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

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

#451

Post by rplst8 »

bb611 wrote: post #435
jklein11 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give some more detail on what the political/business challenges are?

The biggest one is that realtors exist entirely because of regulation a the state level. After that is the extremely entrenched business interest in the status quo - a lot of people are making money off the current system, and any real disruption is going to cost 95-99% of the real estate industry their jobs. As noted elsewhere, the level of regulation is such that even offering better data to buyers/sellers has a lo…

State? Try county! A lot of the public records for homes are held in county courthouses.

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

#452

Post by tommynicholas »

tbrock wrote: post #397
tommynicholas wrote: post #233

BI for developers. Developers run many organizations and teams now, but most Business Intelligence-ish tools are either built for business people (Tableau, Domo) or for marketing (all analytics products, specifically GA). I feel like there's a big opportunity for a tool/tools that are installed in apps as a package and then customized from there. Many teams build a version of this in house (Instacart open-sources the…

Check out Looker. Life changing.

Looker looks great! Not EXACTLY what I'm looking for but also definitely close enough, especially for companies at scale.

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

#453

Post by morgante »

tmsam wrote: post #235

A family member is a lawyer in the Worker's Comp, SS, and Family Law space. THE software for lawyers in this space is called A1 Law. It solves a lot of real problems lawyers in that space have (form letter generation, calendar integration, case management)... but it's so slow to use new technologies. They advertise PalmOS integration. My family member has to have their own server in a closet running the server versio…

I would strongly encourage people to think twice about trying to sell software to lawyers.

It's a Sisyphean task. They are, as a rule, extremely anti-technology and conservative. At a previous startup, we had built software which was saving customers many hours a week—yet it was still an uphill battle to get paying approval.

If even after all the warnings in this thread you really want to build legal software, focus on disrupting lawyers instead of selling to them.

In general, law and media are two of the worst fields for technology.

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

#454

Post by daveguy »

rhizome wrote: post #332
starik36 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I had a consultation with my lawyer, she fired up WordPerfect. There is a blast from the past.

http://wordperfect.com My impression is that the legal industry is most of the reason why WP is still being used.

Word Perfect is the vi of word processors. I still program in vi.

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

#455

Post by buckshee »

braindead_in wrote: post #402

We are an human powered audio/video transcription service and have lots of training data that can be used for training a speech recognition system. An ASR-as-a-Service in the cloud kind of platform where we can use our data to continuously train and improve the models would be very useful for us.

>human powered audio/video transcription service

Mind sharing the name? I have friends doing ASR in college and they may be interested in your company. Though since their focus is on research/publishing papers, they may stick to standard datasets. But knowing about a new data source is always welcome.

Thanks.

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

#456

Post by timpark »

matthewbauer wrote: post #396
ajepst wrote: post #391

All the ballroom dance competitions use this old, disliked software to organize and run the events. The guy who wrote it isn't interested in making improvements, (and it can certainly use improvements) and is happy living off the income from people's per event usage rights. I am sure if something modern and regularly updated came out, it would get a lot of uptake. Thing is, the portion of it that runs during the even…

Is this the software you are talking about: http://www.douglassassociates.com/ ? It looks like it's offered for free now. The thing with this kind of software, is it must be "good enough" for the task.

It looks like you have to pay "to have more than 250 entries [I don't know what's typical], to sign up for web page creation options, and to receive technical support".

And here they ask for credit card details over http...

http://www.douglassassociates.com/online_registration.htm

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

#457

Post by lucaspiller »

bdangubic wrote: post #138
seancoleman wrote: post #41

In real estate, developing with MLS data. - There are over 900 regional MLS providers each with different schemas. - You use RETS, a complicated, non web standards interface for downloading data. - MLS data is plagued with errors and denormalized data making queries difficult.

The entire Real-Estate industry is ripe for disruption. Exactly why are we paying 6% to "agents"? What are "agents" actually doing? 10+ years ago the need for "Real Estate Agents" was there as information was not readily accessible. Things like "what kind of area is this property in", "what are schools like" "what are prospects for this area 5 years down the road" and so on. All this information (and MUCH more) is cu…

As a Brit I don't get the agent thing for buying and selling houses in the U.S. As I understand it's basically required for the buyer and seller to have an agent.

Here you can sell a house privately, and the only fees you need to pay are the solicitor for conceyancing - the fees are around the same when buying or selling, between £500 - £2000. They will just do the paperwork, check there aren't any issues with the deeds, and do minor contract negotiations, and register the sale.

The purpose of an agent here is really just to have a shop where they can advertise your sale, take clients and guide them around a house (but TBH I'd rather just look myself without an agent as they don't add any value in my experience), and do a bit of management between the buyer and seller. For this they'll usually charge 0.5% - 3% (to the seller), but if you want to do it yourself you can just advertise on sites such as Zoopla.

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

#458

Post by Godel_unicode »

chollida1 wrote: post #27

Data management. 1) Cleaning the data as it comes in rather than in batches so we can use it sooner, invalid data is discarded, outlier detection, normalizing inputs etc.... 2) Warehousing of the data with proper indexes so you can perform some advanced queries on unstructured data 3) Some data is sent in bulk at the end of day, some of the data is streamed in fire hose style. How can we preprocess the fire hose data…

> TL/DR Help me, I'm drowning in data

Omg, so many sales pitches. You should figure out which of those were automatically generated by someone who's bot is crawling HN and using NLP to find posts like this, and then hire them. There's basically 0 chance that isn't happening...

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

#459

Post by RickChen »

chollida1 wrote: post #27

Data management. 1) Cleaning the data as it comes in rather than in batches so we can use it sooner, invalid data is discarded, outlier detection, normalizing inputs etc.... 2) Warehousing of the data with proper indexes so you can perform some advanced queries on unstructured data 3) Some data is sent in bulk at the end of day, some of the data is streamed in fire hose style. How can we preprocess the fire hose data…

Chollida. I have been working with a startup in Seattle tackling these very issues. Super great team and great software, please get in touch and try it out! datablade.io

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

#460

Post by kolbe »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #93
kolbe wrote: post #45

Not my industry, but a friend of mine in law was discussing how incredible her in-house software is for managing billable hours relative to all her past companies. I poked around, and most law firms, even very deep pocketed ones, use somewhere between a bad tech system and no tech system to manage and track their work. A small team could easily collaborate with some law firm (maybe take an investment from a few law f…

tech system to manage and track work This is an exceedingly hard problem unless 100% of your work is input through a revision control system.

not when 90% of your work is done through email....
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