Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What work problems would your company pay to solve?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–19 of 19 posts

Re: Ask HN: What work problems would your company pay to solve?

#11

Post by amypetrik8 »

I work as a custodian lead and our custodial staff has long dreamed of an app called "Poopalert". What Poopalert does is use smartpipes (toilet drains equipped with smart device tech such as employee biomedical health monitoring) - so it uses smart pipes to see if there is an unflushed toilet. Then are staff will go flush and clean, so the next guy gets the proper clean experience, and we dock the phantom shitter a small premium for the service which goes to our bonus pool. Anyway, with the smartpipes we can also tell if an employee is unwell or a risk, basically assess their healthy status, and cull the herd so to speak by firing the bottom 10% least healthy workforce.

This will lead to an organization of obedient, respectful, team players, all of which are very healthy - and make our custodial duties - or doodies as it were - much easier!!

Re: Ask HN: What work problems would your company pay to solve?

#12

Post by ensocode »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #3

Neither my company nor any of the five companies I’ve worked for over the past ten years would ever trust any of their business to a one person SaaS shop we would throw some developers on it first. Let me take that back. I was the developer lead for a company from 2016-2018 and we found this 2 person SaaS with a product that we needed. We were going to be 65% of his revenue if we signed the deal. I spoke to my CTO an…

I am in a similar situation. It does not feel safe for big companies to rely on one man shows or small companies. Are there any ways for small companies to get out of this?

Re: Ask HN: What work problems would your company pay to solve?

#13

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

ensocode wrote: post #12
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #3

Neither my company nor any of the five companies I’ve worked for over the past ten years would ever trust any of their business to a one person SaaS shop we would throw some developers on it first. Let me take that back. I was the developer lead for a company from 2016-2018 and we found this 2 person SaaS with a product that we needed. We were going to be 65% of his revenue if we signed the deal. I spoke to my CTO an…

I am in a similar situation. It does not feel safe for big companies to rely on one man shows or small companies. Are there any ways for small companies to get out of this?

Ask some founders or do some research on how B2B companies got started. My n=1 experience working for a startup is that the founders were well connected and got one big contract from a health care system and expanded from there.

They also got investment from their customer and their customer opened doors.

Re: Ask HN: What work problems would your company pay to solve?

#14

Post by nrhrjrjrjtntbt »

They generally seem to pay for enterprise level solutions AWS, GCP, Splunk, Slack, Databricks etc. and then anything else is teams doing integrations. The closest thing yo a startup they adopted was Cursor and even that was recent not as early adopter.

Re: Ask HN: What work problems would your company pay to solve?

#15

Post by mseaworthy »

amypetrik8 wrote: post #11

I work as a custodian lead and our custodial staff has long dreamed of an app called "Poopalert". What Poopalert does is use smartpipes (toilet drains equipped with smart device tech such as employee biomedical health monitoring) - so it uses smart pipes to see if there is an unflushed toilet. Then are staff will go flush and clean, so the next guy gets the proper clean experience, and we dock the phantom shitter a s…

They track Covid outbreaks this way. Seems like a smart alert and invasion of privacy simultaneously.

Re: Ask HN: What work problems would your company pay to solve?

#16

Post by aryanchaurasia »

brudgers wrote: post #4

This sounds less like a product and more like a consulting business. There’s nothing wrong with that and consulting businesses sometimes are able to spin out products…consulting is also a possible way to generate revenue and build a team while developing a product. Good luck.

yes but i am generally figuring out if something interests me and if i can work on it.

Re: Ask HN: What work problems would your company pay to solve?

#17

Post by brudgers »

aryanchaurasia wrote: post #16
brudgers wrote: post #4

This sounds less like a product and more like a consulting business. There’s nothing wrong with that and consulting businesses sometimes are able to spin out products…consulting is also a possible way to generate revenue and build a team while developing a product. Good luck.

yes but i am generally figuring out if something interests me and if i can work on it.

My advice, just start working on someqthing.

You can always abandon it if something better comes along.

Re: Ask HN: What work problems would your company pay to solve?

#18

Post by aryanchaurasia »

brudgers wrote: post #17
aryanchaurasia wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes but i am generally figuring out if something interests me and if i can work on it.

My advice, just start working on someqthing. You can always abandon it if something better comes along.

yes doing that! thanks :)

Re: Ask HN: What work problems would your company pay to solve?

#19

Post by p0d »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #3

Neither my company nor any of the five companies I’ve worked for over the past ten years would ever trust any of their business to a one person SaaS shop we would throw some developers on it first. Let me take that back. I was the developer lead for a company from 2016-2018 and we found this 2 person SaaS with a product that we needed. We were going to be 65% of his revenue if we signed the deal. I spoke to my CTO an…

I have been running a one-man sideline Saas for 18 years. I have found that most customers have no concept of what the company looks like behind a Saas product.

The only time I had the, "What happens if you get knocked down by a bus?" comment, was for a big bespoke contract, which I got.

I have never aimed to hoodwink anyone. I have just been surprised to learn in the average person's mind Saas = company of many people. One client of 10 years was shocked when I told him by email that I was in my 50s and a company of one.

Post reply on HN