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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?

#911

Post by dx034 »

brw12 wrote: post #786
vegabook wrote: post #381

taking on the Bloomberg terminal. They've got over 300 000 subscribers each paying circa 2000 USD every month. That's 600 million dollars of revenue per month. They're running a labyrinthine functionality on a 1970s System/360-style interface (command line at top of screen). He hires an absolute army of "reps" who's sole job is to try to help subscribers to find functionality, through an interface that is best descri…

I also can't emphasize how ossified and inefficient the Bloomberg corporation itself is. I've spent months BEGGING them to take my company's money (we had 3 terminal subscriptions and wanted to increase to 4) with them stalling us because they wanted to upsell us on a direct T1 line (! for like 100MB/day of data, yeah right). The entire company and product is a mess. Unfortunately, last time I tried it, Reuters's com…

Reuters had the glorious idea to be modern and develop the front-end in JS. For an application where consistent high-speed delivery of information is the most important factor, that's just a terrible choice. For many companies, terminals are one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure. They shouldn't have to run in a browser engine.

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

#912

Post by dx034 »

sah2ed wrote: post #422
vegabook wrote: post #381

taking on the Bloomberg terminal. They've got over 300 000 subscribers each paying circa 2000 USD every month. That's 600 million dollars of revenue per month. They're running a labyrinthine functionality on a 1970s System/360-style interface (command line at top of screen). He hires an absolute army of "reps" who's sole job is to try to help subscribers to find functionality, through an interface that is best descri…

Surely, Money.Net [0] is a first step? It was founded by a former top executive at Bloomberg: Morgan Downey. [0] https://www.money.net/

The problem is that most of the alternatives are made solely for equities. There are other asset classes out there that are at least as big (or bigger) where there is virtually no competition.

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

#913

Post by dx034 »

brw12 wrote: post #788
gingerbread-man wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd probably need to invest substantially in antitrust litigation to get access to the raw data streams Bloomberg relies on.

There are many temporally-exclusive agreements on all sorts of data, some government-supplied (!). "Temporally-exclusive" means that anyone can use the data, but one company gets it 5-600 seconds early.

Those are usually rather owned by ThomsonReuters. They make huge amounts of money with exclusive data feeds for algo traders. For the terminal it doesn't matter if you see the data a few milliseconds later, too late to trade anyway.

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

#914

Post by dx034 »

ehnto wrote: post #138
mccolin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human element of home inspection is invaluable. That interaction between homeowner (or prospective) and a knowledgeable professional is critical. But drones as tools for that professional could be great.

I think he may have been referring to rental inspections, of the quarterly kind. A pretty standard checklist. "Is there mess, is there mould, is there damage, are there pets and is that allowed?"

And then you let a drone fly through a flat every quarter? I think the odds of destroying something in the process are higher than the saved costs.

On another note: Are quarterly rental inspections a thing in the US? Never heard of that, why should my landlord care if I tidy up my apartment?

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

#915

Post by dx034 »

nailer wrote: post #603
nailer wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> implying the pill for women doesn't have equally bad side-effects. - I actually wasn't talking about the women's pill at all - you can tell this by reading the post you're replying to. - But yes, inability to have sex is not a common side effect of the female pill. Which I suspect you also already know. Have you considered reading the HN guidelines?

In case it isn't clear: yes the female pill causes depression. It may, also, like the recent male pill, cause suicidal thoughts. However the female pill categorically does not prevent coitus, whereas not having an erection does.

Also, the pill for women was the first product and therefore only had to be better than the alternative. A pill for men would be a substitute to the current one for women and would therefore have to show improvement over that. Investing several billion $ just to end up with a drug that has the same side effect taken by the other gender is not a wise investment. Yes, there's the topic of gender equality, but there are already other alternatives that come with less side effects (but are less convenient).

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

#916

Post by dx034 »

cel1ne wrote: post #183
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.

Just wanted to add that, when taking on big-pharma, you should prepare being sued out of principle. There are so many patents in their hands.

Developing drugs is not just about taking on big pharma, it's about the risk of causing long-term harm or death to innocent people. There are very good reasons why there is such a strict regulation around new drugs. They only exist to avoid repetitions of what happened in the past. It's easy to be against big pharma, but we shouldn't forget that they improved our lives quite a bit (not associated in any way with a pharma company).

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

#917

Post by dx034 »

momentmaker wrote: post #470
fizerkhan wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, I desperately need "Stripe for the rest of the World".

There is bitcoin.

The high volatility and past problems with exchanges make it basically unusable for anyone without deeper knowledge in the field.

Also, it'll take a few seconds to pay via credit card, whereas converting the money on your account to bitcoins in the sellers account can easily take several hours.

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

#918

Post by dx034 »

mrschwabe wrote: post #282

The stock market (ready for disruption). There is a new generation of investors who are not interested in the 'old stock market' but who are instead looking for equity investment that can offer the efficiency, integrity and anonymity that cryptocurrency provides.

A good example for anonymous investments are bearer bonds. They're illegal in most countries (in their purest form) because they're a prime tool for money laundering. It won't be different for any other anonymous investment.

Also, stock markets are by far more efficient than bitcoin, especially when it comes to larger investments. A reason why algo traders are so widespread is because it's extremely cheap to buy/sell stocks if you're an institutional.

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

#919

Post by yoshyosh »

mgav wrote: post #641
jkaljundi wrote: post #99

Wonder what could change in the areas of online recruitment and candidate sourcing? It's a nice business because the business demand is always there - just provide the candidates. Still after Indeed/Simplyhired and Glassdoor, no major innovation besides some niche engineer scraping/sourcing tech. WHat could be done there?

I'm not a recruiter, but I have a startup for matching candidates and jobs on criteria other than what appears on resumes and LinkedIn, but it's hard to get much candidate volume. Even if (a huge "if") I'm right, and this is a much better way to match, it doesn't mean the world will change form what's "working" (or at least familiar) and adapt a new approach. Internal recruiters are often extremely busy and lots of n…

Sounds like the classic 10x problem. Switching costs are so high that your solution needs to be 10x and/or you find an underserved piece of the market to start

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

#920

Post by projectramo »

pdimitar wrote: post #881
CamperBob2 wrote: post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about rock stars?

Ninjas! I run away screaming when I see this in somebody's profile.

To be fair, that's because of the throwing stars, though. Everyone should be afraid of Ninjas.
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