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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?

#111

Post by mamcx »

chollida1 wrote: post #27

Data management. 1) Cleaning the data as it comes in rather than in batches so we can use it sooner, invalid data is discarded, outlier detection, normalizing inputs etc.... 2) Warehousing of the data with proper indexes so you can perform some advanced queries on unstructured data 3) Some data is sent in bulk at the end of day, some of the data is streamed in fire hose style. How can we preprocess the fire hose data…

This is a area I like to work.

I have seen local companies working for months/years to finally use his BI package but the trouble at the step 1 is big (and also, to put the data in a "nice" schema).

The problem is that enter in this space is hard. Years ago I was at a company that have a niche product (in foxpro) for this kind of task, and I have dreamed about build something like this based in my experience, but get the funding for this kind of "boring" task is hard (more in my country, Colombia).

P.D: If wanna help, we can talk. I can't give a magical solution but at least I find this kind of "boring" jobs compelling ;)

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

#112

Post by ruairidhwm »

kolbe wrote: post #45

Not my industry, but a friend of mine in law was discussing how incredible her in-house software is for managing billable hours relative to all her past companies. I poked around, and most law firms, even very deep pocketed ones, use somewhere between a bad tech system and no tech system to manage and track their work. A small team could easily collaborate with some law firm (maybe take an investment from a few law f…

I'm a lawyer and a programmer and run a legal-tech startup. The largest issue I've found with lawyers and technology is that they don't understand it, and there is a lot of fear around it.

Most of the time I spent selling my software was assuaging the risk-averse mindset that exists in the profession, rather than advertising the benefits. I actually gave a TEDx talk on this point as I think it's an enormous issue in the industry.

So the ease of creating the software isn't the issue, it's the culture. That said, legal tech now has a pretty healthy ecosystem which is a delight to see!

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

#113

Post by saosebastiao »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #107
saosebastiao wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you solve a problem that you can't adequately analyze or characterize? How will you know if you aren't trying a failed solution if you don't know what has been tried? How will you know if your simplifications and assumptions are realistic if you haven't seen how they've played out in the past?

See step 1 and 2.

So hire people that already know the industry?

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

#114

Post by my_username_is_ »

reneherse wrote: post #95
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #85

Rapid generation of high quality 3D models of existing objects. Process should be independent of object size eg. a coke can should use the same process as a car and process time should scale with object size. Think somewhere on the order of 10,000 models per day throughput. There's $BNs waiting for you. It's ridiculously hard.

What is the use case for the models themselves?

Product development engineer here. In the early stages of a project it can be useful to have CAD models of a competitor's product when analyzing how to improve upon them. Recently we had an intern reverse engineer a competitor's product, and we've used some of these CAD models as the basis for our new designs.

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

#115

Post by AndrewKemendo »

saosebastiao wrote: post #113
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See step 1 and 2.

So hire people that already know the industry?

Yes exactly.

Often they don't have the tech skills or desire/will to start something themselves, but are happy to join you if they recognize that it's a big enough problem.

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

#116

Post by zitterbewegung »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #85

Rapid generation of high quality 3D models of existing objects. Process should be independent of object size eg. a coke can should use the same process as a car and process time should scale with object size. Think somewhere on the order of 10,000 models per day throughput. There's $BNs waiting for you. It's ridiculously hard.

Do you know what has been tried before or references to other attempts?

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

#117

Post by whataretensors »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #85

Rapid generation of high quality 3D models of existing objects. Process should be independent of object size eg. a coke can should use the same process as a car and process time should scale with object size. Think somewhere on the order of 10,000 models per day throughput. There's $BNs waiting for you. It's ridiculously hard.

Where exactly are the $BNs in this tech? Also, any datasets? I'd love to experiment.

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

#118

Post by ransom1538 »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #3

Not in my industry but I'm part of an HOA and I swear 2/3 of what the people paid to administer it do seems streamlinable/automatable with lots of opportunity for making money along the way. Every time I deal with them I proclaim to myself, STARTUP! Then I forget about it..

I can confirm. HOA software is big. It's mainly managing PDFs and sending emails out. E.g. https://www.condocerts.com

It's a decent industry my friend (not after this posting) makes ~300k a year working on it. However the race may be ending as these companies lock apartment managers into long complicated contracts. Not sure how many apartment managers at scale still need.

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

#119

Post by nhebb »

mabbo wrote: post #79
shinamee wrote: post #48

Tech industry: I want to be able to go to Mars for the weekend... leaving on Friday and coming back early Monday morning. This is still a big problem in tech industry.

You're being facetious but maybe you should actually consider the history behind that sort of thing. Yesterday my friend in LA invited a few of us in Toronto to come to his BBQ this weekend. The group chat became us discussing the logistics and price of how we might do that. 150 years ago, that would have been an insane concept.

300 years ago, when Benjamin Franklin traveled from Philadelphia to Boston, the trip took two weeks. The fastest mode of travel was by boat, and he nearly died in a boat wreck.

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

#120

Post by asragab »

chollida1 wrote: post #27

Data management. 1) Cleaning the data as it comes in rather than in batches so we can use it sooner, invalid data is discarded, outlier detection, normalizing inputs etc.... 2) Warehousing of the data with proper indexes so you can perform some advanced queries on unstructured data 3) Some data is sent in bulk at the end of day, some of the data is streamed in fire hose style. How can we preprocess the fire hose data…

What I envision a solution to be like, would be something like an configurable/codeable OpenRefine (was Google Refine) with streaming ingestion/extraction, with a validation engine/parsing engine (something more elegant than regex, but you can drop into that if necessary) and maybe a pluggable event processor (i.e. a Spark or Flink). I would love to work on such a problem, and solve it.
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