Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup? - takinola
======
chollida1
Data management.

1) Cleaning the data as it comes in rather than in batches so we can use it
sooner, invalid data is discarded, outlier detection, normalizing inputs
etc....

2) Warehousing of the data with proper indexes so you can perform some
advanced queries on unstructured data

3) Some data is sent in bulk at the end of day, some of the data is streamed
in fire hose style. How can we preprocess the fire hose data so that we don't
have to wait until the end of the day to parse it all.

4) Oh and all of this data is unstructured and comes from 75 different
sources.

Soon the average hedge fund will have more people just cleaning and managing
data than they do in quantitative research, dev ops, software development and
trading.

Oh and lots of the data is considered proprietary so while AWS/Azure, etc is
fine, sending it to a third party to process is not.

TL/DR Help me, I'm drowning in data. How do I get the time from when I acquire
data to when I trade based on it down to a reasonable time frame, where
reasonable is closer to hours rather than days/weeks.

~~~
flamesnare3
I think Palantir provides solutions to this problem

~~~
dbuxton
The Palantir solution, from what I understand, boils down to "lots of
consultants (FDEs) writing glue code".

------
tmsam
A family member is a lawyer in the Worker's Comp, SS, and Family Law space.
THE software for lawyers in this space is called A1 Law. It solves a lot of
real problems lawyers in that space have (form letter generation, calendar
integration, case management)... but it's so slow to use new technologies.
They advertise PalmOS integration. My family member has to have their own
server in a closet running the server version of this so his team can use it!
He has no idea how to manage a server, it's absurd that he has to.

Everyone I know in law is dissatisfied with every part of their tech stack. If
someone could come up with an integrated SaaS solution, and be SUPER careful
about compliance... they would be printing money.

~~~
starik36
Last time I had a consultation with my lawyer, she fired up WordPerfect. There
is a blast from the past.

~~~
fs111
Many people here use emacs or vim...

~~~
pdimitar
That's subjective, so you should've kept your subjective opinion away from HN.

------
athollywood
The oil and gas industry is ripe with potential start ups. Here are a few that
come to mind:

1\. A better system for automation and measurement. Current solutions aren't
ideal when it comes to setting up new systems as well as updating and
maintaining existing systems. We build several million dollar facilities a
month and each one has automation and measurement equipment that has to be
individually set up and programmed. Each technician does things a slightly
different way, and the end result is a different set of automation and
measurement logic at each facility.

2) Fiber optic DATS (distributed acoustic and temperature sensing) data
handling and interpretation. This is a fairly new type of technology in which
a fiber optic line is installed in the wellbore. The fiber optic line
basically acts as a 15,000' strand of thermometers and microphones placed
every 3'. The data from one installation is on the order of terabytes per
hour. Oil and gas service companies that offer this service don't know how to
handle this amount of data. The problem could probably be solved with S3 or
something.

3) Drilling optimization. Create a software suite that utilizes ML/AI to help
drilling engineers figure out the best way to drill a well is. It's a perfect
ML/AI application. Lots and lots of training data available, easily defined
input and output parameters, etc. Drilling engineering is full of hard, non-
linear problems and humans are just really bad at it. The only way to be good
at it is to drill lots and lots of wells and then listen to your gut.

~~~
kozikow
Any more insights about applying drones to 1? I work on deep learning for
aierial imagery startup (tensorflight.com). It seems like we could structure
some information from drone images.

If you are interested in helping us understand the problem and potentially
solve it together contact me at kozikow@tensorflight.com

~~~
ommunist
Are you looking to develop applications in forest inventory?

~~~
kozikow
Yes, our current application is focused on Orchards, but we are planning to
enter forestry as well.

------
nsm
Immigration.

Every time I change jobs as an H1-B employee, I've to fill in the same
ridiculous data with every law firms weird interface. I wish the US Digital
Services would focus on streamlining forms and having auto-import from all the
data they already have about me (e.g. automatically translate I-94 records to
how much time I actually spent in the US, infer my past I-797 records
automatically, have a one time education related upload since that obviously
never changes). I realize there are certain valid reasons the agencies don't
share data, but I find that hard to believe in an era of infinite
surveillance, they can't use the surveilled data to at least make my life
easier. I can see how the immigration law industry would never allow this, but
I can hope.

The green card process is another minefield.

Also for Schengen countries, I've to apply for a visa every time I travel, and
they make me list every time I visited the Schengen zone in the past 5 years,
fill out the same application form across different countries, and get the
same paystubs and letters from employers. Even a tool that could just machine
read all the documentation a particular country requires for a specific visa,
and just goes and pulls everything that can be pulled (bank statements, pay
stubs, fill in travel dates based on the flight ticket emails in my inbox,
hotel reservations and so on.) Just make it convenient for me to travel :)

~~~
ForrestN
Unfortunately any assumptions built into an immigration business are likely to
be upended soon. I'd wait at least a year before trying to solve this problem
because the regulatory environment could break your resulting startup.

~~~
akhilcacharya
> I'd wait at least a year

I'd say closer to four to be safe.

~~~
up_so_floating
But then you'd have to wait four more. And then four more? Four more after
that?

~~~
make3
he means trump is much worse with regards to immigration than anyone else in
recent years

------
ggcdn
As a structural engineer, I see a good opportunity to make reinforced concrete
design software available in a SaaS format. The competition is outdated,
clunky, requires local installation and messing about with licenses. Design
firms are paying $1000-$3000/year per user/seat for what amounts to a pretty
basic app.

Unfortunately, there are very few people that understand both computer science
and structural engineering.

~~~
patmcguire
I have a friend who works in construction glass. (It's NYC, that's a big
market). They ship millions of dollars of complex, custom molded glass every
year. Everything's kept track of by emailing excel spreadsheets.

~~~
Achshar
That's disgusting. I feel filthy. I replaced a system in my first client
school that also used excel attachments for tracking student data, exams
results, attendance, assignments, etc. I could physically feel better once I
saw my own implementation replacing email attachment system. Since then email-
excel has been a sensitive topic for me.

~~~
lucaspiller
I've recently found a department for the company I'm working for needs help as
they have literally reached the limits of Excel.

They have a sheet with around 30 rows and 150 columns, and they have 100 of
these sheets (in a single Excel file). Some parts use formulas, but usually
when somebody needs to change something they need to go through every single
sheet. The issue is now when they try to add new data Excel won't let them.

I don't even want to know how they share the file or do backups.

~~~
terrib1e
I work in the healthcare industry. Basically we ARE the industry nowadays, and
we use excel and word to keep everything "organized". There are some half-ass
designed software,websites, and databases that are used as well, but it's
amazing how a multi-billion dollar company can rely on this level of
technology. I think they get these bids to run state government programs, and
have absolutely no plan in place. And for some reason instead of just
automating or updating things, the company just throws bodies at the problems
and makes everything "production" based. I'm sure a lot of places are similar,
but this is a white collar factory on such a massive scale, it literally
sickens me. There are so many channels that approval for changes has to go
through, that by the time some small minor change is implemented its already
way too late, too distorted by having so many hands touch the problem, and too
outdated.

~~~
mgkimsal
"it literally sickens me."

Goo thing you're in healthcare...

~~~
terrib1e
hahaha idk why but for some reason that made my day.

------
scardine
A ticketing system that doesn't sux (I like RequestTracker, but it shows its
age). Top players are ridiculously overpriced.

My management style is like this: every task/request is numbered, placed in a
queue and assigned to a professional.

What I expect from my ticketing system:

\- every manager should be able to assign tasks to someone and set the order
they must be executed. He needs know what his team is doing and when they
finish each task. \- every professional should know what to do and what are
the priorities. \- everything is numbered and linked, all communication
recorded.

Everything should be well integrated with email (please, don't send me a
notification email about an answer and an url, send me the f* answer). If I
answer the email, everything goes into the system, I should be able to send
commands to the system by email (for example, add a keyword in order to make
it a comment instead of answering).

~~~
tacostakohashi
The problem here seems to be that users/customers insist on customizing any
such app to death.

Personally, I think the optimal ticket system would have this data for each
ticket:

* A unique, prefixed ticket # (JIRA gets this right)

* An assignee (like an email To:)

* A reporter (like an email From:)

* A one-line summary (like an email Subject:)

* A multi-line body (like an email body, but ideally with markdown)

* Attachments (like email attachments)

* History for edits of all of these (not like email!)

That's it! It really is basically email, but with a unique ID, and editable
with history instead of immutable with replies, and a decent UI, perhaps RSS +
notifications.

Unfortunately, everybody else seems to think that their ticketing system
should embody their vaguely defined and ever-changing workflow,
prioritization, approval, and release management system, so they want to be
able to add any number of possible statuses, approvals, workflows and and all
the rest. Once you add that, you end up with another JIRA or ClearQuest or
BugZilla, and the cycle repeats itself.

~~~
daveguy
The app you seek is Asana.

www.asana.com

I'm not associated with them, but I have used them successfully for months at
a time (better than most productivity software). The reason is it is well
integrated and similar to email.

~~~
JonoBB
Asana's start up time is just ridiculously slow. Probably the slowest webapp
I've ever used. Also, you can't assign more than one person to a ticket, which
is a pretty big limitation

~~~
TheAceOfHearts
JIRA also doesn't let you assign more than one person to a ticket. Could you
expand on why this is a problem? I'm not familiarized with this problem space
so I'm just curious.

The recent GitHub updates let you assign multiple people to reviews and such,
but I find it's usually better to tag everyone you want to look at something.
I don't think assigning something will send a notification.

------
dvdhnt
Semi-related... I work in wellness and healthcare.

I don't know about you, but I despise filling out the same forms over and over
again when seeing new healthcare providers. I'd love to start a service
modeled after granular smartphone permissions where

(a) I check in at a new office (scan a code, they scan my code, beacon,
something like that)

(b) the office then requests x, y, and z information

(c) a push is sent to my phone where I can review the information and approve
or disapprove some or all permissions

(d) a final step of either entering my pin at the office, using my thumbprint
on my device, or something else.

The key components would be storing the data encrypted at rest, following
HIPAA and then some, having a solid auth protocol (keys, jwts, etc).

I think adoption would be helped because the public are already used to
permissions like these when installing apps.

The benefits are a lack of paper trail, no one is going to not shred my SSN,
my most up to date data is now available, and instead of hosting N
apps/databases, I'm storing 1 and can reduce my maintenance, customer support
issues because one for all, all for one.

Edit: edited for readability.

~~~
tacostakohashi
Too much inertia on the provider side for this to catch on and reach critical
mass - many septuagenarian sole practitioners out there using paper diaries /
files, and larger organisations with some monstrosity written in COBOL (or
MUMPS?) that will never change to accommodate this.

I'd suggest something much more low-tech - a website where you can punch in
all your details - insurance, allergies, medical history, etc, etc... and then
you can print it out (or a subset of it, for different kinds of providers) or
generate a PDF that they can copy & paste into their horrible legacy system
(an improvement on retyping), or, for those truly at the cutting edge - the
kind of electronic transmission you speak of.

~~~
dvdhnt
I'm probably bias because I've lived in two areas now where healthcare is one
of a few, if not the, major industry in the area. They're always trying out
new apps and services here.

I am on board with what you're saying; an escape hatch for non- or semi-
adopters. Obviously, printing is a way to go, so maybe on the mobile app, the
ability to check each piece of information required then export/email to your
preferred destination.

It'd also be interesting to look to make money on conversion i/e replacing, or
integrating with, the outdated monsters you're talking about.

Maybe we're not even talking about healthcare anymore, maybe just the ability
to piece together PII (personally identifiable information) and deliver it to
X.

>>>> on another note

This goes into a topic I've seen posts on recently, and something of interest
to me, personal indexing; a better way to throw blobs against the wall and
have it indexed for me, leading to a personal Google. I mean, that's already
coming, really, between Facebook and Google (especially Google Photos) but
currently I see nothing about piecing together information I'd like to share
on a professional level.

~~~
tacostakohashi
Hmm, Google Drive does a reasonable job of that. It indexes everything
(including OCR for images + PDFs), has decent search, and has per-folder
permissioning and sharing.

It's actually a pretty good solution for ad-hoc "working together" with
someone (a lawyer / architect / whatever) on a project, where you have lots of
files you need to share and refer to during the project.

~~~
dvdhnt
Totally didn't think of that, especially the OCR which is great, having used
it before with the mobile app.

I wonder if you could stitch together a workflow as a reseller for Google Apps
(no clue what their current name is)?

Either way, good suggestion.

------
ajepst
All the ballroom dance competitions use this old, disliked software to
organize and run the events. The guy who wrote it isn't interested in making
improvements, (and it can certainly use improvements) and is happy living off
the income from people's per event usage rights. I am sure if something modern
and regularly updated came out, it would get a lot of uptake. Thing is, the
portion of it that runs during the event needs to be able to run offline since
venues don't always have reliable internet, and that also means you would be
going to at least the first few events for support.. And your tests better be
good, since time is of the essence if some does go wrong mid event. I thought
about it, and decided I was not interested in dealing with all that when my
job pays pretty well. Still, it's a real opportunity.

~~~
matthewbauer
Is this the software you are talking about:
[http://www.douglassassociates.com/](http://www.douglassassociates.com/) ?

It looks like it's offered for free now. The thing with this kind of software,
is it must be "good enough" for the task.

~~~
timpark
It looks like you have to pay "to have more than 250 entries [I don't know
what's typical], to sign up for web page creation options, and to receive
technical support".

And here they ask for credit card details over http...

[http://www.douglassassociates.com/online_registration.htm](http://www.douglassassociates.com/online_registration.htm)

~~~
ajepst
Typical is often larger than 250, and not having things like heat lists up
online before the event would make people think you are not running things
seriously, whether your event is over 250 or not. I hadn't looked at this web
site, and haven't personally used the product. If this website is at all
indicative of the user friendliness and modernity of the product itself, I can
see why the event organizers complain.

------
ThomPete
I posted a similar question last year great discussion there too.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007)

I would suggest we make a monthly of these as they provide important insight
into industries.

~~~
pj_mukh
Seconded. Might even help us get out of the mindset of building things for
other 20-somethings to replace their moms.

~~~
ThomPete
Exactly. The whole point is to get access to people with insights about an
industry and who can point to the problems and why they haven't been solved
and connect them with people who might have solutions to those problems.

Just imagine how much valuable knowledge and insights get lost every time
someone retires.

------
AndrewKemendo
Rapid generation of high quality 3D models of existing objects. Process should
be independent of object size eg. a coke can should use the same process as a
car and process time should scale with object size.

Think somewhere on the order of 10,000 models per day throughput.

There's $BNs waiting for you. It's ridiculously hard.

~~~
reneherse
What is the use case for the models themselves?

~~~
my_username_is_
Product development engineer here. In the early stages of a project it can be
useful to have CAD models of a competitor's product when analyzing how to
improve upon them. Recently we had an intern reverse engineer a competitor's
product, and we've used some of these CAD models as the basis for our new
designs.

~~~
javiramos
Would it be useful to capture the full appearance properties of the model
(BRDF) etc to be able to accurately render the object?

------
scrollaway
Content and patch distribution for video games: Data integrity, progressive
downloads, file-level patching, compression, encryption, and platform/version
branching.

It's quite mind-boggling; nobody is really doing it on an industry-scale
level. Every video game developer has their own way, all of which have their
own problems.

It is a very hard problem. Blizzard actually came up with a very good system,
but it's not in a state where it can be commercialized or open sourced.

I actually think whoever comes up with a system which solves these problems in
a clean and consistent way will be sitting on a little revolution for content
distribution.

~~~
juskrey
I have devoted 10 years to game content distribution, packing, compression
etc. (Now not in gamedev anymore) This is a very easy problem which usually
solved by attaching fairly simple script which is aware of your file formats
to any commercial installer system.

Some companies are even selling more or less standard solutions for that, but
in reality from any given 1000 games 900 will have very different data formats
and all have fairly good reasons to do so - using universal "patch systems"
really creates more problems.

~~~
scrollaway
I think the "900 different data formats" problem is something that will go
away as we move towards better tools which cover all the standard use cases.

Gamedev is riddled with really smart people that reinvent the wheel _all the
time_ because they found a way to micro-optimize this or that. They get to do
this because until recently, there was no "good enough" solution for a wide
range of games (or the "solution" was priced with enough zeroes to make bill
gates cringe).

But you saw how popular Unity got, and how fast. That's the games industry in
a nutshell: ripe for solutions that work for more than just one studio.

~~~
juskrey
BTW Unity, with all its excellence, has really horrible data format for
content and patch distribution, and had and still has huge problems with this.
Perhaps the legacy of early overengineering and struggle to protect the games
from easy reverse-engineering.

And compare, say, to simple incremental zips of Quake with alphabetic file
loading order.. Total no-brainer to implement and use. (I have even seen zips
with custom LZMA compression!)

So, if any, someone will have to solve a problem of artificially created
obstacles, not a problem per se.

~~~
scrollaway
I'm well aware :) I wrote UnityPack:
[https://github.com/HearthSim/UnityPack](https://github.com/HearthSim/UnityPack)

------
tbrooks
I used to work in the keynote speaking industry as an agent.

This industry is horribly inefficient and intentionally so. It's mostly east-
coast based - NY/DC but functions similarly to the LA entertainment industry.

The main problem is this:

You are a meeting planner (not your job title, you are actually a marketing
person or executive assistant) and your boss just tasked you with find a
speaker for your next company meeting.

What do you do? You can either:

1) Find a speaker yourself by searching Google and sifting through the mess of
results

2) Call a speaker's bureau and get raked over the coals on price

3) ???

Ideally, there would be a marketplace for speakers. Where you would be able to
search for talent that fit your criteria (available these dates, for this
price, talks about these things, is well-regarded, etc.) and book them online.

Nothing like this exists.

~~~
systemtrigger
There are marketplaces for speakers: espeakers.com, orate.me, bigspeak.com,
kepplerspeakers.com, speakermatch.com, eaglestalent.com,
celebrityspeakersbureau.com, among others. The speaker profiles include
prices, areas of expertise, and a way to inquire and book. What they don't
show, that you're asking for, is speaker availability and popularity. The
problems I see with disclosing the schedules of speakers: 1) celebrities have
real privacy concerns, 2) talent does not want their real demand every day of
the year exposed to the public because it can hurt the mystery of their
appeal, and 3) disparate calendaring methods maintained by each speaker mean
that no web site can be in sync with all of its talent thus instant online
booking is hard to do. As for the popularity requirement you asked for ("well-
regarded") this is difficult to define because assessments are nonstandard; so
what you get in all speaker marketplaces is endorsements and accolades the
speaker cites themselves in their own profile -- which will always be self-
recommending.

~~~
tbrooks
No, none of the sites you mentioned solve the problem I posed.

Bigspeak, Keppler, Eagles Talent, and Celebrity are bureaus and function in a
traditional way. Espeakers and SpeakerMatch are essentially speaker
directories -- they make money from speaker's paying them a monthly fee or in
a lead gen style.

Orate.me is new to me, I haven't seen it before. In a cursory look at their
site, it looks like their speaker list is just NSA members.

Also the calendaring problem is easy to solve...

There's enough public data to develop a sentiment algorithm and solve the
popularity problem.

~~~
unethical_ban
It seems like the bureaus are the marketplaces; you just don't like their
model for pricing and acquiring talent.

~~~
tbrooks
When I worked at a bureau, we had a running joke... When a meeting planner
asked, "How much is so-and-so speaker?" We'd reply, "What's your budget?"
Coincidentally, that was how much the speaker was. Regardless of how much we
knew the "rack rate" of that speaker was.

During the 2008 election, Rudy Giuliani was running as a Republican nominee.
When his financial disclosures came out, he surprised everyone with how much
he made on the speaking circuit. News orgs filed FOIA requests to see what
universities and public institutions paid him to speak.

For some events, he'd speak in the same city to different groups. The price
each group paid was wildly different (+/\- 50k). The meeting planners hit the
roof.

Speakers bureaus do not view meeting planners as their clients, the speakers
are.

------
seancoleman
In real estate, developing with MLS data.

\- There are over 900 regional MLS providers each with different schemas.

\- You use RETS, a complicated, non web standards interface for downloading
data.

\- MLS data is plagued with errors and denormalized data making queries
difficult.

~~~
bdangubic
The entire Real-Estate industry is ripe for disruption. Exactly why are we
paying 6% to "agents"? What are "agents" actually doing? 10+ years ago the
need for "Real Estate Agents" was there as information was not readily
accessible. Things like "what kind of area is this property in", "what are
schools like" "what are prospects for this area 5 years down the road" and so
on. All this information (and MUCH more) is currently readily available
online. I have purchased and sold 4 homes in the last 6 years and agent I have
worked with has made many tens of thousands of dollars and I can tell you with
utmost precision that she hasn't spend more than 10 hours total. My wife and I
scouted locations, went to open houses, did research online for things that
are important to us and finally called the agent and said "we want to make an
offer." Other than that the only other time we called is for her to let us
into a home if there was no open house soon.

10+ years ago we had other "agents" that made a lot of money, e.g. "Travel
Agent" in Travel&Leisure industry. Then internet came along and now we have
1,000's of websites that have replaced what Travel Agents used to do...

For Real-Estate I think MLS is just a start a small piece of the puzzle,
someone very smart is going to disrupt the whole industry and make many
billions of dollars.

~~~
cbr

        The entire Real-Estate industry is ripe for disruption.
        Exactly why are we paying 6% to "agents"?
    

[https://www.redfin.com/](https://www.redfin.com/) is already doing this. They
charge half the normal fee if you're selling and they give about half of their
fee to you after purchase if you're buying.

(We bought our house with them.)

~~~
bdangubic
Sure, but what you are paying 1/2 for? Imagine owning a home which sells for
$1,000,000. Currently you pay roughly 6% - $60,000. You pick Redfin - they
charge take the money and give you back 1/2 but you are still paying them
$30,000!!

But if your house is sold for $100,000 you'd pay $6,000 or $3,000 to Redfin.
The whole thing is just the biggest currently running scam that I can think of
and someone will come along and totally disrupt this entire industry of
scammers :-)

~~~
jnicholasp
Exactly. Does it take ten times as much work for a real estate agent to sell a
$1m house versus a $100k house? Obviously not. So what are we paying ten times
as much for in the one case, and if there's no connection between effort and
fee, what are we paying for, and why, even in the low end case? Totally a
scam, totally ripe for disruption.

~~~
rplst8
The level of service is pretty low too. Its basically handling setting up a
few appointments to see houses, helping grease the skids for inspections, and
setting up a closing with a settlement company/lawyer. Stuff that really
doesn't take all that much expertise/knowledge.

I'm sure there are little things that go on behind the magic curtain, but
definitely something that could be automated in a b2b fashion.

The worst part of it all - all that money is spent basically to protect the
seller so they can wash their hands of the whole deal once the house is sold.
There is very little to no buyer protection in the real estate world.

------
NPMaxwell
As specific organs reduce functioning, some seniors living at home need to
revise their recipes to avoid complex collections of foods just as TIAs and
other problems reduce their ability to deal with the challenges. To-go food
does not work. For some families, hospital-style food may mimic the diet they
are accustomed to, but for immigrants, traditional hospital food may be
horrific. Older people tend to rely on a very limited set of dishes, so that
custom tailoring recipes may be cost effective. There are dietitian-run food
delivery services, but not ones that create meals from clients' recipes.
Affluent market tends to live away from their parents. The pain point is my
co-worker telling me, "Food is killing my dad, and there is nothing I can do
about it unless I quit this job and move home, which would be disastrous for
my spouse and kids. As far as I can tell, I have to know how to solve the
problem and just sit here, 3,000 miles away, and watch him die." I think this
market would pay a premium.

~~~
petra
>> There are dietitian-run food delivery services, but not ones that create
meals from clients' recipes.

The problem is that you need volume for it to make sense. One way to get that
is aggregating a few people who want the same recipe. The other way is
ordering those meals, frozen, for a bunch of days.

In either case, the people to talk to it about it are probably cooks on
[https://www.josephine.com/](https://www.josephine.com/) .

~~~
NPMaxwell
Nice! Thanks for the link!

------
6stringmerc
A monthly subscription service for a fee of $5 - $10 where every month I get a
new kind of quirky instrument (shaker, wind, wood block and stick, whistle,
triangle, or other noise maker) as a surprise by mail.

The point of the service in the music industry is to inspire new sounds and
the device can either be kept or given away to somebody without a lot of
second thought. Getting stuck is a big problem. Also in music it's important
to collaborate and giving gifts is a good way to make connections and
impressions.

Great tie-in with various Manufacturers or even retailers to get rid of excess
stock / failed impulse buy items / etc.

~~~
tomcam
$5 doesn't even pay for shipping, sadly. Amazon still pays a average of $6 per
order.

~~~
6stringmerc
Eh I was thinking more USPS and less expectation of timeliness. More about the
"set it and forget it until it shows up" kind of thing. Point understood
though, as $10 starts to get into a competitive space (e.g. Spotify).

------
Gruselbauer
I work for a small high end cosmetics business in the European Union. That
particular industry has a _lot_ of compliance and documentation rules imposed
on it by Brussels. My predecessor in the line sadly pushed using Apple's
Filemaker for that. It's not even that bad in the latest version and certainly
offers some advantages over similar solutions but the guy was horribly in over
his head. I'm talking fifty fields in a table having near identical names,
undocumented... everything, no clear UI design paradigms, needlessly
complicated UX and storing PDF as binary data in tables by the thousands.

But I feel like I'm stuck with repairing his shit because there's not a nice
and clean solution anywhere in sight. I thought of Wiki systems but the actual
data entry will be done by people who would be completely put off by any kind
of syntax/markup whatsoever. I'm neither good enough a Web developer to roll
something similar myself nor can I dream of creating something like an entire
documentation system.

I think the problem might apply to other smaller businesses in the EU and
especially Germany, too. Lots of docu to have ready in the unlikely but not
impossible case of an inspection.

For the cosmetics industry it'd need to be able to track ingredients, lots of
external evaluation docu, internal procedures and so on. While at the same
time it would need to be usable by people who are far removed from tech
literate.

~~~
lucaspiller
You could take a look at Jira. I understand most people reading this are
probably cringing right now, but the cause of that and what makes Jira
appropriate is just how customisable it is. You can setup custom fields,
validations, workflows.

~~~
kpil
While this is probably not a too bad idea, I just can't stop myself lamenting
over the customisability of Jira.

Before going bananas with Jira, either be very strict or use separate
instances.

I currently work at in a relatively large organisation where all teams of
various crafts and trades - not only development - share one Jira instance,
since Jira is obviously what 'Agile' teams use.

Let's say that not all teams are equally equipped for analysis and
generalisation.

Although there is supposedly some control process, there are now several
hundreds of custom fields, many duplicates of the standard fields, and
duplicates and triples or more of many custom fields.

The contents of them all are like the dwtf meme: True, False, FileNotFound.

------
zelon88
Not sure how much startup potential there is, but in my industry we struggle
with adhering to procedures, and the root cause of that is because our
procedures are written in the dark by management that doesn't always have a
complete picture or much insight into what they're enforcing. The problem that
creates is that employees only look for work-around's for the procedures
(because they are misguided or misinformed most of the time) and it creates a
bigger mess than if we had no procedures at all.

It's almost as though if we had a Procedural Consulting firm that could come
in, look at the big picture, and help companies to create EFFICIENT and
WORTHWHILE procedures that ACTUALLY do justice to the customer requirements
without breaking the bank. Then they can sit everyone down and explain the
procedures and enforce the assimilation that most companies usually have
growing pains with.

I noticed that when moving to a new company that is trying to grow and achieve
higher levels of accreditation. Management had intended a two-way assimilation
to take place between my procedural knowledge and the procedures they already
had in-place. What happened instead is old procedures are etched in stone and
new ones are seen as an obstacle... The assimilation was one-way and the other
middle-managers like myself are mainly concerned with keeping everything the
same, despite there being improvements that could easily be made.

~~~
Jtsummers
There are probably a fair number of consulting firms you can find for that.

But another (part of the) solution is using workflow software. Something that
allows you to define and share procedures, indicate status of various taskings
along the defined workflows, move data and such along. This clarifies to the
employees what's needed, and gives an opportunity for them to provide feedback
for improvements (too much granularity, not enough, too inflexible, etc.).
Management, then, also gets better insight into the actual status of projects
and taskings. It's part of continuous improvement to constantly be evaluating
these sorts of procedures and clarifying, culling, adding to them. Management
that's unfamiliar with these concepts is just bad management.

In the manufacturing world, the Procedural Consulting firm would conduct "lean
events". (NB: Many, if not most, places do this incorrectly.)

The correct way is to collect metrics (meaningful) over time, encourage and
reward employee feedback about ways to improve things. Then improve them
(sometimes as a move across the board, but often by conducting experiments to
see how well the new concepts work, then roll out to everyone). The risk is
that improved efficiency will obsolete employees, some fear this (like may
have actual panic attacks about this level of fear). Instead, you need a
culture that sees this improved efficiency as an opportunity for growth (the
same number of employees can now do more once people get retasked to new
things).

------
cake93
AR/VR visualization of 3D and 4D microscopy data (multicolor 3D video, as well
as 3D point clouds over time) for biological research.

Look for "lattice light sheet microscopy" or "superresolution microscopy" such
as (3D)-STORM or STED.

These techniques are adopted at a high pace. Groups spent $ 500,000 and often
more on the hardware. They can produce terabytes of data within days, but we
hardly have any tools to view and interact with it. (And the people are
overwhelmed with the analysis.)

Imagine a holographic video of living cell (potentially in near real time)
where you can zoom by grabbing the hologram.

~~~
kiliankoe
A friend just did his diploma thesis on this. He built a system where you use
a tablet device in your hand to push through 3D space visualizing the layers.
I couldn't possibly describe it well enough, but I'll forward him a link to
this thread and see if he answers.

~~~
billconan
When I interned at Autodesk, they have something similar for movie making.

they call it the virtual camera. it's essentially a tablet, you used as if
it's a camera of a virtual world.

Avatar was made with that device.

------
Keyframe
In filmmaking, there's a space for a relatively small and potentially
cheap(er) hybrid manual/motion control grip unit. Something between a panther
dolly (no tracks), a crane and a milo motion control with a stabilised head.
If you're into robotics, this is your space. Companies have started to work on
these issues, but part at a time (like DJI's Ronin). It's not enough though.

Imagine a giant (3-5m reach) monitor arm that can be operated manually, but
that can also remember the moves and repeat them. All of that on a mobile base
that can do the same, along with a stabilisation head that can do a
pitch/roll/yaw. Must be usable with and without power.

~~~
thenomad
Not entirely sure how you'd make one of these, but I can confirm: if you can
make an affordable one, there is at least some demand.

------
ninjamayo
Bret Victor-style dashboard and visualisation systems. I 've been using
Qlikview, Tableau and Excel for years and they are all very limited in what
they can do. New dashboard solutions come out every hour but everyone is
copying each other. I want something that I can mould to my problem, that I
can touch and fully interact with. Hard, hard problem but worth spending time
on this. Make it work in real-time scenarios too please.

~~~
noonespecial
Wish this jumped higher in the thread. I mounted a cheap digital projector and
a web cam pointed down over a white melamine table in my workshop thanks to
Bret's "Seeing Spaces" talk.

Just being able to record and play back what happened on the table has changed
the way I work on things. A commercial version of this project would be huge.

~~~
ninjamayo
Wish more people were thinking like Bret Victor. I 've been working with
visualisation systems for more than 16 years and never seen anything like his
software. The tool that he uses to easily construct charting within a few
minutes is genius

------
rmrm
My wife is a corporate attorney. They pass drafts of contracts around by email
using MS word with change tracking enabled.

Some sort of attorney targeted simple revision tracking front end using git
would be a mighty step forward.

~~~
emerongi
I'm actually close to launching this kind of product. A bit more complex than
Word + Git, but I hope it will be worth it.

One question: is there a use case for live group-editing? Same way live code
editors work. I have to admit that I'm not super familiar of the workflows in
that industry, so I am mostly just designing features the way I would like
them to work.

~~~
trevmckendrick
I ran into this exact problem when selling my company. It's horrible.

How far along is the product? Have you talked to any lawyers about it?

~~~
emerongi
I'm expecting to get the MVP done before the end of this year.

The MVP is mostly targeted at businesses who have to sign/generate contracts
at scale. There's a lot of features for those use cases, and then there's
features for users that the parent is talking about (pure contract-drafting).

I have not talked to any lawyers yet. I think the worst part is that I don't
even know how good the computer-skills of lawyers are, so... designing
features by my competence feels wrong. Since I can design the UI to match the
general structure of a contract, there's a lot that I can add to make the
user's life easier, but it also adds more for the user to learn.

~~~
jv22222
I think it is awesome that you are working on a project.

Most folks don't get started, so congrats on that, but can I say please do
talk to some lawyers asap.

I know it is super painful but, believe me, it can save you months if not
years of going down the wrong direction.

Here is a blog post we put together to show how to get in touch with people to
interview:

[https://blog.nugget.one/2016/09/21/case-study-how-i-
got-25-c...](https://blog.nugget.one/2016/09/21/case-study-how-i-
got-25-customer-development-interviews-in-2-weeks/)

Apologies for the unsolicited advice :)

~~~
sah2ed
Enjoyed reading your article. Thanks for sharing.

------
ramuta
Not a problem in industry, but rather in society: people rapidly losing jobs
due to automation

We all know why this is happening. One way to try to "solve" this problem is
fighting the change (Luddites), but this doesn't work. Also if people don't
have enough income, they stop spending - who's going to buy products and
services anymore?

Another possible solution would be that companies which automate most of it's
work are owned by the community in which they operate.

Let's take banks for example. Most of the jobs in banking system can and will
be automated. Imagine a country/state that has three banks - each of them is
owned by a third of the population (shareholders). When a bank makes profit,
each of the shareholders gets dividends out of it. The same example can be
applied to other industries and in total people would get (in a form of
dividends) the Universal Basic Income (which everybody is talking about these
days).

Don't get me wrong, this is not communism. Companies would not be government
owned, there would still be competition and private companies would still
exist.

Anyway, there are also other ways to tackle the problem mentioned at the
beginning. As Brexit and US elections showed us, it's starting to affect many
people and needs to be addressed asap.

~~~
gluggymug
My joke solution is everyone tries to get into politics as a profession. You
can't automate politics. It will either achieve UBI or create a hell on earth.

~~~
ramuta
Nice one :)

------
huherto
Uber for cooks.

People cook food in their homes. You select the food from several cooks in
your area in an app, drive to their house and pick the food.

I imagine a housewife/househusband that is already cooking for her/his family
to prepare more portions. Snap a photo, a description, and price. It can be
extra income for something that she/him is already doing.

People would use the product because it is convenient, saves times and they
get more food variety.

~~~
Namrog84
I don't remember where or what but I remember this idea being discussed a few
months ago on HN and there were quite a few reasons this is unlikely to
happen. Because safety of properly cooked food and human consumption and other
reasons. If you could stay relatively small and under radar. And get lucky
enough for nothing bad to happen long enough to make billions like Uber. Then
maybe have chance to pull off and get proper legal support/lobbyists

------
tommynicholas
BI for developers. Developers run many organizations and teams now, but most
Business Intelligence-ish tools are either built for business people (Tableau,
Domo) or for marketing (all analytics products, specifically GA).

I feel like there's a big opportunity for a tool/tools that are installed in
apps as a package and then customized from there. Many teams build a version
of this in house (Instacart open-sources theirs), and I think it should be a
product.

~~~
teej
Newrelic is converging on this. Also you should take a look at Looker.

~~~
tommynicholas
New Relic was the inspiration for this idea. I shouldn't have to put my data
into NR to get value, the data is already either in my app's DB or running
through my app. There are actually a lot of reasons why having it be installed
and within the app itself is ideal, opens up many doors that are closed by NR.
I want something that starts with that as a first principle and then figures
out the way to best execute it.

Will check out Looker!

------
kolbe
Not my industry, but a friend of mine in law was discussing how incredible her
in-house software is for managing billable hours relative to all her past
companies. I poked around, and most law firms, even very deep pocketed ones,
use somewhere between a bad tech system and no tech system to manage and track
their work.

A small team could easily collaborate with some law firm (maybe take an
investment from a few law firms), and create some very valuable software.

~~~
ruairidhwm
I'm a lawyer and a programmer and run a legal-tech startup. The largest issue
I've found with lawyers and technology is that they don't understand it, and
there is a lot of fear around it.

Most of the time I spent selling my software was assuaging the risk-averse
mindset that exists in the profession, rather than advertising the benefits. I
actually gave a TEDx talk on this point as I think it's an enormous issue in
the industry.

So the ease of creating the software isn't the issue, it's the culture. That
said, legal tech now has a pretty healthy ecosystem which is a delight to see!

~~~
pc86
Is your talk up somewhere? That sounds very interesting.

~~~
ruairidhwm
Sure - it's here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HakaHEDs7Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HakaHEDs7Q)

------
costcopizza
A one stop service for moving.

Connecting/disconnecting utilities, address change, car registration, new laws
I should be aware of.

End the piecemeal.

~~~
ktaylor
I invested in a startup that did this--the first one--called
[http://www.urbanbound.com](http://www.urbanbound.com). they quickly realized
there was no demand for this in the B2C world so they switched to become a B2B
employee relocation platform (again the first to do this as a SAAS) and they
just landed a Series B. Fish where the money is!

------
eli
It's still surprisingly hard to send email newsletters. I want software or a
service that sits on top of mailgun/ses/my own SMTP server and handles list
management, templating, link redirection, and analytics. And that stores
everything in a way that makes further data mining easy.

Lots of services solved the just sending email part. And lots of mailchimp
type services offer a complete product geared towards marketers. Not much in
between and most existing players have laughably poor APIs that make custom
integrations and extensions painful.

~~~
rafaelm
Besides Sandy which aj0strow already mentioned, there's another solution
called Mailtrain. It's open source and has some of the missing sendy features.
I've been meaning to try it for a while now.

~~~
eli
Will check it out, thanks. I could imagine an OSS based business model working
here. I'd gladly pay for support and perhaps sponsor feature development.

------
bigmattystyles
Not in my industry but I'm part of an HOA and I swear 2/3 of what the people
paid to administer it do seems streamlinable/automatable with lots of
opportunity for making money along the way. Every time I deal with them I
proclaim to myself, STARTUP! Then I forget about it..

~~~
LeanderK
What does HOA stand for?

~~~
bigmattystyles
Homeowners Association - Might be US thing - but basically Condos / Townhouses
/ even neighborhoods form associations to take care of the 'commons' / enforce
a look for the neighborhood, etc... There's usually a monthly payment. Repairs
/ work orders / disputes are settled through them. There's bylaws...

~~~
prawn
Equivalent in Australia is a Strata Corp and the resulting meetings they
involve.

------
agentgt
I'm not in the industry but I would really love a better way of growing your
own food indoors while minimizing as much space but growing enough to support
two people a day.

Basically it is either build your own large messy setup or buy a complete
novel piece of crap that will barely support a single meal... aka aerogarden.

It would be nice to have basically a large self contained opaque cabinet with
drawers of growing food.

Basically I want a food growing appliance with plumbing and electrical
hookups.

I would easily be willing to spend a couple grand on something like that.

~~~
kaa2102
I attended a Washington Post Millennial startup event (inGENuitY) last year
that featured several companies like this.
[http://wapo.st/1TvsnAv](http://wapo.st/1TvsnAv)

------
biztos
This is not the industry I work in, but one of which I'm often a customer:

 _A turnkey package tracking system for small-to-medium shippers._

In much of the world the shipping (as in DHL, FedEx) markets are still very
fragmented and do not look like they're going to consolidate all that much.
(As to why, I have guesses but I don't know for sure. I'm looking at Central
Europe right now but I expect this is true in many other regions).

As far as I can tell the package tracking systems are something the companies
compete on, with the result that a lot of them suck or (worst case) don't
exist.

Case in point: I'm currently waiting for a shipment that the seller swears
they gave to the shipper, but the shipper's system doesn't recognize the code.
Both parties maintain it's probably just not "processed" yet at the shipper's,
going on three days now.

As a software guy, I find it crazy that nobody has a generic white-label
tracking system that any random shipper can use in combination with some
smartphones/tablets for label scanning. It only has to cost less than the
company pays the owner's cousin's teenage son to write the tracking PHP code
these companies would otherwise use, and I bet you could upsell all kinds of
premium add-ons if it worked well.

I would love to see this, and I think it's a big enough market to actually
accommodate a startup.

~~~
confiscate
Hey Biztos, why do you think this would be a big market? What would be some
potential customers of such a turnkey tracking system? I imagine big players
like DHL/FedEx would not be target customers due to their high traffic and
already existing internal package tracking systems

~~~
biztos
Very late reply, but just in case you're still watching: I don't think
DHL/FedEx would be obvious _customers_ but they might be obvious _acquirers_
if your tech really rocked.

AFAICT there are still a lot of small local and regional shippers who offer a
better deal than FedEx/DHL -- I assume that's mostly on price but it could
also be on expertise, proximity, nepotism, whatever -- and the deal has
remained consistently better for many years despite FedEx, DHL, UPS, and other
large players being in the market.

My guess is that the further away from the FedEx/DHL hubs you get, the less
attractive their service and the higher their prices -- and it looks to me
like more and more stuff is being sold online in these markets too, and that
stuff has very low margins and needs to get shipped for "free" or at least
cheap.

Furthermore, in Europe at least you have direct competitors to FedEx/DHL on
the international level (at least within the EU). Players at that level have
their own tracking systems, sure, but that means they have to have IT crews,
software developers, etc. and I'm sure they'd much rather not.

For example I recently had a delivery from DPD:

[https://www.dpd.com/de_privatkunden](https://www.dpd.com/de_privatkunden)

It's probably a much smaller market but there are also specialty transporters
for stuff like art and antiques. I'm sure they absolutely hate having to care
about tracking systems when their value-adding expertise is so thoroughly
elsewhere.

------
contingencies
Normally I live in China, and rarely eat western breakfast.

Recently I returned to Australia to spend some Christmas time with my extended
family.

A few mornings ago, I put some real bread I cut from a sourdough loaf in a
toaster. Due to its irregular size, when it popped it didn't pop out
completely, resulting in a sort of "toaster is too hot to insert fingers,
toast is too hot to hold, toast is ready, find metallic implement to insert in
to mains-powered device to extract toast" problem.

I mentally facepalmed.

Someone should really fix toasters.

~~~
weaksauce
To be fair there shouldn't be any voltage inside the toaster basket area when
the toast has popped up. Unless they did something stupid when designing the
toaster. And you can always unplug it before sticking utensils in there.

~~~
biztos
I've had the same thing happen with toasters, and at least as of a few years
ago it was completely possible for a piece of toast (of just the wrong size)
to get stuck such that it not only didn't pop up, the toaster didn't turn off.
So the toast starts to burn, you grab a knife, what could possibly go wrong?

This happened pretty regularly as it was a European toaster designed for
perfectly uniform extruded wonder-"toast" and I kept sticking hand-cut slices
from round loaves into it.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Don't you just turn it off at the wall... if you don't have completely useless
wall sockets.

------
lucaspiller
Surprised nobody has mentioned the elephant in our industry yet: recruiters
and recruitment companies. I'm not talking about those employed by big
companies, but those who are independent.

For the last year and a bit I've been contracting with a company, and the
recruiter who found me has fees of around 10% per day of my work, which they
bill the company.

They found me via LinkedIn, sent me a couple of emails, arranged a Skype call
between me and the company, and sent me a bit of paperwork. Not bad for €10k.

~~~
agentgt
I'm the founder of a recruiting software company (SnapHop) and I will tell the
recruiting industry like the real estate industry is actually shockingly
difficult to disrupt. This is in part because recruiting is basically sales.
Except your not selling a simple widget but a massive change. A career change
for many is filled with as much trepidation as public speaking (I'll find the
source shortly).

The other problem similar to health care is regulation and compliance but
mainly it is because the industry is a very human industry despite all the
big-data machine learning promises. Getting rid of recruiting is like getting
rid of sales.

The big players in the industry are pretty much equivalent to google and
facebook -> indeed and linkedin. The problem is you can only make so much
money on advertising so they are trying to automate recruiting but still rely
heavily on a service based approach (that is you still need humans). This is
because advertising exacerbates the signal to noise ratio.

When google enters the industry (which I believe they just did recently)
expect linkedin and indeed to become even more service based (ie highly
efficient super recruiting firms).

Consequently cutting edge recruiting software has now become more focused on
marketing automation which is what my company does (albeit we are more focused
on the traditional inbound aka websites instead of the annoying email nagware
you have seen). That is giving recruiters better tools to do their job.

That being said my recent idea is instead of giving recruiters (or corp talent
acquisition marketing) sales automation what if we give individual
_candidates_ that software? That is give the candidates drip campaigns and
automated sales replies and beautiful personal career portfolio websites. That
is allow smart candidates to sell to recruiters and company at scale.

I haven't figured out the monetization for it or the _actual_ demand but I
think it would be interesting and potential disruptive empowering candidates.

~~~
sah2ed
> That is give the candidates drip campaigns and automated sales replies and
> beautiful personal career portfolio websites. That is allow smart candidates
> to sell to recruiters and company at scale.

Not sure I follow. Large companies generally follow a pre-determined hiring
process. How would automated sales replies work for a candidate? There has to
be a hiring event -- a trigger, for the reply to be relevant and be seen by
the right person.

------
NurAzhar
Uber for boat in Singapore please

Hard to find boat from pier to ship

Also cost prohibitive alot of unnecessary middle man

~~~
NIL8
Interesting. I bet this would be useful all over the world. I wonder if
there's anything like this available anywhere else. The longer I think on it,
the better it sounds.

The biggest hurdle would probably be organized crime. It might sound crazy,
but most ports are infested with deeply rooted criminals who are involved with
even the most mundane aspects of the import/export arena. Of course, even
organized crime can be disrupted with the right tech.

------
shinamee
Tech industry: I want to be able to go to Mars for the weekend... leaving on
Friday and coming back early Monday morning.

This is still a big problem in tech industry.

~~~
mabbo
You're being facetious but maybe you should actually consider the history
behind that sort of thing.

Yesterday my friend in LA invited a few of us in Toronto to come to his BBQ
this weekend. The group chat became us discussing the logistics and price of
how we might do that. 150 years ago, that would have been an insane concept.

~~~
nhebb
300 years ago, when Benjamin Franklin traveled from Philadelphia to Boston,
the trip took two weeks. The fastest mode of travel was by boat, and he nearly
died in a boat wreck.

------
protomyth
Not my industry, but in my area. I'm still looking for a good modular house
that can be setup reasonably quickly, low cost, and can survive North Dakota
winter and summer. Something suitable for a single person or a couple.

~~~
paraplegic
These guys sell full size or tiny model geodesic domes, which go up pretty
quickly on a poured platform. They are supposed to be able to withstand
hurricane force winds ...

[http://aidomes.com/tiny-homes/](http://aidomes.com/tiny-homes/)

~~~
protomyth
That might be a decent solution, thanks.

------
Avshalom
There's probably a SaaS in locksmithing.

[http://masterkeypro.com/](http://masterkeypro.com/) is sort of the only entry
in the market and cores/companies-that-need-key-schedules change _just_ often
enough that say $5-10 month could gain traction.

~~~
bb611
Essentially inventory management for locks, including the specific bitting(s)
for each lock? That actually sounds really fun to build, not terribly
challenging, and probably has huge market reach.

One quick challenge though, my understanding is that the average org that
needs this either contracts or has full time staff who manage their locks.
Those are normally guys who manage this by placing the 10 cores they need to
re-key on their work bench, maybe putting a tape label on, and then just going
to the individual locks and dropping in a new core. I get the value as a
management tool, but does this really improve things for the average staff
locksmith?

~~~
Avshalom
Usually yes either they just go through some one like Hull Supply (the company
I worked for) or they have their own department. Whoever they go through
however still has to deal with this shit. Masterkey is fine if you already
have a key schedule, it'll spit out as many pinning combos as it can.

at 300$ a license there's room for competition and if you could make a GUI
that says calls to a prolog style logic engine to automatically create the
keying hierarchy (Management needs keys to these doors, renters need keys to
these doors, janitorial needs key to these doors, etc...) you could easily
beat the functionality of Masterkey.

------
jdc0589
Industry: Any tech company that hosts sensitive/regulated data.

The problem: privlidged access management and auditing.

The solution: Cyberark, but not $250k to cover 1,000 servers. Ain't nobody got
money for that.

~~~
bduerst
I feel like this is a common/old enough problem there should be some open
sourced solutions for it already.

~~~
jdc0589
In linux land, there is Teleport, which is relatively new. There are probably
some other options, but I liked the POC I did with teleport, it just needs to
mature a hair.

In windows land.....I've got nothing, hence the problem.

\- [https://gravitational.com/teleport/](https://gravitational.com/teleport/)

------
iamgopal
Government should allow company to pay part of the salary as life long Income
bond. Company will have tax credit for that. Government will pay them fixed
monthly income depend upon value of bond. I.e. Deferred inflation. But this
can solve minimum income idea very easily.

~~~
cheriot
I'm not sure I really understand what you're describing. Is this like buying
an annuity tied to lifespan and a tax subsidy to encourage it?

------
Too
Software development tools/IDE have come a long way but are nothing compared
to what they could be. Things like static analysis, syntax/context aware
diff/merge, visualization of variable changes while debugging, visualizations
in general, cross language understanding, instant compilation, reverse
debugging, data store integration, remote debugging, hot reloading, dependency
management, cross platform compatibility, documentation integration, design
for async. List could go on forever.

It is somewhat "possible" to get a subset of the features above today but it
always feels more like proof of concept rather than a complete product and you
can never get all of them in one environment.

The problem is that there are so many free tools that are "good enough" so it
becomes quite a luxury to pay for the last mile. Barrier to entry is very
large because of this and because it is a very big and complex problem space.
Would love to see some competition here, only serious actors today are
intellij and VS.

------
Old_Thrashbarg
My sibling was an architect in NYC for a couple years. He found it very
difficult to keep on top of the different regulations which are amended
occasionally. They come in books, PDFs, old janky online tools.

We're working on a startup to bring all together into a modern search engine.
It's called UpCodes.

There's a lot of space in the area of construction compliance that needs
improving.

------
tlb
(AI research industry)

We'd like to run learning algorithms on robots, but there are no great options
for hardware. (Happy to discuss in depth if someone wants to build it)

We want to train large models much faster than any GPU box you can buy. (There
are several new things announced, but there's room for more).

~~~
lowglow
Might be good to chat with you. We're working on Asteria. Happy to reach out.

------
mixedbit
Global CDN with a fixed monthly cost and a capped bandwidth. For example, pay
100$/month and get up to 1Gb/s, traffic above this limit is dropped.

Providers today offer uncapped bandwidth, some, like Amazon, without any cost
cap, some, like KeyCDN, allow to set a cost cap, but take the resources off-
line when the limit is exceeded.

~~~
artursapek
Why on earth would anyone want their CDN traffic to drop? Rise in traffic
usually comes with a rise in revenue - it's a good problem to have.

~~~
funnyfacts365
Unless the traffic increase is a DDoS, then you're spending money on people
who are attacking you...

~~~
artursapek
Yes, but one has to assume that's an exception and mitigate that manually
(like shutting down the CDN temporarily)

------
jakub_g
Email parsing and extracting data from it, (input data in multiple languages),
that is not strictly depending on predefined templates but being able to
adjust itself. Think parsing emails from multiple providers of certain kind of
service and exposing common data model. Looks like perfect usage of machine
learning.

~~~
endisukaj
Doesn't GMail do this already? It's not perfect but it extracts data such as
plane tickets or hotel reservations and saves those to your calendar.

~~~
tomascot
Gmail extracts data from emails with certain tags in it, microformats or one
of those standars. I think OP is talking about something more flexible using
nlp.

------
richard___
A meal prep service for bodybuilders. The hardest part of bodybuilding is
eating right. Something that is affordable, nutritious, and calorie dense
would be extremely valuable. There is no meal delivery service I know of that
satisfies the last criterion. $10 should get you at least 1000 healthy
calories

~~~
crystalPalace
Have you considered Soylent or one of its many derivatives? Some such as
Joylent are a little cheaper while others have a wider variety of flavors and
there are even keto options like Ketolent and Keto Chow.

------
starik36
Radio Industry. I know it's a slowly dying business, but that's because the
giants are too slow to turn.

I want to be able to go to a website, ask for demographics that I am looking
for and be able to purchase an advertisement and hire talent to record my
commercial.

As it stands, you have to deal with salespeople.

~~~
jdavis703
Isn't this what ad agencies are supposed to do? Or are you saying you want a
digital-only ad agency, like Adwords, except for radio?

~~~
starik36
Yes, something similar to AdWords. Which Google previously did do, but then
cancelled it. [http://betanews.com/2007/04/16/google-s-ad-moves-ruffle-
feat...](http://betanews.com/2007/04/16/google-s-ad-moves-ruffle-feathers/)

I want my pool cleaning guy to be able to go online and buy a radio commercial
advertising his business. If he has to go through a salesperson and negotiate
and all that, you've already lost him.

I think there is a ton of money sitting on the table waiting to be claimed for
this opportunity.

~~~
confiscate
Why do you think there is a ton of money for this? Currently buyers go through
salespeople--it's not elegant but not it is working. How much more money would
an automated system be able to extract, given that some buyers are comfortable
with doing it in-person?

~~~
starik36
Right now the small time business money is not on the table at all. Couple of
reasons for that.

One is that it's expensive to buy. One cause of that is that you have to pay
sales people. If you remove sales people layer, you would lessen the cost of
the ads and allow these people to come to the table.

Second reason is that dealing with sales people is a hassle. Their incentives
do not align with those of the buyer. Salespeople do not want to deal with
small timers because commission is too small.

------
takinola
As a SaaS provider, one of the key indicators of a customer at risk of churn
is the presence of another competitor in their account. A service which
notifies you once an account signs up for a competing service would be
immensely valuable in helping to target retention activities.

~~~
tacostakohashi
As a SaaS provider, would you be ok with having your competitors find out when
one of their customers signs up with you?

~~~
devoply
You could employ some sneaky tactics to ferret out if a customer's browser
visits a competitor's website... without letting the competitors or the custom
know.

~~~
pc86
Or as this is otherwise known, "spying on your customers."

~~~
philtar
I believe the term you're looking for is 'analytics'

/s

------
analog31
An easy way to design things using catalog mechanical parts.

I imagine being able to create a structure or assembly from stuff in the
McMaster-Carr or ThorLabs catalogs without having to be a CAD expert. When I'm
satisfied with the thing on my screen, I press a button, enter my credit card
number, and the parts arrive from their respective vendors in a couple days.

A search feature would be vital, of course. Being able to modify some parts
would be useful, e.g., if I need 14 inches of pipe, I can cut down a 24 inch
piece. Drawing from multiple disciplines would be necessary, e.g., combining
an electrical box, optical assembly, and structural framework.

Maybe you get paid via a little kickback from those vendors, who also agree to
integrate their catalogs with your service.

~~~
notananthem
It exists in the form of them and other suppliers providing cad for everything

------
earthly10x
I'm in the AI industry and our problem is that we have so little grasp on what
intelligence actually is, that we stumble in getting our machines to mimic
portions of human cognition even on the vector space level.

------
scaramouche
A request/approval system. The current offerings are laughably unusable.

~~~
gary__
I bookmarked a few gmail apps for this a while back, though have not used them
myself. Does either of these look like what you are after?

[https://www.wizy.io/solutions/gmail_workflow.html](https://www.wizy.io/solutions/gmail_workflow.html)
[https://kissflow.com/how-it-works/](https://kissflow.com/how-it-works/)

------
JoeAltmaier
I do embedded Linux porting. The big job is writing drivers and building the
device tree. This would be so much simpler if schematics could be annotated
with scrapable clues about pin connections and device parameters (e.g. device
tree fragments). Its all derivable from the schematic and chip specs, but that
part could be automated almost completely.

It would put me out of a job, but better than shooting myself in the head next
time I have to face 40 hours of slogging through data sheets.

~~~
jsudhams
Will the requester typically provide the datasheets?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Nope. But fortunately most chips have widely available datasheets. Except
Chinese knockoffs which can involve lots of sleuthing and black-box testing.
Had to write a camera driver for a clone that had spotty support (a poor copy
of a better device), took a month to get it right.

------
Avshalom
It's not really start up material but Sage/MAS is basically crap for companies
that need custom work. The door warehouse I worked at basically needed 2-3
parallel system (1-2 of them being us scribbling on paper) because we custom
fabricated doors and MAS was basically useless for passing that kind of thing
around.

P.S. If any of you are in Austin I recommend Hull Supply, they're good people.

~~~
Axsuul
Can we get in touch? Currently building something in this space and would like
to understand your problem better. My email is in my profile!

~~~
Avshalom
I left Hull/Texas in April 2015 but if you want to bug somebody
[http://hullsupply.com/page/contact/](http://hullsupply.com/page/contact/)

ask to be transferred to Gabe, I'm sure he's still IT there.

P.S. I don't know if he'll remember the name but Axel -from the cage and
lockshop- if you want a name to drop.

------
Kaizyn
In the IT industry, finding good startup ideas is a hard problem.

~~~
jv22222
We've got you covered at [https://nugget.one](https://nugget.one) :)

~~~
yellowapple
Neat idea, but I ain't exactly keen on paying $50/month for "typical
Craigslist job listing as a service"

------
braindead_in
We are an human powered audio/video transcription service and have lots of
training data that can be used for training a speech recognition system. An
ASR-as-a-Service in the cloud kind of platform where we can use our data to
continuously train and improve the models would be very useful for us.

~~~
buckshee
>human powered audio/video transcription service

Mind sharing the name? I have friends doing ASR in college and they may be
interested in your company. Though since their focus is on research/publishing
papers, they may stick to standard datasets. But knowing about a new data
source is always welcome.

Thanks.

~~~
braindead_in
[https://scribie.com](https://scribie.com) Email is in my profile as well.

------
cheriot
It's not my industry, but I've been thinking about my health habits and a WaPo
article made me realize I don't even know what a healthy weight range to
target is[1]. BMI ignores bone structure and muscle and the most
popular/affordable body fat estimations are +-10%. Is there something else out
there to help make an individualized weight goal? Or any other health goal?

[1]
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/01/nearl...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/01/nearly-
half-of-americas-overweight-people-dont-realize-theyre-overweight/)

~~~
jonex
Tape measure and formulas is better than both weight and BMI. And while the
errors can be large for some, you won't mistakenly think you are fit at 35%
nor fat at 10% using them. There's actually not very much good knowledge out
there on exactly what levels are optimal for health. It's mainly based on
epidemiological research. However, as long as you aren't below 10-12 % BF (ca.
84 cm waist) there is probably no danger going down. If you are going towards
25% BF and above(ca 98 cm waist) you probably should see over your habits.

If you want to keep it simple, just set some random measurement in-between
those numbers as a limit and start dieting when above.

I don't think the big issue for regular people is that they have tried
measuring themselves but by random chance got an inaccurately low estimate,
rather that they haven't really tried measuring or does not succeed in losing
fat. The latter is sad as losing fat is mostly a solved issue, but the
misinformation is so high that it's hard to get on the right track. If someone
could solve the information problem they'd be a public health hero!

For people into body-building or serious fitness, the issue of estimating fat
is a bigger one. Some people go for DEXA scans, but they are quite expensive
and takes time. Something doable in your home, but more accurate than tape
measure or callipers, especially for tracking variations, would be the ideal.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
A cheap durable texting cel phone with long battery life for use as a pager.

Edit: probably without android.

~~~
aj0strow
Which industry is that? :)

~~~
bbcbasic
Organised crime

------
strobe
One problem from my past experience at architecture industry: every country
has it own rules & regulations for represent drawings of
designs(documentation)(many small things like floor plans, sizes, fonts,
frames, symbols descriptions all are different) as result CAD software
developed in one country very hard to use in another without lot of weird
tricks which works only for subset of original functionality. I believe it may
be solved be separating actual building model and view/render representation
like AST and interpreter. But unfortunately is super hard to do just because
that AST model should include lot of complex stuff.

------
probolsky
I recently had to reserve six hotel ballrooms/conf. rooms for focus groups.
Hotel sales offices suck. They are not responsive, sometimes taking days to
respond, they have old technology (if any). They require signatures on
multiple documents (almost none use online forms). For some inexplicable
reason sales and catering managers all have assistants, who by the way, cannot
actually do anything or give you any information, they are just clerks to take
info. It was a coordination nightmare to set up all six locations and dates.
There is great opportunity here to automate and streamline this process.

------
komali2
Many doctor offices still have horrifying paper record systems, don't use
e-invites, etc. Companies are fixing this but the market is still huge.

I don't know why the few companies that are in the IoT space for oil and gas
aren't scooping up literally _billions_ in missed opportunities for sticking
cell-enabled sensors on oil platforms, fields, etc. Then there's the next
billion dollars waiting for whoever starts sticking controllers next to the
sensors on valves, etc.

Drone inspection and repair in oil and gas. People are doing this but it's
taking way too long to take off for how much money is there just waiting to be
picked up.

Sticking a laser scanner on a drone. Again, people are doing it, but what the
fuck, there's _so much money_ just sitting there.

If you're looking for contract work, just start browsing random EPC websites
and calling up the shitty ones. Probably a good 10,000 at least that are still
rocking 1995 crapsites, and not in the "good" "low functionality low load
time" way, the "using tables for layout" way.

Trains should be automated. They already are in Taiwan for some lines, it's
been feasible for years.

Motorcycle safety is still subpar for where we are in material science. There
are a lot of riders out there that will pay _buckets_ for greater safety.
We've figured out how to not get our skin ripped off but I believe there's
still a market for preventing broken bones, spinal snaps, decapitations, and
the like.

Somehow we still don't have GUI HUDs in our moto helmets. Like BMW is working
on something but honestly it would be a _relatively_ simple and profitable
thing for a _very_ small startup (2 man team working part time). Literally
even just casting your smartphone screen to the visor would be enough to get
people buying so they can have a HUD map and shit.

Big market for motorcycle storage solutions. I giggle whenever I see someone
with an ammo box strapped onto their sports bike. We already dropped hundreds
on gear and thousands on the bike, we spend many more hundreds or thousands on
modding the things, there's ample opportunity for more elegant and functional
storage solutions.

VR allows for limitless desktop screen space in a portable package. I'd like
to be able to bring an HTC vive and a tiny screenless box to plug it into that
would allow me to have a "multi-monitor" setup while I travel. Some say the
resolution isn't there yet, I say make the text bigger. I have no problem
reading the stuff in steamVR.

I get made fun of every time I bring it up but I'm convinced people are
stupidly ignoring lighter than air travel, transportation, and data
distribution, especially in an automated sense. Google has their wifi balloon
thing but they dropped their blimp transport truck project. I think it
could've been a thing.

There may be some margins available in teaching low-income people how to cook
and eat basic foods instead of frozen meals. It took me to getting
scholarshipped into college to realize that we were losing buckets of money
eating frozen meals and fast food because we thought it was the "cheapest
option," not to mention how unhealthy we were for it. Think like somehow
getting low-income folks to buy potatoes, onions, peppers, dried beans, cheap
cuts of meat, etc and demonstrating how it's faster, cheaper, healthier, etc.
Potentially a gov funding opportunity, would save on EBT and healthcare costs.

Kids learn by doing. Good luck changing anything about education in the USA
though.

Someone would be able to take over any industry in Taiwan that they please if
they start up the company and instantly pay 2x local salary, give PTO, and
have other basic benefits that we take for granted here. It wouldn't be much,
you'd be paying ~44k/year USD for an Engineer, for example. You'd be able to
poach the best talent, you'd draw shitloads of negative press from pissed of
old Taiwanese businesspeople (no press is bad press), everyone would be
telling you you're wrong, and you'd Donald Trump your way straight to the top.
Think Scranton Oakmont or Gordon Ramsay as well. Just don't break the law.
Also learn Chinese.

~~~
tomcam
Wow! You've got range. What are EPC and PTO?

~~~
komali2
Apologies, I hate when people do that to me.

EPC means "engineering, procurement, and construction" company. So like,
lyondell-basell or jacobs engineering or foster wheeler (now AMEC) or Mustang
(not the car) or KBR.

PTO = Paid Time Off. Catchall for vacation time, sick time, holidays.

~~~
tomcam
Ok, thanks. Work for myself so did not connect to PTO which should be obvious
in retrospect

------
OliverJones
Antibotnet -- software products and hardware gizmos to detect when IoT gizmos
get pwned, recruited into botnets, and then the botnets are activated to
attack KrebsOnSecurity or somebody.

This stuff should be priced for home and small office use.

"BEEEP" Why is your laser printer's ethernet port issuing tons of SYN
requests? Unplug that printer! Factory reset it!

Grow it into carrier-grade implementations.

------
ajo_LODR_IO
Checkout [https://www.lodr.io](https://www.lodr.io). We focus on loading files
into RedShift. The data processing engine is built on a serverless backend for
faster data loads at better prices. You don't have define schema, data types
etc. Drop file, transform (optional), and load.

------
woogiewonka
Vehicle purchaseing. I despise having to negotiate a lower price when both
parties know what the vehicle is actually worth, what incentives are available
and that the salesperson is bullshiting the buyer. My soul dies a little every
time I have to buy another car. I wish someone would put dealerships out of
business somehow.

------
bobosha
Enterprise passwords/keys sharing with an audit trail, non-repudiation,
expiration and all that jazz. Most (all?) companies I know, including ours
have challenges sharing such info. Current solution is mostly to use google
drive or dropbox in most businesses I know.

~~~
gentleteblor
Are these passwords for individual use (in SaaS apps for example) or are they
passwords to enterprise assets (databases, document stores etc).

I've used Azure Key Vault quite a bit and it might be a good solution to the
latter scenario.

~~~
bobosha
Those seem MS specific, something lightweight, dropbox-ish/slack-ish easy-to-
use app for enterprise security sharing.

~~~
gentleteblor
Key Vault is an MS service for sure, but you can use it for anything as it has
rest api.

It's not as friendly as drobox/slack but it's far more secure.

------
frodprefect
Industrial heat treating. PID controllers with expansive reporting software.
Whole industry is scrambling right now to make their own or buy systems
upwards of 10K.

Think Wi-Fi thermostats that record data.

------
ausrname1
Sales. It's crazy that selling products requires the build-out of entire
sales, marketing, and support organizations when most companies could be well
served by an Uber for Sales.

------
mcgrill
Anything that has to do with mining engineering and the use of software is
just ripe for startups, getting the industry to adopt thought is a different
story.

~~~
gimili
What are the biggest challanges for the mining engineering industry?

~~~
DanBC
Safety critical equipment needs safety critical software.

You also need to provide machines and software for cheaper than a human life.
Human life has a distressingly low value in several mining industries.

~~~
gimili
So you see the biggest challenges in the machines and execution of the work,
rather than in the planning?

------
joeld42
One of the best places to look is where an emerging platform overlaps with
existing specialty fields. For example, VR is currently an emerging platform,
here's a few things that maybe someone is pursuing but there's no established
solution for:

\- 3D Storyboarding for VR cinematic storytelling (mixed desktop/VR)

\- VR home tours for real estate

\- VR sports training for golf/tennis/baseball

\- Rehearsal/Staging VR for event planning.

\- VR Training for DIY/Construction.

etc.. In particular if there is a field that you personally work in or know
someone that's a great place to start.

~~~
rubicon33
What about VR for surgery training?

~~~
bduerst
That would better be served with AR, no?

------
weewooweewoo
Strippers, but for emotional labor.

------
danschumann
All these ideas are wrong, because they are cash grabs. Money will never
satisfy you. Find a startup you love by looking back to your best memories(10
years ago or more) of creating something and seek to give people that
experience. Then, even if you fail financially, you'll still have more great
memories, 10 years from now.

~~~
RoboticWater
I fail to see how industry problems ripe for technical solutions equate to
cash grabs. Problems are essentially the basis of every startup (if we
generalize a little), and I can assure you that engineers can be passionate
about solving a problem.

I also don't really understand what you mean by giving people the experience
of something you were creating in the past. What does that mean? As advice it
seems exceptionally vague; something an writing teacher might tell me to write
about, but not solid advice for founding a startup.

------
mrdlin
sdfg

------
kapauldo
This is the best thread I've ever read on HN. It's like going to a conference
without the time and cost spend. How about a product that does this thread
once a week. Half therapy half happy hour.

~~~
ThomPete
I started the original thread last
year:[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007)
and the discussion was so valuable and resulted in this essay
[https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-
problems-4...](https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-
problems-47ee63bb3511#.7gt7sglel)

We been talking about doing it monthly. And I have been talking with a few
people about creating a conference around it. No pitches, no ted-lets save the
world speaks. Just problems and people who are looking for problems to solve.

~~~
mathgeek
> No pitches, no ted-lets save the world speaks. Just problems and people who
> are looking for problems to solve.

What ideas have you come up with to efficiently match up the problems with the
solvers? Seems like pitches would still be involved somehow.

~~~
ThomPete
I am thinking that pitches are for solutions. So I don't think that would be a
problem.

The problems would be conversations.

------
vegabook
Finance, specifically fixed income:

Regulations will unbundle research from liquidity provision starting sometime
in 2018 (moving regulatory target, but theme seems clear). Sellside will have
lower incentive to pay large research groups; buyside will have to pay
explicit fees for research advisory. There is a big opportunity in providing
platforms, with macro and market data live, where researchers can interact
with capital managers, given that said researchers will likely find themselves
bereft of their current distribution networks (bank sales forces) sometime in
the next few years.

Equities already have a hybrid form of this where buyside earns "credits" to
be allocated at the end of each year to research providers. But fixed income
is at least twice as big as equities, is much more opaque because is
essentially unlisted (mainly "OTC" = "over the counter" ie only those in the
know), and therefore much more susceptible to disruption.

~~~
blobwalker
Are you suggesting an extension of CSA into fixed income, or a platform for
selling/distributing research?

~~~
vegabook
apologies the only "CSA" I know is the Credit Support Annex between
counterparties, which seeks to minimize risk on mark to market of derivative
contracts. Is this what you are referring to?

------
fatdog
Work in software, key problem in my industry is a lack of leadership.

~~~
miles_matthias
We started StartupCTO.io as a way to address this. We saw the same lack of
support for CS grads thrust into leadership, so we're doing something about
it.

------
ommunist
Too many startups are trying to disrupt the industry, thus creating the
problem, that cannot be solved by one more startup. Its the same problem with,
say, capitalism. You cannot solve it by organising one more political party. I
am not saying capitalism is bad. Its a problem.

------
xiaoma
Everyone is ignoring the low-end of the market.

~~~
csdreamer7
Low end of what market? Propose an idea.

~~~
xiaoma
I was just answering the OP. With all these downvotes for that I have nothing
more to say.

~~~
csdreamer7
You gave a very vague, short answer to something that really needed a better
answer. A story the poor are dealing with. A volume market possibility you
were hoping someone would supply. The downvotes are deserved.

You could always give a good paragraph answer that everyone else is
contributing to this otherwise excellent post. Maybe the downvotes would
disappear.

~~~
farm_code
[http://www.thebopstrategy.com](http://www.thebopstrategy.com)

------
treehau5
Not sure, but if it involves automating more jobs away, wank off.

~~~
vinay427
I don't understand this idea that everyone needs jobs, all of the time. Ideas
are not created so that jobs can be created, and workers on a societal level
don't work so they have jobs. They work so the business operates and serves
society. Why not develop ideas and businesses that provide value to all of
society and provide benefits such as a basic income that compensate for the
fewer workers needed?

~~~
treehau5
> Why not develop ideas and businesses that provide value to all of society
> and provide benefits such as a basic income that compensate for the fewer
> workers needed?

Because this is a pipe dream that ignores the decades long of suffering it
will take to reach that state, if ever.

~~~
vinay427
Certainly, but automation seems inevitable at this point because it actually
is beneficial to most of society, in terms of productivity. I don't think
becoming less automated to save jobs is any less of a pipe dream.

~~~
treehau5
> I don't think becoming less automated to save jobs is any less of a pipe
> dream.

It may seem inevitable. Until you have an entire generation of the work force
put out of work. Then the only thing that will be inevitable will be civil
war. We always need to have work for people to do. It's fundamental to our
nature. It's the modern expression of hunter/gathering.

~~~
vinay427
But there's no real precedent for an entire society needing few workers, so
I'm not sure that either of us could guess with any certainty what would
happen. I'm not saying things will work out, but it's never been tried to the
best of my knowledge.

~~~
treehau5
Yeah, I don't mean this disrespectfully, but that's probably one of the worst
rationales for trying something, at least for something important as this.

~~~
vinay427
I agree. I'm not the one trying to change the status quo. I'm not actively
invested in this cause because I don't see clear dangers yet. Jobs are
naturally becoming more automated by nature of productivity and efficiency, so
if you want to prevent that you need to make a stronger case than "it may not
work because we've never done it before".

------
saosebastiao
These questions pop up every now and then, and while I get the intent, you're
not gonna get anything useful out of it. The idea that someone who knows how
to code can disrupt an industry that they are not a part of is disingenuous,
and the examples that you can find are exceptions, not the rule. It's also
extremely naive and presumptuous...what makes you think people in the industry
haven't already tried? People who fall ill to this delusion end up in one of
two categories: those that attack easy problems with tiny markets, and those
that attack hard problems and spend decades learning about and becoming a part
of the industry before they solve them.

As someone in the supply chain and logistics industry, I can list for you
hundreds of people that know the traveling salesman problem and precisely why
its not applicable to their situation. I know hundreds of people that already
know how to better manage their safety stock than someone who suggests using
Gaussian demand models. I know hundreds of people who can optimize last mile
delivery costs orders of magnitude better than a drone engineer. I know
hundreds of people who can manage inventory distribution and ordering
automation better than someone who knows databases.

And sure, there are companies out there that are doing everything ass
backwards and could use some help, even if it is primitive and simplistic. And
when they decide to look for it, who are they gonna choose: the guy who saved
Amazon $500M/year with their truck load optimization expertise, or you, with
your shiny website and a trick you learned from a textbook?

So as a piece of advice, if you aren't part of the industry already, don't try
to do B2B in that industry. B2C is fine, because as a consumer you are
ostensibly a part of the industry...but B2B is a death march.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
_The idea that someone who knows how to code can disrupt an industry that they
are not a part of is disingenuous_

Uh, no. The idea is that you identify the problem, build the team to solve it,
build something quick that can prove that you can solve it in a better way
than others, iterate to the point that CAC < LTV, scale.

~~~
saosebastiao
How can you solve a problem that you can't adequately analyze or characterize?
How will you know if you aren't trying a failed solution if you don't know
what has been tried? How will you know if your simplifications and assumptions
are realistic if you haven't seen how they've played out in the past?

~~~
AndrewKemendo
See step 1 and 2.

~~~
saosebastiao
So hire people that already know the industry?

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Yes exactly.

Often they don't have the tech skills or desire/will to start something
themselves, but are happy to join you if they recognize that it's a big enough
problem.

~~~
saosebastiao
If your expertise is organizational and can put together the right team with
those that _do_ have the domain knowledge, I'll concede the point. But domain
knowledge is irreplaceable if you actually want to solve hard problems with
scalable markets.

