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

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281–290 of 734 posts

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

#281

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..

http://www.ciraconnect.com/ is a fairly young company in this space...

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

#282
It's not really start up material but Sage/MAS is basically crap for companies that need custom work. The door warehouse I worked at basically needed 2-3 parallel system (1-2 of them being us scribbling on paper) because we custom fabricated doors and MAS was basically useless for passing that kind of thing around.

P.S. If any of you are in Austin I recommend Hull Supply, they're good people.

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

#283
post #130

My wife is a corporate attorney. They pass drafts of contracts around by email using MS word with change tracking enabled. Some sort of attorney targeted simple revision tracking front end using git would be a mighty step forward.

There are quite a few start-ups that have tried to solve for this. But the legal industry...

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

#284

I posted a similar question last year great discussion there too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007 I would suggest we make a monthly of these as they provide important insight into industries.

Yep, I was reading through the discussion in your post and thought it would be interesting to shake that tree once more so I reposted the question.

Great to hear.

I got so exited about the thread and it made me realise something very interesting which I turned into an essay. I call it looking for hidden problems underneat obvious solutions.

https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4...

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

#285

Radio Industry. I know it's a slowly dying business, but that's because the giants are too slow to turn. I want to be able to go to a website, ask for demographics that I am looking for and be able to purchase an advertisement and hire talent to record my commercial. As it stands, you have to deal with salespeople.

Isn't this what ad agencies are supposed to do? Or are you saying you want a digital-only ad agency, like Adwords, except for radio?

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

#286
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…

I think it is also partly because any inefficiency in work leads to an increase in the Billable Hour. When it makes you more money it isn't really broken.

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

#288

A request/approval system. The current offerings are laughably unusable.

I bookmarked a few gmail apps for this a while back, though have not used them myself. Does either of these look like what you are after?

https://www.wizy.io/solutions/gmail_workflow.html https://kissflow.com/how-it-works/

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

#289
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low end of what market? Propose an idea.

I was just answering the OP. With all these downvotes for that I have nothing more to say.

Sorry but I have no idea who you are or what you are talking about. What kind of market are you referring to?

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

#290

In real estate, developing with MLS data. - There are over 900 regional MLS providers each with different schemas. - You use RETS, a complicated, non web standards interface for downloading data. - MLS data is plagued with errors and denormalized data making queries difficult.

Have you seen https://simplyrets.com/ ? I haven't used it but it looks like a great start. This problem is hard to solve at the root because each MLS is independently owned and heavily influenced by the National Association of Realtors and local governments. As an active RE investor myself, I'd love to work on a problem in this space.

You hit the nail on the head. Having developed with MLS data before, my opinion is there's little incentive for MLSs to make the data easy to work with. As long as each MLS gets their data distributed on the large portals that most consumers use, there's little reward to update (read: spend money on) their systems to implement a modern format to help indie developers and startups. That's the status quo. I don't think anything is going to change unless the large portals band together and spearhead some kind of industry-wide effort to fix this problem.

As an aside, I'm working on a RE investment product that solves challenges similar to this one and I'm looking for RE investors to join me. If you're interested, shoot me an email at hello[at]myname.com.

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