
Ask HN: What business would you start in 2018? - nns
What business would you start in 2018?
======
codegeek
In the US, I will start a company that would partner with
Doctors/Clinics/Hospitals where they would agree to transparent pricing for
simple and routine services (like wellness checkup, simple procedure etc.). In
return, the consumers will purchase a service from us (sort of insurance but I
hate that word) for a much lower premium/fee per year (say something like 500
a year) where they pay the routine services out of pocket but we cover them
for major procedures or catastrophic stuff (like cancer treatment). Each
Participating doctor/clinic/hospital gets a cut of the premium that the
consumer pays us.

This creates a win-win for all 3 parties. Consumers don't have to pay crazy
health insurance premiums (which can be 15K easily for a family of 4 per
year), pricing is transparent and even though they pay out of pocket for
general services, the total they will spend per year will be MUCH less than
average insurance premiums we pay today in the United States. Not to mention
that insurance companies don't get to butt in every decision about which
service should have been covered and which one not. Doctor gives a bill,
patient pays it and all done. Probably will put some medical billing companies
out of business too ? Doctors/clinics/hospitals get a cut of the premium from
every consumer who participates effectively creating a huge pool/network.

Bonus feature: Our company will create a centralized platform where consumers
can login and see their doctor visits and billing all in one place. No more
individual health insurance websites or doctor billing websites. I can get a
simple statement at the end of the year even if I visited 20 different
doctors.

How we make money though with those lower yearly premiums will be a challenge.
Btw, this was just a joke and a wishlist. I wish someone would do this.

~~~
briandear
That’s what “insurance” actually is— protection against unforeseen financial
loses. The current idea of “insurance” is more of a health plan than a
financial protection scheme.

Car insurance doesn’t pay oil changes because that’s a normal part of owning a
car and thus should be budgeted for, but a crash isn’t — this insurance exists
to make someone whole after a covered loss.

~~~
eldavido
There's a really great writeup on this in "catastrophic care", a book I'd
recommend on this topic.

Rather than "insurance", a better model is that "you'll need to spend a lot
with p approaching 1, for some years of your life". So allocating each person
a lifetime fixed pool of money (through the tax system) might be a good way to
force some cost discipline onto the system, while still ensuring coverage and
access are widespread.

What I like about this is that it makes explicit, society's commitment to
sharing some of the burden of care. I have a close friend whose wife has
Crohn's. It's a real bitch of a disease, essentially no known cure, chronic,
you just try to get it "managed" as well as possible. We could probably spend
an infinite amount of money trying to improve her quality of life, but that's
not fair to society at large. So if we said, here, you get $x, that would
encourage the medical system to provide cost-effective management options that
would be within some bounded price range everyone agrees would be reasonable.

I think there's a real reluctance to put a precise dollar figure on how far
we'll go per person toward "universal coverage of everything", but that's
precisely the conversation we need to be having.

~~~
Tomminn
'I think there's a real reluctance to put a precise dollar figure on how far
we'll go per person toward "universal coverage of everything", but that's
precisely the conversation we need to be having.'

This is only a thing in the US.

In the countries with sane public health systems, they have zero problem
saying "Look, we've got this much money to spend, we think this way of
spending it gets the most bang (roughly speaking, QALY's) for buck, so if you
want more coverage hit up the private insurance market" [1].

And you know what, those private insurance markets _work great_ because they
actually have to provide meaningful value beyond the public system in order
for consumers to bother using them.

As a vaguely relevant side note: Goddam it's difficult for me not to get angry
about the diabolical state of the health system in the US and _I don 't even
live there_. There should be marches on the streets about this. You could
radically improve the lives of the vast majority of 300 million people without
spending an extra cent of government money on health if you just stopped being
so goddam dumb about it [2].

[1] For instance, here is the website of the public pharmaceutical supplier in
my country-- NZ-- who've hired lots of phys and maths grads I know:
[https://www.pharmac.govt.nz/about/your-guide-to-
pharmac/fact...](https://www.pharmac.govt.nz/about/your-guide-to-
pharmac/factsheet-01-introduction-to-pharmac/).

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita#/media/File:OECD_health_expenditure_per_capita_by_country.svg)

~~~
Robin_Message
When Obamacare was being debated, the UK was accused of having "death panels",
which were basically this: deciding that it was uneconomical to provide
certain types of care to certain types of patients where the QALYs achieved
would be minimal and excessively expensive.

But that is "communist" and so Americans as a whole could never agree to it.
They'd rather squeeze every last day out of someone rich, even with a low or
negative quality of life impact, and let the poor die early.

I don't live there and it makes me mad too. It fails the Rawlsian test of
ethics (veil of ignorance), which I think is a good way to decide on political
issues.

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andridk
Bitcoin VR vegan gluten free crossfit app

~~~
onion2k
Native or PWA?

~~~
murdockq
Vue or React?

~~~
mLuby
So 2017. ReasonML and Serverless

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fossuser
Something around video verification.

Convincing fake video and audio is coming soon - it isn't a major problem yet,
but it will be more challenging to determine if recorded evidence can actually
be relied on.

Some sort of service that signs and proves the authenticity of videos I think
is a an idea that was until recently probably bad, but has now became good.

It'd be similar to what digicert does for websites. You could then work with
browsers to show verification for trusted videos.

~~~
elephant0xffff
> Some sort of service that signs and proves the authenticity of videos.

I don't think that is even possible.

You might want to succeed with amateur efforts, but I would guess there will
be a point where it is impossible to tell if a video is fake or not.

~~~
fossuser
Just sign it after you verify the original person’s identity so you know if
it’s been tampered with.

Company would be responsible for effectively verifying identity - similar to
how this is done for websites.

------
monk_e_boy
Teacher collaboration tool to open source lesson plans.

Create a platform like facebook or github for teachers to collaborate on
planning an entire unit. At the moment each teacher does it alone or maybe a
department may get together and create some content.

But there are thousands of schools tens of thousands of teachers, all of them
building lessons and delivering them.

Build in testing. assignments. progress. etc.

~~~
tommerbomb
I've actually thought that something like this could be a fairly useful
product. May I ask what your inspiration for such an idea was? Perhaps
personal or anecdotal experience? Genuinely curious.

~~~
monk_e_boy
I am a cover teacher, I travel to schools when teachers are sick.

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thatsnotmyusern
I intend to retire from my current successful company (founded in 2011) and
design a range of personal health & wellbeing items for people on the Autism
spectrum (more for people with mild-to-moderate ASD, Aspergers, or other
similar disability, as opposed to for severe cases - i.e. this isn't a medtech
company but a health and wellbeing product line). I stumbled on this by
creating a few prototypes at home for my personal use that really contribute
to my quality of life as someone with mild ASD traits.

Also, a social enterprise-based reforestation project – I'll be using same
savings to buy a piece of deforested ex-farmland (one in particular) and
working with friends and local community to return it to its former forested
glory. The goal is really to give back but also to learn a heap about land
management and permaculture.

For-profit and non-profit, respectively.

So it's really businesses that scratch my own itch.

------
joseakle
A not for profit ride sharing platform, in the spirit of ghost.org .

Self driving cars are still years ahead, besides that, humans will still be
needed for other kinds of gigs for some time.

~~~
throwaway413
See Waze Carpool. AFAIK not (as much) for profit.

[https://www.waze.com/carpool](https://www.waze.com/carpool)

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bobosha
A staircase bot to carry heavy objects. With an increasingly aging population,
it is a literal pain to be lugging objects - especially heavy ones - up/down
stairways.

~~~
_csoz
I believe those are called elevators

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aryamaan
A personalized learning program.

I really think education is a very inefficient process currently. Not that it
doesn't allow growth of other traits which it doesn't value but also the
virtues which it does see fit remain undeveloped.

For starters, I will begin with a program like 'Computer science/ concepts for
developers' which will go far further than Networking, OS, DB...

The most important part of it would be that it will specifically crafted for
the individual- it will start with the level of expertise the learner is at
and incrementally go up.

Secondly, it will be focusing on virtues which imo makes learning efficient
and enjoyable- like pressure free learning but getting sense of accomplishment
by doing stuff. The best reason one would be learning for would be for
themselves.

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igetspam
I don't know but I'd support companies working to improve privacy. It's a hard
thing to monetize but there's a need and a market.

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gremlinsinc
A not-for-profit company that builds an AI based identification and reputation
(drivers license meets credit score meets ebay ratings) system on the block
chain (perhaps using voice + location + image to imprint a person as being who
they say they are.

Then use this identification system to create a crypto-currency that has
guaranteed basic income built in, and the person would need to re-verify every
6 months to keep their account.

The not-for-profit company would also start it's own businesses that provide
products/services to consumers and use only local fiat + the ubi-coin for
payment with maybe benefits for using crypto over fiat (to increase adoption).

Execs for all businesses would be capped at 125x average worker salary. All
left over money at end of fiscal year would be divided up evenly and 30% would
go to workers as a bonus, 70% would be dispersed to ubi coin holders evenly.
Businesses the co-op could start could be grocers, mail-order pharmacy,
insurance companies, cell phone providers, the goal being --be self-sufficient
but not make a profit except enough to pay all workers, and reward the
community as a whole and also make services people use everyday cheaper and
more affordable.

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schnevets
Collaboration/Project software designed with distributed teams in mind first.

~~~
nniroclax
I'm actually exploring this idea right now. It's been an issue I've been
facing in my day job and think it is only going to become more pervasive as
more teams start to work remotely.

If anyone is currently experiencing this issue, I would absolutely love to
talk to you! I only have a really rudimentary site up right now at
[http://hallwayapp.com](http://hallwayapp.com) if anyone is even remotely
curious (no pun intended).

~~~
schnevets
I've been working remote for 2 years now, and your articles and experiences
are definitely accurate. Subscribed!

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pimmen
Something to do with transportation and logistics really. Free trade is just
not going away despite populists doing their dardnest to make it more
difficult and free trade runs on transporting stuff from A to B easily.

If you could innovate something minor in that field, I'm talking something
that impacts maybe 5% of the shipping process, that's an absurdly big market.

However, don't do like the airlines and build your business plan on having
exclusive agreements with nice and naive governments. Once that special
treatment stops and they let smaller players in party's over.

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kennxcl
Real time interactive NBA betting app. Try to get John Stewart to host.
Squeeze HQ app out of business

------
digikata
I actually don't think I'd start this one personally, but given the recent
supreme court ruling, I would expect that a sports betting site/app would
likely get traction pretty quickly.

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mamcx
A relational/lang mixed access/excel platform.

Looking for enough funding to work on this (just to cover life expenses
US1000/month)

~~~
Robin_Message
Check out airtable.io; they are the closest I've seen to achieving this and
I've been watching this space for a decade.

(It's my dream to build something here too.)

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7373737373
Website to collectively buy satellite pictures

~~~
text_exch
What's wrong with the USGS or Landsat data portals?

~~~
Faaak
Resolution is the main factor. Landsat is ~15m, DigitalGlobe is ~0.5m

~~~
zeptomu
Landsat is 30m.

There is also Sentinel2 (which is 10m) that can be used commercially.

Obviously DigitalGlobe (and recently Planet) do better with <1m resolution but
it seems to be more expensive and (sub)licensing might be non-trivial (at
least they are vague in pricing details).

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gbartz
Apocryphal News Site - "News, just the way you want it."

~~~
Faaak
Be careful not to fall into an echo chamber

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sgtmas2006
A data firm within the US. (which is what i'm doing)

~~~
plessthanpt05
pretty vague there -- what do you mean data firm?...like a consultancy? I
mean, OP didn't specify what type of business to start, but in some sense
pretty much all tech start-ups are data firms.

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Jach
Prediction market + cryptocurrency ICO. How can I lose?

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gorbachev
GDPR consultancy

~~~
Stanleyc23
should have started that 2 years ago

~~~
drspacemonkey
True, but the number of executives and managers that are just starting to ask
"what's this GDPR thing I keep hearing about?" tells me that it's about to be
a growth industry.

IME, there's also a significant overlap between the execs that insist "2 years
isn't enough time to get compliant" and execs that ignored it for the last 2
years. Not sure what that means, but it's at the point where I write off
timeline complaints as whining and lack of forethought.

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mabynogy
A good, simple and anonymous chat app.

~~~
asdsa5325
He said _business_ \- you can't make much money off of simple and anonymous.

~~~
mabynogy
Some do and create value can be enough for a startup.

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niravs
Social apps. Neglected. Especially voice + social.

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loandigger
A betting site offering over/under wagers on the number of people from the
Trump administration who are indicted in the coming years.

~~~
plessthanpt05
Would this be covered under the new sports betting legalization?

~~~
loandigger
yes. It'll be like hsx.com, but for felons.

------
pcunite
#1

Imagine you have a fleet of vehicles and one of your drivers just had a
fender-bender or seen one occur. One or both of the involved parties will call
the police and notify insurance agencies. Sometimes the evidence, as deemed by
you to favor your situation can get moved around or shuffled by local
authorities. With my service, you'll be able to post as many pictures or
videos as you like of the actual event. Our in-vehicle dash-cams will also
collaborate the information you're uploading. The complete offering and system
helps you secure a better insurance rate saving you millions. I just need
$4.5MM to get started.

#2

This one has an even greater return. Imagine REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED
REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED
REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED
REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED
REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED. It
will do really well!

