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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?

#521

Post by myegorov »

ggcdn wrote: post #62
tacostakohashi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the total size of this market - how many users/seats are there out there for this?

Not sure. In the US there are about 281,400 civil engineers [1]. I couldn't find more detailed information on structural engineers. -Assume about 10% are practicing structural engineers who need to design concrete structures = 28140. -Assume a company wants 1 license for every 2 engineers = 14070. (I base this off the fact that my company has 6 licenses for 12 engineers, but we may be higher than average) -Assume we…

I think this is an overoptimistic view of the size of the market. The field is highly fragmented. A large fraction of structural engineers are contractors or work for smaller firms (think wood design, rather than concrete/steel) and wouldn't be target customers for section analysis and concrete detailing software. An absolute majority of those that work for the larger firms don't require anything more than Excel spreadsheets. From my experience, a typical structural engineer is a rather savvy computer user, often times writing Excel macros or AutoLISP scripts to automate their tasks.

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

#522

Post by elgfare »

endisukaj wrote: post #216
jakub_g wrote: post #178

Email parsing and extracting data from it, (input data in multiple languages), that is not strictly depending on predefined templates but being able to adjust itself. Think parsing emails from multiple providers of certain kind of service and exposing common data model. Looks like perfect usage of machine learning.

Doesn't GMail do this already? It's not perfect but it extracts data such as plane tickets or hotel reservations and saves those to your calendar.

I think it just parses some standardized markup

https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/overview

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

#523

Post by lisper »

icebraining wrote: post #517
lisper wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to me to be fraught with all manner of peril. Suppose a burglar poses as a buyer under an assumed identity, and then robs the house while wearing a mask. What is the recourse?

Apparently Opendoor literally buys (and fixes up) the house and then re-sells it, rather than simply arranging the transaction, so they're selling an empty house.

Ah, I see. That actually makes a lot of sense.

But what if someone steals the appliances? That is actually a problem for new construction.

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

#524

Post by danieltillett »

rmrm wrote: post #305
takinola wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be very careful trying to solve this "problem". While MS Word change tracking may seem abhorrent to you, most lawyers are well trained in its use and are very comfortable using it. Also, switching costs are huge. A lawyer would not only need to see the benefit of an alternative but also convince all other lawyers they work with to put aside the solution they are already comfortable using and try something new.

I should note - yes, my wife sees no problem at all with this workflow. My understanding of the workflow is that they will send a clean copy as well as the redline to each other. Sometimes someone will in response further modify the wrong copy, and send back, which causes problems as it becomes unclear what was accepted and what was not and someone has to manually go through and check things. I hear that complaint co…

... and what is the consequence of this 'problem' to the billable hours?

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

#525

Post by kpil »

mabbo wrote: post #77
ggcdn wrote: post #37

As a structural engineer, I see a good opportunity to make reinforced concrete design software available in a SaaS format. The competition is outdated, clunky, requires local installation and messing about with licenses. Design firms are paying $1000-$3000/year per user/seat for what amounts to a pretty basic app. Unfortunately, there are very few people that understand both computer science and structural engineerin…

I suspect much engineering software is ripe for innovation. My wife is a Water Resources Engineer- a specialized form of Civil that focuses on "when it rains, where the hell is all this water going to go?". The software for that kind of modeling is apparently pretty basic, pretty expensive, buggy, etc.

I think that the models are quite advanced and where the money goes.

It does not mean that you just can't take a couple of web developers and make it usable, but as the market is small it might pass the price point with a supersonic bang...

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

#526

Post by briandear »

morgante wrote: post #509
zo1 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is one of mindset. From my perspective, even looking at accountants. Their industry and the clients they serve think that they are selling their "time", and not a service by itself. So, reducing the time it takes the lawyer/accountant to do something simply means less time being billed. It does not mean that they can now charge "more" for the time, as the cost per unit of that expert's time appear…

Exactly. The legal industry predominantly uses hourly billing and making up "equivalent hours" would be extremely unethical. It's part of why I encourage everyone I know (particularly developers) to switch from hourly to fixed-price billing. Any efficiencies you gain should belong to you, not the customer. (There's also the fact that I find a lot more people are willing to pay $10k for X than $250/hr for 40 hours.)

The problem with fixed price as a developer is that rarely are requirements exactly understood or detailed enough to actually be able to bid the job. "Export to PDF" ok.. no problem -- that then turns into: "can you add page numbers? Can you support A4 - and US letter sizes?" And you have scope creep-- one more little thing isn't reasonable to say no to, however it quickly becomes a death by a thousand paper cuts. Ok, so now you price in that enevitable scope creep, so now your price is much higher. "$5000 to export to PDF? That's crazy!" -- yes but I am anticipating the fact that you don't know exactly what you want. "But we do, we made it clear!"

You see how that goes. Project pricing leads to a guessing game. Billing hourly is fair for everyone, at least in software. If I am more efficient, I pass that onto the customer. I don't 'lose' money -- it usually results in more work.

Imagine charging $80 for some corn because I want to make the same money as if I had guys hand-picking and hand seeding and doing the entire farming process without machines. That corn only cost me $0.10 to produce but I am charging a price as if I didn't have modern efficiencies. I would sell a lot less corn and actually profit less due to both competition and price elasticity. People would look for alternatives to corn.

In software, not passing on efficiencies means that there would actually be a smaller market for software development. Imagine how bad the market would be for us if we wrote everything in assembly. A simple web site might cost $100m and there'd be exactly 5 people in the world building websites.

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

#527

Post by DanBC »

cc439 wrote: post #265
DanBC wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone should really fix toasters. They have. They're called dualit. https://www.amazon.com/Dualit-20293-2-Slice-Toaster-Chrome/d...

>$189 I bought my bottom of the barrel Wal-Mart toaster for $6 about 8 years ago. It might occasionally have issues popping out a piece of bread but it cost $6 and it toasts bread consistently. I'm mostly holding on to this thing to prove a point to the "they don't make them like they used to" and the "you have to spend at least $100+ on X or else it will break in a week" crowd. I know it isn't the best toaster out t…

I agree. I'm just pointing out that if you want a toaster that takes fat slices they're available.

Maybe I should have linked to this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Russell-Hobbs-22400-Slice-Toaster/d...

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

#528

Post by eli »

rafaelm wrote: post #421
eli wrote: post #250

It's still surprisingly hard to send email newsletters. I want software or a service that sits on top of mailgun/ses/my own SMTP server and handles list management, templating, link redirection, and analytics. And that stores everything in a way that makes further data mining easy. Lots of services solved the just sending email part. And lots of mailchimp type services offer a complete product geared towards marketer…

Besides Sandy which aj0strow already mentioned, there's another solution called Mailtrain. It's open source and has some of the missing sendy features. I've been meaning to try it for a while now.

Will check it out, thanks. I could imagine an OSS based business model working here. I'd gladly pay for support and perhaps sponsor feature development.

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

#529

Post by cake93 »

bicubic wrote: post #516
cake93 wrote: post #372

AR/VR visualization of 3D and 4D microscopy data (multicolor 3D video, as well as 3D point clouds over time) for biological research. Look for "lattice light sheet microscopy" or "superresolution microscopy" such as (3D)-STORM or STED. These techniques are adopted at a high pace. Groups spent $ 500,000 and often more on the hardware. They can produce terabytes of data within days, but we hardly have any tools to view…

Do you know where I could source some sample data? I'm developing a VR data visualization system but not in this particular context, could certainly look into it.

Here, follow the instructions to download and install the HDF5 plugin for Fiji:

http://lmb.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/resources/opensource/i...

From the same site you can download "pollen.h5". Then follow the steps to load the dataset in "hyperstack (multichannel)" mode. This will open a window where each frame in the movie is a z-slice of the 3D image.

Then go to Plugins/Volume Viewer (scroll down) and switch the mode (top left) to "Volume". (this is what you should get: http://i.imgur.com/0QoGa1t.png)

The same people also published lots of 3D data of the zebrafish embry. Have a look at:

http://vibez.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/

Look for "e098.h5" to download it.

If you have never worked with the HDF5 format before, you can use HDF5 View (https://support.hdfgroup.org/products/java/hdfview/) to look into the files. As you can see here (http://i.imgur.com/nnTiyQh.png) the data in pollen.h5 basically is a uint8-array of 193x199x419.

There are libraries for many languages to read HDF5. Eg. "h5py" for Python.

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

#530

Post by 6stringmerc »

krisroadruck wrote: post #352
6stringmerc wrote: post #134

A monthly subscription service for a fee of $5 - $10 where every month I get a new kind of quirky instrument (shaker, wind, wood block and stick, whistle, triangle, or other noise maker) as a surprise by mail. The point of the service in the music industry is to inspire new sounds and the device can either be kept or given away to somebody without a lot of second thought. Getting stuck is a big problem. Also in music…

This would actually be fairly straight forward to launch yourself using something like http://cratejoy.com Subscription boxes are a thing :-)

Very cool and thank you for providing input! I've already got the 'spiderweb' model in mind so crunching some numbers might be fun, err, well, informative. I'm planning to spend 2017 learning JavaScript and building small things so to have a list of personal projects seems neat. Appreciate your time!
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