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Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

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Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#161

Post by smabie »

otagekki wrote: post #158
smabie wrote: post #125

I would say finance. Excel has it’s uses, but managing a billion dollar portfolio isn’t one of them. It’s a hard space though, firms have such drastically different needs that tt’s difficult to create an app that serves everyone.

Finance is a mature and highly regulated market with loads of expensive software and consultants to do all you need. ERPs and off-the-shelf financial software with in-house specific developments do the heavy lifting and spreadsheets macros do the rest.

For banks sure. But the PE, VC, and hedge fund space have almost no regulations and very little software to serve their needs. I worked at a startup that provided portfolio analytics software and it never was able to actually break into the market in a real way (our valuation was and still is stuck at 200m for 8 years). It’s a really hard problem but if someone can crack it, they potentially could be the next Bloomberg.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#162

Post by atari800 »

There's almost nothing in the manufactured housing (AKA "mobile home", AKA "trailer" AKA "HUD-code home") industry. The industry experienced a severe contraction even before the Great Recession, declining in the 2000's from its most recent boom years of the 90's.

In that earlier era, there were several vertical software companies selling Windows and DOS dealership management systems to the many independent (mom-and-pop) dealerships of manufactured homes

By the time the industry started to recover in the last several years, they had all gone out of business. Because of the timing of the near-death of the MH industry, none of those companies even tried to move to web-based SaaS products.

As far as I know, the only new dealership management (line of business) system for the industry is my own SaaS product, which I started selling a year ago.

I'm a software developer, but my family owned a dealership for decades, so I know the business well. The industry is weird, and different enough from automobiles and motor homes that software for those (seemingly related) industries isn't really a good fit.

I've had some success bootstrapping my business. The industry is big enough at this point that I can make pretty good money as a small player, but it's still small enough that it's unlikely to attract any big operators. The market is too small for them, I'm pretty sure.

I think it would be difficult for someone who doesn't know the way things are done in the industry to create software for it. It's certainly possible, but for sure you'd have to partner with someone who has expertise already.

But I guess that's true of almost any niche industry.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#163

Post by Blake_Emigro »

jsutton wrote: post #45
lazyeye wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it because lawyers charge for their time and have zero incentive to be more efficient

There is always an incentive for saving time. For example, lawyers can use that time to take on more clients or simply be more thorough.

It really depends on the area of law, type of firm, type of client, etc.

In immigration or family law there is lots of procedural work, the lawyer might be solo, and the client is an individual or family. In this case the lawyer can generally not charge thousands per hour, they're doing most or all of the work, and the work has lots of steps that are repeated every case. This is a good case for the use of software to increase efficiency.

In big corporate law the work is specialized, the lawyer belongs to a firm, the client is a multi-national, paralegals and associates do a lot of the work, and the firm can charge thousands per hour. Here there's not a lot of incentive for efficiency.

Practice management software targeted to solos and small firms is very successful, look at https://www.clio.com/

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#164

Post by Blake_Emigro »

dmode wrote: post #77

I just went through extensive home remodeling. This is a big industry and there are a lot of opportunities to improve it by software. It was impossible for me to get a good visualization of what the end state of my home would look like. I needed to hire designers for that. It was difficult to know what various paint options would look like. And then there is the whole construction / contractor / material aspect of it…

And then there is the whole construction / contractor / material aspect of it.

A big problem with a renovation is the uncertain number of surprises that the contractor will encounter when tearing out the existing material. The contractor doesn't want to get stuck cleaning up that black mold for free.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#165

Post by Blake_Emigro »

wpietri wrote: post #105
edanm wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a mistake if you're thinking of Bezos as an example in the context of small business owners. Actually, you can probably just rule out Bezos and any of the other FAANG companies as crazy exceptions. Outside of tech, the standard entrepreneurship story is "I want to be my own boss; hmm, maybe I'll franchise a McDonald's". It's only in tech that we end up equating entrepreneurship with things like innovati…

Well, the whole theory of a franchise is that it reduces all risk because the product has already been figured out. And franchising didn't really become popular until after WWII, so I'd have a hard time calling it "traditional". And just to be clear, I'm not thinking of Bezos as an example of small business owners. He's just the only person I've ever heard of who successfully said, "I'm starting a business. I wonder…

As far as I know, he had a business model involving an emerging technology, and wanted to select a product that would be most successful with it. He felt books was that product. He's said as much in interviews.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#166

Post by veggieburglar »

Riguad87 wrote: post #99
travisjungroth wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a little experience and a bunch of contacts in the wine industry. I’ll look into that.

I'd love to hear if there is active sampling of /terrroir/ conditions for modelling and study of the vintages.

I’ve never seen anything like that. I can’t see it to be a business need, although it would be neat to see. Much more pressing is the need for good sales/CRM software, which is being addressed by many companies at the moment. Lots of growth still to be had there.

Automatic and connected moisture sensors are definitely a big thing, and I’m sure that large growing operations have all kinds of tools in their belt.

Most of the small growers I work with seem to run things by feel and by spending large amounts of time in the vineyard day after day.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#167

Post by copperfitting1 »

gumby wrote: post #66

Agriculture. There are plenty of companies trying to serve ag with what they think ag needs. Most of them fail. Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees. They are NOT dumb hayseeds like they are often portrayed! But they typically don’t have a lot of domain knowledge around software. Smaller farmers are used to making and fixing their own tools (all know how to weld); bigger farmers run corpor…

There are plenty of companies trying to serve ag with what they think ag needs. Most of them fail.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#168

Post by copperfitting1 »

Imagine how many people never used a chat app in a business context before. Maybe this is hard, as you can’t imagine who they could be — or you don’t remember a time _before_ the ubiquity of chat apps in the workplace. But trust me those people are a majority of the workforce.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#169

Post by stevesimmons »

jatgoodwin wrote: post #42
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #13

I've started looking at software to help with residential construction tasks, i.e. the construction of a single-family house. My impression so far is that there's so much variability in what they encounter, that most tasks are best handled ad hoc by experienced tradesmen. But I'm not certain; it's possible that that's just the status quo, not how it needs to be.

I currently work with a lot of residential construction and repair. I feel like truss factories could use some help with quality control with machine vision probably. A problem is trusses are built by alcoholic meth heads making minimum wage rather than carpenters on site to save time and money, but then the truss factory has to send out an engineer to fix it on site, usually missing or wrong gang nails or its just o…

A friend of mine is a director of a company making equipment (tools and software) for truss manufacturing. He's been doing it for 15+ years, including a stint running their USA subsidiary.

If you'd like an introduction, my contact details are in my profile.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#170

Post by PascLeRasc »

mynegation wrote: post #47
titanomachy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned programming in order to do my job more effectively while I was employed as a research assistant in a university neuroscience lab. At some point I realized that programmers in industry get paid 10x more (not an exaggeration, literally 10x) so I left after a couple years. I enjoyed my time there a lot, I was building tools to help very smart and motivated people solve cool science problems. My users sat acros…

Out of curiosity - what are the typical tools that you built? I am in industry but sometimes have a crisis of meaning. I would not be able to sit next to researches but was wondering if there is a gap in open source tools that I (or someone else) could help to cover.

Not who you asked, but I did neuroscience programming for a bit. If you're looking for open-source software to contribute towards, check out PyCortex and the SPM Matlab package. We could really use some kind of "SPM for Python", or some other kind of fMRI pre-processing pipeline in Python.
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