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Ask HN: What business would you start in 2025?

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41–50 of 51 posts

Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2025?

#41

With all the hype around AI, deeptech, etc., I’m wondering if there’s a market for R&D consulting as a form of technical due diligence. I see money being thrown at some of the most hare-brained nonsense that could have been avoided with a bit of critical analysis. I would think sophisticated investors and customers would find this kind of service useful, but maybe I’m missing something. Does anyone have experience wi…

There is a market for technical due diligence consulting, but the work is typically done by friends of investors; it's a difficult and tiny market to get into.

Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2025?

#42

Non-genAI/LLM applications of ML are most exciting to me at the moment. Seems like the tooling and techniques are at a good point of proven but with creative prospects not yet explored, especially with generative siphoning off some of the hype. Worst case I’d learn some stats.

People sleeping on the fact that Deep NNs can approximate any function. Let them focus on hallucinating chatbots, make something actually useful!

Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2025?

#44

A No Code platform. Yeah, I know it is a crowded space. There aren't that many great options yet tho, enterprise NoCode platforms are all bad, they don't know how to make good software. Patching together a bunch of random React, NextJS, Prisma code won't do it for much longer.

I dont have much information.In my humble opinion,a nocode platform based on python and excel or something would be easy for AI tools to ccreate tools since they are quit efficient in python and excel coding . P.S :Info might be a bit outdated

Yes, it is easy to create low quality things, quite hard to create anything professional

Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2025?

#45
Security consulting for AI use... The boring traditional stuff as main focus. You know making sure that dialog box that you input your prompt is correct or you handle user accounts and so on correctly.

On side could also sell testing against AI, but the usual suspects are already enough work.

Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2025?

#46

Something in the mental health space to tackle the loneliness epidemic.

I’d really like to see something like Meetup but… better. Not really sure how. Like, I don’t know, you pick a date/time window and get paired up with five random people to go and debate what the best cuisine is at a bar. An app just to create low stakes, spontaneous and silly interactions for you. I haven’t used Meetup for a while but I always found it so dry, and it was rare anybody from my age group attended, probably because the meet-ups are so boring.

In fact I just checked Meetup and all I see is weird scam courses and speed dating events.

Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2025?

#47
We built the world on a foundation of crates of dynamite. We're now in the process of demanding better packages and purer ingredients. We want the users to be more careful.

I'd suggest selling bricks. In other words, operating systems that never, ever, trust user code. See Genode or GNU Hurd for examples.

Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2025?

#48
Honestly, my idea would be a privacy protecting search engine, think DuckDuckGo, that promises to never use AI without careful research and if it is used promise that it'll always default to off.

It feels like everyone is putting AI in even though not many people particularly want AI.

Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2025?

#49
post #46

Something in the mental health space to tackle the loneliness epidemic.

I’d really like to see something like Meetup but… better. Not really sure how. Like, I don’t know, you pick a date/time window and get paired up with five random people to go and debate what the best cuisine is at a bar. An app just to create low stakes, spontaneous and silly interactions for you. I haven’t used Meetup for a while but I always found it so dry, and it was rare anybody from my age group attended, proba…

Hell I’d love something like that even for random online interactions. Getting paired with random interesting people from all over and have casual exchanges that are private and not recorded forever on some social platform.

Re: Ask HN: What business would you start in 2025?

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Focus on digital nomads. Again and again they post and comment about loneliness, for obvious reasons given the lifestyle.

Why do they keep living that way then in your opinion? Being a digital nomad is something only people in very specific conditions can even afford to do so it’s a deliberate choice. It’s hard for me to have much sympathy for someone who’s deliberately living a life that’s making them feel lonely.

Several reasons:

1. They're sold on a lie. Here's a photo of my laptop in front of a beautiful pool, next to a delicous bowl of $1 Pad Thai. Ignore the February burning season and total inability to communicate with anybody outside of self-deceiving 20-something Westerners like myself.

2. There are benefits. Being a DN is freeing and fun, especially if this is your first shot at remote work. You don't justify to anybody what time you have your sandwich in the morning.

3. Most DNs have never experienced actual loneliness before, so they don't know how crippling it is. They think all their friends and family having been away/busy one weekend or even one month was loneliness. That's like how the people in 5-day COVID hotel lockdown thought of themselves as having experienced imprisonment. Sure, only in a glancing sense.

4. Sex/romance tourism. Look at the hot exotic naive foreigner who's here to exchange some emotions/experiences with you, the hot exotic native person who's otherwise boring or too slutty/free-thinking for people in your own country.

Being a Digital Nomad is a life experience that comes with as many negatives as positives. But there are positives.

Why do people do it? Because the alternative is to never have done it.

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