Ask HN: What problem in your business is worth paying 10k/y for? - cronjobma
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cdevs
Anything that any salesman or customer service employee mentions that plugs
into salesforce. A mail button for sales force ? A print button for salesforce
? A make my phone call customer button inside salesforce button? Oh sweet only
$20 per month per salesman....so we have 50 people on salesforce so only 1,000
a month, only $12,000 a year? This should help get us out of dept so fast !!!
FML.

~~~
ZenoArrow
I'm guessing you weren't pushing for Salesforce, but out of interest, did your
company evaluate any other CRM platforms? If so, do you know why they chose
Salesforce?

~~~
cdevs
They bought into it when they were a tiny company over 7-8 years ago and
barely used it for a few years, a few yeas ago me and some other devs joined
and said why do you have this and why spend this much money for storing a
customers email and some notes when we you also have 2 other systems doing the
same thing. We tried to pull them away and build a small system for their
small needs but that's when they dug the hole ten times deeper with numerous
integration. No matter how big or small the integration the prices add up
quickly. They were a company with out developers at one point and still never
learned to ask if we can do something vs buying into mailchimp or salesforce
plugin. No matter what the CEO wants he's afraid to take away the salesmans
costly toys.

------
jbob2000
I need an easier way to send my clients quotes, invoices, and reminders.

Quickbooks is nice if you're an accountant who likes entering stuff into
tables. But I am not an accountant and I'm bad about keeping on top of my
accounts. It takes too many clicks to send a stupid little invoice once in a
while.

This is a space that could really use chat bot support. I want to quickly type
something or go through a wizard to do my accounting. "Hey Accounty, can you
send Client B an invoice for The Big Package at $200 for 12 months? Make it
recur annually". And Accounty goes and sets everything up and sends the
emails. No interface. Completely automated. When an account is overdue, it'd
message me and say "Hey, Client A is overdue, shall I send a reminder?" If
someone replies to the invoice email, it'd say "Hey, Client C replied to the
invoice and asks 'Can I pay later?', how do you want to respond?". Wire that
up Siri or some other speech to text engine and I can do my accounting on the
drive in to work.

~~~
thepredestrian
What industry do you work in? I'm surprised there isn't a lightweight
accounting software for freelancers / consultants

------
notadoc
Great question, there are many opportunities here. Network with entrepreneurs,
sole proprietors, private practice physicians/dentists/etc, and other small
business owners and you'll often hear similar complaints or pain points.

As a general rule I'd say nearly any business would pay 10k/year for:

\- Anything that would offer 2x that (or greater) in ROI

\- Anything that would automate or handle routine tasks that otherwise an
expensive person must perform (there are many of these if you think about it)

\- Anything that saves 10k+ worth of someones time (this is not too hard to
identify if you focus on the expensive persons)

\- Anything that generates 12k+ of new revenue

\- Anything that replaces 10k+ worth of annual contractor/consulting work

\- Anything that undercuts competition charging more for the same service,
without a degradation in service quality

You probably want specifics, so two areas I often see smaller businesses
struggle with are email lists and security/software updates.

There is substantial opportunity in finding new ways to monetize the boring
old email/customer list in nearly every industry. I frequently hear small,
medium, and even some larger businesses struggle to monetize an email list in
any meaningful way, and so instead the primary metric is always about
'engagement' and other buzzword centric statistics that rarely translate into
revenue. Private practice doctors and dentists often struggle with this, as do
everything from bakeries, app developers, web sites, authors, interest groups,
etc. There are many businesses with large customer lists or customer prospects
in the form of email lists that make $0 from those lists.

Another is anything related to security, particularly anything that takes a
perceived complicated task and makes it easy or handles it outright without
any downtime or complication to the end user(s). Whether it's routine client
and server software updates, routine security audits, moving web apps/sites to
https, maintaining and keeping up with web/email/crm/accounting software
updates for small businesses, etc, there is huge opportunity out there for
much of this to be a subscription type service rather than expensive periodic
consultant or contract work that is often very distracting for the small
business to implement.

Anyway, those are just two simple ideas that I see/hear frequent issues with.
Usually a focus on something common that already exists but needs improvement
will be much easier than trying to do something completely unique.

~~~
cdevs
Extra good point for security. It's easy for us to say we are using 10k
security product to make 60k customer happy but we can also brag to any
customer from there on.

------
cdiamand
If you're looking for more of these problems:

1K - 10K
[https://www.oppslist.com/?payment_level=4](https://www.oppslist.com/?payment_level=4)

10K - 100K
[https://www.oppslist.com/?payment_level=5](https://www.oppslist.com/?payment_level=5)

------
tunetine
Tableau. We pay far more than $10k/year even after the pricing model change.

~~~
tommynicholas
Think about running your own Superset instance. Could be the solution and IMO
it's much better than Tableau.

~~~
thisisit
Is Superset mature enough? We have been exploring a lot of BI tools so much so
that we near scraping the bottom of the barrel. But Caravel/Superset never
came up because it is still under incubation and that doesn't go well with the
enterprise managers. It doesn't help that there have been constant name
changes.

~~~
tommynicholas
It's great and IMO pretty damn mature. They use it widely in prod at Airbnb so
the only ways in which it's not "mature" are in customizability.

~~~
thisisit
What kind of customization?

~~~
tommynicholas
I think there are just certain scenarios it may not support, like at one point
writing queries in the editor for JSONB fields in Postgres was either hard or
impossible, things like that. But generally it's pretty great and ready to be
used IMO.

------
ellius
I do fraud investigations for a bank. We spend an insane amount on labor costs
because all of our transactional data resides in different systems. Want to
review credit card data? Go pull system X. Want to review wire transfers? Go
pull system Y. Etc etc. some of these things have to be separated out of
necessity (e.g. card data is stored in a particular way due to regulations),
but I would easily pay 10k / y to be able to get a complete view of customer
transaction activity from a single place. We'd save millions in labor costs if
someone could pull it off correctly.

~~~
tixocloud
I'm in a bank as well but I reckon 10k won't be enough to solve the issue.
We've built an enterprise data warehouse that pulls everything together and it
still hasn't been perfect. What we do well though was extract the data at a
higher level of abstraction - we came across a tool called Thoughtspot that
also helped us join things together and drill down but from what I heard, it's
pricey.

------
lox
Anything that increases team productivity significantly. If my team of
developers is > 10 then I'm probably spending about 100k per year in
supporting tools:

\- source code management \- server monitoring and metrics \- payment
processing \- testing tools \- continuous integration tools

Any of those could easily cost 10K/year, or more, depending on what the team
is doing and how fast they are growing.

Beyond that, anything that ties back to revenue. Email marketing, PPC, SEO.
Also possibly things that optimize finances, analytics or anti-fraud.

~~~
adius
Would [https://feram.io](https://feram.io) fall into this category?
(Disclaimer: I'm a cofounder)

~~~
cdevs
Interesting, working on a bitbucket version?

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TomMarius
Acquisition of high-quality clients for my software agency is a problem for
which solution I'd be willing to pay 100k/year.

~~~
fairpx
those are some pretty high quality clients then. What type of projects do you
do. We've implemented a pretty good model for our agency to attract quality
clients without networking and doing all sorts of stuff that we don't like.
Happy to help.

~~~
TomMarius
I'd be very happy if you sent me a message about your model, my address is
marius@tolud.com.

We tend to describe ourselves as "the tech team for your (tech) startup", our
goal is to be a one stop shop for tech-heavy startups and companies.

We work with Node.js, TypeScript and React/React Native. We've created a bunch
of quite unique libraries and components that help us develop a lot faster and
with less bugs (I can get into detail over e-mail).

The company is new (founded in March 2017) and so far I just used my contacts
from the past to find us work (7 developers, 2 analysts/consultants), but this
source is quickly drying up. Right now we're finishing our website and my plan
is to go to some meetups, but I'm not entirely sure it's going to help and I'm
afraid I'm going to lose time.

Our biggest problem is that we don't have much of a portfolio, only a bunch of
internal applications we can't really show. Clients I found online don't trust
us and/or want our services extremely cheaply, which is a problem because our
developers are senior guys that charge a bit - but that was a deliberate
choice, we want to make high-quality software.

~~~
fairpx
You can find my contact info in my profile. Basically in short, what's worked
for me is side project marketing:

\- Create a tiny free product, that solves a tiny problem for your target
customer \- Promote your side project. Since it's free and frictionless, it's
so much easier to have it spread on the internets. \- On that side project,
there should be an email subscription form somewhere and your main service as
an upsell.

This exact model is pretty much all we do and it's resulting into at least 5+
figure each year worth of client work. We spend zero time networking or doing
all sorts of stuff that is time consuming.

~~~
TomMarius
That's a good idea. I considered something similar, but different - I merely
thought about having the SaaS app as something to point out as a reference
project. Thank you for your time!

------
bgia
Extracting data from PDF in a reliable way.

~~~
vram22
Extracting at least text from PDFs is not always 100% perfect, due to inherent
issues with the PDF format (partly because it is a graphic format, and does
not have a one-to-one mapping to text, also maybe because of some weird
decisions they made). I both read about this and was told about this by a key
person at a PDF software product company, whose product I researched and then
used in a project. The product was xpdf (a C library, it also had binaries or
EXEs), from Glyph and Cog. I was contracted by a client to research PDF
libraries for extraction of text from PDF; found and evaluated a few, then
recommended xpdf to the client, and used it in the project. That is how I know
this.

The only guaranteed way to get 100% accurate text from PDF is ... to not do it
:) Instead, get the text from the same source that is used to generate the
PDF. Obviously, that will not always be possible, but when it is, it is the
better solution.

------
fiatjaf
Correctly identifying if the customers are going to pay their bills or run
after two months without paying, leaving a bill of ~1000 (consider that the
State justice system doesn't work and the customers are individuals).

~~~
gsylvie
Do you report them to any credit agencies?

~~~
fiatjaf
No, because they can sue me if I do and even if I'm right I don't want the
risk of having to pay an indemnification, Brazilian judges are crazy.

------
gm
For a dev shop, anything that brings in more than (more or less) $20k /year.

Otherwise also fundraising (as someone else said).

Though for both of these, if the business is cash-strapped, the results would
have to be pretty much assured.

------
maxwin
Enterprise pays the most for ERP. If you can create a better SAP, then you
will make millions. I am saying as an SAP user, it is good but really
expensive.

~~~
hakanderyal
Creating an standard ERP system is not the hardest part (it's still really
hard tho).

Deploying ERP for enterprise customers means writing tons of custom modules &
processes specific to the customer. That's why integrating an ERP for the
first time or switching vendors is costly and risky. Most successful ERP
systems for enterprise customers are basically domain-specific frameworks to
create customer-specific solutions.

However, there is still a big market for business management software for
SMBs. The market is so big and ever expanding that I doubt it can ever be
saturated. Aside from english-speaking market, there are even bigger
opportunities for localized solutions.

------
deepnotderp
Better EDA tools.

Oh my god, i would pay so much for that...

~~~
Tomminn
I'm interested in this field. What are the current pain points with EDA tools?
And are we talking device level, process level, circuit level or all levels?

~~~
deepnotderp
Pretty much everything.

There's a landmine of bugs in even the best EDA software. I'd just like for
the software to run nicely once, like TensorFlow... sigh.

If you're thinking getting into this field, I might suggest a modular software
architecture where the non-proprietary parts are open source and everything
NDA-sensitive is kept closed source (pretty much anything the foundry
touches/provides).

~~~
Tomminn
Super super interesting. So this is the case for the big expensive commercial
products like those that come out of shops like Synopsys? It strikes me that
helping to improve (device side) EDA is probably a pretty sound investment of
my time, since I've got some phys chops and it's pretty important to the
global economy.

~~~
deepnotderp
Oh, believe me, in many ways it's _worse_ with the big expensive tools because
those are produced for only a few companies.

------
dijit
Slack. Apparently.

~~~
Rjevski
My current employer doesn't use Slack and instead uses XMPP and a web front-
end called "Movim". I can tell you right away, it is shit. I'd gladly pay
10k/year for the privilege of using Slack, so please don't bash on it until
you realise how bad the alternatives are.

~~~
CryoLogic
Discord is free and in many ways better. If you don't mind the gamer vibe.

~~~
edgartaor
In what ways?

~~~
literallycancer
It doesn't have (as much) performance issues. Seriously, loading a couple
hundred messages shouldn't take even a second, what are we, living in 1990?

------
superzamp
On the fly image processing & optimization.

~~~
pier25
Like [https://www.imgix.com/](https://www.imgix.com/) ?

~~~
superzamp
Exactly.

------
omarforgotpwd
Credit card fees.

------
Overtonwindow
Fundraising.

------
slackoverflower
This is good thread for anyone wanting to figure out what B2B SaaS business to
build.

~~~
jlgaddis
I presumed that's why the question was asked; someone is looking for
opportunities.

~~~
elorant
Problem is that pretty much everyone in here is already a software engineer so
their problems might be quite hard to solve.

------
kibrad
saving 20k/y (cloud bills, for example)

~~~
EpicEng
I would also pay 10k / year to save 20k / year.

------
fiatjaf
Advertising.

------
CryoLogic
databases, migration tools

~~~
cdevs
I've written a sql to elasticsearch mapping tool I feel I should of released.
Eleasticsearch is in desperate need of many tools we take for granted in sql
land, like a command line client you can easily punch in queries on the fly
because trying to write multi line json into the commandline curl is death so
I'm forced to install kibana.

~~~
yazr
Can you give a few more examples ?

I am interested because writing these support tools IS effort+time+focus but
not usually a technical problem.

~~~
cdevs
Mostly emulating what phpMyAdmin can do, the time spent for a elasticsearch
beginner trying to figure out how to clear a index without losing or having to
rebuild their mapping is insane, basically the answer is just don't and just
copy your mapping but if something could easily extract that and say flush
index then awesome. Creating mappings is a nightmare if you don't remember
what types they have and it would be insanely simple to do the phpMyAdmin
style of create table where you type in a "column" name and then use the drop
down for the type "string, date, geo point".

------
Walkman
maybe CI

------
featherverse
Curious. About 1 week ago I saw a post on reddit that asked "What product
would you pay $20,000 for?" I thought that was odd, typically that's not how
you plan a business, you find something or create something of value and then
you sell it. You don't start from how much you want to earn and then look for
ways to earn that much.

Now here's a similar post, what would you pay "$10,000/yr" for.

You can label me a skeptic, but I wouldn't buy anything from anyone who's
primary motivation for starting their business is to make X amount of dollars
in Y timeframe.

~~~
thinkingemote
It's a standard way of finding business ideas. look for where there is a need.
hackernews has these every week, I actually think they provide interest, even
if the intention is business rather than discussion.

~~~
featherverse
Fair enough, I just think that people should look for their career by either
finding ways to monetize activities which they already enjoy, or by looking
for ways to create new kinds of value for the world. If you do those things,
revenue often comes.

By contrast, every disgusting corrupt snake who has ruined the world for
everyone else has started out with the goal of making X dollars in Y
timeframe. So while I'm not saying they're all going to be evil, all of the
evil ones share that trait.

------
fairpx
an AR headset that allows us to work on 50, 60 inch displays where ever we
are, without having to mount large displays to walls etc.

~~~
softwareqrafter
What's your business that you guys like to work on large displays?

~~~
fairpx
We design User Interfaces for Web and Mobile development teams
([http://fairpixels.pro](http://fairpixels.pro)). Working on large displays
seriously increases productivity.

