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Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#151

Post by aabajian »

The leading cause of death is cardiovascular disease. >90% of these cases can be attributed to an overweight population. It's not an easy problem to solve, but there has to be a way to fix it. Lots of calorie counting apps, activity trackers, motivational reminder apps, etc. Obesity is very complicated, but there are three basic facts:

1. Calories in, calories out is the golden rule.

2. The vast majority of calories come from carbohydrates.

3. Carbohydrates activate addictive dopaminergic pathways (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/pdf/nih...)

People overeat because food is easy to access, and it provides a short-term, immediate chemical reward. External rewards often need to be introduced to break this vicious cycle. Hobbies, relationships, career achievements, etc. can function as alternative rewards. Perhaps there is a way for technology to provide short-term rewards in lieu of eating?

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#153

Post by lwhalen »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #104
tyingq wrote: post #3

The 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'm trying to get into this area...I used to work for EIG and frankly they SUCK. I'm wanting to start an employee co-owned hosting firm that values employee/customer relationships. I think honestly it's not so much the systems/software that matter most for hosting - it's the customer service. When EIG took over Bluehost the first thing they did was outsourced ALL tickets to India (Hari the CEO's parent's company) - T…

howdy fellow EIG alum! I worked there from '07 to '09 in their Ops department.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#154

Post by JamesBarney »

A marketplace for specialized micro-consulting(30 minutes to an hour).

I've seen plenty of projects that are rife with anti-patterns because a team was unfamiliar with a problem or technology and made a bunch of bad decisions while they were still coming up to speed.

The use-case I envision would fix this. Because it's really a travesty that when we're the least familiar with technologies is when we make some of the most important architectural decisions. And these mistakes could be avoided with questions like "What issues will we run into?" "What patterns should we follow?" "What are good resources to get started?"

For instance I recently joined a project that was built by devs coming up to speed on React. And boy did they abuse Flux, they didn't build a store for every drop-down but it's pretty damn close. However I really think a React Guru could have steered them around this mistake with just 30 minutes of his time.

Obviously the biggest problem is ensuring quality without having to hike rates too much.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#155

Post by dharma1 »

dirtyaura wrote: post #96
cperciva wrote: post #64

Figure out a way to reduce the not-in-San-Francisco penalty for startups. There are some very good reasons why startups flock to the bay area, including "lots of available talent" and "that's where the VCs are", but there are also problems with being in the bay area -- talent is considerably more expensive (due in part to the cost of housing) and visa issues (particularly under the current presidency) being the first…

I wonder if this is really solvable by technology and tools? In my opinion, tools for effective remote working are there. Github, Slack style communication, collaborative project management tools, CI tools in cloud. Design tools could be more collaborative, but it ain't a showstopper. Video conferencing still sucks now and then, but 50 years after the Mother of All Demos, it starts to be usable enough :) I feel that…

Having worked with mostly remote Devs for the past 5 years as a designer I have some thoughts on this.

1) bandwidth in many parts of the world is still not nearly good enough for high quality video

2) need good inexpensive remote whiteboarding tech. The MS surface TV looks good but too expensive to fit in everyone's remote office

3) initiating remote video should (either for screen sharing or video chat) be immediate, like 3 secs max, zero friction, not something you have to schedule or spend minutes setting up - just like turning your chair to talk to someone sitting next to you in an office

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#156

Post by nicolaslem »

tyingq wrote: post #3

The 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.

And you are talking about mostly hosting PHP application. For some stacks these stagnant players do not even exist.

The user experience of deploying a Python/Django code to production is so bad in my opinion that I started a shared hosting service focused only on that: https://prodmatic.com

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#157

Post by aclimatt »

cperciva wrote: post #64

Figure out a way to reduce the not-in-San-Francisco penalty for startups. There are some very good reasons why startups flock to the bay area, including "lots of available talent" and "that's where the VCs are", but there are also problems with being in the bay area -- talent is considerably more expensive (due in part to the cost of housing) and visa issues (particularly under the current presidency) being the first…

In a similar vein as dirtyaura's comment, it's not a technology or tools problem. It's a people and relationships problem.

Successful businesses are built on the backs of relationships. Your product is important, your tech is somewhat important, but THE most important part of a building what many would call a "successful" business is the relationships you create.

It doesn't matter what you're trying to achieve -- convince people to buy your product, convince people to work for your company, convince VCs to give you money, convince Google to buy you -- all of these things may begin on the premise of merit, price, features, value, but they end up based on the relationships built between the people involved.

Deals are closed over drinks. People work for people they enjoy spending time with. VCs invest money in people they trust. Yes, all things in life have exceptions, but the longer you stay in business, the more you realize that businesses are run by people -- they are not opaque fact-driven entities -- and people are social creatures. The actual reason that people in San Francisco still cling to an age-old culture of doing business together in person instead of over Slack is because humans enjoy spending physical time around other humans. Maybe it's communication bandwidth, maybe it's something else, but until VR replaces physical intimacy, there is no perfect substitute.

If you want to succeed outside of San Francisco, begin building the relationships you need to do so. People can claim that Slack, Hangouts, and the phone match the effectiveness of physical presence, but try switching to a permanent long-distance relationship with your significant other. Good luck.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#158

Post by colinmegill »

JamesBarney wrote: post #154

A marketplace for specialized micro-consulting(30 minutes to an hour). I've seen plenty of projects that are rife with anti-patterns because a team was unfamiliar with a problem or technology and made a bunch of bad decisions while they were still coming up to speed. The use-case I envision would fix this. Because it's really a travesty that when we're the least familiar with technologies is when we make some of the…

https://hourlynerd.com/ is an interesting model, if a different industry

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#159

Post by dharma1 »

JamesBarney wrote: post #154

A marketplace for specialized micro-consulting(30 minutes to an hour). I've seen plenty of projects that are rife with anti-patterns because a team was unfamiliar with a problem or technology and made a bunch of bad decisions while they were still coming up to speed. The use-case I envision would fix this. Because it's really a travesty that when we're the least familiar with technologies is when we make some of the…

For tech it could be a nice add-on to Stack Overflow, since they have a reasonable amount of data of people's knowledge/quality and a reputation system

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#160

Post by babesh »

lessclue wrote: post #87
zump wrote: post #36

Sleep. How can we make better use of that wasted time.

Sleep isn't "wasted" time. Without sleep, we'd be dysfunctional, and soon thereafter, dead.

You dream, come up with different perspectives, learn, come up with creative ideas, etc... At least that is the case for some people.
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