Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 253 posts

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

#241

Post by shapiro92 »

Pinbenterjamin wrote: post #5

We run background checks, and there is definitely a space for public record aggregation. We directly interface with those interested in the results of the check, and there is an overwhelming amount of work in building integrations with schools, applicant tracking systems, hospitals, public records, courts... We spend most of our time building XML and JSON parsers to cram their data into our models. If there was a com…

May I ask, how does that work with Privacy concerns? I am aware banks run background checks before you open an account. But I always assumed that the "checker provider" has a licence.

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

#242

Post by austenallred »

kaicianflone wrote: post #179
austenallred wrote: post #67

This is a really simple but basic one. Market size might not be billions of dollars, but a basic learning management system along the lines of Teachable/Udemy that allows for code with built-in testing would be used overnight by a dozen code bootcamps and would pull a lot of people out of the other platforms. Maybe it's just a feature, not a full product, but it makes any "learn to code" MOOC unusable.

Stephen Grider on Udemy uses Jest to create automated tests for his JS and React courses that you can run while you watch and code his videos. Jest and Mocha both have a watch feature that will test a file each time it is saved for "continuous testing", much like using Gulp watch or any type of dev live server environment. Also Jest features Snapshot testing which will take a picture of a UI and test all changes made…

Yeah, I just want that built into the LMS itself

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

#244

Post by Procuriffy »

solveeng wrote: post #226
moftz wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The problem grows in scale as organizations grow in size or spending increases and is applicable across most industries.

The biggest challenge is finding a solution that fits workflow needs, has the necessary features, and is user friendly enough that the solution will actually be adopted.

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

#245

Post by Procuriffy »

lastofus wrote: post #188
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?

You are right, there are many solutions and the existing offerings are often usable however organizations have difficulty with the implementation.

Two majors problems around proactively managing an organization's spend culture:

1) Entropy: the pain around the problem is not acute and is a slow dissent into disorder. The problem gets harder to solve as organizations grow.

2) Chosen solutions are not adopted by the team and data around company spending is lost.

Solutions need to fit current workflow or have a dedicated champion with authority to insure adoption.

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

#246

Post by ravi096 »

kodablah wrote: post #4

I'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…

Take a look at https://robinsystems.com

​Robin enables an App-store like user experience to simplify deployment and lifecycle management of Big Data, NoSQL and Database deployments, On-Premise and in-Cloud. It supports application-level snapshots, clones, time-travel, QoS, scaling, backup/restore, etc. It takes care of HA, stable hostnames, Application templates, events, notifications.

Check out the demo clips for [video]

Cloudera https://vimeo.com/213037162/a66e0b4e77 HortonWorks https://vimeo.com/227832200/8d9c749984 MongoDB https://vimeo.com/206348836/a36e535add ELK Stack https://vimeo.com/225899966/6000bae6f2 Controlling IOPs in shared environment https://vimeo.com/171608156 1-Click deploy, snapshot, the clone of entire Oracle https://vimeo.com/195549219 Even RAC cluster https://vimeo.com/223730427/e8cb8c92f8 and SAP HANA many more applications

Disclosure: I am the lead developer at Robinsystems

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

#247

Post by andrei_says_ »

khamba wrote: post #186
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?

Right now using an in-house app to make edits to emails initially built in dream weaver.

So, html email template (no unlined css) > merge word content in dreamweaver > upload to custom web app > app uses premailer to in-line the specified css > make changes to the content via ckeditor (which messes up the html in many cases) > export in pardot-ready format.

The app versions the content changes and allows comments as well easy email tests. We do 20+ revisions per campaign so that’s a necessity.

This was built 5 years ago and still works but getting inadequate for the complexity of responsive emails.

I’ve looked at this: https://beefree.io/ but it does not allow the creation of custom content modules. So looking into building a new version of our own, again.

It’s a pain but nothing compared to debugging email markup.

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

#248

Post by w_t_payne »

Balgair wrote: post #184
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…

I once worked for a company where the accountants had written a massive and convoluted VBA application that had gradually become mission critical to the company.

The IT department allocated a number of people (half a dozen?) for some time (8-12 months?) trying to turn it into a maintainable software product.

They failed.

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

#249

Post by techsin101 »

austenallred wrote: post #67

This is a really simple but basic one. Market size might not be billions of dollars, but a basic learning management system along the lines of Teachable/Udemy that allows for code with built-in testing would be used overnight by a dozen code bootcamps and would pull a lot of people out of the other platforms. Maybe it's just a feature, not a full product, but it makes any "learn to code" MOOC unusable.

learn.co does something similar thing.

you install a cli program, write the code, type something like: learn test .... tests are ran and results show. if all tests pass then dashboard is updated showing tests are passing.

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

#250

Post by techsin101 »

tixocloud wrote: post #2

From a technical side of things: - data management - faster analytics software - test and learn optimisation - faster model deployment From a business side of things: - loyalty program/rewards - pricing optimization - financial services to underserved customers including entrepreneurs, families, millennials, freelancers, etc.

im creating something for loyalty rewards but most small businesses seem apathetic, too busy for anything new
Post reply on HN