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

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

#251

Post by vittore »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #130
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.

I just tried to set something up on DigitalOcean. It's a small website with some PHP (already written), but I'd like the possibility of expanding it with Node later. So I rented a VPS, but setting everything up is such a pain, with all that SSHing and process management and Linux permissions and everything. Something that allowed me to just throw my site up with the ease of a common shared web host, but also allowed…

Maybe something like heroku with multipack will be just what you need.

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

#252

Post by Sophistifunk »

jasonlingx wrote: post #129
vatotemking wrote: post #128

Decentralized sharing. Person 1 and 2 turns on wifi on their phones. Person 1 sends a file to person 2. Person 2 receives a notification and accepts. File is now on his phone. This works without cel coverage and without internet. Just the wifi of 2 phones turned on.

Like AirDrop?

only, actually reliable.

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

#253

Post by CM30 »

I think media and content monetisation is a massive opportunity here. Or in other words, finding a way for people to get money from their written content without ads or subscriptions.

This is because the advertising industry is in a bit of a decline at the moment, and it's likely than in a few years things like AdBlock will make many ad funded businesses (like media outlets) completely unsustainable. So if anyone finds a good alternative, it will probably make them rich.

Just... good luck finding said solution, given that we've tried ads, donations, subscriptions and microtransactions and found that all four have major problems as far as getting people to actually use them goes. Still, the opportunity is there for whatever miracle worker figures out a way to make content profitable again.

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

#255

Post by lorenzhs »

burgalon wrote: post #166

Here are my thoughts 1) Free p2p money transfers / gateway to bitcoin or other crypto-currency so that it's more widely adopted 2) Better open bank accounts - allowing open transparent accounting for organizations and companies 3) Solve democracy - better analytical tools for mass discussion, arguments and decision making which will encourage use of facts and science, and discourage politics 4) Human-Machine interfac…

7) there are several companies in this space, https://www.planet.com/ being one, and they're acquiring another one, Terra Bella (formerly Skybox), the deal is on the front page right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573523). There might be more that I don't remember.

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

#257

Post by sah2ed »

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…

Someone posted a different take on display ads on HN recently [0] called http://pleenq.com/

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327125

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

#258

Post by lorenzhs »

legohead wrote: post #93
bikamonki wrote: post #43

Here's my wishlist, not sure if there is a market for it: - Twitter w/out fake accounts. - a marketplace that uses Facebook as a vehicle for engagement/promotion but which operates independently. - Secure SMS for 2FA tokens - Android w/out Play Services - Schema-based email - Stripe for the rest of the World

Anything 2FA related to cell phone networks needs to die. You are relying on the security of the cell carrier, which is not a safe bet.

Yep, but it's still better than not using a second factor at all. It all heavily depends on your threat model. I don't think Yubikeys scale to the general population, carrying around something on your keyring is a hard sell for many. (But if you've got your PGP private keys on it, too, etc, it's a fantastic tool/toy for nerds!)

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

#260

Post by nevdka »

sytelus wrote: post #207

Hackers rarely think of politics as playing field for startups, so in my mind this one of the biggest untapped opportunity right now. People from both sides are going nuts over Trump politics. That means tons of eyeballs and attention that would be available for the right startups for next 4 years. Things like BuzzFeed and DailyXYZ are going to make a massive killing in terms of ad revenue. At this stage still the re…

You could also think of a new political party as a startup. Run your own candidates for congress, and run for president yourself.
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