Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup? • Hacker News Board

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

#481

Post by meowface » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 6:29 AM UTC

bduerst wrote: post #270

jdc0589 wrote: post #247

Industry: Any tech company that hosts sensitive/regulated data. The problem: privlidged access management and auditing. The solution: Cyberark, but not $250k to cover 1,000 servers. Ain't nobody got money for that.

I feel like this is a common/old enough problem there should be some open sourced solutions for it already.

The problem is big enterprises need support agreements and the other typical enterprisation features. An open source project alone will never fit most enterprise's appetites, especially for something as important as security/auditing/compliance. You at least need a company behind the open source project willing to provide enterprise setup and support.

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

#482

Post by jupiter90000 » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 6:37 AM UTC

morgante wrote: post #453

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…

I worked in a tech department of a rather large law services organization. There was a desire to maintain certain inefficiencies so that more hours could be billed to clients. If it could be done in 25% of the time, that's 75% less they could bill clients for 'attorney time spent.'

See how well pitching 'do it faster and make less' goes over.

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

#483

Post by tintor » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 6:44 AM UTC

rmrm wrote: post #130

My wife is a corporate attorney. They pass drafts of contracts around by email using MS word with change tracking enabled. Some sort of attorney targeted simple revision tracking front end using git would be a mighty step forward.

github with contracts as text files?

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

#484

Post by joatmon-snoo » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 7:02 AM UTC

richard___ wrote: post #480

A 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

Something like Blue Apron?

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

#485

Post by cube00 » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 7:11 AM UTC

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…

Or just wait it out until he snuffs it... http://www.douglassassociates.com/compmngr_history.htm#long_...

"So what happens when the Douglasses are no longer around? We have every reason to believe that we'll be around for a good long time, but we wanted a plan to provide for our loyal customers just in case we aren't so lucky. So we made one.

Here is how the plan works. Immediately upon learning of our deaths the executors of Dick's estate (his two highly computer literate kids) will post two files on our www.compmngr.com web site and will send out a broadcast email advising our customers how to download the files. The first file is a small standalone computer program called RegisterEvent.exe, which allows you to create your own registration files. So you won't have to register with Douglass Associates and you won't have to pay a registration fee. You can read more about RegisterEvent and how to use it below. The second file is a ZIP file containing all the source code for COMPMNGR and its supporting programs. This file will only be of interest to those few users who want to continue COMPMNGR development and who either know C++ programming or or willing to hire a C++ programmer."

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

#486

Post by ommunist » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 7:23 AM UTC

Too many startups are trying to disrupt the industry, thus creating the problem, that cannot be solved by one more startup. Its the same problem with, say, capitalism. You cannot solve it by organising one more political party. I am not saying capitalism is bad. Its a problem.

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

#487

Post by farm_code » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 7:27 AM UTC

csdreamer7 wrote: post #404

xiaoma wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just answering the OP. With all these downvotes for that I have nothing more to say.

You gave a very vague, short answer to something that really needed a better answer. A story the poor are dealing with. A volume market possibility you were hoping someone would supply. The downvotes are deserved. You could always give a good paragraph answer that everyone else is contributing to this otherwise excellent post. Maybe the downvotes would disappear.

http://www.thebopstrategy.com

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

#488

Post by reitanqild » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 7:32 AM UTC

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…

> 4) Oh and all of this data is unstructured and comes from 75 different sources.

Sounds like a job for Apache Camel?

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

#489

Post by ommunist » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 7:34 AM UTC

rpedela wrote: post #275

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 investigated doing a SaaS product in the legal space. One of the things I heard multiple times from lawyers is that they are more likely to buy a product if they can bill their clients directly. What you are talking about would not fall into that category. That doesn't mean you couldn't build a successful business, but I think it is important to understand that the market has different rules.

That was done in the UK. I wrote the first working version for Legal Cost Finance, who offered instant credit facility "to make justice affordable to everyone". It took them 3 years to take off even when the whole case was that they literally brought bulk of pre-paid (!) customers to legal firms.

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

#490

Post by nsm » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 7:37 AM UTC

thomasloh wrote: post #380

nsm wrote: post #179

Immigration. Every time I change jobs as an H1-B employee, I've to fill in the same ridiculous data with every law firms weird interface. I wish the US Digital Services would focus on streamlining forms and having auto-import from all the data they already have about me (e.g. automatically translate I-94 records to how much time I actually spent in the US, infer my past I-797 records automatically, have a one time ed…

like a TurboTax for all immigration forms?

Yes