
Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software? - travisjungroth
Successful software companies are mostly founded by software engineers, or at least other white collar professionals. And since people mostly work on what they know (which is good) this seems to leave a lot of industries behind. What blue-collar industries do you know that could really be helped by better software?<p>For more background, I&#x27;m in the early stages of forming a startup, and just narrowing down problems. I&#x27;m trying to get a friend on board as a cofounder. He&#x27;s great at mobile, and I can handle the backend. We also both worked other careers before switching to software (oil and aviation). I&#x27;ve got B2B sales experience.<p>When you put this all together, it makes an interesting combo of an app for non-office businesses. I&#x27;d really like to make something that&#x27;s more of a tool than just an app. Think &quot;mobile phones in airplanes tracking your rental fleet&quot; over &quot;weather app&quot;.<p>Any direction-pointing is very welcome!
======
gumby
Agriculture.

There are plenty of companies trying to serve ag with what _they think_ ag
needs. Most of them fail.

Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees. They are
_NOT_ dumb hayseeds like they are often portrayed! But they typically don’t
have a lot of domain knowledge around software. Smaller farmers are used to
making and fixing their own tools (all know how to weld); bigger farmers run
corporations with a lot of employees.

They are unlikely to be interested in a SSAS. Why? The tax law for farmers in
the USA and Europe revolves around tax treatment which favors cap ex (which
makes sense — they need to buy big equipment which is used only briefly each
year. It’s hard to share since all the other farmers in your area need that
equipment at the same time). So understand your market and figure out what
their specific need is, then meet it.

~~~
janee
>Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees

That's a very astute observation. I've found it crazy hard to try and improve
existing spreadsheet workflows for farmers as we dig deeper into the domain.

I think in general industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets could
possibly benefit from specialized software solutions. Think someone called it
the unbundling of spreadsheets or something

~~~
toyg
_> industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets_

That would be _all of them_. Spreadsheets always end up running a business,
because the ultimate measure of business is money / resources, which is
inevitably expressed in numbers.

Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for
optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the
latter area are worth the loss of freedom in the former area.

~~~
etripe
> the ultimate measure of business is money / resources

That's not untrue, but perhaps too reductive a view on business, as it ignores
"soft" market factors like being primarily risk-oriented vs revenue-oriented,
the company's reputation, leadership vision, employee fitness to perform,
technical debt, etc.

Yes, they all boil down to more or less revenue, profit and growth, but if you
only ever look at the spreadsheets, you'll be divorced from reality.

> Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for
> optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the
> latter area are worth the loss of freedom in the former area.

A major selling point for custom software beyond the simple Excel-like CRUD
variants is its adoption of sectoral or company assumptions and goals. Yes,
that introduces rigidity, but not all rigidity is bad. Most if not all sectors
have standards and regulations to comply with, as well as market constraints.

I would suggest good rigidity is the kind that keeps you from making mistakes,
forces you to get to know your audience or develop your business, whereas bad
rigidity is due to leaky abstractions or poorly bounded contexts. The latter
indicates the product is maladapted to day-to-day business operations.

~~~
janee
> I would suggest good rigidity is the kind that keeps you from making
> mistakes, forces you to get to know your audience or develop your business

Another reason would be scale. The flexibility in spreadsheets usually goes
hand in hand with having to deal with inconsistencies and from what we've seen
that mechanism is usually a person or persons which does eventually break down
at a certain volume.

e.g. a farmer getting 20 different purchase orders a week, all in their weird
unique format and trying to convert all of it into a single format by hand

------
dhruvkar
Construction is a big field, and there are many niche industries within it.

I work in natural stone. There are several different types of companies just
in this niche. Usually the flow of product is:

 _quarries - > factories -> distributors (us) -> fabricators -> kitchen and
bath shops -> end user_

There are maybe 5-7 major pieces of software for the first four stages.
"Under-served" is an understatement.

Similarly, there are 10s (if not hundreds) of other niches within
construction, each with its own vertical. Tons of niche software is missing.

When I see another niche analytics/forms/site chatbot/automate social media
startup, I slap myself to make sure I'm not crazy.

There's a whole ocean out there, but most software startup companies are
running into each other in Depoe Bay.

~~~
frequentnapper
the problem is having access to these niche fields and knowing enough to be
able to create something useful.

~~~
dhruvkar
agreed, a lot of it is niche knowledge that you could only gain by working in
such a field or having close access to a company.

Consulting within a niche is one way to do this.

~~~
Riguad87
In the eighties, my best friend's father was into organic farming in the
following manner : he'd squish the slugs he happened to find while walking
through his crops and that was his pest control over the top of great land
husbandry in the tenth generation. My friend taught himself turbo pascal then
vb and the farm tax deduction provided a 286 of my unfulfilled dreams. The son
was shortly trading in commodity supplies and even derivatives and taking
delivery of GPS equipped combines. But I doubt he could have been successful
had he not grown up with his father's wisdom.

------
dwrodri
There is a non-trivial amount of work being done at university research labs
that has yet to feel the effects of the machine learning revolution because
PIs aren’t investing (or cannot afford) programmers, and scientific equipment
is manufactured by a small handful of companies who have little incentive to
innovate.

Please note that n=2, but both myself and a friend of met have met people
working in life science labs that were assigning research assistants to
manually count cells in images, and manually sweeping through images to find
stills that were in focus.

~~~
titanomachy
I learned programming in order to do my job more effectively while I was
employed as a research assistant in a university neuroscience lab. At some
point I realized that programmers in industry get paid 10x more (not an
exaggeration, literally 10x) so I left after a couple years.

I enjoyed my time there a lot, I was building tools to help very smart and
motivated people solve cool science problems. My users sat across the lab
bench from me (the original open office plan?) and iteration/feedback cycles
were super fast. People were appreciative and I could see how much time I was
saving them. It was very motivating. Some of the more useful stuff I built got
picked up by other labs in the group.

Maybe I'll do that kind of thing again someday, if I decide I've had my fill
of megacorp programming.

~~~
mynegation
Out of curiosity - what are the typical tools that you built? I am in industry
but sometimes have a crisis of meaning. I would not be able to sit next to
researches but was wondering if there is a gap in open source tools that I (or
someone else) could help to cover.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
There is a _ton_ of this kind of work available. I run into various people
online who need a simple automation task done, but either don't know where to
start, or start and don't know how to make progress.

e.g., a month ago I made a small machine for a dental research lab that
basically added a feature to a piece of test equipment. The feature was so
basic and obvious, I have no idea why the equipment didn't already have it.
But it was an opportunity for me to step in and make a small piece of hardware
to do what they need at little cost.

A few months before that I made a GUI for a customized bit of veterinary
equipment, and so on... These jobs are out there. They're quick and easy for
an experienced engineer but the problem is finding them consistently. My main
focus these days is trying to do just that.

------
joezydeco
_Successful software companies are mostly founded by software engineers, or at
least other white collar professionals_

They're also founded by people that know the business they're dealing with. If
you know oil and aviation, think about where customers are feeling pain and
focus your effort there.

~~~
byoung2
_They 're also founded by people that know the business they're dealing with_

I worked as a contract software engineer and I built quite a few MVPs for
niche businesses I would never have thought of. I built a dashboard for rental
management companies to track vendors (e.g. plumbers, electricians, pool
cleaners) to make sure their licenses, insurance, and background checks are up
to date. I built a tool for companies to track and calculate multistate tax
withholding for traveling employees (apparently there is a complex algorithm
based on the number of days you worked in the state, your home state, etc).
There are thousands of these business ideas out there that some domain expert
is running in a spreadsheet but could be turned into a SaaS product.

~~~
joezydeco
_I worked as a contract software engineer_

Did the domain knowledge come from the person paying you, or did you figure it
out yourself?

~~~
byoung2
The client supplied the domain knowledge...in more than a few cases they were
doing things manually, and I automated them. For example the vendor
verification involved manually looking up licenses, or doing data entry on
ACORD25 insurance forms. I automated it, so that given a license number,
trade, and state, a crawler would fetch the data on a schedule. I also wrote a
parser that could read insurance data from an ACORD25 form and put it in a
database. The client was tracking all of this in spreadsheets, and I just
copied the logic from there.

------
tvanantwerp
Was just reading a long list of complaints about poor software quality from a
variety of industries' vendors. Might be some good opportunities in there.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/fdorvf/scum_of_th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/fdorvf/scum_of_the_earth_xray_vendors/)

~~~
travisjungroth
That thread is gold. Thanks.

------
Ididntdothis
When I was contractor I did a lot of niche apps for small businesses. I think
it comes down to your ability to sell. I suck at it so not much success for
me. But there is a ton of opportunity if you are willing to talk to people
about their needs and then go out to sell. You won’t be the next unicorn but
you can make decent money and it’s fun working with small business owners.

Add: I often saved them countless hours with some simple Excel VBA or running
a loop over a database table. Really simple stuff.

~~~
jermaustin1
Some of my very first consulting gigs were around access and excel automation
with VBA. They paid well for being a 19-year-old kid still living with mom and
dad.

Now most of my consulting now is:

\- Bringing web-apps up to date (mainly by getting rid of a lot of jQuery that
could just be JavaScript, or shockingly common could just be CSS)

\- Refactoring hard/impossible to understand 2000+ line methods (least
favorite - so risky)

\- And cleaning up the dead-code and inaccurate comments that accumulate over
the years from the ghosts of contractors past.

I'm basically a janitor for "enterprise" software code-bases.

~~~
gitgud
> _Refactoring hard /impossible to understand 2000+ line methods (least
> favorite - so risky)_

Maybe I'm just weird, but for me that's one of the most satisfying things to
do.

Like reaching a big boss in a video game and having to slice pieces off him
until he's no longer a problem.

~~~
tonyarkles
> Maybe I'm just weird, but for me that's one of the most satisfying things to
> do.

I'm with you, but also agree with the GP. It's super satisfying to get stuff
like that cleaned up, but one of the most shocking things I've come across is
callers who do absolutely bizarre things that rely on side effects from those
methods. More than once, refactoring a big method like that has spiraled out
of control fixing all of the callers as well.

------
edw519
I think a better question for 2 experienced guys like you is, "What industries
are overserved by software?"

That would open up a whole bunch of possibilities that no one is looking at.
Much better than competing with 2000 others at the next soon-to-be-obsolete
app.

I've built a great career by asking customers to consider the "low tech
solution" first, then building upon it. Amazing how often they love it so much
that the "building upon" step never comes.

As I sit here on a client's system with 14 useless windows open, being
bombarded by skype, email, voice, chat, webex, outlook, office, text, jira,
confluence, and sharepoint notifications from 14 others with their own 14
useless windows open, none of us getting any real work done, I wonder why 2
guys like you who know how to get shit done don't come in and just fix this
for us.

~~~
travisjungroth
[https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

Couldn’t help myself, the number is even the same!

What do you think a solution to this problem (too complex, too many things to
monitor) would look like? And all-in-one like Basecamp? Or maybe a super
system that puts stuff in one place?

~~~
edw519
Start over. Remove everything and add back only what's actually needed.

It's easier than most people think.

------
DoofusOfDeath
I've started looking at software to help with residential construction tasks,
i.e. the construction of a single-family house.

My impression so far is that there's so much variability in what they
encounter, that most tasks are best handled ad hoc by experienced tradesmen.
But I'm not certain; it's possible that that's just the status quo, not how it
_needs_ to be.

~~~
jatgoodwin
I currently work with a lot of residential construction and repair.

I feel like truss factories could use some help with quality control with
machine vision probably. A problem is trusses are built by alcoholic meth
heads making minimum wage rather than carpenters on site to save time and
money, but then the truss factory has to send out an engineer to fix it on
site, usually missing or wrong gang nails or its just out of alignment.

Temp laborers could probably use some software to help with tracking hours
etc. Typically all the hours are tracked with just the supervisor writing down
on a carbon copy how long they worked and gives it to the laborers to take
back to their office which is then manually input to the billing system to pay
the laborers at the end of the day.

Keep in mind there's a much larger population of non-smartphone users that
only use flipphones in construction especially day labor so any sort of app
meant for the workers or laborers to use would just go unused.

~~~
Blake_Emigro
"Temp laborers could probably use some software to help with tracking hours
etc. Typically all the hours are tracked with just the supervisor writing down
on a carbon copy how long they worked and gives it to the laborers to take
back to their office which is then manually input to the billing system to pay
the laborers at the end of the day."

You're exactly right on this one and it exists in Vancouver, Canada:
[https://faberconnect.com/](https://faberconnect.com/)

"Keep in mind there's a much larger population of non-smartphone users that
only use flipphones in construction especially day labor so any sort of app
meant for the workers or laborers to use would just go unused."

Right on the first point, wrong on the second. The app is used by a different
crowd - mostly younger, and many newcomer professionals or working holiday
visa holders. This crowd doesn't need the daily pay to buy a 12-pack after
work, and a cash advance in the morning to get smokes and a bus ticket.

I've used both types of service regularly over the last couple of years to
fill in the gaps while I work on my startup.

------
dpix
Government. Often plagued by bad or outdated software rather than the lack of
it

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
That's true, but it's too hard to sell to the government for a small startup.

The RFP process is so long and brutal, and most of the time you need to have a
man on the inside and basically go through that process as a formality because
you are already guaranteed the contract.

~~~
jtolmar
What about the RFP process itself then? Can a company make it easier for
startups to sell to the government?

~~~
kls
you would be better off just making an American Indian, female, midget your
CEO so you can short circuit the process. If you think that is a joke, it's
not, each one of those items scores high points in the RFP process and sets
you ahead of the pack. That is the problem with a software solution for it and
that is that it is innately a human process. A combination of who you know and
who you are. The rest is just fluff on paper.

~~~
jjeaff
You say that, but take a look at all the biggest companies that supply to
governments. There is a very good chance they are run by grey haired white
men.

Sure, you can get some points for diversity, but in the end, diversity only
gets a few small contracts here and there while the establishment rakes in the
Lion's share.

------
yarper
If you know aviation, literally anything that will decrease fuel usage. Also
maintenance & repair operations (a whole lot of dirty fingerprints going on
there).

~~~
howardhughes
> If you know aviation, literally anything that will decrease fuel usage

Apart from writing full blown avionics systems for engine/flight control -
what are you suggesting?

~~~
travisjungroth
Not obviously, but it could be. Reducing idling time and improving routes both
increase fuel efficiency without changing the airplane. Maybe software could
help with those.

Edit: my reply was to the original comment which was something like "how is
this a software problem?"

~~~
spaceandshit
> Reducing idling time and improving routes both increase fuel efficiency
> without changing the airplane

Do you think idling time is a software problem? Aircraft idle for various time
based on other requirements and needs, for example, spooling up the engines or
inerting the fuel tanks.

Routes are already optimized by air traffic for the fastest, and cheapest
route. They have no incentive to increase flight times as there would be fewer
aircraft flying then.

~~~
travisjungroth
Software can't _fix_ aircraft idling, but maybe it can help. And ATC has the
final say on routes for IFR aircraft (except emergencies), but there are a
thousand VFR airplanes in the air right now. I think it's possible we can do
better than GPS direct.

I don't have a solution for either of these things, just enough intuition as a
pilot and software engineer to say "maybe there's something there".

------
chrisMyzel
If you have already expertise in Aviation in-house - why not aviation. It's
currently still a very slow moving industry but spacecrafts were once too.
Further there's General Aviation which has already a strong software market
around tablet/pc based navigation and flight planning but lacks to see
anything truly "disruptive".

------
rawoke083600
Also keep in mind sometimes... the "undeserved industries" are "undeserved"
for a reason... like politics, culture, and or refusal to change etc..

------
smabie
I would say finance. Excel has it’s uses, but managing a billion dollar
portfolio isn’t one of them. It’s a hard space though, firms have such
drastically different needs that tt’s difficult to create an app that serves
everyone.

~~~
otagekki
Finance is a mature and highly regulated market with loads of expensive
software and consultants to do all you need. ERPs and off-the-shelf financial
software with in-house specific developments do the heavy lifting and
spreadsheets macros do the rest.

~~~
smabie
For banks sure. But the PE, VC, and hedge fund space have almost no
regulations and very little software to serve their needs. I worked at a
startup that provided portfolio analytics software and it never was able to
actually break into the market in a real way (our valuation was and still is
stuck at 200m for 8 years). It’s a really hard problem but if someone can
crack it, they potentially could be the next Bloomberg.

------
Swtrz
Most law enforcement applications are the same : a monolithic crud .net client
connecting to a version of sql server and each one is god awful. They need
strong saas apps, Im tired of managing them.

~~~
kls
I pick up contracts from a law enforcement software vendor and can confirm
that most of the software in the industry is abominable. When I picked up the
contract their system was a win32 C/C++ GUI, communicating to a custom built
geo server. I felt like I was back in the late 80's early 90's doing
development again. Anyways I modernized their stack to web and mobile tech and
people in the industry think their are wizards of dark magic. It's amazing how
behind the times that industry is.

------
n-exploit
The non-profit/social sector - and we need it here. Why hire software
developers when you can afford 8-10 part-time staff for the same price.
Sincerely, a non-profit Technology Director.

~~~
justaguyhere
Could you please provide some examples of tasks that can be improved with
software in non-profit/social sector?

------
pkalinowski
Well, navigation systems for competitive hot air balloons pilots could use
some competition. The one widely used is from 1998.

Total market size is about 50 people, though :)

~~~
travisjungroth
What do they need that a modern handheld aircraft GPS doesn’t provide?

------
atari800
There's almost nothing in the manufactured housing (AKA "mobile home", AKA
"trailer" AKA "HUD-code home") industry. The industry experienced a severe
contraction even before the Great Recession, declining in the 2000's from its
most recent boom years of the 90's.

In that earlier era, there were several vertical software companies selling
Windows and DOS dealership management systems to the many independent (mom-
and-pop) dealerships of manufactured homes

By the time the industry started to recover in the last several years, they
had all gone out of business. Because of the timing of the near-death of the
MH industry, none of those companies even tried to move to web-based SaaS
products.

As far as I know, the only new dealership management (line of business) system
for the industry is my own SaaS product, which I started selling a year ago.

I'm a software developer, but my family owned a dealership for decades, so I
know the business well. The industry is weird, and different enough from
automobiles and motor homes that software for those (seemingly related)
industries isn't really a good fit.

I've had some success bootstrapping my business. The industry is big enough at
this point that I can make pretty good money as a small player, but it's still
small enough that it's unlikely to attract any big operators. The market is
too small for them, I'm pretty sure.

I think it would be difficult for someone who doesn't know the way things are
done in the industry to create software for it. It's certainly possible, but
for sure you'd have to partner with someone who has expertise already.

But I guess that's true of almost any niche industry.

------
kamaal
Hospitals and Healthcare. There is simply too much paper work that goes on.

My father had a bypass surgery last year, and the entire documentation process
was a nightmare. It was like reams and reams of paper work, bills,
prescriptions. The funny part was they would scan the paper forms and send to
each other(blood banks, insurance, clinics etc) for quick response. They might
as well have online forms and invoices.

------
stmw
Healthcare - which affects all of us and is 18% of GDP - is by far the most
underserved by software. It is a bad version of the 90's for doctors, nurses,
patients and everyone else. There are a number of firms that are trying to
make this better.

(plug: at Commure - developer.commure.com, we are one of them, but that's
independent of the larger point).

~~~
Optimal_Persona
Commure looks fascinating, I was hoping something like this existed! I work in
publicly-funded mental health/social services. Our programs use 5 different
EHRs, then we have to interact with 4 more supplied by county funders for
billing and compliance. It's a real Tower of Babel shitstorm to transfer data
between systems in the absence of interoperability standards like FHIR. As you
note, the current fragmented state of health tech has significant human and
economic impacts.

~~~
stmw
Thank you, glad to hear you say that - you certainly have a wonderfully
colorful way of describing the problem we are trying to fix!

------
peter-m80
Lawyers and justice

~~~
dullroar
My ex-wife worked for a legal software firm. One thing to note is they were
threatened with lawsuits ALL THE TIME, because, after all, their customers
were lawyers. So any bug or whatever else would end up with some nasty email
from some customer exclaiming, "We're going to sue!" In reality, not many (if
any) actually carried through with it, but if that sort of threat makes you
queasy, better be (or have) a really good lawyer yourself if you go this
route, and not just as a domain expert for the software itself.

~~~
nmaley
So true! I built a solution for a legal services outfit a few years ago. First
bug they see, they want to sue you. Forget about working with the vendor to
refine the solution. They just want to sue you. Never want to work with
lawyers again.

------
hermitcrab
Most software is written by men for men. Try writing something aimed at women.

~~~
twiclo
What does that even mean? Do you want developers to put flowers over their
UIs?

~~~
pnako
Women have different hobbies, or indeed careers, than men. Not much
competition in the market for manicure salons, for example (I'm aware of
Phorest).

The women I know tend to have different creatives hobbies than men's creative
hobbies (think crocheting vs woodworking). I'm willing to be there are more
woodworking CAD programs than equivalent programs for crocheting in the
market.

There are fishing lure design applications. Can you think of something similar
for a more feminine hobby?

------
dmode
I just went through extensive home remodeling. This is a big industry and
there are a lot of opportunities to improve it by software. It was impossible
for me to get a good visualization of what the end state of my home would look
like. I needed to hire designers for that. It was difficult to know what
various paint options would look like. And then there is the whole
construction / contractor / material aspect of it. It is still based on good
old connections and negotiations.

~~~
Blake_Emigro
_And then there is the whole construction / contractor / material aspect of
it._

A big problem with a renovation is the uncertain number of surprises that the
contractor will encounter when tearing out the existing material. The
contractor doesn't want to get stuck cleaning up that black mold for free.

------
patel011393
Scientific software for doing research is awful in many ways. There is a great
deal of need at all levels to upgrade how scientists read, recruit
participants, analyze data, and more. However, inside knowledge is needed to
be successful. The research field has many unique practices that are important
to work around.

------
copperfitting1
Imagine how many people never used a chat app in a business context before.
Maybe this is hard, as you can’t imagine who they could be — or you don’t
remember a time _before_ the ubiquity of chat apps in the workplace. But trust
me those people are a majority of the workforce.

------
svavs
The grain industry. Specifically grain elevators.

There are a few mid-sized companies that control a large chunk of that
industry. Since they don't have much competition, innovation is more or less
at a stand still. Companies like bushel ag are changing that, but lots of
opportunity.

------
turc1656
At the risk of sounding less than helpful or pessimistic, the first thing that
jumped out at me when reading your post is that you are going about this
backwards.

I'm not saying you can't or wont' succeed. I have no idea.

But it seems like the first thing that happened is that you decided you wanted
to start a business. Usually it's the reverse - you get inspired by
discovering a problem and realize you have the skillset and motivation to
solve it and then you come to the realization that you need to start a
business to do that. For founders/entrepreneurs with experience having done
that previously, this is likely a scenario with a much higher probability of
success.

But I imagine the success rate of people who say "I want to start my own
business" and then look for a business to start have much lower success rates.

I'm not trying to rain no your parade at all. Just wanted to give you
something to think about before you spend a fortune in time and/or money
starting something. I could easily be wrong, though. Just food for thought.

~~~
fennecfoxen
It sounds like you are describing the Silicon Valley ideal, but things like
"finding a good business to start" are very much a traditional approach, and I
am confident they will teach you about how to do market research to this end
in business schools.

~~~
wpietri
Is it a traditional approach? I've met a lot of entrepreneurs and small
business owners, and I have heard of almost nobody starting from "I have
started a business, now what should we do" being successful. Bezos arguably
took that approach, but that story gets told so much precisely because it was
unusual. More often it turns out like Webvan, where the lack of deep domain
knowledge means making noob mistakes that kill the business.

And I'm not sure business schools are a big help here. The vast majority of
MBAs end up joining mid-sized to large existing companies as high flyers, and
I think the curriculum aims to support that.

~~~
erisinger
In the US this is precisely the traditional approach. The country was built by
immigrants who would arrive in an area -- San Francisco or New York for
example -- decide that if they didn't want to work in a sweat shop they would
have to start a business, then look around to see what their neighborhood
needed, and build it. Laundromat, restaurant, feed store, etc.

They didn't need to be intrigued by a problem or have a background that set
them up to solve one. They decided to start a business and began by figuring
out in what way their region was underserved, then built something to fill the
gap. Voila.

There's no obvious reason this approach couldn't work in tech as well.

~~~
wpietri
One, I think starting another instance of a well-known kind of business is
very different than creating a new product, especially when one has used that
kind of business a lot. So even if what you say were true, I don't think it
would be relevant to, "I've started a business, what kind of product should we
make."

But two, I'd like to see some evidence that people really did entirely
arbitrary things based on demand, without relation to other factors. If we
look at a well-known example, the way Indian-Americans have dominated the
motel industry, there's pretty clear evidence that wasn't just driven by
looking around the neighborhood to see what was needed. E.g.:
[https://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/06/11/why-indian-
am...](https://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/06/11/why-indian-americans-
dominate-the-u-s-motel-industry/)

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bjourne
There's a lot of software you could build to help grassroots mobilization
efforts. However, there's not a lot of money in that business.

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math0ne
I know there are lots of players in the field but I know a few lawyers and the
software the work with on a daily basis is terrible!

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tempsy
Loan servicing.

Navient is terrible. A decent UI would go a long way.

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mokarma
As someone creating software in that industry, I agree. Although my team
recently made a large dent via a selling a chunk of our software to an
industry leader.

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wasdfff
A lot of business and accounting is excel hell

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thusjustin
The justice system

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imvetri
Anything that doesn't disturb young minds.

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superkitty
agriculture!!

