Ask HN: What business service would you pay $100/mo for - jscodermonk
======
manmal
An AI or concierge who reads all my emails, Slack, iMessage, WhatsApp
messages, and alerts me when something is very important right now, and
otherwise lets me fetch aggregated inquiries when I have time to. The data I
get should all have a 2-3 sentence TLDR so I can quickly skip them, and
provide some sensible replies I can choose to accept or decline inquiries.
Long informative WhatsApp/Slack conversations should be greatly reduced in
length to just tell the story without omitting vital details. Since many
emails require some kind of action from me, the non-complex ones should be
doable via the AI or concierge, e.g. schedule a call or put reminders in the
calendar.

Example: A potential customer and I want to go to lunch. They write me an
email asking for the exact place and time. The service recognizes that this is
quite urgent, and presents me a digest of the message, plus a selection box
for time slots (with my schedule overlaid for context), and 3 of my favorite
places. I choose a slot and a restaurant, and the service writes the answer in
a polite tone, matching my writing and verbosity style. The potential customer
then writes back an email saying they are looking forward to the meeting. The
service knows from previous incidents that I prefer a canned response in that
case and auto-replies "Looking forward", and adds a suffix the calendar entry
"\- confirmed".

It would be worth it just for the feeling of not being alone with that amount
of messages crashing in on me every day. A personal assistant for everyone.

~~~
kortex
I cannot fathom how many times things have fell through the cracks, despite
Gmail's different inboxes, which do a great job at sifting out much of the
low-priority/mailing list stuff. Would easily provide $3.33/day in increased
productivity and reduced stresse

------
tchock23
Be careful with asking hypothetical questions like this. It would be better to
phrase this question as 'which business services do you currently pay $100/mo
(or more) for, and why?'

It's too easy for someone to say they would pay for something when they don't
have to put in any real commitment...

~~~
dheera
As a potential customer though there are many things I actually _would commit
to_ that unfortunately just don't exist. I agree though it's a difficult
survey to do.

------
redsable
I would pay $100 a month for a service that would give me good ideas to make
money in my spare time.

~~~
iKlsR
[https://nugget.one/](https://nugget.one/)

~~~
justboxing
Interesting.

Has anyone tried the paid service -- 20% per month (or 19.99 to be precise) ?

Any experiences (positive or negative) to report?

I'm looking for something like this in the " Live Mentoring" and "Founder
Community" areas...

[ EDIT: Not sure this site is seeing all that much activity. The blog posts
don't have any dates on them,

but I figured from comments that the latest post is nearly 1/2 a year old.
[https://blog.nugget.one/](https://blog.nugget.one/) ]

~~~
jsh42
Nugget has a pretty vibrant community of SaaS-focused founders. As a modern
community, most of that activity is via Slack and Discourse threads, not
passive blog posts. The Nugget Slack channels are pretty active, and they
include real-world mentoring by folks who have been there/done that.

Like any community, only a small handful of Nugget members are super active.
Many people come to Nugget looking for self-implementing ideas, and they tend
to wash out when they realize that hard work is involved to make ideas into
businesses.

Several Nugget members have done the work to hit revenue, and there is a core
group of us who are taking advantage of mentoring by Nugget's Justin and
Brandon, who really know their stuff.

I belong to FounderCafe, Fizzle and Nugget; they all add value, but Nugget is
laser-focused on actively helping people actually BUILD SOMETHING. If that's
what you are seeking, you owe to yourself to check out Nugget.

------
MasterScrat
A service to code-review all the code I push to GitHub for my personal
projects, by people who have more experience than me and could point out
possible improvements and corner cases I missed.

~~~
manmal
Depending on the amount of code you produce, I hope you would be prepared to
pay more than $100?

~~~
MasterScrat
I guess it would need multiple price ranges, based for example on max
LOC/month and on the level of reviewer you need.

------
dheera
Gigabit internet access. Or anything better than this stupid 10 megabit
Comcast uplink. Uplink matters, especially when you have a lot of data to
upload to S3.

------
adzicg
I already pay 3-4x that for a pay-as-you-go personal assistant, and hiring
that agency was likely one of the best business decisions I ever made, as it
freed up a ton of my time that I can use for more important things.

~~~
ProblemFactory
I have often thought of getting a part-time or virtual assistant.

But my main concern is that to be effective, they would need full access to my
email. GMail doesn't have any way to grant limited access (for example no
permanent delete), and even if it did, just read access to email would grant
access to all my online accounts via password reset or magic link emails.

How have you organised this? Or how did you find an assistant you can trust
with that access? Do you review their work, or assume it is all above board?

~~~
adzicg
I've not had to do this. I have a point person at the agency and opened an
email address on our company domain for her, so when she contacts people for
me, she uses her email, not mine.

------
jimmaswell
Setting me up with a guaranteed stream of viable remote contracting software
jobs that pay fairly, maybe.

~~~
thebiglebrewski
Maybe get a job if you're looking for a guaranteed stream of work? Lol just an
observation. If it's a big deal to you...maybe just try to find a remote
friendly company to work for?

~~~
jimmaswell
There is no "just" doing that, especially as a new graduate with only one
internship of experience, in a poor location.

~~~
thebiglebrewski
Ah sorry, I'd just assumed you were more experienced. Yeah build up that
portfolio, and best of luck!

~~~
jimmaswell
Portfolio so far is volunteer work on two large (thousands of players) Unity3D
games over the years, various smaller side projects of my own, and one
internship. Doesn't seem to be quite enough to get responses around here
though. Going to have to move soon before it's too late for the employment gap
to be explainable (graduated May)

~~~
thebiglebrewski
I'd be glad to review your portfolio and resume if you're at all interested. I
work mostly in web but might be able to give some pointers, I've done this for
lots of people. My email should be in my profile.

------
piinbinary
Better internal documentation hosting.

I want something that can pull in documentation generated from code (from
tools like godoc or javadoc), README files checked into code, plus other more
wiki style documentation.

With all this documentation in one place, I want it to be smart about helping
me deal with dead links and suggest pages that might need update when code
updates. For example, say a wiki page references running a command with a
certain flag. If I check in a change removing that flag from that command, the
wiki should let me know that the page might need to be updated.

Ideally, this wiki would also have a stack-overflow -like Q&A feature to
reduce the time spent helping other team members.

------
mickelsen
Flat-rate PBX + call receptionist service. The virtual secretary would just
take notes, appointments and callback reminders if I'm not available.

------
hjnilsson
(Assuming a few employees at least)

Accounting system, Timesheets, payroll system, backup service, cell
phone/internet plans, City Centre meeting rooms that can be booked online, HR
services (measure employee satisfaction etc.), fruit delivery to the office,
flower delivery to the office, excellent quality VOIP with screen sharing.

There are many more, but above are just a few that I'd consider worth it.

------
kp995
I would say cyber security is a need for every product or service that is in
inception stage and their makers want to roll that service out. Making a cyber
security product and serving them from their launch will make them pay you way
more than 100$!! This will also help them significantly to get their product
or service early right into the market...

------
mendeza
Probably something that would lead me into a new profession or 2x my salary
rate.

Some things come into mind:

-I pay $20/month for videos to learn 3D modeling and animation

-I payed for a while a subscription to treehouse, where I could learn mobile and web development

-$40 dollars for a book to learn OpenCV3

It would be an easier question to ask what would a business pay $100/month
for.

------
tmaly
I have a few different types of outdoor flowers. I spend enough time on
maintaining them and a lawn. I would pay 100 a month to have two 30 minute
sessions with a really experienced gardener who would show up and help me with
all of the different seasonal issues.

I have heard you could have roses blooming all summer if you care for them
right. I have no clue on how to do this.

------
taysic
A really good analytics service. Like really good - I get really confused by
Google Analytics and don't have time to learn how to use all its capabilities.
From my research, I haven't found the competitors to be a ton better. I would
love something that basically collects all the data and gives me intelligent
analysis. Probably would pay more than 100 though.

~~~
jpx
[https://www.paveai.com](https://www.paveai.com) (YC W16) might be something
you're interested in.

Disclosure - I'm one of the founders :)

------
scrollaway
A really, really good ISP.

------
dotsh
Just make you service and price it as you want. You'll still find someone who
needs it and will pay for it. Then learn from it and adapt further. ;)

~~~
smithmayowa
Are you sure this is true.

------
newlikeice
Cell phone service with unlimited data

~~~
lol768
Seems hugely overpriced (but then I think the same about most US cell phone
services - Fi is a total ripoff IMO, almost £8 per GB is ridiculous).

Three (in the UK) offer unlimited for £24/mo.

~~~
virtualwhys
Yeah, I signed up for Fi prior to heading to France for a couple of months.
Since the apartment I was renting didn't have internet access I figured I
could get by with Fi by minimizing my internet usage (as I did successully in
Mexico this past winter on a pay-as-you-go data plan).

Big mistake, $10/GB proved to be untenable. I hunted around a bit and found a
service offered by Orange/Sosh: 25 euros per month got me 40GB of data and a
pretty snappy 4G+ connection. Naturally I canceled my Fi plan immediately.

------
kapauldo
2-5 prequalified sales leads

------
krptos
Sorry for hijacking the thread.

What simple service would you pay $10/month for? #JustCurious

~~~
Kmaschta
Unlimited music, unlimited movies and series, unlimited internet, unlimited
nice-to-have-but-not-essential services.

And also all services that make me save at least 5 hours a week.

