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

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

#811

Post by VLM »

apsharma wrote: post #743
JamesBarney wrote: post #154

A marketplace for specialized micro-consulting(30 minutes to an hour). I've seen plenty of projects that are rife with anti-patterns because a team was unfamiliar with a problem or technology and made a bunch of bad decisions while they were still coming up to speed. The use-case I envision would fix this. Because it's really a travesty that when we're the least familiar with technologies is when we make some of the…

"For instance I recently joined a project that was built by devs coming up to speed on React. And boy did they abuse Flux, they didn't build a store for every drop-down but it's pretty damn close. However I really think a React Guru could have steered them around this mistake with just 30 minutes of his time. " The trouble here is that the guru or consultant who comes in needs to understand the context of the problem…

If you microfocused it enough it would work.

Am I doing anything wrong isn't happening in 30 mins. Am I doing anything wrong with React is more than 30 mins. Am I abusing Flux? That sounds doable. videoconference with a live dev plus codebase access.

In a previous career I walked hundreds of consultants thru connecting to the telco WAN and ISP network that employed me, and I can't help you with everything but in 30 minutes I can easily tell you what is wrong with your BGP configuration or your frame relay configuration or your MPLS/ATM connection. At least WRT connecting to that employer, at least WRT connecting 15 years ago. The consultants knew their client networks inside and out, I mostly told them "no do not redistribute via RIP RFC1918 address space to us" or "no you really don't want to send us a 0/0 route" or "you think we'll accept a route for a.b.c.d/27 and you're actually sending it correctly but you not having sent us a LOA means I'm filtering it right out" or "you might want to think about enabling md5 authentication because we have, as our welcome letter you obviously didn't read, clearly explained" and yeah people actually tried stuff like that. Also people with obvious peculiar ideas about how BGP works WRT priority of routes and load balancing and stuff. Could I tell these "network administrator consultants" how to set up MCSE server stuff, well, no, but I sure told a lot of them how to configure Cisco WAN interfaces and how BGP works (or doesn't work)...

You can do a lot in 30 minutes over a narrow enough specialty.

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

#812

Post by yummyfajitas »

Lordarminius wrote: post #808
reitanqild wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for bringing up this. This is actually a really good example for why we don't want to ban weapons: Genocides are often perpetrated by the country the victims actually belong to. Examples: Germany under Nazism, former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, -I'm fairly sure the list goes on. I feel totally safe and I'm actually happy knowing that many of my neighbors have weapons. Especially here in Norway were I know there are st…

Genocide is an extreme condition and a poor reason to extend gun ownership. There is a very long list of countries that are doing better than fine and severely restricting gun ownership. Long before it becomes the case that you need guns to defend your space, you may want to take a long hard look at the politics of your community / country.

There is a very long list of countries that are doing better than fine and severely restricting gun ownership.

There are long lists of entities who safely ignore tail risk events - that's true almost by the definition of "tail risk".

That doesn't mean buying a cheap insurance policy against tail risk events is a bad idea.

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

#813

Post by germanier »

irq-1 wrote: post #704
mslot wrote: post #352

I always think there are huge opportunities for growth in intra-EU trade. It's a market with over 500M people and a $17 trillion GDP. While the EU has taken away a lot of trade barriers, language and unfamiliar regulations remain a huge barrier, but also a huge potential for growth. If a company in California has ample opportunities to sell in Florida (>2000 miles away), why then is it significantly more difficult fo…

> If a company in California has ample opportunities to sell in Florida (>2000 miles away), why then is it significantly more difficult for a company in Greece to sell in Denmark, which is a much shorter distance. The US has a federal "interstate commerce clause" which means that individual states cannot regulate trade with other states. The federal government has all the control, which would be like the European Uni…

The US version is a bit more far-reaching but the Common Market[1] allows me to sell almost anything in any EU country.

Incidentally, Amazon is one such example. If I buy something on the German amazon.de the contract is formed with Amazon EU S.à r.l. in Luxemburg and the goods are often shipped from a Polish warehouse.

The difficulties companies face within the EU are largely language and culture related rather than legal.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market

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

#814

Post by 9erdelta »

Collecting boxes and packing materials. Seriously, I am overflowing with pristine boxes and packing material courtesy of Amazon prime. Certainly there has to be a business surrounding the collection of these materials and selling them back to Amazon et. al.

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

#815

Post by VLM »

jdironman wrote: post #471

Leased CGI sets / models / scenes. Building full fledged models / generations of popular cities and places and leasing them to film producers. Its cheaper for them to lease than it would be to hire full devs and designers to start from scratch..I know there is some 're-use' in place by these companies such as pixar and disney. Re-use is not what i am talking about though. I am talking about movies like transformers /…

Look into games. Imagine some GTA-like game set in actual Chicago, or minimally edited Chicago to remove all trademarks anyway.

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

#816

Post by saurabhn »

xchaotic wrote: post #800

Aaccurate 3-d scanning of 3d environments - houses, mines you name it. I think the tech is there in your pocket and with good software plus very accurate measurement of location, orientation + panorama/spehrical photo shoots, you could have very high quality recreations of real world areas - which in turn could be explored, modified and enjoyed in VR/AR/MR. For example simulating house refurbishment or furniture purc…

This is a super interesting topic to work on! There's an academic initiative which does exactly this, it's called the Digital Historical Architectural Research and Material Analysis or DHARMA [0] for short (it's at the University of Notre Dame). Figuro3D [1] is a startup (also out of Notre Dame) which borrows a lot from DHARMA and applies it to 3D printing.

[0]: http://architecture.nd.edu/research-publications/dharma/

[1]: http://www.figuro3d.com/

Edit: formatting

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

#817

Post by germanier »

ovidnis wrote: post #794
david927 wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the EU has the equivalent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area

Are those two equivalent though? As I understand the Schengen Area is about freedom of movement whereas the Commerce Clause is about, well, commerce.

No, they are not really. Schengen is mostly about border controls. For example, Switzerland is in Schengen but they are not part of the EU customs zone, so goods cannot be freely moved across the border (although there are a lot of bilateral treaties to make this easier).

But the EU has their own version of the Commerce Clause, the Common Market.

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

#818

Post by viridian »

cr0sh wrote: post #656
WA wrote: post #165

Contraception. Almost everybody needs it. The current solution of flooding the body with hormones works, but causes side effects. The pill for men won't make it. My prediction is that we'll have some other non-hormonal contraception within the next 20-30 years, probably invented by a startup that wants to disrupt this billion dollar market.

> The pill for men won't make it. From what I understand, "they" have already developed this, and trialed it. It worked great, but for many men it had certain undesirable side-effects, and for a very few the side-effects weren't good at all. But for most, it worked well. The interesting thing? Almost all of the side-effects that were experienced by the men in the study all sounded exactly like the side-effects women…

As funny as this anecdote is, the real issue was that it caused a couple of cases of permanent sterility so the scientists were forced to abandon the study.

The whole thing is annoying because I've now seen the whole "lol boys can't handle what girls put themselves through on the pill" from print news, reddit, buzzfeed, my girlfriend's gynecologist, and now hacker news. It would be great if male contraception existed, and lots of men would be fine with the side effects, but permanent sterilization is a whole different ballgame as far as risk factors go.

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

#819

Post by gavanwoolery »

edraferi wrote: post #803
gavanwoolery wrote: post #782

Biggest: largest, most ambitious, most lucrative, riskiest, highest impact? I have one that meets all of those criteria. Ditch legacy and redefine one language/OS to rule them all. Give app stores the middle finger. Throw the web browser away. Throw away antiquated build systems. Create a universal, minimal, extensible, and sensible layout and rendering engine. Create an imperative language as fast as c yet portable…

OK, so say you do that. What advantages do you think you could realize through this ground up rewrite?

Look at the millions of complaints filed about HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. There is huge room for improvement in the way we write native and web applications - the fact that we still make a distinction signals its own problem. We can do better, and there will always be room for more innovation and improvement.

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

#820

Post by danielvinson »

azm1 wrote: post #684
danielvinson wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love the concept, but I can't see this as useful as an App, since pretty much every use case I can think of I'd want to be at my computer for. I also find it kind of amusing that you're advertising esports advice from a woman who plays on a CS:GO team which can't even compete with a mediocre ESEA-IM team... she might be an absolutely amazing teacher and amazing person to work with, but she isn't good at the game, whi…

Are the csgo team coaches really good at playing comp. csgo? Dont think its the main quality you need to have to push him forward.You great player but never be able to communicate it to others.But as a good observer with analytical skills you can be great at spotting potential and weakness etc etc

That's something that has been discussed in depth in the pro community for a long time... the conclusion that most team owners have made is that you generally need a coach who can play at a top pro level or has previously played at a top pro level. Obviously the target market here isn't pro teams, but even so, the people who have large amounts of money on the line choose not to hire coaches who have never been very good at the game.

I also have a lot of first-hand experience with this since I taught paid lessons in CS 1.6 way back in the day. Generally the market for lessons is full of mid-tier players who are very dedicated, but don't have the support necessary to improve (ie. a team of players as good as them or a proper coaching system). These players are almost all looking to go pro some day, and want to be able to break through to that level. Since the difference in skill between a Top 1% player and a Pro in CS:GO is so massive, any random competitive player won't be able to give good advice since they are at the same place as the client, and can't understand WHY things are done the way they are among the Pros.

It's worth noting that the Orbit Female CS:GO team isn't even all among the top 1% of players - they went 10-6 in ESEA-Open last season, which is the lowest level of competition which is even sanctioned. Any team that is dedicated and practices, even if they aren't good, will make it through Open at X-4 without much difficulty (I've coached a few teams through this).

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