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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?

#61

Post by godelski »

sdiq wrote: post #22

I work in the humanitarian field in a poor country ravaged by war and famine. We have a number of humanitarian actors currently working in this country and no one actually has access to accurate population statistics. Well, none exists. The last census was conducted in 1975. I believe someone could use technology to get a much better estimate of the population. One thing that always springs to my mind is the possibil…

I'm curious how exact you would need. Like within 90%? 80%? 50%?

For those that want to follow up on this, you could use current satellite imagery to make population estimates, but it wouldn't be really accurate. You could wait for companies like Planet Labs[1] to get daily photos of the Earth (IIRC 4m resolution), and increase accuracy. You could also hire pilots to strap a camera and survey the interested areas. There are also, IMO, unethical spins (especially in oppressive regimes) that you could do with that data (ie: civilian surveillance). Or even cheaper, use drones (because you don't need daily or real time surveillance). That could also have other spinoffs. Or you could literally just send people to go count. Don't know which would be the cheapest.

[1] https://www.planet.com

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

#62

Post by jcfrei »

rayiner wrote: post #6

Inter-operable video and phone conferencing without prior setup required. Probably half the video conferences I’ve tried to participate in in the last year have been a disaater, with people having technical problems dialing in, dropping out, etc. Even phone confernces (using VOIP conference providers) have awful quality. I want to be able to email some people a link, and with no account creation, registration, or sof…

maybe uberconference.com?

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

ryanSrich wrote: post #56

Technology adoption. I'm not necessarily talking about change management (although that could be a feature), but technology adoption in the broader sense. For example: if I'm a Health IT executive, how can I ensure the adoption of say, Kubernetes is the right path for my organization? I may have 20+ stakeholders, from actual practitioners, to finance pushing me in various directions. It's almost like there's space fo…

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by Joeri »

An app for installing and maintaining mixed fleets of lora/sigfox/... IoT sensors.

When installing these at scale in existing buildings you have to be able to send out local workforce to properly install and activate thousands of sensors, as well as maintain them afterwards, without prior training. It’s one of those things that sounds easy on the surface but is riddled with complexity, like how to register which sensor is installed where in a foolproof way, or how to easily locate faulty sensors for replacement.

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

#65

Post by kaicianflone »

In healthcare billing with patient insurance companies, hospitals and doctors are contractually prohibited (and sometimes illegal) from sharing how much they get paid per procedure unit (RVU) from insurance co's. However, if you are a third party for the hospitals and have access to the billing info of a metropolitan area you could create some kind of price comparison system for all of the hospitals.

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

#66

Post by twunde »

hunter23 wrote: post #18

I work in health tech. Here are some problems: * Helping patients select the right doctor. Currently most people use Yelp or through referrals. The problem is that Yelp has little correlation to quality of care. It's very difficult for patients to evaluate a doctor - usually what they end up doing is evaluating the customer service aspect of the doctor (did they speak to me nicely, did they make me wait for an appoin…

Fair warning: Healthcare has a long sales cycle, is heavily regulated and is difficult to break into as an outsider. Generally you'll want someone on the founding team with a significant healthcare background and connections (even better if they're a MD). Once you have found a way to sell you'll find that the competition is fairly minimal compared to other industries.

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

#67

Post by austenallred »

This is a really simple but basic one. Market size might not be billions of dollars, but a basic learning management system along the lines of Teachable/Udemy that allows for code with built-in testing would be used overnight by a dozen code bootcamps and would pull a lot of people out of the other platforms.

Maybe it's just a feature, not a full product, but it makes any "learn to code" MOOC unusable.

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

#68

Post by nugget »

Pinbenterjamin wrote: post #5

We run background checks, and there is definitely a space for public record aggregation. We directly interface with those interested in the results of the check, and there is an overwhelming amount of work in building integrations with schools, applicant tracking systems, hospitals, public records, courts... We spend most of our time building XML and JSON parsers to cram their data into our models. If there was a com…

How broad would a vendor's coverage need to be on day 1 to be valuable for you?

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

#69

Post by Immortalin »

sdiq wrote: post #22

I work in the humanitarian field in a poor country ravaged by war and famine. We have a number of humanitarian actors currently working in this country and no one actually has access to accurate population statistics. Well, none exists. The last census was conducted in 1975. I believe someone could use technology to get a much better estimate of the population. One thing that always springs to my mind is the possibil…

Any way to get in touch?

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

#70

Post by awshepard »

Pinbenterjamin wrote: post #5

We run background checks, and there is definitely a space for public record aggregation. We directly interface with those interested in the results of the check, and there is an overwhelming amount of work in building integrations with schools, applicant tracking systems, hospitals, public records, courts... We spend most of our time building XML and JSON parsers to cram their data into our models. If there was a com…

I think Socrata (now acquired by Tyler Technologies) was maybe tackling some of these challenges?
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