Mostly posting this because I want to see it, but drones to automate residential property inspections. I'm actually thinking about miniature drones that can do internal and external residential inspections. My startup is in property management and a lot of the work a human does could be done by a drone + healthy amount of machine learning on the images captured.
Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
11–20 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#12Establishing nationwide retail distribution networks and ignoring e-commerce.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#13Fix ads. I think there is a need for a product that allows websites to self-manage their ads, allowing them to handle display, tracking, payment, and client management internally. Imagine being able to get rid of all the third-party ad and tracking scripts on your website in favor of hosting and managing all of it on your own domain, displaying ads that are guaranteed to be relevant and attractive (since you chose th…
would be cool
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#14ChatBots: One big opportunity that i can see is the rise of chatbots on popular messaging platforms. It is going to bring the tech advances to a lot more people in a much easier way.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#15The old shared hosting market is still pretty large. But it is stuck with ancient stuff like cpanel and mostly dominated by stagnant players like EIG, GoDaddy, and the like. Seems like there's room for a move something like what DigitalOcean did in the VPS space.
I use shared hosting too and I got into cPanel like 3 times a year for 2 min each. Sure, it needs to be there but regardless it fills the needs already.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#16Mostly posting this because I want to see it, but drones to automate residential property inspections. I'm actually thinking about miniature drones that can do internal and external residential inspections. My startup is in property management and a lot of the work a human does could be done by a drone + healthy amount of machine learning on the images captured.
I think the biggest problem will be that drones can't open doors or cabinets. You'll still need someone there to look under the sink, go into the basement.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#17Contract Economy: There is still a significant opportunity for a Freelancer/Upwork group to exist. Something that better vets quality while not pushing for Toptal prices. I suspect you'd need to set up physical presence in the likely countries properly vet and control quality but this could easily be covered by a premium for a know quantity vs going to western rates. Crytpo Currency: There is room for more disruption…
Cargo ships don't have enough free surface area to mount the number of solar panels that would be needed for propulsion. Sails are already being used on a few ships but they only save a small percentage of fuel.
I'd like to add that cargo ships, while being very efficient in terms of how much they can transport over a unit distance given unit energy, require enormous amounts of energy.
See some resources:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...
- https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch8en/conc8en/fuel_c...
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#18Mechanical Turk for Programming tasks would be great to see.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#19Fix ads. I think there is a need for a product that allows websites to self-manage their ads, allowing them to handle display, tracking, payment, and client management internally. Imagine being able to get rid of all the third-party ad and tracking scripts on your website in favor of hosting and managing all of it on your own domain, displaying ads that are guaranteed to be relevant and attractive (since you chose th…
Buysellads is very close to this, and has been around for a long time. I ran beaconads, their subsidiary, for a short time and the biggest issue is that most ad buys are coming from a handful of massive companies.
Old Navy doesn't want to deal individually with a site that doesn't have 10,000,000 visits/month. So we end up needing an intermediary at the same scale as the big advertisers.
Not saying this can't work at some level, just that there are some big economic forces fighting against scaling a product like this.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#20Here are a few, and I frequently have these conversations with VCs, albeit biased toward areas I work in:
- Spatiotemporal analytics usually in the context of IoT. Most people currently repurpose cartographic tools for this purpose but the impedance match is poor and the tools are seriously lacking elementary functionality. There is no magic technology here, just exceptional UX/UI and an understanding of the problem domain and tooling requirements.
- IoT database platforms, no one offers a credible solution for this currently. Everyone defines this in terms of what they can do, not in terms of what is required in practice. There are many VCs currently hunting for this product but the problem is one of fundamental tech; you can't solve it using open source backends.
- Also for IoT, ad hoc clusters of compute at the edge being able to cooperate for analytical applications. The future of large-scale data analytics is planetary scale federation for many applications. Significant tech gaps here.
- Remote sensing analytics. Drones and satellites are generating spectacular volumes of this data and no one can usefully analyze data of this type at scale. Today, companies wait weeks for a single analytic output on less than a terabyte of data.
- Population-scale behavioral analytics. Many startups claim to do this but none of them can actually work with relevant data at a scale that would deliver on it despite increasing availability of the necessary data.
- AI based on algorithmic induction tech i.e. not the usual DNN and ML tech everyone calls AI. This is way more interesting if you have a novel approach.