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Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

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Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#181

Post by hackerews »

chrisfrantz wrote: post #135
awshepard wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but worked in the field for a time. Trafficking usually means configuring your ad in the campaign management system. What are your targeting parameters, what are your tracking tags, uploading the ad itself, entering in lots of custom information that while conceptually similar across ad platforms usually has different names and often has to be manually entered. A lot of platforms do offer APIs of some sort to…

Another ad guy here. The problem is best practice on one platform doesn’t equal best practice on the other. Additionally, there are many ad formats that don’t overlap on multiple platforms. Even GDN vs FB is a huge disparity. I would be interested in the product though if one existed. Alternatively, one place to manage creatives and language as well as targeting for each campaign might be helpful as we use google she…

Do large agencies have systems for this? Or is everyone using Excel?

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#182

Post by hackerews »

Joeri wrote: post #64

An app for installing and maintaining mixed fleets of lora/sigfox/... IoT sensors. When installing these at scale in existing buildings you have to be able to send out local workforce to properly install and activate thousands of sensors, as well as maintain them afterwards, without prior training. It’s one of those things that sounds easy on the surface but is riddled with complexity, like how to register which sens…

What tools are used to maintain these now?

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#183

Post by hackerews »

javiramos wrote: post #177

The process of getting quotes, sending POs, receiving invoices, paying them Net30 etc. is an extremely manual process. Companies have dedicated employees that all they do is send quotes, receive POs, and receive payments. The process is so painful. Edit: I am in the industrial space. Basically all large equipment purchases work via a [Quote > PO > Pro Forma Invoice > Final Invoice > Payment > Receipt] process.

What part of the process is painful?

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#184

Post by Balgair »

Thriptic wrote: post #84

Software development infrastructure in a box plus strong training materials / guidance for scientists. Increasing numbers of scientists are writing code without any formal CS training, and the outputs are predictably awful and unreliable. It is very common to find no testing, no acceptance criteria, no version control, no formal planning, no code review, no style guide being employed, sparse commenting, fragmented de…

I'll give an example: A friend is a PhD candidate in a neuro lab. He uses Matlab almost exclusively and the undergrad was in neuro as well. He has never taken Clac, let alone any matrix algebra. Ask him what det() means, and it's a deer in headlights. That said, he's written about 10k lines of matlab code, with 15 levels deep of nested for() and while() loops. To say he needs help is known, as he paid me to help him out for 16 hours the other month. Literally, it was impossible. I could barely wrap my head about his problem, let alone the code. Remember the saying : 'Don't do data science in a GUI' ? Well, his issues were a good argument for that. Trying to get what he was doing in a python IDE would not be possible, it's just too complicated.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#185

Post by jokh »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #164
simon_acca wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using jitsi for the past year or so and the experience is pretty much what you describe. https://meet.jit.si

I used to use this in my company and while joining and creating meetings is pretty painless the audio/video quality was pretty crap. Perhaps they have improved in the three years since I've used it.

It's pretty good now.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#186

Post by khamba »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #59

Modular template based responsive html email builder with version control, comments and approvals. Our marketing department sends 10+ campaigns/week, each goes through multiple changes and compliance approval. It’s very time consuming, especially when someone needs to touch the code.

This looks interesting. Is there any solution that you are already using?

> especially when someone needs to touch the code

Do you not generally touch the code? Is some kind of WYSIWYG editor used to create an email or is the code human written?

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#187

Post by kathe-rine »

herlitzj wrote: post #39
sdiq wrote: post #22

I work in the humanitarian field in a poor country ravaged by war and famine. We have a number of humanitarian actors currently working in this country and no one actually has access to accurate population statistics. Well, none exists. The last census was conducted in 1975. I believe someone could use technology to get a much better estimate of the population. One thing that always springs to my mind is the possibil…

How much penetration do cell phones have into a lot of these countries? May be a way to tease out a rough population from cell phone use statistics.

Not sure how it is where OP is, but in many African countries it's common to have multiple SIM cards, to take advantage of in-network calling deals or to compensate for spotty coverage maps.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#188

Post by lastofus »

javiramos wrote: post #177

The process of getting quotes, sending POs, receiving invoices, paying them Net30 etc. is an extremely manual process. Companies have dedicated employees that all they do is send quotes, receive POs, and receive payments. The process is so painful. Edit: I am in the industrial space. Basically all large equipment purchases work via a [Quote > PO > Pro Forma Invoice > Final Invoice > Payment > Receipt] process.

There appeared to be dozens of choices for invoicing software, both in general and targeted at specific verticals.

What makes all of the existing offerings not usable?

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#189

Post by moftz »

javiramos wrote: post #177

The process of getting quotes, sending POs, receiving invoices, paying them Net30 etc. is an extremely manual process. Companies have dedicated employees that all they do is send quotes, receive POs, and receive payments. The process is so painful. Edit: I am in the industrial space. Basically all large equipment purchases work via a [Quote > PO > Pro Forma Invoice > Final Invoice > Payment > Receipt] process.

Add government red tape on top of this and it can take a week or more to get a COTS part ordered from a vendor that sells all of their stuff online. Heaven help you if the vendor isn't in the approved vendor list, that's another week to get all the compliance paperwork to them and get signed. It's agonizing when you need something quick but still need to go through all the hoops because the item is technically government property.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#190

Post by contingencies »

javiramos wrote: post #177

The process of getting quotes, sending POs, receiving invoices, paying them Net30 etc. is an extremely manual process. Companies have dedicated employees that all they do is send quotes, receive POs, and receive payments. The process is so painful. Edit: I am in the industrial space. Basically all large equipment purchases work via a [Quote > PO > Pro Forma Invoice > Final Invoice > Payment > Receipt] process.

Please send me an email, same issue in my firm, keen to discuss. I may have a solution.
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