
scarecrowbob
I'm a musician. If you could offer a reliable way for people who want to book
talent to do so, and for musicians to get paid a reasonable rate, then you
could perhaps get a slice of the pie.

The problem is that the pie is so small and there are so few of them, it would
be tough to make any money.

But musicians hate selling performances, and venues hate buying and managing
talent.

~~~
thebrettd
GigMasters? I used this to find a musician for my wedding.

~~~
scarecrowbob
Well, they work okay for one off events, but use case I have in mind is the 40
or so wineries in the county where I live; about half or more hire folks to
come play music on a Saturday or Sunday.

If they'd all just subscribe to a service, then they wouldn't have to dicker
with a bunch of musicians and have their tasting room GMs deal with booking
folks.

The same thing could apply to all the little bars and restaurants here; they
have a reoccuring need to hire talent, but they usually have some staff member
who doesn't want to be doing it (and isn't getting paid much) buying talent,
so it's a pain in the butt for musicians and the bars get inconsistent
products.

But at that end of the market, the budgets are so small that it'd be tough to
take much out to work as a service.

------
techaddict009
I am working on something where users will be given revenue from whatever I
earn due to their efforts.

But problem I am facing is my users are from all over the world and every
country has different taxation law. And there is no proper service to pay my
users except paypal (whose credibility is getting worse day by day).

~~~
sinatra
Bitcoin?

~~~
techaddict009
The thing I am targeting is going to be used by normal internet users who dont
know what bitcoin is. So cant work.

------
hbt
Requirements traceability. Linking your SRS, code, tests, metrics together
into an organized information tree.

Also, find a way to generate passive income for FOSS developers and
crowdsource FOSS projects and turn them into decent products (proper doc, saas
api, maintenance/support etc.) .

------
ronilan
3 off-the-cuff: Ordering and Provisioning of large telecom product catalogs,
converting BMC Remedy apps to modern stacks and reliable fast address
validation. In IT telecom, where you dig, you find.

~~~
meatysnapper
My uncle used to work for a major EE conglomerate selling telephone systems to
countries. Are you talking on a scale like this, or something else?

~~~
ronilan
Opposite.

Large catalog where every screw is of different shape and requires a different
tool to be put into a different wall in a different town so to speak.

------
shostack
Cross-channel attribution in digital media.

Many companies (including Google, etc.) are making healthy progress here, but
nobody has managed to really tell me the incremental value of my display
efforts, the value of a view-through, whether bidding on that brand term
really made a difference, etc.

Right now the tools out there can give you different lenses to view data
through (static/custom attribution models), or take a stab at finding a data-
driven, dynamic attribution model.

However the outputs all seem to be pretty underwhelming and do not typically
spit out actionable insights like "Increasing spend on X, Y and Z placements
should give an incremental revenue lift of $$$$."

Companies have tried, and for the most part failed. If anyone thinks they have
the solution I've been waiting for, please don't hesitate to respond. But as a
starter, your offering should do more than the free version of Google
Analytics.

~~~
macoughl
I have a product in beta right now that was created to solve this problem for
my own agency and now I'm bringing it to market as SAAS -
[https://www.getbridgeanalytics.com](https://www.getbridgeanalytics.com) . I
don't list the actionable insights you describe on the splash page features
but that is what is being built behind the scenes. Its in very early beta but
I'd love to have you join if you are interested. Let me know at
mike@getbridgeanalytics.com

------
dude_abides
Data Warehouse optimization.

What? A tool that helps discover inefficiencies in Hive/Presto/Dremel
query/pipeline/scripts.

Why? It is so much easier to just add new machines to your cluster, than to
optimize your code and fix inefficiencies. But the latter option typically
results in millions of $$$s in savings.

~~~
curiously
what is a data warehouse?

------
mooreds
An HOA for my single family house. Or at least a reserve study.

I have owned a single family house in the states for five years. Just put a
new roof on. Big expense. Used to live in a condo where a reserve study had
been done, and every month a portion of the dues were allocated to large
upcoming expenses. They recently replaced the roof of a 100 unit building and
paid for it out of reserves (no assessment).

Would dearly love to have someone come in and do a reserve study of my house,
give me a figure for how much I should be saving every month. Possible add ons
include property management services (lawn care, etc).

------
rgbrgb
Real estate title/escrow API for California (then USA, then world)

Currently most title/escrow companies are local brick and mortar shops,
largely due to slight regional differences in how the process works and who
pays what (these differences are mostly historical artifacts that we don't
want to mess with) [0].

At Open Listings [1] we're building the slickest real estate offer/transaction
platform in the industry but it involves a fair amount of offline coordination
with other agents, inspectors, banks, and title/escrow companies. Essentially,
we're building an API on top of a lot of human interactions and an interface
for our clients and agents to drive that API. We'd love to be able to plug
into a preferred escrow service to do the title transfer and replace one slow,
expensive interaction with an API call.

[0]: [http://www.firstam.com/assets/title/ca/respa-reform-
tools/wh...](http://www.firstam.com/assets/title/ca/respa-reform-tools/who-
pays-what.pdf) [1]:
[https://www.openlistings.co/](https://www.openlistings.co/)

~~~
mgreg
No doubt the entire title insurance industry could likely be turned over
though the laws would make this very difficult.

I noticed that OpenListings is looking to try to disrupt on the buy side of
real estate transactions. Curious why you wouldn't try to do something on the
sell side where I think there is massive room to change things and it's pretty
darn formulaic.

~~~
mooreds
My guess is that they started with buyers because buyers typically are less
wedded to an agent. Most agents start out on the buy side because significant
numbers of buyers have no loyalties, and because buyers "pay nothing" for the
services of an agent (as opposed to the sellers, who pay 5-6%), so customer
acquisition is easier. (Of course, buyers do end up paying, it is just wrapped
into a 30 year monthly payment.)

All this only applies to the US market,not sure about international RE.
Source: I worked for a brokerage for years.

------
nosuchthing
Bicycle storage systems (indoor vertical space? outdoor enclosures?)

Bicycle security.

Foldable / Transportable Bicycles.

~~~
ThomPete
whats the problem?

~~~
bannus
Lots of city apartments don't have bicycle storage. Lots of bikes in cities
get stolen when left outside.

~~~
infinite8s
I've been seeing these around neighborhoods in London - small half oval
bicycle storage lockers the size of a street parking space that can hold 10
bikes (can't recall the name at the moment).

------
secfirstmd
Hmmm, random thoughts (based on our work at
[http://www.secfirst.org](http://www.secfirst.org)):

1\. Build a bitcoin based, secure methodology for money transfer between
individual/institutional NGO donors and end-users (cutting out a lot of NGO
middle men and/or Western Union style folks)

2\. Build a simple, deployable, open source system for low income countries
where SMS is still used to find information on stuff like farmers wanting to
know prices at new markets.

3\. Micro-services to help young NGOs get setup. -Find
individual/institutional donors which match the NGOs theme -Help with
regulatory process -Help with introductions to donors -Write applications
-Admin tasks - website, brochures etc

4\. Build a __secure __, Open Source platform for low-income country
government management systems. (With modules, for example: Need a simple
health management system? - here ya go...need a simple method of managing
education results? - here ya...need a simple method of managing voter
registration? - here ya go etc etc)

5\. Build a system, ranking etc for measuring digital security risk (on a
close to real time basis) on a country-by-country basis. The sort of thing
already used on a physical basis for stuff like kidnap and terrorism...So I
could travel to XYZ country and see that last week there ABC number of
censorship incidents, ABC number of reporting fishing attempts using 123
exploits etc. This is only the first stage, the REALLY hard part is then
linking it to tools, behaviour change and processes to mitigate these
risks...(We are trying to hack together something a little in a very very
simple version in our app, Umbrella but dam is it hard.)...

6\. Make PGP so simple my grandma can do it (HERE, TAKE MY MONEY!!! :)

~~~
ThomPete
While I appreciate your ideas the point with this thread was to find problems
not come up with solutions. Maybe I am reading them wrong but they sound like
(great) ideas, but are they actual problems?

For instance do my grandma really care about cryptography?

By turning it around and ask for the problems I am hoping for a more open
ended list where the solutions aren't given already.

~~~
secfirstmd
Ooops...my bad

~~~
ThomPete
No worries I understand the urge. I have it myself.

------
eonw
i currently work in the healthcare industry and am constantly amazed at how
outdated anything we use is... this is the single largest industry in the US,
it has money falling out of its pockets and is used to paying exorbitantly for
everything. You could really pick any pain point in Healthcare and build a
decent sized revenue stream with the right sales team in place.

~~~
ef4
Having attempted to do exactly that, I have gotten a little wiser about just
why the existing software is so bad, and why it's hard to supplant. Writing
better software isn't the hard part.

As you alluded to, it all comes down to the difficulty of selling to them. No
matter the size of the customer, they all seem to take two years to make up
their minds to buy. That is pretty harsh on a scrappy startup. To grow
quickly, you need to pour a very significant pile of money into an enterprise
salesforce two years before you actually want to start making money.

That also leads inexorably to the conclusion that small customers aren't worth
the hassle, so you need to target the behemoths who can spend enough money to
justify their acquisition cost. And the behemoths are so scarred by years of
disastrous IT projects that they are deeply risk-averse.

I also think the industry remains in denial about the strategic value of
software, so you don't actually get paid what you're worth. They all know they
need software, but they see it more as a necessary chore than an opportunity
to revolutionize their business.

My hope is that a real technology company directly enters the healthcare
market and starts kicking butt by building their healthcare services around
great software from the ground up. That would shake the incumbents out of
their denial.

~~~
meatysnapper
Hospitals/Big Healthcare need to be sure the vendor will be around for a
decade or three. It is very hard for a startup to offer this assurance in a
believable manner. It will take someone like Google to tackle this.

~~~
ef4
Right, part of their problem is that they're demanding the wrong thing.
Instead of demanding a high degree of stability from one vendor, they should
be demanding open standards and real interoperability, so their eggs aren't
all in one obsolete basket.

~~~
meatysnapper
Wrong. This is like saying we should demand only a small degree of reliability
from airplane wings, but we should make them easily replaceable.

I don't think their insurers would like that. When medical records start
getting lost/exposed because of small outages or vendor changes, the Feds will
come down very hard.

~~~
ef4
I didn't want to imply software that's not stable. I was replying to the point
about wanting a big stable company to purchase from.

------
kendallpark
Healthcare: Pretty much all EHR systems suck.

------
perplexes
Recently I've been trying to find people to do IT tasks, but we're not at the
full-time IT level, we're still a small business.

Stuff like:

\- Setting up a RAID0 dev ubuntu box and transferring my data to it \- Setting
up a VPN to EC2 for both our office (using our router that does VPN) and our
personal machines (for when we're away from the office) \- Diagnosing office
internet issues

~~~
ericabiz
There are usually local companies that do IT services if you live in or near
any major city. Check with other people you know or check Yelp for references
and reviews.

~~~
mooreds
Yes, my parents ran a small biz and had an IT guy who was a contractor who
took care of their NetWare server, backup setup, etc. He was always busy!

------
mrfusion
A friend of mine in property management thinks having a way for HOA members to
vote online would be a useful service.

~~~
mosquito242
[https://easyvoting.co/](https://easyvoting.co/) is a solution that tackles
this.

------
JoeAltmaier
Make customers stickier. Get them to try a product for more than 12 seconds
(average web attention span).

~~~
awa
What's the source of the 12 second data?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Microsoft measures this every few years. Last time I think it went down to 9
seconds.

------
known
You need Cash/Caste to succeed as an Entrepreneur in India;

[https://www.change.org/p/independent-nation-
for-300-million-...](https://www.change.org/p/independent-nation-
for-300-million-india-s-untouchables)

------
braindead_in
Automatic Speech Recognition solution, a rival to Google's system.

~~~
ThomPete
I appreciate your idea, but what is the problem you think this would solve?

~~~
braindead_in
We are an manually powered audio transcription service. We convert spoken
audio files to text via a four step process which guarantees minimum 98%
accuracy. Our customers are mostly researchers, journalists, videographers,
podcasters etc.

Right now, our transcribers manually do the typing. If we have a ASR based
system, which produces even a 80% accurate transcript of the audio, we can
improve our efficiency manifold.

We have a lot of data, audio files and their corresponding transcript. That
data can be used to train a DNN based system. A software solution or framework
which can do that would be ideal for us so that we can keep feeding in the
data and continuously improve our model.

~~~
akg_67
ASR will not help improve efficiency unless you don't care about the mistakes
made by ASR (for example, close captioning of real-time audio). Why? Because
transcribers will need to listen to audio again to be able to correct the
mistakes made by ASR. Basically, once ASR listening to audio and then
transcriber listening the audio again to correct mistakes made by ASR. Also,
you will increase you cost as you will need costly "editors" to correct the
ASR mistakes instead of cheaper "transcribers" to transcribe, reviewing and
transcribing requires different skill set.

At one time I invested in a medical transcription business that experimented
with voice-to-text technologies but couldn't generate any additional
efficiency in transcription by using technology. What worked in improving
efficiency was the transcriber's knowledge of medical terminology and medical
field, matching the same transcriber with the same speaker as transcriber
became acclimated with the nuances and tones of the speaker, and letting
transcriber handle only certain type of transcription.

Transcription is a manual operation and Toyota Way is a good way to maximize
efficiency.

~~~
braindead_in
I'll counter that ASR does improve the efficiency. The biggest player in
Medical Transcription is Nuance. It's main product is a ASR! The MT industry
has moved on from all human process in the last decade. The ASR accuracy in MT
is currently around 90%. The rest of the work is done by human editors.

Our goal with ASR is not replace the typists, but to assist them. On an
average typing takes 4X the duration of actual time. An 80% accurate ASR may
reduce it to 2X, which in turn should translate to faster turnaround and
improved throughput.

------
aikah
A startup that has a product that gives developers startup ideas ?

~~~
ThomPete
Or one that find problems for businesses to be built on.

~~~
davemel37
or just browse complaint sites. There is a company in New Jersey that browses
amazon reviews for feature requests and creates those updated products in
china and sells them on amazon. They do hundreds of millions a year in sales.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Glad someone could make that work. I tried it with RentACoder a few years ago
(scanning the "need a coder" lists for product ideas), but the requests had
very little in common besides only wanting to pay bargain-basement prices.

~~~
akg_67
What were the issues you encountered? I know a few people who developed side
projects by reading through oDesk and elance jobs. I read them time to time to
stimulate brain to come up some relevant features to my own projects.

Definitely you will need to have patience to find ones that catch your fancy.
Also no one job going to give you idea, but when you read a lot of them, you
start to see patterns and might develop linkage that will make interest
project for you.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
It was over 5 years ago. There really weren't any issues. I just didn't see
any common threads that were interesting. Could very well be the type of
projects I looked at.

------
lioness
"Malicious Binaries"

~~~
ThomPete
can you elaborate?

~~~
lioness
It is a shameless plug for the non-existent startup that creates computers
with ternary architectures for the benefit of all beings...and of course would
render malicious binaries obsolete.

~~~
ngneer
Cute

------
thesis
Are you out of ideas? How did this make it to the front page?

~~~
ThomPete
I am guessing because people would love to see what kind of problems are out
there to potentially solve.

I know I would, thats why I asked the question that way :)

------
jedmeyers
How to solve SAT in exponential time?

~~~
ngneer
By solving 2-SAT in exponential time and generalizing :)

