All these ideas are wrong, because they are cash grabs. Money will never satisfy you. Find a startup you love by looking back to your best memories(10 years ago or more) of creating something and seek to give people that experience. Then, even if you fail financially, you'll still have more great memories, 10 years from now.
Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
471–480 of 734 posts
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#472Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you don't agree that 'the person who represents themself has an idiot for a client'?
Probably smart to bring one to court with you but maybe not required for drawing up a standard will where the few assets you own should just go to your next of kin
Lawyers write human readable code that's compiled and run by a judge or interfacing APIs (institutions such as financial ones)
Your advice is akin to saying "hey you inexperienced coder, write some production ready code but don't test it and when the only time it needs to run, give it a try. Hope you don't screw it up! When there's another coder in the room who can claim 'oh no he meant to set my financial variable 100X not 10x' and can convince the compiler to agree with them"
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#474Everyone is ignoring the low-end of the market.
Except all those budget supermarkets, clothes stores, ebay, uber to some extent etc etc.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#475The oil and gas industry is ripe with potential start ups. Here are a few that come to mind: 1. A better system for automation and measurement. Current solutions aren't ideal when it comes to setting up new systems as well as updating and maintaining existing systems. We build several million dollar facilities a month and each one has automation and measurement equipment that has to be individually set up and program…
Any more insights about applying drones to 1? I work on deep learning for aierial imagery startup (tensorflight.com). It seems like we could structure some information from drone images.
If you are interested in helping us understand the problem and potentially solve it together contact me at kozikow@tensorflight.com
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#476All these ideas are wrong, because they are cash grabs. Money will never satisfy you. Find a startup you love by looking back to your best memories(10 years ago or more) of creating something and seek to give people that experience. Then, even if you fail financially, you'll still have more great memories, 10 years from now.
I fail to see how industry problems ripe for technical solutions equate to cash grabs. Problems are essentially the basis of every startup (if we generalize a little), and I can assure you that engineers can be passionate about solving a problem.
I also don't really understand what you mean by giving people the experience of something you were creating in the past. What does that mean? As advice it seems exceptionally vague; something an writing teacher might tell me to write about, but not solid advice for founding a startup.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lawyer friend of mine told me his firm doesn't use software to check all the "hereafter referred to" are bound to their template and vice-versa. They instead have to print the document and go through it with a highlighter. The firm charges their clients on an hourly basis, so they don't really have an incentive to be more efficient.
You hit the nail on the head, there is an incentive to automate legal services ala legal zoom but for lawyers themselves the more tedious and paper based the process is the more they can make.
Hourly billing is (very slowly) going away. Fixed fee arrangements will be king (people want predictability). So then a lawyer will want to be as efficient as possible. The legal industry is admittedly behind the times, but they do continue to move forward.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#478A 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…
Actually, I'm a lawyer and a product owner at a big accounting firm, so I'm pretty well positioned to discuss this topic. I have half a dozen solid startup ideas that I'm tempted to take and start running with right now. Documentation management alone is in desperate need of innovation. I build toy apps in my spare time that cut thousands of dollars of charge hours young associates waste on bullshit tasks, just withi…
> cut thousands of dollars of charge hours young associates waste on bullshit tasks
Doesn't this take money away from your firm? It is only when firms are competing on cost, time or client recognized quality that they will institute better workflows via software.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#479A 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…
Seconded
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#480A meal prep service for bodybuilders. The hardest part of bodybuilding is eating right. Something that is affordable, nutritious, and calorie dense would be extremely valuable. There is no meal delivery service I know of that satisfies the last criterion. $10 should get you at least 1000 healthy calories