
Startup Ideas 2020 - saadalem
https://dcgross.com/2020-startup-themes/?src=t
======
davnicwil
> Just like Javascript made programming more accessible to a broader audience

I think this is entirely cart before horse. What actually happened was the web
made programming relevant to a much broader audience and JavaScript is the
language you use to program for the web, so everyone learnt that.

~~~
icandoit
I think you are right.

Also anybody could right-click and "view source". (Imagine being able to do
that in any Swing app in their peak, for contrast.)

When pages were just a few hundred lines any page could be recreated with a
web browser, ambition, and enough time. Those days are long gone, now, with
huge transitive node dependencies, minification, and feature-combinatorial-
explosion. Like a sandboxed document-centric qbasic.

~~~
52-6F-62
When I was a kid that was very much a hobby!

I’d save whole websites and play with their code (back then that meant html2/3
and early css and Javascript, but still). It was enticing after playing with
terminal views for years before that. Kids like colourful things, what can I
say.

------
bluedevil2k
Haven't we been hearing about "software that doesn't require any tech skills
to build" for 25 years now? It seems like a pipe dream. It's built on some
innate belief that someone can create tools that work for _every_ kind of
business possible, which is crazy. I can think in the past few years I've
worked on health care registration websites, diamond auction websites, oil
reserve management software - nothing would have been tied together with any
common tool and all required extensive amounts of custom code for their
business logic. I think it's time we drop this dream of normal "business
analysts" writing all the software in a company.

~~~
perlgeek
> It seems like a pipe dream. It's built on some innate belief that someone
> can create tools that work for every kind of business possible, which is
> crazy.

It doesn't need to work for all every kind of business.

Often it starts with an excel sheet. Which works for surprisingly long, but
eventually problems with concurrent data entry, or more logic / validation
etc. really make that untenable.

But, going from a highly customized excel sheet to an in-house developed
custom application is a huge leap; only when you start to replace it do you
realize just how many Excel features you were actually using.

When you start writing a custom application, you need to take of
authentication, permissions, audit logging, search functionality and so. Maybe
your web framework helps you with some of them, but never all of them, and the
missing concerns are a huge pain to get right.

I really want something, either a framework or a highly extensible
application, to let me actually focus on the business logic. And at the same
time, still let me deploy on premise, let me have a functioning CI/CD pipeline
and keep my code in git.

For a complex project, it will be a programmer writing the code, not a
business analyst. But they should focus 90% on intrinsic complexity, not on
accidental complexity. We're not there yet, so we need _something_ better.

~~~
ehnto
> For a complex project, it will be a programmer writing the code, not a
> business analyst. But they should focus 90% on intrinsic complexity, not on
> accidental complexity. We're not there yet, so we need something better.

What follows is a tired argument, but hear me out as I'm using it as a
springboard. The reason you hire engineers to design bridges is because they
know how to do the important engineering bits. If all it took to make a bridge
was knowing how cars will move from one side to the other, then we wouldn't
need engineers. So...

We often want our software engineers to do all the business logic too, which
is why engineers that provide the most value to projects are actually people
who love building business solutions and not engineering software, or some
blend in between. But maybe that's also why most software sucks and costs a
fortune (sorry everyone).

Is the issue that we're conflating the two tasks into one? If so, is a product
that would solve your problem one that cleanly delineates between software
engineering tasks and logic tasks? Or is it one that gets rid of software
engineering all together, if that were possible?

> I really want something, either a framework or a highly extensible
> application, to let me actually focus on the business logic.

I would argue there's already many relevant application frameworks that are
good at this once you learn them, the trouble is the industry moves so fast
between tools so your business solution specialist programmers spend all their
time learning new software engineering paradigms.

~~~
perlgeek
> Is the issue that we're conflating the two tasks into one? If so, is a
> product that would solve your problem one that cleanly delineates between
> software engineering tasks and logic tasks?

Oh yes!

> Or is it one that gets rid of software engineering all together, if that
> were possible?

I have no problem with doing software engineering when I don't have the
feeling that the problem has been solved dozens of times before.

Let me try to give an example: you run a colocation business. So you have to
manage data centers, cages, racks, and the hardware that's in the racks.

I want a solution where the boring CRUD is mostly taken care of, so you get a
list view of the hardware, you can filter it, modify and so on. You can also
define some constraints (like, a hardware inherits the location from its rack)
that are automatically enforced. And of course permissions are enforced, a
customer can only see their own hardware, and can only access racks that
contain only his hardware etc.

But I also want the flexibility that adds a rack view, where I can show a 2d
graphics of the rack and where each piece of hardware is, which port is
connected by cables to which other port etc. This is something that nearly no
other business needs, so I'm totally fine writing my own thing for this view.

Software like ServiceNow allows the first part pretty easily, but it's
expensive, cloud only (unless you pay several millions a month, I've heard)
and doesn't have the kind of flexibility to allow me to implement the rack
view, for example.

------
keithwhor
Everybody in this specific social group of investors continues to list
Developer Tools as, effectively, an Evergreen space.

What’s baffling to me is that the amount of innovation in Developer Tool
businesses (not tools, businesses) is _surprisingly_ small. There are three
factors that influence this, IMO:

(1) The OSS community has trended towards an insular culture incentivized by
OSS popularity where stars and Twitter followers are status signals. In this
world, it’s hard for talented engineers to stop seeking “star status” and
transition to the business ecosystem where they’re bottom rung of the ladder.

(2) The space is extremely sophisticated — with longer R&D cycles — and VCs
routinely incentivize suboptimal growth trajectories when they’ve identified
apparent winners and miss opportunities with more practically iterative
companies. (Expecting growth at all costs in a space where continuous delivery
+ R&D is the norm.) This blows up some companies early and prematurely kills
other promising technologies. I think the 18mo expected cycle time probably
needs to be adjusted for these companies, _especially_ early stage.

(3) Founders are heavily pressured towards exits. Long R&D cycle time, the
pressure cooker of VC growth expectations, and the rarity of high-ownership,
customer-oriented developer tool + engineering talent makes early exits
extremely attractive for both founding teams and acquirers.

How do we fix this? Between Daniel, Elad and a bunch of folks who keep writing
this stuff — I think it’s time for a new developer-oriented fund, backed by
the people and companies passionate about the space.

I’ve been a major sponsor of Vue.js for years. I’d like to do more to help
talented developers start businesses in the future, when possible. If anybody
thinks something like this is interesting, give me a holler.

~~~
reggieband
There was a recent post here on HN for a medium article "Get Rich Slow And
Steady" [1]. It seems like this is a space attracting the attention of
investors. I think the developer tool business overlaps with the type of SaaS
businesses described in the article.

There is still space to tackle getting from a no-revenue idea to a stable
cash-positive subscription service. My eyes water when I see ideas attracting
10+m in _seed_ capital before they even have a viable product. I remember
pitching an idea with a friend for a slow burn SaaS startup (in real-estate).
We wanted under 1m and we were laughed out of every room. Everyone wanted to
back a potential unicorn and not waste their time on guys thinking so small.

Maybe things have changed but it seems right now there are two categories:
startups with huge ideas that can get substantial venture capital to take
moonshots and stable existing SaaS business that can slow burn on existing
subscription revenue. I'm just not sure there will ever be a market for "Give
us 1m and we'll build a company that generates 250k/year of profit".

[https://medium.com/@tom.kubik/get-rich-slow-in-
software-5700...](https://medium.com/@tom.kubik/get-rich-slow-in-
software-57001f41f3a9)

~~~
christiansakai
I find it amazing that people can find many small niche ideas that are
profitable enough like this. I must have my head entirely in the wrong cloud.

~~~
reggieband
Well, to be fair, some (or even most) small niche ideas won't be that
profitable (if they are profitable at all). That is the reason why I feel that
the market for those small investments will never really flourish. The
downside is the same, you lose all your investment. The upside is completely
underwhelming, you recoup your investment after 4 or 5 years after which
hopefully you see a profit.

This is traditionally the space for friends-and-family investment or bank
loans. If I was an investor then I don't think it is a space I would get into.

It also explains why the article I mentioned is focused on _established_ and
profitable SaaS businesses. That means the filter for crash-and-burn has
already taken place allowing investors to change their ROI calculation enough
to make it viable.

~~~
christiansakai
Isn't it harder to compete on established and profitable SaaS business? What
can a small dev shop, or an indie developer do to compete in a space like
this?

~~~
reggieband
To be clear, the article isn't advocating for investing in companies competing
against established/profitable SaaS businesses. It is advocating investing in
the existing companies that have already achieved profitability.

------
jpm_sd
> DuckDuckGo is small, but it’s growing 50% year-over-year. As of last week,
> it is also a search option on every European Android device. If the growth
> rate were to double, DDG would surpass Google in 6 years.

That's what we call a "Big If". And doesn't DDG just rent someone else's
index?

~~~
luhn
Yeah, search results are provided by Bing.

~~~
krick
Wow, I didn't know that. So what exactly is a DDG then? Just a page to query
Bing (anonymously?)? They don't crawl any data themselves?

~~~
pb7
Yep. They do a small amount of crawling solely to populate their "instant
answers" for limited topics.

~~~
sansnomme
Their marketing and brand are the most important aspects. Bing proxies are
a-dime-a-dozen but only DuckDuckGo has achieved tremendous media attention and
funding.

~~~
pb7
One of the proxies had to win out, right? We're only talking about DuckDuckGo
and not BearBearClaw because they survived. I don't think they're doing
anything _particularly_ special. They're also a much older company with a lot
smaller search volume than people realize.

------
pascalxus
> Remote is acceptable, even encouraged.

11% of all SE jobs posted on Stackoverflow in the last 4 months or so were
Remote:

[https://skilldime.com/app.php?PieChart2=Remote](https://skilldime.com/app.php?PieChart2=Remote)

I like the way the blog post is so well written in a witty style that's both
entertaining and interesting to read.

~~~
atupis
Remote will be huge and there is definitely a need for tools to enable remote
working and communication.

~~~
overcast
What exactly is missing from remote working/communication? I honestly can't
handle anymore stupid messaging/conferencing systems.

~~~
y-c-o-m-b
I'm also curious what tooling is missing. Slack, Zoom, and Outlook has covered
100% of our very large (over 1000 employees) remote company's needs.

Seems the issue is more about reducing the number of tools rather than
acquiring new ones.

~~~
jslove
Slack easily replaced by Keybase etc.

For me the killer would be something that makes meetings more efficient via
AI.

------
maverick19221
An aside, I love the metaphor rich writing:

> Privacy might be the digital spinach

> As this chewing gum loses flavor

> A startup idea that hits the seed ecosystem like a fashion fad, with a
> surprising number of founders suddenly all wearing the same ripped jeans

> The market has priced in the trade war in atoms, but not in bits.

Any suggestions on how to get better at writing like this?

~~~
hombre_fatal
Practice creative writing daily. I'm not too convinced reading a lot is part
of it, as the other comments suggest. Else we'd all be great writers. I'd
argue that consumption is the least important part of being a good creator.
Else we'd all be good creators with our endless content consumption.

But I guarantee you will notice results if, every morning, you write at least
a few paragraphs answering some sort of creative writing prompt. After a
while, creative ideas will just come out of your head as you try to write.
Just like how words and phrases magically come to you as you get better at
another language.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/](https://old.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/)
is a great resource. I like to read a few ideas in the morning and consider
them in the shower. Then I brew a coffee and write as much as I can before I
start my day, even if my idea completely sucks. I just try to treat my crappy
idea as a constraint and run with it.

------
tempsy
Half the bullet points on here all fall into enterprise SaaS...

In my opinion the shift from big game changing ideas like Airbnb, Lyft/ Uber,
and Stripe to a dozens enterprise SaaS apps popping up in San Francisco has
been one of the biggest reasons why I've felt for the last year that there
doesn't feel like there's been a "big next thing" for awhile.

I just can't get excited by another dressed up note taking app, and wouldn't
be excited to work for one.

~~~
redisman
At least SaaS as a business model is a lot more palatable to me than the OG
unicorns' ads and data harvesting.

Generally I don't see why customer-facing technology is supposedly objectively
better and sexier and more "real" engineering.

~~~
tempsy
It’s more exciting to work at a company that is actually game changing. Some
SaaS cos fit into that bucket as well, but majority I see funded today fill
some niche project management use case that just isn’t that appealing to me.

I didn’t say anything about it being “realer”.

------
kiwicopple
> 2\. Saying Yes to NoCode

> 9\. Developer Tools

While these two may seem contradictory, I see this as a great trend for
developers.

Developers of 10 years ago would focus on building common solutions like blogs
and landing pages. Now there are slew of NoCode startups that allow non-
developers to do it themselves.

This frees up developers to focus on more complex problems.

The Developer Tool startups of today should be asking - "what are the common
tasks that developers are doing today, that will be easy for non-devs in 10
years?"

Perhaps my thesis if wrong, but that's what we're hoping to achieve at
[https://supabase.io](https://supabase.io)

In our case the "complex task" is creating CRUD APIs. Creating these are
monotonous and developers could be spending time on much more valuable tasks.
We're starting to see this with the rise of amazing tools like
GraphQL/PostgREST.

Other areas to watch will be the "simplification" of databases. Think "MS
Access" for advanced databases like Postgres. Metabase is a good start here,
focusing on the reporting aspect of the data. The next steps may be database
design and data entry, - Retool seem like they could do well in this area.

~~~
petra
It's a good question.

Possibly, In 10 years low code will dominate enterprise development, IOT and
quite likely , also most consumer crud apps.

And today, many people develop very similar services across companies. In the
future most of those services will be available online.

On the other hand software will become dominant in many more fields.

SO that will require more infrastructure, and more software engineers dealing
with machine learning, unstructured data, data science, 3d objects and worlds,
machine creativity, experts in optimization.

------
dsalzman
"3\. The New Meme: Enterprise Search “Enterprise search” is shaping up to be
in 2020 what RPA was in 2019. A startup idea that hits the seed ecosystem like
a fashion fad, with a surprising number of founders suddenly all wearing the
same ripped jeans. I’ve seen about a dozen teams and companies working on
next-generation enterprise search in the past few weeks. They’re all
attempting to build the same thing: a search/feed/discovery product that helps
you find things amongst Slack, Gmail and Salesforce clouds.

I’ve yet to see anyone properly tackle the more rudimentary, “boring” and
lucrative approach: an on-prem search appliance, similar to GSE, that indexes
internal intranet, wikis as well as email. On-prem software is annoying to
build, something many founders shy away from."

At my old startup Pinecone, we built something similar called Ask Pinecone. It
would index everyone's emails and internal wiki's on premise. Then you could
send an email with a question to ask@youcompany.com some Bayesian based
modeling would then forward the email to the most appropriate person at the
company based on the contents of their inbox and your email.

~~~
citilife
> I’ve yet to see anyone properly tackle the more rudimentary, “boring” and
> lucrative approach: an on-prem search appliance, similar to GSE, that
> indexes internal intranet, wikis as well as email. On-prem software is
> annoying to build, something many founders shy away from."

It's hard because you need to access the documents and from a security
perspective that's not ideal. We took a different approach which actually
builds a search graph based on what's discussed (plugs into email, slack,
etc.): [https://insideropinion.com/](https://insideropinion.com/)

Works very well and doesn't need access to the source document (so more
secure), although that'd improve the search.

------
pascalxus
LOLZ: >"Now Instagram has too many ads and finding a genuine phone charger on
Amazon requires a degree in investigative journalism."

------
alexfromapex
Re: the first point, Amazon is terrible now. I’m afraid to buy things because
of all of the fake reviews. How are you supposed to buy products sight-unseen
with fake reviews abound?

~~~
mosburger
I wonder if a curated, moderated Amazon could work? Probably wouldn't scale
very well, but perhaps if there were more live humans involved in the process
of choosing which items were available for purchase, it'd work a little
better?

I sorta feel like the future is in smaller more boutique sites for specific
things. Like Wayfair for home furnishings or Chewy for pet supplies. A bit
like going to the local pet store instead of Walmart for your dog food.

~~~
dbenamy
I’ve increasingly been using
[https://thewirecutter.com](https://thewirecutter.com) for this.

~~~
TeMPOraL
You also have to stay away from Amazon anyway, to not get a fake sent because
of their inventory commingling.

But yes, I use the Wirecutter for recommendations too, and I never regretted
purchasing anything they recommended.

------
skinkestek
Here's one non-abstract idea that you can get for free, even though I might
try myself as well:

Give Confluence a run for its money.

Confluence is so bloated that a clean install takes longer to start than it
takes to boot my laptop and log in.

Plugin SDK documentation is a mess.

As far as I can see it only sells because of the brand and because of network
effects.

If anyone could manage to create a real wiki (remember, it means quick!) and
market it they might have a chance at some nice cash that would otherwise flow
to a company that keeps wasting peoples time.

End of rant ;-)

~~~
drywater
No company will buy products just because they are better. They buy the brand,
the support, the advertising.

~~~
frandroid
What support does anyone need to use Confluence? How many people _use_ that
support?

~~~
dflock
> How many people _use_ that support?

That's not really relevant to Enterprise sales.

------
davidjnelson
> Given free transcription and the drive of remote work to video conferencing,
> we’re about to witness a Cambrian explosion of cataloged meeting
> information. What was previously oral knowledge will be automatically
> documented by machines. We’ll see many opportunities come out of this.

Automatic searchable transcripts for video chats. Now that sounds useful!

~~~
distantaidenn
My startup is currently working on this now. One of my major concerns is data
security and client confidence.

One hurdle I haven't figured out how to get over is reassuring clients that
their data is safe with us -- i.e. we aren't reading/listening in on every
conversation.

~~~
davidjnelson
I wonder if there’s a failsafe way you can prove it’s off when they want to
turn it off.

------
rmac
"I’ve yet to see anyone properly tackle the more rudimentary, “boring” and
lucrative approach: an on-prem search appliance, similar to GSE, that indexes
internal intranet, wikis as well as email."

Is there a reason to believe this is something enterprises actually want? Was
GSE too early?

~~~
vkou
Enterprises want this. Source: Every single company, tech or otherwise,
everywhere in the world, is a complete mess when it comes to discovering
information you need to do your job.

Whether or not you can actually make enough money from building a selling on-
prem search is another question. It is an incredibly difficult space to
develop for, because every one of these messes has a _vastly_ different IT
stack. [1][2][3]

You could take the easy way out and build search for Slack + Jira + Email, but
that would help less than 1% of businesses world-wide.

[1] The first full-time job I worked had an unholy amalgamation of HP Quality
Center, SeaPine source control, something about Sharepoint, and random
documents stored in people's shared folders. Oh, yeah, and it had an on-
premise Google Enterprise Search (Or whatever it was called back in 2011),
which was almost entirely useless.

[2] The second was a mix of Jira and TikiWiki.

[3] The current job my wife holds has a bunch of files in a shared directory,
a database that is installed from four floppy disks, and an IT stack that
quite prominently includes Windows 2003.

~~~
eitland
> It is an incredibly difficult space to develop for, because every one of
> these messes has a vastly different IT stack.

I have a strong feeling that Google Desktop Search had a lot of this sorted.

That was 10 years ago.

With all the advances that has been happening in the meantime and assuming
businesses are interested enough to adjust a tiny bit to simplify crawling
this doesn't seem impossible at all if a well-funded team started working on
it.

~~~
vkou
The technical problem is solvable, the deployment and technical support, and
sales problem, and getting customers to upgrade, and the technical support,
and did I mention the technical support problem would be a complete nightmare.

You can't actually leverage any of the economies of scale that you can get
from building software, when you have to hold the hand of every single
customer you deal with.

Someone like Oracle[1] can get away with this sort of thing (While charging an
arm and a leg for it), but this is not the problem that your typical startup
can solve.

[1] The other difference is that your Oracle database + solution is business
critical, and businesses have no problem with paying $XY,000/year for
business-critical solutions. Intranet search is a nice-to-have, and businesses
balk at paying $5/user/month for that sort of stuff.

------
ArtWomb
Well, thanks for introducing me to Vayyar at least ;)

If I understand their value prop, they provide a single sensor solution that
is essentially a black box. And the output is the wide-range 4D point cloud.
Power consumption is ultra-low. But the fidelity is still very high. It's up
to the partner to design the software that consumes the data. Vayyar just
provides the black box.

If it works. The total market here seems on order of "replacing cameras" in
retail, manufacturing and surveillance!

[https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/20/vayyar-nabs-109m-for-
its-4...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/20/vayyar-nabs-109m-for-its-4d-radar-
tech-which-detects-and-tracks-images-while-preserving-privacy/)

------
ajsharp
> While consumer privacy might be overrated, enterprise ephemerality is
> underrated.

Yep, this is the core assumption underlying Sharesecret -
[https://sharesecret.co](https://sharesecret.co).

------
40acres
A start-up at the intersection of 'developer tools' and 'NoCode' would be very
exciting to me. I'd love to see tools that reflect some of the principles
outlined in Bret Victor's blog.

[http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/](http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/)
[http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/](http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/)

~~~
sansnomme
Just remember that the tool has to be useful and practical at the end of the
day. Red's obsession with crypto tokens and the failure of Eve reflects badly
on the rapid application development ecosystem (on the other extreme, you have
Embarcadero Delphi and SAP, each costing n-figures). Microsoft's suite is for
some reason on life support. Access, Visual Basic are all pale shadows of
their former selves.

~~~
zubairq
Visual Basic died because Microsoft chose not to continue development of the
VB6 comatible ecosystem. It was a multibillion dollar a year business in the
1990s

------
joddystreet
We tried building NoCode (used to be hosted at noapp.mobi), I think around
January 2017. The project has been abandoned since then, you can find the
project at -

1\. Docs - [https://github.com/veris-
pr/v3-docs/wiki](https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-docs/wiki)

2\. Core - [https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-core](https://github.com/veris-
pr/v3-core)

3\. Backend - [https://github.com/veris-
pr/v3-api/tree/develop](https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-api/tree/develop)

4\. Mobile App - [https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-app/tree/feat-
offline](https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-app/tree/feat-offline)

5\. Mobile App - [https://github.com/veris-
pr/v3-client](https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-client)

Quick demo (forced under 2 minutes time, we tried to take this to TechCrunch),
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfZT75rduPg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfZT75rduPg)

This was a POC project. It was quite suitable for simple business process
management based apps. One of our customers has been using a conference room
manager built on this platform, for 3 years now.

------
miguelmota
Does "No Code" just mean having a UI? What I mean is the examples it gave for
"No Code" look like regular Saas companies so I don't see what's the
difference between something labeled "No code" and a regular software product
that you use a UI to do things since the code is abstracted away. The majority
of web based products don't require the user to code so "No code" seems like a
buzzword more than anything.

------
zackbrown
When it comes to winner-takes-all (the bread & butter of VC economics,) it
strikes me as dissonant to bet both on no-code and on dev tools.

No-code’s winner-takes-all scenario presumes full automation of developers.
It’s in the name: no code, no developers.

Postulate: software developers will remain necessary as long as human brains
don’t natively speak “Von Neumann.“

Thus the winner-who-takes-all is going to be “with-code,” not “no-code.” “No-
code” is a misnomer and a dead-end.

------
MediumD
For #3: If anyone is looking for an enterprise search they can boot up "cloud-
prem" (in their VPC), that's exactly what we're building at
[https://landria.io/customers/why-landria](https://landria.io/customers/why-
landria).

~~~
mish15
What search tech are you building it on out of interest?

------
a13n
More like "VC Compatible Startup Ideas 2020"

It's totally feasible to start a successful company outside of these ideas. I
think this list is helpful because they answer the "why now" question that VCs
are looking for.

In other words, this list is helpful if you're trying to start a $10B company
today.

~~~
keithwhor
Not to be too cheeky, but this is mostly a list of trends dictated by
companies started three or more years ago.

Meaning it's actually "VC Compatible Startup Ideas 2017."

Outside of Developer Tools (I'm a fan!) I would say your advice -- it's
feasible to start a company outside of these ideas -- is probably _exactly_
where you want to be looking if you're _starting_ a company today. Daniel's an
investor, so he's casting a net for startups / founding teams he hasn't heard
of yet. Content marketing is dealflow 101. That said, if you're a founder in
one of these spaces, he has a fantastic reputation, so you should absolutely
reach out. He wouldn't have posted it if he wasn't looking for awesome people!

~~~
a13n
Yeah good point, if you're starting one of these today you might already be a
bit late.

------
joering2
Interesting read but none of these ideas actually explain what problems they
solve. Programming is my hobby and being financially secure, I’m in position
where I could easily spent half a day writing someones code for nothing more
than “thank you, good job”. Seriously, so long as I know someone’s problem is
being solved. I wish there were website like “thank you for programming dot
com” where people with low or no budget could post problems that programing
can solve and programmers could tackle those at zero financial gain, maybe
only as a extra point in their resumee.

------
rokhayakebe
Privacy

Judging by what people are posting on IG, FB, and what I hear they are posting
on SNAP, I have come to the conclusion that Privacy is a niche product.

------
citilife
> 3\. The New Meme: Enterprise Search

Exactly what we're doing:
[https://insideropinion.com/](https://insideropinion.com/)

Seems like most people aren't thinking of search the exact same way though.
It's a huge problem (having worked in large fortune 100 companies).

------
russellbeattie
Bytedance?? OK, I guess... But Lark's home page blurb seems a bit direct: "Hey
look, the Chinese government is going to hack into your servers and look at
all your corporate secrets sooner or later, why not just make it easy for both
of us and use this service now? Sign up here."

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OkGoDoIt
Was this published in 2019 or 2020? There’s a line pretty far down the page in
the Enterprise Dabblers section that says “As of today (January 2019), we see
a half dozen pitches a week for automation software”

Maybe that was a typo? Or maybe this is a slightly updated article from a year
ago?

------
shreyshrey
Lark looks very similar to what we are trying to accomplish with AirSend
([https://www.airsend.io](https://www.airsend.io)). I guess interesting days
ahead.

------
aantix
Sidekiq is a one man band. Perham owns the space. Good for him.

------
harrisreynolds
Re 2. Saying Yes to NoCode ... We are working on an MVP in this space called
Webase. It is still very early but we are starting with basic CRUD operations
and then will be layering on more sophistication going forward.

Check it out here: [https://www.webase.com](https://www.webase.com)

~~~
mritchie712
what does it do? do you have a video demo?

~~~
harrisreynolds
Also... I tried to check out SeekWell from your profile but it didn't load.
Are you still working on it?

~~~
mritchie712
just saw you were CTO of Shipt, we (SeekWell) had a couple users there. Just
followed you on Twitter, DM if you want to chat some time.

------
tito
Completely agree on the "Carbon and Climate" section.

Negative makes a carbon negative bracelet made with carbon dioxide pulled from
the atmosphere. I created the company to make carbon more personal.
[http://gonegative.co/](http://gonegative.co/)

------
justinzollars
I agree with this question:

"Will it [TikTok] be in the US App Store by years end?"

~~~
smbullet
Interesting thought. If TikTok got banned they would probably release a web
interface for Americans or Android phones would suddenly become really popular
among teens.

~~~
blackrock
So teens would dump iPhone for Android just to get TikTok? That would be very
interesting indeed.

The other year, teens were surprised when they got a green bubble on their
iMessage, indicating the other person was not using an iPhone.

Admittedly, TikTok does appear to be more fun and interesting (for teens) than
Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, because the point is to just watch fun and
pointless stuff. And maybe learn something new, or do something yourself to
imitate them.

------
huac
I wrote a post about the so-called "law of advertiser atrophy":
[https://hua.substack.com/p/everything-i-have-ever-learned-
ab...](https://hua.substack.com/p/everything-i-have-ever-learned-about). TLDR:
the author correctly identifies an issue, but misdiagnoses its root cause and
how it will play out moving forward.

In fact, I would endorse short AMZN, long GOOG/FB, as an investment strategy
(but not as investment advice)!

