The music industry as a whole. Who owns what song, what percentage, what role (writer, publisher), who recorded it, who collects for which industry, who collects mechanical royalties, performance royalties, would I make more money with ascap, bmi, sesac or gmr? How about this publisher, vs this other one? Tell me how often the music I own is played on radio, spotify, etc. Was my royalty here calculated correctly?
Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
221–230 of 253 posts
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#222I'll take a startup in a box. I want Kubernetes, Elastic, Kibana, FileBeat, Prometheus, Consul, Grafana, databases, HTTP gateways, etc all set up on on the cloud (or set of servers) of my choice and a dashboard that lets me add users (e.g. like a modern Webmin/cPanel+WHM) and make minor config changes if I don't want to run these myself. I want those things HA and I want stable hostnames for them (e.g. Consul DNS on…
Biggest problem in this is, one size does not fit all.
It is hard to compile a stack - which would be useful for most companies.
Yes, there have been attempts made - for Example, Open Stack. But then I feel, there is always an element of specific technology based on the needs of the product being built.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#223I want to see a good identity and user manager SaaS oriented towards smaller customers. There used to be Stormpath, which was pretty amazing, but they got bought by Okta, which is less friendly to small teams and more enterprise oriented.
I'm working on https://github.com/fiatjaf/accountd.xyz , which is basically a universal association of profiles (identified by a username) with accounts on "silos" like twitter, github, trello and email addresses in general. You can use it either for user login or to post-association of accounts with profiles. There's no documentation, but you can see it working on https://sitios.xyz/ and https://sitios.xyz/trello .…
This is not quite what I had in mind, but it's quite interesting. One recommendation: don't use a username, that approach has a number of flaws you can easily avoid here.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
What technical debt?
The kind of technical debt otherwise known as premature optimisation. If you don't even know yet that your app has to scale - and in which way - preparing for that contingency is a waste of resources.
I wouldn't qualify that as a premature optimisation. Kubernetes is de facto standard of running applications now and you get all the benefits for almost free. Premature optimisation in this case would be over provisioning - throwing more servers than you need.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
The kind of technical debt otherwise known as premature optimisation. If you don't even know yet that your app has to scale - and in which way - preparing for that contingency is a waste of resources.
I wouldn't qualify that as a premature optimisation. Kubernetes is de facto standard of running applications now and you get all the benefits for almost free. Premature optimisation in this case would be over provisioning - throwing more servers than you need.
K8s is "de facto standard" already? When did that happen? No doubt that K8s has a great future and I personally like it a lot as well. But to call it a standard requirement itself is premature.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#226The 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 govern…
I was working on a solution addressing this problem during my undergrad inside our university incubator (in India). Although I left it due to unavoidable reasons. But do you think the problem is big enough to worth exploring again?
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#227I work as a fitness instructor and I want to have an holistic control panel to monitor my customers health and program, I want them to speak to each others and share. I want them to see their historic datas too
Healthifyme is doing something on similar lines but there are based out of India right now.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about giving it away and then offering consulting?
There is an inherent conflict with that kind of business model. If your product were simple enough, that would reduce your opportunities for consulting. So to rope in consulting offers, you'd be inclined to add complexity and config options to generate more avenues for consulting.
Depends on your mission.
In my experience, the companies that succeed are those who are sincere in wanting to help their customers.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#229A huge problem with CRMs is the lack of staff engagement. A company will spend $30 million to customize their Salesforce workflow (or their SAP workflow, or any other workflow or CRM tool) but the staff will hate it and so the investment seems wasted. That’s why Natural Language Processing seems like it could be a win for this space. A salesperson should be able to write a quick text message on their phone, and that message should be parsed by an NLP script and then put into Salesforce. The promise of this idea, as well as the problems, I detailed here:
https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#230I am a network engineer for a medium size company (I have worked for very large enterprises too) and there a a lot of opportunities for startups in network engineering. 1)Simple network automation platform that works for "My" custom environment, simply and effortlessly and also it should not break any existing network. (I don't mean like HP Network Automation) 2) Network diagram software - Seriously, any experienced…
I'm not a network engineer, rather a security-focused guy, and I'm also very interested in this topic because the basis for a secure network is a well managed network without any unknown/undocumented assets (network equipment incl. layer 2 as well as network participants).
Few months ago I attended a talk of Ivan Pepelnjak, the author of a network engineering blog called ipspace. He talked a lot on network automation and enumerated some success story. I remember he talked about people setting up several data centers in a relatively short amount of time by using a lot of network automation / configuration management.
http://blog.ipspace.net/2018/03/presentation-and-video-real-...