Build cheaper houses
The value of homes is mostly in the land. 600k house? the land is 350k, construction materials and labor comes in at 150-200, 50-100k left over is margin for the developer.
Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
571–580 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is a reasonable price to pay for this kind of service, including the coffee if the place requires you to consume it?
There's a cafe near me in Brooklyn that has a nice interior space and free wifi. It's always packed and everyone brings a laptop. Coffee prices are normal if not a bit low for high-end coffee (their coffee is really good). They serve snacks, but not much else. I have no idea how they turn a profit with all the people lounging for hours with a little espresso or cup of tea. There's a morning rush, but it's really smal…
Sounds like The West
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#573Physical space for lounging, socializing, and working. I live in NYC and there's still a striking lack of space that facilitates people getting out of their apartments and doing "whatever." Starbucks popularized the concept of the "third space" (the first two being housing + workplace) and I think there's so much room to improve upon this.
Related: physical space that welcomes the elderly. Loneliness/depression is a huge problem for older people. I think it would really boost wellbeing for these people to participate in something and to see other faces.
Not just the elderly.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't write it off. There could be could add battery storage to be used during the journey. They could include wind turbines to add further power generation. Also ships can go slower. In my limited knowledge of boats every extra knot takes significantly extra fuel. If we were bringing multiple power sources 'slow' cargo may be viable. And the has to be other ways to increase this function. And there is always hy…
I've heard that cargo ships are currently prevented from going much slower because of the human crew. Drone ships could help.
The human crew isn't much of a factor in cargo ship speed. Ship owners would be happy to leave their crews out at sea a week longer if it was profitable.
Drone ships won't be practical any time soon because of maintenance problems. Crews spend much of their time at sea performing preventative maintenance, painting, and fixing broken equipment. With a drone ship all of that work would have to be done at the pier which would be far more expensive than paying a crew.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is a reasonable price to pay for this kind of service, including the coffee if the place requires you to consume it?
There's a cafe near me in Brooklyn that has a nice interior space and free wifi. It's always packed and everyone brings a laptop. Coffee prices are normal if not a bit low for high-end coffee (their coffee is really good). They serve snacks, but not much else. I have no idea how they turn a profit with all the people lounging for hours with a little espresso or cup of tea. There's a morning rush, but it's really smal…
> It's always packed and everyone brings a laptop.
This is the problem with NYC coffee shops. They're place to go talk with a friend for a bit or for a first date. They're not really places to casually hang out all day.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#576The leading cause of death is cardiovascular disease. >90% of these cases can be attributed to an overweight population. It's not an easy problem to solve, but there has to be a way to fix it. Lots of calorie counting apps, activity trackers, motivational reminder apps, etc. Obesity is very complicated, but there are three basic facts: 1. Calories in, calories out is the golden rule. 2. The vast majority of calories…
> Calories in, calories out is the golden rule.
Lot's of folks have rebutted with the various ways this is an oversimplification, I won't recap them here.
I will however add another overlooked factor that most folks don't know about: Our gut bacteria is responsible for a lot of pre-processing, and their efficiency varies a lot depending on the mix of strains you happen to have.
So, identical twins, with identical lifestyles and diets, can still have very different experiences with weight gain and loss.
Fortunately, this is actually something that (once the mechanisms are better understood) can be fixed quite simply with a fecal transplant.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#577The leading cause of death is cardiovascular disease. >90% of these cases can be attributed to an overweight population. It's not an easy problem to solve, but there has to be a way to fix it. Lots of calorie counting apps, activity trackers, motivational reminder apps, etc. Obesity is very complicated, but there are three basic facts: 1. Calories in, calories out is the golden rule. 2. The vast majority of calories…
I read this obesity ascription to carbs a lot and it beats me. I am from an African country where carbohydrate dominant meals are the staple. It is not uncommon to see a families eat 3 square carb laden meals yet obesity is extremely low! So my question is why isnt obesity prevalent in this part of the world?
It's complicated - humans can thrive on a very wide variety of diets. However snacking on sugary stuff seems quite a big thing in the USA and probably not in most of Africa.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#578Fix ads. I think there is a need for a product that allows websites to self-manage their ads, allowing them to handle display, tracking, payment, and client management internally. Imagine being able to get rid of all the third-party ad and tracking scripts on your website in favor of hosting and managing all of it on your own domain, displaying ads that are guaranteed to be relevant and attractive (since you chose th…
> displaying ads that are guaranteed to be relevant and attractive...
Pretty much all the evils in todays ads are a byproduct of the sellers controlling the ecosystem and focusing on their needs over the buyers.(i.e. selling impressions, focusing on pageviews, not reporting on viewability, monetizing data, etc...) This does two terrible things...this makes your ad placements ineffective for 90% of the legit advertisers and only viable to the bad actors selling pills and other spammy/predatory products.
If you want to really fix ads, you need to put the average buyer in the driver seat, you need to make your monetization accountable to your advertisers bottom line, and you need to collaborate on creative design to be beautiful within your site...
As long as publishers and sellers control the marketplace, we are doomed to have clickbait, fake news, ridiculous cookie tracking, and irrelevant ads.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#579Better 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.
The web has a long time to catch up in terms of technology (iOS has poor support for APIs that would make web apps compete with native) and culture (most businesses don't care that their app is slow and bloated and defer resources to the app).
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#580The leading cause of death is cardiovascular disease. >90% of these cases can be attributed to an overweight population. It's not an easy problem to solve, but there has to be a way to fix it. Lots of calorie counting apps, activity trackers, motivational reminder apps, etc. Obesity is very complicated, but there are three basic facts: 1. Calories in, calories out is the golden rule. 2. The vast majority of calories…
I read this obesity ascription to carbs a lot and it beats me. I am from an African country where carbohydrate dominant meals are the staple. It is not uncommon to see a families eat 3 square carb laden meals yet obesity is extremely low! So my question is why isnt obesity prevalent in this part of the world?
The nutritional value of staples in the developed world is probably a lot higher (percentage of digestible carbohydrates per serving).