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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?

#81

Post by idax »

dmode wrote: post #37

A next generation internal / corporate portal. Everyplace I have worked at had either a really bad implementation of an internal portal or had a bunch of wiki pages clubbed together. It was incredibly difficult to get even basic info, such as where is the conference room, who works in the security team, what is the expense policy, so on a so forth. In my current multi billion dollar company, when I am meeting with so…

I agree. I think if you could branch off what stripe has done with their 'home' feature, you'd have a real business on your hands. https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home

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

#82

Post by jakebrereton »

eksemplar wrote: post #16

A tool for managing software development that doesn’t suck. Especially if your developers are doing a lot of small projects, that while too small to have their own sprint or their own kanbanboard are too big to fit into a single card on Trello. Possibly something that mixes business and process models into it, but again, something simple where you attach a single bpmn drawing and maybe an architectural sketch to the…

What you're saying here really resonates, and it's something that we, at Atlassian, have heard from many of our users. The Jira team has been hard at work on a brand new project type that aims to give teams running "scrumish" the perfect opportunity to build a board and workflow that will truly fit any style of work (even work with an odd schedule, multiple projects at once, and that requires a mixture between operations and dev!).

We've gotten a lot of feedback that often times the strict structures of scrum and kanban are overly burdensome, yet teams still want and need some basic guardrails (as well as the ability to modify their processes on the fly). Our Product team is still testing and iterating on this new project type quite a bit, and if you're up for it, we'd love to give you an early demo and get your honest thoughts and feedback.

If you're interested, please shoot me an email and we'll find some time for a demo: jake@atlassian.com

Jake

Jira PMM @ Atlassian

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

#83

Post by dyim »

I do B2B sales (specifically, customer support for consumer-facing businesses), and I'd pay ~$1,000/mo for a service that solves this problem:

Which warm intros should I ask for? There are ~1,000 companies in my ideal customer profile. I've got ~500 friends who I'd feel comfortable asking for warm intros, and say these friends each have ~500 friends. After deduplicating, that's ~100,000 second-degree connections, some of whom are decision-makers at companies I'd like to sell to.

I'd want someone to go through my LinkedIn/Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc., and tell me something along the lines of: "Ben might know decision-makers at Companies A, B, C, D, and E." And, conversely, I'd like to know all the possible warm introductions that could lead me to Company A (e.g. "Ben, Max, and Jennifer could possibly introduce you to Alice, Bob, and Cameron at Company A").

All of this information is available to me; it's just a total O(N^2) pain to clean and aggregate it. Like, I can certainly spend an hour listening to podcasts and looking through Ben's LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends, Instagram followers - and seeing if any of them are COOs at CPG brands. But I'll run out of podcasts eventually, and then it's not a very high-leverage use of my time to repeat that process for Max, Jennifer, Nate, Christy, et al.

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

#84

Post by Thriptic »

Software development infrastructure in a box plus strong training materials / guidance for scientists. Increasing numbers of scientists are writing code without any formal CS training, and the outputs are predictably awful and unreliable. It is very common to find no testing, no acceptance criteria, no version control, no formal planning, no code review, no style guide being employed, sparse commenting, fragmented development environments / dependency hell etc. People frequently know that what they are doing is suboptimal, but it is hard to convince them that they should put in the work to use industry best practices for a variety of reasons.

If someone could create a product (probably infrastructure plus a Python IDE) which made doing things the "right way" easy for these users, and which would provide case studies or tutorials to show them WHY doing things correctly is beneficial using analogies to good lab behavior, it would be hugely valuable.

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

#85

Post by awshepard »

raleigh_user wrote: post #72
canadianwriter wrote: post #28

Digital marketing and programmatic advertising - TRAFFICKING. Everyone hates it. It's 100% required but no one has solved the issue. It can eat up so much time and if you make a mistake can cost valueable data.

What do you mean by this? As in, people hate doing marketing or they don't understand how to advertise? Plus, a mistake can cost valuable data? Where are you losing data?

Not OP, but worked in the field for a time. Trafficking usually means configuring your ad in the campaign management system. What are your targeting parameters, what are your tracking tags, uploading the ad itself, entering in lots of custom information that while conceptually similar across ad platforms usually has different names and often has to be manually entered. A lot of platforms do offer APIs of some sort to help with bulk campaign/ad creation, but there's often no "one stop shop" to be able to set up a google campaign and facebook campaign at the same time. There are some companies working on this, I think usually referred to as (or in conjunction with) "marketing automation".

A mistake can mean - misconfiguring your target (wasting money on ads that won't give you an ROI), misconfiguring your 3rd party tracking (letting data like conversions go unaccounted for, or not having your auditing tags setup, meaning you show ads to fraudulent users that you otherwise wouldn't have to pay for), etc.

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

#86

Post by ColonelPhantom »

austenallred wrote: post #67

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.

Isn't automated testing commonplace in MOOCs?

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

#87

Post by sdiq »

herlitzj wrote: post #39
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…

How much penetration do cell phones have into a lot of these countries? May be a way to tease out a rough population from cell phone use statistics.

Somalia, is the country I am talking about and cellphone penetration is quite high. Most people might not have smartphones, though. I have been thinking about this too. Using cellphone network data and come up with estimates.

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

#88

Post by sdiq »

godelski wrote: post #61
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. Th…

I am not exactly an expert on matters demography but I think 50% would be low. At the moment, we have a study that was done by one of the UN agencies and the figures they came up with seem very disputed. They used 1975 census as the base for their extrapolations. Quite a lot happened since and their figures are not really believable.

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

#90

Post by sdiq »

Immortalin wrote: post #69
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…

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