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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?

#41
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.

What, specifically, would the drone inspect? The only thing I can imagine a drone being useful for is inspecting the roof and chimney. And that's counting on the home inspector being too lazy too get on a ladder. In fact, most of them just use binoculars and call it a day. You really need a licensed professional who knows the local codes and is experienced enough to know what to look for. I don't see home inspections getting either fully or partially automated any time soon. The value-add just isn't there.

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

#42
post #39

Person to person IT support. A service where I could get help with my computer, but not from a company that tries to sell me junk software. I let a person with IT skills connect to my pc while interacting by chat or microphone, I pay them by time spent helping me.

There's MouseSquad or local IT. A lot of computer problems tend to be more hardware or require reboot or physically attaching disks/usb to the machine for troubleshooting.

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

#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

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

#46

ChatBots: One big opportunity that i can see is the rise of chatbots on popular messaging platforms. It is going to bring the tech advances to a lot more people in a much easier way.

Question: I've seen a large amount of hype around chat bots, but is there any evidence that "normal" people really use these for anything more than novelty, excluding the realm of Amazon echo et al.

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

#47
post #33

Contract Economy: There is still a significant opportunity for a Freelancer/Upwork group to exist. Something that better vets quality while not pushing for Toptal prices. I suspect you'd need to set up physical presence in the likely countries properly vet and control quality but this could easily be covered by a premium for a know quantity vs going to western rates. Crytpo Currency: There is room for more disruption…

Asus and Motorola have made dockable phones. https://www.engadget.com/products/motorola/atrix-4g-lapdock/ https://www.engadget.com/products/asus/transformer/book/v/

I believe that is why he/she said they haven't seen someone do this well yet...

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

#49
Many of the same things as five years ago.

While it's easy to say IoT, cryptocurrency, or whatever the latest buzzwords happen to be—there's ideas that have been floating around for years which are still viable, it's just that they're hard and require exceptional execution. In that sense, they are almost timeless until implemented correctly.

For example, another comment suggested marketplace/content discovery. That's been an unsolved problem for almost a decade now. Ads are another great example: they've been dishing out human misery for about the same length of time. People hate them, so they use ad blockers, and everyone loses. These aren't new problems or opportunities.

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

#50
post #42
post #39

Person to person IT support. A service where I could get help with my computer, but not from a company that tries to sell me junk software. I let a person with IT skills connect to my pc while interacting by chat or microphone, I pay them by time spent helping me.

There's MouseSquad or local IT. A lot of computer problems tend to be more hardware or require reboot or physically attaching disks/usb to the machine for troubleshooting.

Mousesquad has shutdown, that's the first google result. I don't see results for localit related to computer.

About your comment, imagine that the app can know my location, and pair me with a local expert, if the expert has to go to the other person home to fix their computer the price increases.

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