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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?

#611

Post by petra »

NPMaxwell wrote: post #561

As specific organs reduce functioning, some seniors living at home need to revise their recipes to avoid complex collections of foods just as TIAs and other problems reduce their ability to deal with the challenges. To-go food does not work. For some families, hospital-style food may mimic the diet they are accustomed to, but for immigrants, traditional hospital food may be horrific. Older people tend to rely on a ve…

>> There are dietitian-run food delivery services, but not ones that create meals from clients' recipes.

The problem is that you need volume for it to make sense. One way to get that is aggregating a few people who want the same recipe. The other way is ordering those meals, frozen, for a bunch of days.

In either case, the people to talk to it about it are probably cooks on https://www.josephine.com/ .

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

#612

Post by disillusioned »

lisper wrote: post #523
icebraining wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Buyers have to go through an identity verification stage to gain access to the homes, including, I believe, the taking of a credit card. Not impossible to spoof, but far more frustrating than merely downloading an app, clicking "I agree" and getting the unlock code to burgle.

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

#613

Post by bobosha »

Enterprise passwords/keys sharing with an audit trail, non-repudiation, expiration and all that jazz. Most (all?) companies I know, including ours have challenges sharing such info. Current solution is mostly to use google drive or dropbox in most businesses I know.

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

#614

Post by hunckler »

tmsam wrote: post #235

A 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…

There's a new startup called Doxly that might be a good SaaS solution: http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthunckler/2016/12/05/doxly-co...

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

#615

Post by hunckler »

stult wrote: post #444
tmsam wrote: post #235

A 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…

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…

PactSafe is disrupting the online agreements space, has already raised some serious capital and landed some big name clients with its SaaS platform: http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthunckler/2016/11/03/pactsafe...

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

#616

Post by vit05 »

ThomPete wrote: post #559
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…

this topic reminds me the time I worked for GE. I was continues looking for something to use on Kaizen.

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

#617

Post by stult »

chuckus wrote: post #552
sitkack wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's pretty much true in general. Our fees are dictated more by the market than our actual costs. So if we were billing fewer hours, we'd just raise the hourly billing rate for our associates.

From our perspective in the national standards group, we would actually want our associates to just spend more time on value added activities. Instead of wasting time organizing PDFs of exhibits and monkeying around in spreadsheets, we want to them evaluating the relevant legal and technical tax issues. So it's not precisely cost control that is the primary concern, but quality assurance.

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

#618

Post by vinay427 »

treehau5 wrote: post #604
vinay427 wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there's no real precedent for an entire society needing few workers, so I'm not sure that either of us could guess with any certainty what would happen. I'm not saying things will work out, but it's never been tried to the best of my knowledge.

Yeah, I don't mean this disrespectfully, but that's probably one of the worst rationales for trying something, at least for something important as this.

I agree. I'm not the one trying to change the status quo. I'm not actively invested in this cause because I don't see clear dangers yet. Jobs are naturally becoming more automated by nature of productivity and efficiency, so if you want to prevent that you need to make a stronger case than "it may not work because we've never done it before".

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

#619

Post by ktaylor »

huherto wrote: post #406

Uber 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, s…

There are a ton of regulations around preparing food for sale. They vary from state to state. There are cottage laws popping up in some states that allow certain foods to be prepared without heavy regulation, mainly for food categories that are more self-stable and don't easily spoil (E.G. turn deadly) such as baked breads, candy, etc.

Instead of "selling" the food, though, maybe the structure could be a food club or other value swap.

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

#620

Post by scrollaway »

fasterthanlime wrote: post #602
scrollaway wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite incredibly thorough. How familiar are you with Blizzard's NGDP protocol / CASC file format?

Not at all, but after a cursory look it seems to solve a slightly different (and easier, imho) problem. I might be mistaken!

It's actually exactly what you described - the documentation is very sparse on it because it's an internal thing (I'm guessing you found the CASC documentation, not the NGDP one). If you're interested, shoot me an email and I can send you some more details; but it'd simply be for intellectual curiosity, as I said it's an internal protocol.
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