

Ask HN: Does Your Startup Improve Lives? - qF

In response to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2664467<p>I am really curious how various founders (or employees, the original thread was specifically about startups, but any company should be able to improve lives) feel that their company is improving lives.<p>Some questions to steer the answers in the general direction of what I am looking for;
- Does, and if so how, your company improve lives?
- Was/is it your intent to improve lives?
- Were there any (unexpected) side-effects of your product/service that ended up improving lives?
======
nathanbarry
My company, Legend, improves lives in a very tangible way. OneVoice is our iOS
app that helps anyone who can't verbalize their thoughts "speak". Though not
the first in the space, I focused on great design and it being very easy to
use. So far it has been very well received.

I get messages every day from parents who are now able to communicate with
their autistic children, grandparents who have suffered strokes who can now
"speak" to their families, and many other great stories.

Link: <http://thinklegend.com/OneVoice>

Though it is very expensive for an iOS app ($199), it costs a fraction of the
main competitors. Currently devices like the DynaVox ($7k+) are the most
commonly used so OneVoice, including the iPad, is less than 10% of the cost.

It has been a joy to work on and I am looking forward to seeing how I can
continue to improve it over the years to come.

~~~
chime
OneVoice looks awesome! However, you should start thinking of Proloquo2go and
their ilk ( <http://www.acapela-for-iphone.com/gallery> click on 'AAC') as
your competition now instead of DynaVox.

How is AcapelaTTS working out for you? I know they take a significant chunk of
sales. Is it worth it? I'm currently using
<https://bitbucket.org/sfoster/iphone-tts> but the quality is far from
satisfactory.

My research <http://ktype.net> is in the same arena but is aimed at addressing
a slightly different audience. Feel free to contact me if it sounds
interesting to you.

~~~
nathanbarry
Thanks! Yes, Proloquo2Go and TouchChat are truly the main competitors, but
many people still compare against the DynaVox and dedicated devices.

AcapelaTTS is working pretty well. It was expensive to get started, and they
like to maintain some control, but so far I haven't had any real issues.

I started off with the exact library you are using (Flite), but ultimately the
quality wasn't high enough. The voices from Acapela sound so much better.

------
ubermensch
I'm a co-founder at Training Mobs (<http://trainingmobs.com>), an online
health and fitness community that makes it super easy for people to find an
awesome workout near them. We believe that providing a strong social component
keeps people motivated to work out and keeps them coming back - our members
tell us that it feels less like a workout and more of a social outing, since
everyone is sweating it out together and having a great time. Anybody can post
a workout (which we call a 'mob', after the Flashmobs concept but for
fitness), and anybody can join it.

Right from the start, our core vision was to improve the health and lives of
people by making awesome workouts accessible. Its free to join, and about half
of the workouts are totally free. We also work with small, independent studios
and personal trainers to provide our members with a great selection of
workouts at really reasonable prices, often below the drop-in rate.

Phew, okay, corporatey schpeel over. But yes, we do believe that we have made
some progress towards our vision of fun, accessible workouts that actually
make you want to keep doing them as opposed to burning out and giving up.
Search for us on twitter and read some of the tweets :)

Oh, and unexpected side-effects? It turns out that working out with 30 other
people bonds you into fast friends surprisingly quickly! Strong friendship
groups within the community also makes it all but certain that a member will
continue to come to the site and workout with their friends.

------
veyron
This question is an "eye of the beholder" one -- it's not only subjective, but
oftentimes an equal number of people could argue that a startup does not
improve or actually detracts from peoples lives.

Take facebook as an example. A lot of people would argue that it detracts from
peoples lives (degrading the real-life experience of interacting with people),
but a lot of people would also argue that it improves lives.

Now take finance. Forget about blankfein's "god's work" remark. In general,
most parts of finance improve lives (though most HNers would disagree). Look
at market making (providing liquidity for other traders). There's an intrinsic
demand for liquidity from funds which try to manage an index, hedgers, and
speculators. The goal of market making is to provide liquidity to facilitate
those other traders. And yes, there's a small premium for the service, but the
fact that the premium is shrinking over time reflects a lower cost for the
rest of society.

~~~
iskander
(I'm going to agree with your first sentence by disagreeing with everything
you said about market making)

> Look at market making (providing liquidity for other traders). There's an
> intrinsic demand for liquidity from funds which try to manage an index,
> hedgers, and speculators. The goal of market making is to provide liquidity
> to facilitate those other traders. And yes, there's a small premium for the
> service, but the fact that the premium is shrinking over time reflects a
> lower cost for the rest of society.

I think that's a very quaint view of market makers, maybe valid 20 years ago
but it seems disconnected from modern circumstances. Market making has largely
become synonymous with algorithmic trading, which now accounts for somewhere
between 25%-75% of traded volume (obviously varying widely between markets,
see [http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2011/03/04/505021/algo-
tradi...](http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2011/03/04/505021/algo-trading-and-
the-nymex/)).

A significant subset of the prop traders have been spiraling into a latency
arms race, which has gotten to this absurd point where even millisecond-scale
trading is considered slow.

Regular old market making (put orders on both sides of the book, make profits
from the spread) only seems to work in the absence of significant competition.
In reality, profitable firms are running all sorts of short-term speculations
and even trying to prey on the trading behavior of people & other algorithms.
There have been all sorts of algo-induced pricing anomalies documented at
<http://www.nanex.net/FlashCrash/FlashCrashAnalysis.html>.

The supposed benefit of all this nuttiness is improved liquidity, but I
wonder: Who needs liquidity at the millisecond scale? What business, other
than algorithmic speculation, will suffer if they have to wait 1/2 a second to
buy or sell something?

Also, I question whether the premium of modern prop trading is actually
small-- there are a large number of prop trading firms that seem to be doing
extremely well for themselves. I don't know the specifics, but I wouldn't be
surprised if the sum of prop trading profits reach high into the billions.

Furthermore, these companies siphon off a large number of smart grad students,
who would have likely otherwise done something actually socially productive
with their time.

~~~
actionbrandon
Sorry, but you just spewed a bunch of crap about market making and algorithmic
trading that has no basis in fact. reading and blindly believing zerohedge is
just as bad as watching cramer and calling yourself a trader. I will address
one comment, instead of wasting space on many. You claim that 25-75% of volume
is made up by algo traders. I agree, and its probably closer to the 75%.
However, this is meaningless. Since the beginning of trading more than 50% of
volume is made up of speculators/market makers. It's always been that way,
except now that its computers doing it people spaz out.

The only difference is now the spread on stocks is a penny or less instead of
25-50 cents or more. Damn computers arm race!

------
IgorPartola
My aim with Ping Brigade certainly is to improve lives. Servers go up and down
all the time. It is actually quite shocking what you find when you start
monitoring one 24/7. Ping Brigade is affordable (or free), and dead simple to
set up server monitoring. I believe that helping more websites stay up for the
price of two lattes a month is a good thing.

Link: <https://www.pingbrigade.com/>

EDIT: Before I added the monitoring piece, Ping Brigade just had the latency
measuring component. One of the users contacted me reporting a bug: sometimes
Ping Brigade would tell him that his site was down when he could see that it
was not. It turned out he had set up round robin DNS with four web servers and
on one of them, apache was misconfigured. I know that this was tiny and
anekdotal, but it was nice getting an email from the user saying thanks for
helping him figure it out.

~~~
jreposa
You should add SMS and phone support. I have custom scripts that do this for
me through Twilio.

The first two failed tests go to SMS, the next ones will call me directly on
my mobile and tell me the issue using Twilio's text to voice API.

I have a half written Rails app that I was going to release as a webservice,
but I can't be bothered. I'd gladly pay you instead.

~~~
IgorPartola
Yes, SMS is next on my TODO list (along with full IPv6 support and downtime
history). Twillio conveniently lowered their prices recently too. If you'd
like, I can shoot you an e-mail when this feature is complete. Or just follow
@pingbrigade on Twitter.

------
synnik
Just in the last week, I started informally helping a renewable energy
startup, as they move from testing their new generators into seeking funding
to deploy them across South America.

We've got one built, being put in place in the Amazon right now, and have
plans to deploy 50 more installations over the next 1-2 years.

Our stated intent and goal is to bring sustainable energy to 3rd world
countries, with minimal environmental impact.

~~~
IgorPartola
This sounds like a really cool enterprise. Could you share any details of the
technology involved?

~~~
synnik
In short, the founder of the business has developed new hydro-kinetic
generators that have higher efficiencies than the existing technologies. So
they can generate power from a slower-moving river. The generators can be
placed in standalone deployments, creating their own local grid. They also can
be attached to existing grids to augment the current systems.

As I am just helping to organize it all, and not the founder nor the inventor,
I'm not comfortable getting into too many details, but if anyone really does
have a sincere interest (especially if interested in investing), let me know.
I'll get you in touch with the guy in charge...

------
bvrlt
We developed Genius Scan, a small scanner app for iPhone. The intent of the
app was to make it easy for people to scan documents and send documents when
not close to a physical scanner.

One of the best rewards we have is some of the users comments. \- "This app
simplifies my life and it actually works like it says it does (weird…)." \-
"My wife went to the hospital and I needed to send my in-laws her diagnosis
and discharge papers(They are both M.D.'s) It worked like a charm. It saved me
from buying a scanner and going to kinko's!" \- "As a student, this app has
saved my butt a few times." \- "Saved my company over $1100 in courthouse copy
fees last month alone." \- "When needed to have a document but no copy machine
nor fax, it saved me, got a mortgage with with the bank!!! (had to send a few
documents)" \- "I've used this app for the past year and it is so helpful. I
am able to post assignments for my students and copy their worksheets while
still in class with them. I do not have a fax machine and this has saved my
butt a few times! Yea!!" \- "As a traveling sales rep, I have to fax my
figures through to our interstate office each night, when staying in motels
this can get quite expensive, now I just scan and email. No more horrendous
fax costs!! Thanks guys!!"

One of the best emails we received just contained: "FYI genius scan saved my
ass on Thursday and now I will graduate in may all because of genius scan!"

So while in the first place it's hard to think an iPhone app can really
improve people's life, a few comments tell us that Genius Scan can have a
small positive impact on some people's lives. Also, it's interesting how many
uses people can find for this app we would never have thought about.

Link: <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/genius-scan/id377672876?mt=8>

------
benwerd
The startup I head up tech for, <http://latakoo.com/>, is designed around a
strong social mission (that also happens to be a solid business model). In
fact, it arose from a separate attempt to find a new commercial model for
local investigative journalism.

We allow anyone to send high quality video very quickly - and then store it in
a web-based archive for search and later retrieval. All you need to do is drag
your video into our tool and click "start", and it uploads it to the cloud.
(There's an API for integration, obviously, and we've got some interesting
video sharing ideas up our sleeves.) Our payment model is like a cellphone
plan: you pay for minutes of video sent every month, and even get rollover
minutes.

A lot of the people who find the greatest value in this are video journalists.
They can shoot some footage and send it back to base faster than they
ordinarily could, significantly cheaper than hiring a satellite truck or other
comparable Internet products. They can also use the web archive and pull down
other footage to create an edited piece in the field.

I think improving our infrastructure for news has a tangible impact on
peoples' lives: access to information is a requirement in a functioning
democracy. And of course, we're directly improving the lives of anyone who
needs to move high quality video around.

------
davidw
My latest project, LiberWriter is a lot of fun for precisely that reason. I
mean, it's not a world-changer, but many of my customers are writers who want
to publish their work on Kindle and are _very_ frustrated by the process, and
having a system to make everything better makes them very happy. So, yeah, in
its own small way, it's something that improves people's lives by taking away
a source of frustration and anger.

------
mmorris
While there are some startups that aim to make big, obvious improvements in
people's lives (biotech, for example), any startup that hopes to find lasting
success must be based on creating value for users. More often I think that it
may be in a seemingly small way that your service or product helps improve
people's lives - but for those users who really need it, it may not seem so
minor.

For example, my current project, <http://inthatbox.com>, aims to help people
organize their storage boxes/containers/etc.[1]. That may seem like a minor
improvement in a user's life, but if you've ever moved a house with dozens of
identical cardboard boxes or if you've ever spent hours searching through a
closet or storage unit for something you know you've got somewhere, our
product won't seem like such a small help any more (we hope!).

[1] Currently just an iPhone/iPod touch app, but very soon we'll have an
integrated web app, an iPad app, and then eventually an Android app as well.

~~~
timjahn
LOVE this idea! Something like this would make a world of a difference in
moving. Definitely going to use it next time I move.

~~~
mmorris
Thanks! There are quite a lot of improvements coming in the next few months.

Let me know if you do end up using it, we love feedback.

------
RobIsIT
Here's what I took away from PG's "life improvement triangle":

It's very difficult to change the processes people learn. If someone has been
throwing a ball a certain way for their entire life, it's an uphill battle
getting them to change. Similarly, if someone has been filling out a paper TPS
report in the same way for the past 10 years, it's tough to get them to fill
out that report online.

It's not impossible to change behavior, but it's an uphill battle.

The best businesses (ie: those with the highest value) supplement and
_improve_ the lives of people rather then changing their behavior.

In the Bloomberg video, the interviewer asks PG about his opinion about
Groupon. The smarter question would have been "did Groupon improve the lives
of people?" The answer is yes. They took something people were doing and made
it better.

The best businesses don't often reinvent the wheel, they make the wheel 150%
better.

------
kunley
Great question. I was going to write an article based loosely around the
thought that startups could have a strong mission statement of directly
improving people's quality of live.

We at <http://wisdio.com/> believe we do it. We want to quickly deliver
answers for people's questions in a variety of topics, including professional
and hobbyist knowledge. Unlike Quora, which we're being usually compared to,
we don't focus on creating a hyperspace of perfect questions with some
answers, but rather on matching a question with an expert able to answer it,
in a smallest possible time.

We believe that this has a chance of changing the model of advertising for
small businesses, for example. Instead of directly investing into ads, one can
invest his time into answering the questions in his domain and lift himself as
an expert. This can have an effect of building a massive trust for potential
customers. We think of it as it would be a more "humane" alternative to ads.
Of course this is not our only goal, rather one of possible byproducts of
using our service.

The service wisdio.com is in closed alpha now and we're getting positive press
here in Poland. The service is bilingual - English and Polish - so any of you
can start using it right away. Most of the content so far is in Polish,
though, and you won't see a mixed-language content as it wouldn't have any
sense. So at the moment the English content is minimal and is created mostly
by polish users using the service in both language versions.

Of course we plan to change that and gain a broader audience, as well as some
recognizability outside of our country, during our CEO's trip to the US this
summer.

[edit: cut some tech info, sorry for drifting from the original topic]

~~~
arun057
Interesting. Can I get alpha access?

~~~
sebastianzontek
sure, just type wisdio.com, leave your e-mail, and follow instructions. Then,
we will send you an invtitation

------
emit_time_n3rgy
Based in NYC, a friend and I founded Grripz™ in April of this year
(<http://grripz.com>). The idea is simple, eliminate sore hands caused by
carrying grocery and shopping bags. It was provoked from my personal
experience and the idea moved into development when my friend who runs a
hackerspace called Alpha One Labs (Brooklyn) became enthusiastic about
partnering to develop the product.

The product has improved our lives and we have sold them in-person where we
had many encounters with people who immediately loved the idea ranging from
kids, the elderly, a psychologist working on a PHD on post traumatic stress
disorder, and many other New Yorkers. We have seen people a second time who
bought a Grrip who told us "thank you!" Selling them in-person was very
encouraging and reinforced to us how important such a simple addition to one's
life can be...every little bit counts when it comes to reducing un-needed
stress.

Grripz™ Comfort Handle™ is the quick, cheap and easy way to make your life
easier when carrying bags or other materials.

------
powertower
My product (not a startup, and not a project, since 2003)
<http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper> helps everyone get started with
creating and developing (and hosting) websites.

I have people that don't understand what a file system is running an Apache,
PHP, and MySQL web server, installing and working with WordPress, Drupal,
Joomla, etc, with a few clicks.

I also have just as many professional web developers and businesses using the
product.

It simply makes their lives easier. They get to skip the headache and pain of
downloading, matching runtimes, configuring, setting up, creating
virtualhosts, reading forums and blogs, etc.

There are free alternatives (xampp, wampserver, etc) to WampDeveloper, but I
really don't compete with them in any way... Full control panel, 1 click
website creation, local DNS, auto webapp installation, uses advanced features
of the NTFS filesystem such as junction points and hard links, keeps Apache,
PHP, and MySQL up-to-date, professional support, and quite a bit more.

------
domador
Improving lives? What a lofty goal!

It's strange whenever I think of my company's product in such terms, since my
product doesn't reduce global warming, improve international relations, or
anything like that. However, it DOES accomplish the much more modest goal of
facilitating an aspect of time management (<http://www.domador.net/two-click-
reminder>). I did set out with the goal of making people's lives easier when I
developed this program, and I hope that's what it accomplishes, even in a
marginal way. I definitely want my programs to improve lives. I shudder at the
thought of ever running or working for a company with an extremely selfish
motivation, a company obsessed with its own benefit and indifferent to the
effect its actions have on the rest of society.

I am just getting started, and it's too early to tell if my product is having
beneficial side effects. I haven't gotten much feedback yet.

------
amac
The startup I co-founded Lifemall, I think improves lives. We help people sell
things they don't need. We help other people buy second-hand things if they
can't afford to or choose not to buy new.

Since we're relatively new, I can't comment on whether or not it's improving
lives and any side effects, however it is our intent to improve people lives.

------
timjahn
With our Entrepreneurs Unpluggd events
(<http://www.EntrepreneursUnpluggd.com>), we're looking to help entrepreneurs
succeed.

From my own experience, I've found that being around like minded people who
support you, help you, and believe in you makes entrepreneur-minded people
happier, which in turn can lead to better family life, etc., and ultimately,
improving lives.

We hope to create this atmosphere at each of our events and help entrepreneurs
move forward with their work.

------
cubicle67
Our company was created with the aim of putting people like myself out of a
job. We're working hard to make small businesses much less reliant on their IT
guy.

------
clarky07
Yeah I believe we do. I started out as a project to improve my life, as I
wasn't satisfied with any of the budgeting software I'd used myself. I made an
iOS app called Ez Budget and it has worked great for my wife and I. Currently
working on versions for iPad, Android, and Mac so people can stay synced on
all their devices. <http://ezbudgetapp.com>

------
jreposa
Yes. As compared to the incumbent ($RATE) in our space, we allow consumers to
get information faster in a transparent way. There are very few sites in our
space that do this. We are the largest.

As for our new mobile personal finance community, we expect that people's
lives will benefit, simply because we're a conduit for connecting consumers
with a common goal. (financial success)

------
kolinko
Yes.

My startup - <http://www.motivapps.com/> creates a series of apps that inspire
and teach people. For example one of them is a workshop for setting life
goals, and another one is an app that helps people to write love letters.

------
pitdesi
Absolutely. Our startup <http://feefighters.com> reverse-auctions down credit
card processing fees for businesses, giving small and medium businesses the
negotiating leverage of much larger entities.

We've changed lives in saving countless mom-and-pop bookstores and coffeeshops
several thousands of dollars a year. It feels awesome - we get lots of "love-
mail"

As a side benefit, we've taken money away from the shady characters that were
ripping them off. Win win win.

And yeah, it was always our plan to improve lives. We have owned small
businesses in the past and were tired of getting burned by these guys and
wanted to do something for the little guy.

~~~
nathanbarry
Your Tour pages are really well done! I love it when companies spend the time
to really design out their content.

------
dools
If you're someone who builds websites, then yes.

~~~
megamark16
More information please, what specifically do you do for people who build
websites to make our lives easier? Talk yourself up, it's OK to brag in this
thread :-)

