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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

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Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#411

Post by avalaunch »

ryandrake wrote: post #313
avalaunch wrote: post #174

A major pain point in my life is house maintenance and repair. I really miss having a (good) landlord. That's what I want - a single point of contact to manage the upkeep of and fix any issues related to my home. There's so much friction in the process of finding the various contractors needed to keep a home in good order. First you have to search on craigslist, angieslist, or google for contractors that service your…

It's neat, but I'd be worried about market size. This is a problem that not a lot of people have. Sorry, but for most people, it's not a big deal to call a plumber, and the vast, vast majority of people (at least in the US) clean their own homes. EDITing my comment to be more constructive: There could be money in a cloud- or app-based Personal Assistant, but you would really have to focus razor sharp on your target m…

Market size is definitely something that would need to be considered. I agree that the bread and butter would be the upper middle class, but I think you may be underestimating how large of a market that is. There are 115 million homes in the US, with 20% of them earning 100k or more [0]. Only a negligibly small percentage of those make over a million which is the lowest I think you'd have to make to justify the cost of a personal assistant. I also think you're oversimplifying the problem and making an unsafe assumption about how many people have this problem, but I could be wrong about that. It would need to be tested.

House cleaning should probably be an optional add-on, but I think you're underestimating how big of a market that is too. Approximately 10% of households seek outside help with at least some of their household cleaning chores.

[0] http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/16/156688596/what-ame... [1] http://www.housecleaningbiz101.com/CleaningIndustryFacts.htm

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#412

Post by Dwolb »

sahil_videology wrote: post #319
Dwolb wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective (automotive product development), this is called 'system design' or even 'product development'. We start from a use case, idea, feature 'want', whatever, and we move both up and down from the idea to arrive at customer use models(up) or requirements (down). The documents for this development start to look like hierarchies with many cross-dependencies (the solution starts to 'fall-out'). For exampl…

I second the need for something like this. This kind of tool can be used for clearly communicating scope and even aid estimation of timelines because it shows all the complexity.

Cool that you agree. Are your projects structured similarly?

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#413

Post by PopcornTimer »

Mixergy specifically for bootstrapped solopreneurs/micropreneurs except NO video interview or a lot of the unnecessary info.

I want something I can read (comprehensive guides) with specific background info on insider knowledge per industry or cool things they did that made the company a success.

Mixergy interviews are often too long, too much noise to sift through, and not enough core information.

Examples of things I've love to see... Say you are building a physical product... How did you go about figuring/developing the prototype. If its hardware, where did you go to get the prototype done (PCB boards, etc..). How did you figure out manufacturing, if its overseas, how did you coordinate (different language, sourcer, shipping information, quality control, etc...).

If you're in the food industry, how did you manage to get contacts to help you get your product into stores, how did you develop or manufacture the product, etc.. If you're in catering, how did you go about reaching specific clients before you were known, etc...

The things people want to know are the details that are difficult to find that could be useful. I don't care much for the stories (success or failure doesn't matter as much as the core background on how things got done).

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#414

Post by frankpinto »

A site where you sign up for coffee / tea / lunch with a stranger in your workplaces area.

Context:

- I'm currently in Guatemala City and nobody talks here. A lot of people go to their office, bring their lunch, go home. You hang out with your high school / college buddies some evenings / weekends. I should know who works in the building next to mine.

- Haven't read the book but the concept of "Never Eat Alone" has been running through my head for a bit

- http://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/6-habits-connectors.html?cid...

Inspiration:

http://teawithstrangers.com/

http://teawithtanay.com/

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#415

Post by dang »

notduncansmith wrote: post #364
conroy wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt Cutts has said recently[0] that guest blogging should be avoided. [0]: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/

I don't understand why this comment is being downvoted. I feel like it's relevant to the discussion (and was about to post it myself).

Comments like the GP have been affected by the recent change we made to make some downvotes more powerful (cf. sama's recent post on this). We did this to address HN's toxic comments problem, but it has a downside: some good comments get caught in the crossfire. It's not that they're getting more downvotes than before, it's that you see it more because they're getting counted more.

The HN community has long had an informal self-correcting mechanism for this case: when fair-minded users see a substantive and civil comment unfairly faded out, they upvote it back to par. We're encouraging everybody to do this consciously. The hope is that the overwhelming majority of good comments will come to rest in positive territory, while comments that deserve it stay negative. Exactly this happened with the GP.

In general, it's best to give such comments a corrective upvote yourself and trust your fellow users to do the same. "Why was this downvoted" posts mostly add noise—especially once the comment in question is back at par. (We're seeing a lot of this.) If it turns out that it's necessary to rally corrective upvotes—that is, if casual reader attention isn't enough—we'll figure out an unobtrusive way to achieve that. For now, though, let's wait and see if it is.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#416

Post by avalaunch »

keithwarren wrote: post #186
avalaunch wrote: post #174

A major pain point in my life is house maintenance and repair. I really miss having a (good) landlord. That's what I want - a single point of contact to manage the upkeep of and fix any issues related to my home. There's so much friction in the process of finding the various contractors needed to keep a home in good order. First you have to search on craigslist, angieslist, or google for contractors that service your…

I love this because bootstrapping the concept is far simpler than an infrastructure build out, this is a super-service which can start out by sub-contracting all the individual services. I am game, when do we start! update: Some further thoughts on cost. Looking at what I pay for my home (some of these I use, some I have had quoted; I also factored a monthly cost out of some of these which are quarterly). My home is…

I agree that the correct initial approach would be to bootstrap by sub-contracting out all the work. The trick would be negotiating favorable rates with the contractors and staying on top of things to make sure they do a good job and don't add unnecessary friction for the customers. Once business picked up enough in a city, it might be more profitable and manageable to switch to full time employees.

To start with, you could leave general maintenance off of the list of services performed, perhaps offering those fixes a la carte.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#417

Post by tspike »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #131

I compiled different ideas over the week. coMarketing: I would like to see a solution that allows smaller companies that target a similar audience to be able to put their "little" marketing dollar together and have a better chance at fighting the big guy. Phone screen on my computer: When I am at my desk, I want to be able to use my phone from my computer. I can use the desktop interface to go through contacts, check…

MightyText has been working very well for me in sending/receiving texts from the PC.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#418

Post by wmaiouiru »

A cloud processing platform that would automatically edit videos for users based on algorithms. My thesis is that users will take more and more videos but the tools to edit them (adobe premiere, youtube editor etc) are too much hassle for people. The first market segment would be goPro and google glass users. Thoughts?

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#419

Post by rokhayakebe »

basicallydan wrote: post #181

I've been sitting on this gem for a while. I present to you: The Bruce Wayne Gap Year. Wealthy people with desires to become Batman can more-or-less do so. First they sign a waiver and an NDA, removing any liability from the Bruce Wayne Gap Year company. Then they'll pay the company tens of thousands of dollars to pay for what is to come. They'll be put into a real criminal gang [1], and taken around the world gettin…

Could this be built on top of current virtual reality hardware/software?

Edit: I have a friend who made LOADS of money filming couples who wanted to do their own version of adult movies. So I am sure there is a market for something like this.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#420

Post by rhizome »

personlurking wrote: post #19

Just going to throw this one out there. I live in Lisbon, it's tourist-central (I'm from SF and I've never seen so many tourists). Since I see a ton of lost people every single day there should be a way to digitally leave comments on things and places and a free one-stop shop to find such info (like Wikitravel). This info, although having a central repository, should be pushed out to an app that connects to one's pho…

Sorry.
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