Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups? • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by mccolin » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 5:07 AM UTC

kul wrote: post #11

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.

The human element of home inspection is invaluable. That interaction between homeowner (or prospective) and a knowledgeable professional is critical. But drones as tools for that professional could be great.

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

#22

Post by arikrak » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 5:08 AM UTC

cheetos wrote: post #10

Fix 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…

One can do that with affiliate advertising to some extent. I don't think it would be easy to use other pricing models since advertisers wouldn't trust small website's metrics. (And large websites already manage their own ads through many different methods.)

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

#23

Post by aapusaam » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 5:09 AM UTC

cheetos wrote: post #10

Fix 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…

Wasn't this how independent websites use to work before ad networks such as Google ads took over the internet? Problem with managing your own ads is that it would be very hard to get quality relevant ads if you have a small website, not to forget the overhead involved in maintaining ad space without a dedicated ad server.

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

#24

Post by yeukhon » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 5:10 AM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #20

Here 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…

A lot of that is really really specific for what you do. I think people are generally trying to solve ONE problem rather than creating a solution for the general problem, because usually, a general solution breaks down very very quickly and thus low retention rate.

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

#25

Post by siquick » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 5:10 AM UTC

kul wrote: post #11

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.

And give Realtors even less to do? /s

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

#26

Post by skynode » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 5:10 AM UTC

We need to simplify the whole lifecycle of data management. It is still considerably complex. We'll see an accelerated revolution in other areas such as machine learning when this simplification is complete.

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

#27

Post by itomato » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 5:11 AM UTC

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.

Yeah, I've thought about this. I've even run some numbers.

You'd need to combine an ISP and MSP with an add-on like analytics and integrations.

Trouble is, then you're competing with AWS and GCE.

You have what amounts to bare metal through AWS, available by the hour. You can have that today, plus the ability to scale across geographies at the click of a button. Few colos can offer that.

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

#28

Post by shortoncash » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 5:12 AM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #20

Here 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…

Could you be more specific about the IoT DB issue? What would a credible solution do?

Thanks in advance.

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

#29

Post by yeukhon » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 5:12 AM UTC

cheetos wrote: post #10

Fix 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…

But that's exactly what 99% of the Google customers are trying to avoid to do. They don't want to handle the management. They don't want to host the ad management platform. They just want a paycheck after the cut (and after all the legal contracts). They just want a tool that works and everyone is familiar with.

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

#30

Post by arjie » Mon, Feb 06, 2017, 5:14 AM UTC

cheetos wrote: post #10

Fix 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…

It's less valuable to advertise a Lego set to a person on a Lego fan site than it is to advertise a car to a person on a Lego fan site who happens to want a car.

I'm a little sceptical of first party content sensitive untargeted advertisement, but we'll see. I also think the people who would block ads would block these too.

See responses to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13576611 where people say they will block ads anyway. It's not the tracking. It's not the bandwidth. It's just because it's easy to do.