
Ask HN: What products or services do you wish existed for your startup? - memn0nis
What products or services (software or not) do you wish existed for your startup?<p>I&#x27;m taking 6 months off and looking for projects to work on (most of my experience is in B2B software, so ideally would work on a project in that space). Any ideas like &quot;I wish someone produced X or Y&quot; would be helpful!
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sergiotapia
Something to simplify FTP.

When you partner with a business in b2b most data is delivered through sftp
channels.

Make a tool that vastly simplifies that. Be it onboarding, offboarding,
alerting, emailing, the works.

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memn0nis
How is this different than file sharing (e.g., Dropbox)?

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jvagner
Based on own experience, there are a lot of systems out there that will only
injest certain kinds of data via an FTP drop off. They won’t change or update
their systems, but everyone who wants better visibility to the data they’re
dropping into the ftp system will have to write something to cover that.

So, you’d probably need to build both halves of the FTP chain, but each would
still need to deliver the value add if only half of the new system was being
used.

~~~
memn0nis
Interesting... would you mind giving me an example of the type of data you are
referring to? Or perhaps an example use case / real world example?

~~~
jvagner
Real world example: uploading product, inventory and pricing data to
ChannelAdvisor for processing and then republishing out to multiple e-commerce
platforms (Amazon, Jet, Rakuten, etc). CA is a big complex powerful system,
and my team was uploading FTP files every few minutes. We had the same kind of
issues that E2E email delivery and receipt testing would be important for. In
our case, we needed to know more about how many of those files were being
read, injested, etc. There were dependent processes that could only be
triggered if the data had made it into the system. We relied on process
scheduling intervals to get close, but knowing more about the state of the ftp
pickup itself could’ve improved yields to what we were trying to do.

~~~
throwGuardian
What does it take for CA to modernise their intake? As a customer, you should
really them to change, rather than settle for a band aid around their
drawbacks.

~~~
jvagner
Big public SaaS company... they're not going to change on anything but their
own roadmap schedule. They have competitors, and we looked at them, but we had
at least two requirements that the newer, smaller, fresher competitors
couldn't provide, and we couldn't do without.

I'm not involved in this project anymore, so it's not a current conundrum for
me, but we had this issue a few quarters ago.

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du_bing
A user gateway. I need a product that can help me process user registration,
login, session and other user identity logic. Than I can add my own user
experiences using programming languages. The present user processing tools are
too complicated and makes non sense.

~~~
masonhensley
Like this? (Open source)
[https://www.keycloak.org/](https://www.keycloak.org/)

~~~
du_bing
seems great, but how to use it in other programming language? How to add my
backend logic?

~~~
pharaohgeek
Keycloak is an identity/authentication provider. Your app would leverage it
using OpenID Connect (OAuth 2). Keycloak would handle the heavy lifting
related to identity management, registration, password changes,
authentication, etc. Your app would handle everything else.

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mikece
Horizontizally scalable RDBMS that can grow by adding commodity hardware and
storage and can be queries with ANSI SQL. And MIT/BSD licensed.

(Not a Six month project, I know....)

~~~
sergiotapia
cockroachdb

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jen20
I would absolutely second CockroachDB here, though it’s not BSD or MIT
licensed. I’m not sure why that is a reasonable thing to want, though.

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ReD_CoDE
I think one of the main issues in startups is building cross-platform products
as quickly as possible, so I think this is why some companies like Google work
on some new technologies/methodologies like Kotlin

But there's a big issue, most of the times founders are not programmers and
looking for some codeless solutions

And I think there're not any countable solutions in the market. The somewhat
countable solution that exists is Bubble.io but even Bubble has some
limitations and even issues but has a very good UI interface and logic behind

I decided when our startup officially launched for our next startups and
projects we build an invaluable solution and I think I have the answer in mind

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wethebestcoder
Mentorship after a successful Kickstarter.

~~~
throwGuardian
I think there's plenty needed to get to a fully funded Kickstarter too

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tnolet
A service that hooks into Stripe or whatever and sends a nice "welcome / swag"
package to the address of whoever just signed up.

It should take care of ordering and stocking t-shirts, mugs etc. with my
design and then shipping it.

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mister_hn
A better Scrum Board and Issuer tracker than Jira

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mikekchar
To be fair, as far as I can tell Jira's Scrum Board is pretty good (I only
test drove it, though). It gets a lot of stuff right. It's main problem is
that it's connected to Jira. There appears to be a lot of baggage there. If I
were to do this (and I've been tempted), I would make the UI pretty similar to
Jira's and remove most of the complexity underneath. Of course the downside to
this is that the complexity underneath is there for a reason: People who are
not programmers want a whole bunch of weird stuff. However, I think there may
be a small market for a programmer focused Scrum board that has basic
reporting capabilities (which Trello, unfortunately lacks: Screenfull is quite
good, but necessarily fiddly). Probably would fit into a 6 month project.

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arberavdullahu
A product that finds me the best deal for my customized services, for example
servers, emails, hardwares, etc.

~~~
freehunter
This takes up so much of my time as a founder... trying to determine where I
should be hosting, what technologies (VPS, Serverless, SQL vs NoSQL, Azure vs
AWS, etc) I should be using, etc. If I’m paying $20/mo to DigitalOcean would
the bill be cheaper at Amazon? Would their extra technologies make me more
effective? Does it even matter? Why don’t vendors have a list saying “if you
need this, use that” for all their horribly named services that all overlap
themselves?

Don’t get me started on email hosting. I don’t even know what’s possible in
the email world so I’m 100% sure I’m overpaying but I don’t have the time to
figure it out.

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ian0
A financial modelling tool that also has API access for booking revenue.

~~~
lazycder
+1

Running an e-commerce store, would definitely pay for something that could
help me track margins on my products, when I break even, etc.

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TomMarius
"Virtual" scrum master

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wingerlang
Could you expand on this?

I recently took over scrum master role and I've built my own JIRA
visualisation to help me (and the team) during standups that basically
highlights progress-over-time (rather than JIRA's 'just now'). It basically
helps us to compare each day against yesterday to see trends.

It also does some status magic by looking at story point progression, time
logged and so on to highlight tickets that "should" have progress but doesn't
(so that we can converse about it).

It also helps me specifically by calculating story points per day / per person
etc for the next sprints, how much to add etc.

I figured I could even add some slack bot to send messages automatically about
e.g. "tickets in trouble" to further remove some manual work.

Rambling on here but, does it sound anything at all to what you're looking
for?

