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

41–50 of 253 posts

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

#41

Post by raleigh_user »

Some sort of enabler for content. I work in content marketing (not click bait shit but helping b2b companies tell their story without hiring a full design/marketing/dev team).

Our process and system is super efficient recording video + sending notifications to team members to edit, add captions, strip audio for your podcast, set up your podcast, set up your alexa flash briefing, etc.

But it takes hours to do all of this if youre on your own and thats ONLY if you know how to do it all. Content is the black box most have no idea how to do. If you don't pay our agency to do it for you you are kind of out of luck.

We sell a book on our process now and sell about 50 copies a week. These people are validated and want to learn how to do it, and are willing to pay to learn.

It only makes sense to build the platform that automates this process for these people and offer it to them. They've already paid to learn. Might as well offer the platform to do it.

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

#42

Post by seige »

Semkas wrote: post #29

I do some illustration and have noticed on twitter how much every illustrator who gets some experience with 3d-tools likes to use 3d modelling to create block-outs for scenes they want to draw. By creating a simple scene out of blocks and shapes you can make your perspective work while drawing a lot easier. A tool that could be really populair would be something that makes making 3d mock-ups easier for 2d artstists w…

What are your thoughts on tools like https://placeit.net ?

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

#43

Post by seige »

gimlids wrote: post #25

Journalism needs a WYSIWYG editor for stylized content -- content that is more visually diverse/interesting than the linear text+image+embed format, but not SO so custom/new as to truly require a developer to build it.

What is a good live example of this stylized content?

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

#44

Post by kodablah »

franciscop wrote: post #32
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…

I don't think for a startup you need K8s and most of the things you have outlined! Maybe for a late-stage startup, but then you are already doing something so a generic slap-it-there solution might not be the best idea. You are describing a large-scale setup boilerplate, far away from what I'd call a startup in a box. Slap in a simple server like my own project [1] or no server at all until product-market fit, and th…

Of course you don't "need" them. However, I don't believe I'm describing a large scale boilerplate. You can get this with a few servers and a couple hundred a month these days. Heck, you can do it on a laptop w/ minikube probably (though obviously not ok to do in prod, just goes to show the costs are not the problem here). Sure it's easy to run an app. But it's not easy to admin it as you grow (even though you are not yet "big" and still may be only one or two people).

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

#45

Post by maerF0x0 »

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…

besides the " marry myself to a cloud vendor" part it sounds like you want a platform as a service. AWS and Google both provide more or less what you've asked for. Just takes minimal glue to turn the features on.

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

#46

Post by kodablah »

herlitzj wrote: post #38
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…

Sounds a lot like Terraform https://www.terraform.io/

I am somewhat familiar w/ this product and I'm afraid I'm not articulating how simple I expect. Where do I click to search my logs?

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

#47

Post by iamdave »

rayiner wrote: post #6

Inter-operable video and phone conferencing without prior setup required. Probably half the video conferences I’ve tried to participate in in the last year have been a disaater, with people having technical problems dialing in, dropping out, etc. Even phone confernces (using VOIP conference providers) have awful quality. I want to be able to email some people a link, and with no account creation, registration, or sof…

Even phone confernces (using VOIP conference providers) have awful quality.

VoIP, especially multi-tenant voip like conferencing is 70% dependent on YOUR local network connection and 30% the provider's infrastructure. Having a high bandwidth pipe is no guarantee for 100% clear and jitterless voip communication. Have you had a network engineer take a deep inspection of voip traffic to see if there's any QoS or packet filtering going on that could degrade performance (i.e. if you're a small office that has your voice traffic occurring side by side with literally every other network device you're GOING to have a bad time).

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

#48

Post by kodablah »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #45
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…

besides the " marry myself to a cloud vendor" part it sounds like you want a platform as a service. AWS and Google both provide more or less what you've asked for. Just takes minimal glue to turn the features on.

Yup, I basically want self-hosted PaaS in a box, but also w/ opinionated interoperability (e.g. use Prometheus alert manager to tell if my DB disk is reaching 90%, use consul DNS to have stable names for my log server, use Grafana to show me memory usage across every container/app, etc). It's always the "minimal glue" that takes forever and often once "glued" it becomes stale because it's not maintained unless it's someone's job or something breaks.

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

#49

Post by kodablah »

lwansbrough wrote: post #35
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…

I mean, everyone has different requirements or preferences, so you don't get it all set up for you generally. But there is at least one such solution which more or less fits your description: DCOS.

> I mean, everyone has different requirements or preferences

I've found this is only kinda true. Most people need the same supporting infrastructure and most people only need to deploy their HTTP-visible app, maybe a cron or backend daemon, and probably a data store. Everything else from logs to metrics to alerting to HA gateways and so on are quite universal.

Post reply on HN