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Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
401–410 of 734 posts
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#402We are an human powered audio/video transcription service and have lots of training data that can be used for training a speech recognition system. An ASR-as-a-Service in the cloud kind of platform where we can use our data to continuously train and improve the models would be very useful for us.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#403Immigration. Every time I change jobs as an H1-B employee, I've to fill in the same ridiculous data with every law firms weird interface. I wish the US Digital Services would focus on streamlining forms and having auto-import from all the data they already have about me (e.g. automatically translate I-94 records to how much time I actually spent in the US, infer my past I-797 records automatically, have a one time ed…
I am in same boat. There is a YC startup simplelegal that is trying to do this. But startups can't fix main issues with the immigration.
SimpleLegal is not working on immigration. You may be thinking of Simplecitizen. Teleborder also tried. Along with many other non-YC companies. It's not a easy problem.
Source: am cofounder of SimpleLegal
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#404Earlier 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.
You gave a very vague, short answer to something that really needed a better answer. A story the poor are dealing with. A volume market possibility you were hoping someone would supply. The downvotes are deserved.
You could always give a good paragraph answer that everyone else is contributing to this otherwise excellent post. Maybe the downvotes would disappear.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#405All the ballroom dance competitions use this old, disliked software to organize and run the events. The guy who wrote it isn't interested in making improvements, (and it can certainly use improvements) and is happy living off the income from people's per event usage rights. I am sure if something modern and regularly updated came out, it would get a lot of uptake. Thing is, the portion of it that runs during the even…
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Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#406Uber for cooks.
People cook food in their homes. You select the food from several cooks in your area in an app, drive to their house and pick the food.
I imagine a housewife/househusband that is already cooking for her/his family to prepare more portions. Snap a photo, a description, and price. It can be extra income for something that she/him is already doing.
People would use the product because it is convenient, saves times and they get more food variety.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
The entire Real-Estate industry is ripe for disruption. Exactly why are we paying 6% to "agents"? What are "agents" actually doing? 10+ years ago the need for "Real Estate Agents" was there as information was not readily accessible. Things like "what kind of area is this property in", "what are schools like" "what are prospects for this area 5 years down the road" and so on. All this information (and MUCH more) is cu…
The entire Real-Estate industry is ripe for disruption. Exactly why are we paying 6% to "agents"? https://www.redfin.com/ is already doing this. They charge half the normal fee if you're selling and they give about half of their fee to you after purchase if you're buying. (We bought our house with them.)
Sure, but what you are paying 1/2 for? Imagine owning a home which sells for $1,000,000. Currently you pay roughly 6% - $60,000. You pick Redfin - they charge take the money and give you back 1/2 but you are still paying them $30,000!!
But if your house is sold for $100,000 you'd pay $6,000 or $3,000 to Redfin. The whole thing is just the biggest currently running scam that I can think of and someone will come along and totally disrupt this entire industry of scammers :-)
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#408I work for a small high end cosmetics business in the European Union. That particular industry has a lot of compliance and documentation rules imposed on it by Brussels. My predecessor in the line sadly pushed using Apple's Filemaker for that. It's not even that bad in the latest version and certainly offers some advantages over similar solutions but the guy was horribly in over his head. I'm talking fifty fields in a table having near identical names, undocumented... everything, no clear UI design paradigms, needlessly complicated UX and storing PDF as binary data in tables by the thousands.
But I feel like I'm stuck with repairing his shit because there's not a nice and clean solution anywhere in sight. I thought of Wiki systems but the actual data entry will be done by people who would be completely put off by any kind of syntax/markup whatsoever. I'm neither good enough a Web developer to roll something similar myself nor can I dream of creating something like an entire documentation system.
I think the problem might apply to other smaller businesses in the EU and especially Germany, too. Lots of docu to have ready in the unlikely but not impossible case of an inspection.
For the cosmetics industry it'd need to be able to track ingredients, lots of external evaluation docu, internal procedures and so on. While at the same time it would need to be usable by people who are far removed from tech literate.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#409The oil and gas industry is ripe with potential start ups. Here are a few that come to mind: 1. A better system for automation and measurement. Current solutions aren't ideal when it comes to setting up new systems as well as updating and maintaining existing systems. We build several million dollar facilities a month and each one has automation and measurement equipment that has to be individually set up and program…
Are you in this industry? Where could I learn more about #2? Sounds like something up my alley...
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#410A family member is a lawyer in the Worker's Comp, SS, and Family Law space. THE software for lawyers in this space is called A1 Law. It solves a lot of real problems lawyers in that space have (form letter generation, calendar integration, case management)... but it's so slow to use new technologies. They advertise PalmOS integration. My family member has to have their own server in a closet running the server versio…
A lawyer friend of mine told me his firm doesn't use software to check all the "hereafter referred to" are bound to their template and vice-versa. They instead have to print the document and go through it with a highlighter. The firm charges their clients on an hourly basis, so they don't really have an incentive to be more efficient.
You hit the nail on the head, there is an incentive to automate legal services ala legal zoom but for lawyers themselves the more tedious and paper based the process is the more they can make.