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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?

#831

Post by edshiro »

danieka wrote: post #357
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…

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…

Great idea! I have just signed up and added some skills.

However, I am not sure how I should charge. Since you don't have enough people offering the same skills I promote and I presume very low to inexistent demand, there is no price correction at this stage, nor market to begin with :(.

It would be useful if somehow your app could suggest a recommended fee for a given skill.

It looks like a great idea though!

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

#832

Post by danieka »

edshiro wrote: post #831
danieka wrote: post #357

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…

Great idea! I have just signed up and added some skills. However, I am not sure how I should charge. Since you don't have enough people offering the same skills I promote and I presume very low to inexistent demand, there is no price correction at this stage, nor market to begin with :(. It would be useful if somehow your app could suggest a recommended fee for a given skill. It looks like a great idea though!

Thanks for signing up!

As you say there isn't much demand, but we are working on it. Thanks for your suggestion on recommending fees :)

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

#833

Post by danieka »

joeax wrote: post #728
danieka wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I like the idea too, but also got lost at no web interface. There are instances where you'd want to screen share and look at code. Slack integration would be kinda cool too.

Thanks for the feedback

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

#834

Post by peter_silie »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #139
marmaduke wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't these addressed by CGAL? Or you mean, you'd want database primitives using CGAL?

Unfortunately CGAL is not suitable, and yes you do need to support it in the underlying representation and database. The litmus test for a suitable computational geometry engine is the ability to do arbitrary ellipsoid computational geometry at something like one part per trillion error, and the ability to compute intersections of very complex polygons on that surface quickly. On that last point, you can execute an e…

I am not sure if all those goals can be combined.

For example, the intersection of n polygons could have exponentially many segments. To prevent denial of service, accuracy has to be sacrificed, but "one part per trillion error" sounds hard.

As another example, representing the intersection between two line segments without error requires a data type that has three times as many bits as the x/y components of their endpoints, so rounding has to happen here, too.

The only solution I can come up with that would not have those problems would be to subdivide a plane into grid cells of size one trillionth of whichever unit, rasterize all polygons into it do the Boolean operations at pixel-level, but that would require huge amounts of memory and processing power. And additionally it would be vulnerable to a DOS attack where the attacker sends many very large overlapping rectangles.

Lastly, huge amounts of data would require many computers to be able to work on this problem in parallel, but if an attacker sends only overlapping polygons, parallelization would be very tricky if not impossible.

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

#835

Post by Sophistifunk »

Lxr wrote: post #312
Sophistifunk wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think is the intersection of "needs to do a lot of LaTeX" and "pays for software" groups? Honest question.

Why do you think there is a small overlap? The first group is very large (almost all academics in CS/math/physics departments around the world) and is generally affiliated with universities that pay for software.

I didn't really know who the main users would be, that's why I asked :)

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

#836

Post by danieka »

danielvinson wrote: post #670
danieka wrote: post #357

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…

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…

She is a great coach (I've taken lessons from her) but I get you point. We are partnering with quite a lot of gamers, among them organisations like Denial and Elevate.

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

#837

Post by wolfgang42 »

tyingq wrote: post #3

The old shared hosting market is still pretty large. But it is stuck with ancient stuff like cpanel and mostly dominated by stagnant players like EIG, GoDaddy, and the like. Seems like there's room for a move something like what DigitalOcean did in the VPS space.

I'm currently running http://bitmash.io, which is a shared hosting service for PHP apps (currently WordPress and Piwik) that handles updates and manages the site for you (but also lets you control it if you'd like). I'd love to hear what sorts of features people want in a shared hosting service.

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

#838

Post by danieka »

danielvinson wrote: post #820
azm1 wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

We'd love to have you on our platform. Have you considered signing up?

I'm available on danielk at fliffr.com if you have any questions.

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

#839

Post by wolfgang42 »

sureshn wrote: post #364

I see an opportunity for a continuous delivery platform , if you notice on stackshare people use Jira(trello) , github , gitter(slack) and travis/jenkins for their work , so much of context switching happens navigating(working) the tools. The idea here is to build one platform which will have all of this in Tabs and available to the teams in a hosted manner. So when one delivers code , the next tab he should be able…

GitLab is doing this. They currently have:

- Issue tracking (jira)

- Issue kanban (trello)

- Git repository

- Chat, via bundled Mattermost (gitter/slack)

- CI (jenkins)

- Docker registry

Plus, they're planning on adding even more features. We have a self-hosted instance at work and I use it for pretty much everything other than email and actually writing code.

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

#840

Post by saddestcatever »

prestonpesek wrote: post #787
whitepoplar wrote: post #457

Physical 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.

This is exactly what spacious.com in NYC is working on, a network of coffee / meeting lounges across the city, inside really nice restaurant dining rooms that are otherwise closed until dinner service. (big disclaimer: I'm the cofounder).

Love it! (Little pricey in my opinion), but I can't tell you how often I've walked in and out of coffee shops just hoping to find an available seat - somewhere around other humans.
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