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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?

#551

Post by rpedela »

exceptione wrote: post #291
rpedela wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I investigated doing a SaaS product in the legal space. One of the things I heard multiple times from lawyers is that they are more likely to buy a product if they can bill their clients directly. What you are talking about would not fall into that category. That doesn't mean you couldn't build a successful business, but I think it is important to understand that the market has different rules.

(...) if they can bill their clients directly. Can you explain what you mean? Letter generation etc is still usefull, I don't see what billing has to do with it. They can still charge what they want to.

Sure. The purpose of a SaaS product would be to improve efficiency and save time. Given lawyers typically charge by the hour, they would lose money unless they could bill their clients directly for the use of the more efficient software to make up for the lost revenue due to saved time. However billing clients for legal software is not the norm.

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

#552

Post by chuckus »

sitkack wrote: post #478
stult wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I'm a lawyer and a product owner at a big accounting firm, so I'm pretty well positioned to discuss this topic. I have half a dozen solid startup ideas that I'm tempted to take and start running with right now. Documentation management alone is in desperate need of innovation. I build toy apps in my spare time that cut thousands of dollars of charge hours young associates waste on bullshit tasks, just withi…

> cut thousands of dollars of charge hours young associates waste on bullshit tasks Doesn't this take money away from your firm? It is only when firms are competing on cost, time or client recognized quality that they will institute better workflows via software.

Depends, there are billable hours e.g. time spent with customers and non-billable hours e.g. administrative tasks not specific to any customer such as payroll, transfer of knowledge between work colleagues. So by targeting reduction of non-billable hours, you would have a compelling reason to sell to firms who bill by time.

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

#553

Post by prawn »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #32
LeanderK wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does HOA stand for?

Homeowners Association - Might be US thing - but basically Condos / Townhouses / even neighborhoods form associations to take care of the 'commons' / enforce a look for the neighborhood, etc... There's usually a monthly payment. Repairs / work orders / disputes are settled through them. There's bylaws...

Equivalent in Australia is a Strata Corp and the resulting meetings they involve.

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

#554

Post by svnee »

ajepst wrote: post #391

All 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…

This is an idea I also considered, given that in Europe the software is similarly awful, but at least the guy (yes, the one guy) here is still doing some improvements.

See http://www.topturnier.de/ for what he is doing.

If one would like to do something in this space I'd go with a solution where you can rent the equipment, get it shipped to you in boxes and ship it back later. For larger organisers you could arrange for leasing options or an on-premise installation that has an auto-update.

The advantage would be to provide offline capabilities including a controlled network environment for adjudicators.

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

#555

Post by webmaven »

Gruselbauer wrote: post #408

I 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…

It sounds as though a customizable CMSm or DMS would be just the thing to take care of the fiddly bits that trip up developers of de-novo solutions (ie. accessibility, internationalization, usability, binary format document storage and indexing, access control, etc.). My personal favorite in this space is Plone[1] which has an excellent security record and happens to have many EU developers, but most of the popular contenders will do as a starting point.

Enterprise intranet/extranet apps often start out small and then spread like kudzu, eventually prompting a major project to replace them wholesale with a huge consulting-ware solution (like Sharepoint) that never fulfils the promises made (The exception being the specific niche you're asking about, compliance, which does have proprietary solutions that work, but are incredibly expensive).

To avoid that fate, try to pick something that you know can start small but you have evidence that it can also easily (ie. without a huge consulting engagement) scale to an organization-wide solution with 3rd-party as well as in-house extensions.

Good luck!

[1] https://plone.org

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

#557

Post by jupiter90000 »

mysterypie wrote: post #498
jupiter90000 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in a tech department of a rather large law services organization. There was a desire to maintain certain inefficiencies so that more hours could be billed to clients. If it could be done in 25% of the time, that's 75% less they could bill clients for 'attorney time spent.' See how well pitching 'do it faster and make less' goes over.

Can't they still bill whatever they want? If 10 hours of proofreading, form filling, photocopying, and filing would be billed for $1500 (10 hours x $150 an hour), couldn't they still charge $1500 if the software took 80 milliseconds to do the same job? Oh, the clients expect an itemized bill? Simple, the above charges would be "10 legal intern equivalent hours @ $150/hour". If a client questions it, the lawyer can ex…

Not saying something like this would be impossible, just saying what I saw. However, the line of reasoning could be slippery. For example, they could say "1000 lawyer hours at X dollars an hour." When questioned, the company says "we could of had them trace all the documents with a pen to copy them by hand. Instead we used a photocopier, so we're billing you for the awesome technology." Seems like it'd be a hard sell and possibly unethical (in another way than it already is). I do think things might be able to be changed in terms of mentality, though.

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

#558

Post by svnee »

Gruselbauer wrote: post #408

I 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…

This looks like a problem we recently solved for driving schools in Luxembourg that needed to track a lot of data about students for legal and internal reasons.

I'd be very interested in discussing the needs for a compliance and documentation tracker system and see if there is a market for it.

You can reach me at clement@clement-weyer.lu

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

#559

Post by ThomPete »

kapauldo wrote: post #556

This is the best thread I've ever read on HN. It's like going to a conference without the time and cost spend. How about a product that does this thread once a week. Half therapy half happy hour.

I started the original thread last year:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007 and the discussion was so valuable and resulted in this essay https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4...

We been talking about doing it monthly. And I have been talking with a few people about creating a conference around it. No pitches, no ted-lets save the world speaks. Just problems and people who are looking for problems to solve.

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

#560

Post by ThomPete »

pj_mukh wrote: post #355
ThomPete wrote: post #88

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.

Seconded. Might even help us get out of the mindset of building things for other 20-somethings to replace their moms.

Exactly. The whole point is to get access to people with insights about an industry and who can point to the problems and why they haven't been solved and connect them with people who might have solutions to those problems.

Just imagine how much valuable knowledge and insights get lost every time someone retires.

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