Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

news.ycombinator.com

521–530 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#521

Older people. We live in a rapidly ageing society. Retirees are a large and wealthy demographic. Despite that, tech companies are absolutely woeful at designing products for older users. We don't empathise with their needs. We don't understand how poor eyesight, arthritis or cognitive difficulties can affect UX. There's a huge amount of pent-up demand and excellent opportunities for future growth.

I've been thinking a lot about this recently.

There are certain near-future technologies like self-driving cars and robotic home care that could revolutionise the lives of the old. I think that's a given, but they have a relatively high barrier to entry.

At the other end of the scale there must be pure (or almost pure) software solutions that could help older peoples' lives also.

I've been thinking of Alexa-style AIs that actually perform useful tasks such as pre-screening scam phone calls, alerting the user about important emails, or proactively helping the user perform a bank transaction. This could be useful for everyone, but when an old person can barely read emails, never mind sort important ones from the scams and junk, I think it would be a godsend.

The devil is of course in the detail. As a high-level concept it all sounds great, but how would it actually work? I've been imagining a kind of "meta-OS" that sits on top of the OS and drives it on the user's behalf. Or perhaps it should be more like a netbook, with all the actual content kept in the cloud, and the AI as a thin client dedicated solely to allowing easy access to the data. There are a lot of possible way for this to work, and a huge number of problems to solve...

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the co-founder of Fliffr. We're building a marketplace for services where you can charge by the minute. We have everything from experts in SEO, chefs, personal trainers, Esport professionals. We also have a couple of developers, for example you can contact me for advice on #go #javascript or #ionic. Our goal is to build a service to quickly get in contact with an expert and only paying for the advice you need. Us…

Does it support a web-interface? It's not clear from the website.

Not yet, but it is something that we are thinking of adding. Would a web interface be useful to you?

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#524

Here are a few, and I frequently have these conversations with VCs, albeit biased toward areas I work in: - Spatiotemporal analytics usually in the context of IoT. Most people currently repurpose cartographic tools for this purpose but the impedance match is poor and the tools are seriously lacking elementary functionality. There is no magic technology here, just exceptional UX/UI and an understanding of the problem…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#525
post #38

Better marketplace discovery systems. Apple's App Store, the Google Play store and Steam all suffer from the same problem: it's very hard for the people who would enjoy your app to find your app. This probably also applies to streaming video and music.

I'm saying it now, apps are on their way out, web only is the future. Everyone is completely sick of installing a stupid app for everything the want to use. Compound that with a billion notifications for all of those apps. With that said Steam does a pretty good. The discovery queues have led me to some great finds, as well as all of the curator lists.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#526
post #440
post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a philosophical level, what you are asking for is what Google's AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) was designed to solve except that this will leave us with a web much broken than how we started.

Broken, why?

Previous discussions on HN:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414570

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722590

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it support a web-interface? It's not clear from the website.

Not yet, but it is something that we are thinking of adding. Would a web interface be useful to you?

Yes, interacting with a UI on a desktop computer is so much better than using a phone screen.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#528

Easy, personal access to cloud computing. I have a macbook and am pretty satisfied with it. But a problem is, that in order to learn data-science/deep learning i need a beefy GPU/CPU and everything else. I could buy a desktop, but i am a student and not much at home, also in the age of cloud computing this seems silly. Also the upfront investment for a student is not negligible. I want really easy, flexible instances…

Amazon, Google and IBM are all tackling this quite well. Not really startup territory.

However, and I have done some work in this space, perhaps providing simple-to-use services built on top of these and offering them to non-technical folks would be a good business model?

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#529
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn't reading a book about React before they started working with it be preferrable? Great in theory but difficult in practice. Developers rarely ever have the luxury to pick up a book as a means of getting up to speed when there exists online resources like Google and StackOverflow where you can easily find posts that answer your query string(s) verbatim.

But you don't necessarily know what you don't know. If you don't know enough to ask high quality questions, SO and Google won't help you. If you're lucky, G will lead you to tuts and repos with useful code. If you're not, you'll make a ton of stupid beginner mistake and be overdrawn on the technical debt account before you even start.

JavaScript frameworks are rarely ever worth buying a book to get up to speed for. Books like this [0] are a much better time investment as the deep knowledge gained would be useful beyond the currently trending JS framework.

[0] https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not yet, but it is something that we are thinking of adding. Would a web interface be useful to you?

Yes, interacting with a UI on a desktop computer is so much better than using a phone screen.

Cool, thanks for the feedback. If you want me to reach out to you when we have a web interface drop me an email at danielk at fliffr.com
Post reply on HN