

Ask HN: What has recently pissed you off that ideally a product could solve? - southkey


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User8712
I mentioned this in another topic, but grocery shopping. The entire process
seems inefficient. New idea...

You place an order online or on your mobile phone while you're at work, or on
the bus. After you decide on your order, the app generates a unique code. The
grocery store is now replaced with an automated warehouse, with pickup or
drive-through windows. You walk up to a window, scan your unique code that was
generated earlier, swipe your credit card to confirm, and the warehouse
automatically picks your items and out they come in bags. You toss them in
your trunk if it's a drive-through, or just carry them away if these are city
center stores.

Optionally, the store could have a little room to pick your own fruit and
veggies, in case you prefer to see them.

This makes the whole process a lot more flexible. You could even remove the
concept of placing orders and generating codes, and instead have a grocery
store account for your household. For example, you ask your son to pick the
groceries down the street. After he leaves, you realize you want some curry
powder. You just click a button on your phone to add curry powder to the
online list, and that's it. Your son doesn't even need to know, he just shows
up at the window, scans your family card or enters a password, and out comes
your groceries, including the newly added curry powder. After he gets the
groceries, the online list clears.

~~~
workhere-io
Or even better, you could order your food in a mobile app (or on a website),
and the supermarket would deliver to your home later at a time you choose,
e.g. between 4 and 5 PM. Several supermarkets such as
[http://www.nemlig.com/](http://www.nemlig.com/) do this in Denmark for a
delivery price of just $3.5.

~~~
GFischer
I agree, we actually sketched a very similar process (and a business model
canvas) with some friends during a brainstorming idea :) .

One particularly promising idea was combining internet orders, with a pick-up
place like BufferBox.

We also added some ideas to our canvas that were more specific to my country,
but it's definitely viable and among my favourite things I'd do if I was able
to do a startup. I hope someone is able to do it.

[https://www.bufferbox.com/](https://www.bufferbox.com/)

Edit: swapbox too, it seems bufferbox is winding down which is sad.

[https://www.swapbox.com/](https://www.swapbox.com/)

I don't see if those offer refrigerated holding. I think a similar service,
specializing in foodstuffs, has a niche.

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atgm
Sending money internationally.

Comparing products across brands (they all have specs but the way they sort
the specs is different and it's a pain to flip through tons of tabs).

Finding a chair to fit my kitchen table (given the dimensions of both).

Diagramming my bedroom to try to figure out if I can build a better bed.

Finding furniture that fits in a given volume (in my case, I want to find a
trolley or counter that's Y cm high, at least X cm long, and between Z1 and Z2
cm deep).

~~~
joefarish
Regarding your first point I recently used www.transferwise.com recently to
transfer money from my UK bank account (GBP) to a US bank account (USD). It
was pretty quick (took 3 days) and I got a very good rate (taking into account
the fees involved). I'd definitely recommend them.

~~~
atgm
Apparently they don't support JPY yet, but thanks for the heads-up!

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ckelly
I want a content marketing platform that let's you easily turn blog posts into
other units of content (videos, infographics, slideshows, whitepapers) without
going to 9 different systems.

~~~
AznHisoka
Not sure how a blog post can turn into a video... or an infographic if it's
not visual. A slideshow - that's doable.

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danlev
I've been wanting an easy way to gauge opinions and ideas on a topic between a
small group of friends/co-workers without creating accounts on a service.

For example, I want to ask "what are your thoughts on the new logo?" and have
my co-workers leave comments and upvote/downvote each other's opinions.

Ideally, like a HN/Reddit-style upvote/downvote comment system where they
could just type their name in and comment/vote.

~~~
sevilo
Hmm, just out of curiosity, what do you find not sufficient enough to support
this with existing systems like facebook?

~~~
danlev
One of my main use cases are company email chains of 50 or so employees where
I think it'd be annoying to send a link asking for everyone's opinion but
requiring them to sign-up for a quick, one-time voting.

For Facebook, not all of us are friends, and a few of them don't have
Facebook, so it might seem a little rude to request that.

~~~
sevilo
Interesting.. I've ran into similar situation before although it was not at a
work environment, more like an email thread that contains ~30 friends to ask
for opinions on some activity, and not everyone is facebook friends with each
others. I do find email threads create "spams" for people who do not have as
strong of an opinion on the topic, but it didn't seem annoying enough to piss
anyone off. Are there something else that you really dislike about using the
email chain itself to ask for opinion/suggestions?

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captain_mars
Moving my single-player game progress between computers.

A few months ago I completed a game on an old Windows PC. Recently, I acquired
a new PC, and had to unlock all the levels of the game again by playing
through the game from beginning to end.

It's just a minor inconvenience, so it doesn't really "piss me off"; it is
just something that would be nice to have.

~~~
throwawayacct10
Use a Virtual machine? I hope your old PC is not so old that VM is very slow.

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ceeK
A system for better communication during different crises. People always
complain when things go wrong and the authorities in charge don't give away
information, or give it away in such a way that all people involved don't
receive it.

I.e. my girlfriend was on a train recently, which stopped for one hour outside
of the station. No information was given until nearer the end of that. Why?

A system that everyone could use: the first responders could provide
information on the situtation. Editors could then format this for customers /
people affected. Some other system could deliver it (something like
iBeacons?).

~~~
stevekemp
Trains in the UK are a nightmare when they're delayed.

I spent seven years working from home, making a trip from my home to company-
HQ every few weeks. The train information board would also say "Train Late:
ETA $(current time + 1 minute)".

Even if they knew in advance it had to be 30+ minutes behind schedule it would
always say something like "Time: 13:30, ETA: 13:32" or so. Then keep updating.
It meant you never had any idea if the train would genuinely turn up in a
minute, or if it would still be lying to you an hour later.

I did seem to suffer from bad luck on the days I travelled, due to land-
slides, rain, wind, or power-failures on various parts of the line. I usually
kept waiting, but some days you could tell there would be no useful service.
(i.e. They'd offer buses instead of trains, and that meant a 2 hour trip down,
a working day, and a 2 hour trip back was just written off because a bus might
take 4-5 hours to make one leg of the journey.)

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anywherenotes
Well here's my idea:

A shopping list, but the trick is it knows where the food is in store, and
arranges the list so that items on list are located close in store. For
example, this is original list: apples, milk, hotdogs, chips. Lets say store
has milk and meat on one side, and apples and chips on the other side. The app
will rearrange to: apples, chips, milk, hotdogs. And perhaps give you a little
map of store to show you were things are.

~~~
makerops
This is a great idea (had it myself at one point); the problem is you would
have to have buyin from the grocery store itself, and like a casino...the more
time you spend in it the more money they make.

~~~
anywherenotes
That's a good point. Still, it's probably manageable to accomplish for major
stores by manually mapping some out (or letting your app users map it out). I
usually go to bigger stores, because you can find everything in one store.
People who shop often wouldn't need the app, since they remember where
everything is.

The same idea expanded a bit, could be to optimize for money. For example, if
your list is going to be $200, you might save 20 dollars by shopping in
two/few separate stores (accounting for gas), and app could divide the list
into multiple lists per store. This is way harder, because prices change all
the time (store layout doesn't change as often), and usually you can't look up
prices online. The app could take into account any store coupons (assuming
manufacturer coupons could be used in any store). The target audience for this
are people who are willing to trade in time to save few dollars. I'm not sure
they will have smartphones.

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maresca
Lottery Pools.

The lottery pool manager where we work keeps a physical list of who has paid
up. Email invites were being sent through our company emails, but the higher-
ups put the squash on that. She then scans the tickets, makes copies, and
hands them out.

I decided to build something that would automate all of this except the buying
of tickets.

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kfk
A cheaper CRM that I can extend with plugins. Really, right now these things
are super expensive for a small company in, say, east Europe. Also, there are
tons of them for developers, none very good for businesses. I want the
“standard” goodies (teams, tasks, admin panel, etc.), but then I want to be
able to easily build on top of those.

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jeremyriney
The damn hold music on freeconferencecall.com! Why can't there be a product to
let you choose your own music!

~~~
nodata
Perhaps if you pay?

~~~
jeremyriney
Let me clarify -- let the user choose what music they would want to hear. I.e.
let them listen to the music on their iPhone and then have the conference call
interrupt their music playback when ready. Not sure if technically feasible.

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jeremyriney
I get pissed when reading an article on CNN and end up clicking a few click-
bait type articles or videos in the right column. It takes ALL of my self
control to avoid some of these. Maybe a browser plug-in that removes all these
annoying recommended things which have NOTHING to do with the article.

~~~
bglazer
[https://www.readability.com/‎](https://www.readability.com/‎)

Have you ever heard of readability? It's a plugin that removes link-bait crap
and reformats articles into a standard format.

~~~
jeremyriney
I've heard of them, let me try them out.

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Kanbab
Notarizing and having to physically mail said notarization.

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bennyg
Saran Wrap. I hate the stuff. This is not a software problem though haha.

~~~
hablahaha
I hate it too! I've started using reusable wraps, like Bee's Wrap
([http://www.beeswrap.com/](http://www.beeswrap.com/)) or Abeego
([http://abeego.com/](http://abeego.com/)).

~~~
bennyg
Those both look pretty awesome - great suggestion! I might just purchase some
because of your suggestion. I absolutely loathe using plastic wrap haha.

~~~
hablahaha
They're so so great. Unlike plastic wrap which inevitably gets wrapped in
itself and you have to cut it and mess with it, this is really substantial,
you just pull it out of the drawer and you're done. And I have no problems
washing it. I was using foil before I found this and that's even more of a
waste...

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gesman
This is great thread for ideas!

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codezero
DMV

