Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup? • Hacker News Board

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

#651

Post by lisper » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 11:22 PM UTC

grogenaut wrote: post #608

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?

The house unlocks to a tracked verified identity from a smart phone, Not to random people in masks, would be my guess. Also empty houses are hard to steal only vandalize

I guess I'm asking how the identity is verified. It's not hard to spoof an identity on a smart phone. And empty houses are full of copper wire and electrical appliances (and in this case, apparently, security cameras) which are commonly stolen from construction sites (and cost a lot more than a smart phone nowadays).

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

#652

Post by jondobbs » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 11:32 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #320

bdangubic wrote: post #138

Earlier 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.)

We are actually in the process of building out a platform that gives home sellers the power to sell their home with the support, guidance, and advice of an agent without the fees. Feedback is welcome.

In less that 30 seconds, you can begin the process of listing your home with no contract or fees and includes MLS syndication.

The app auto-dispatches photography, drop-ships signs and lock-boxes, and starts the documentation management process.

At anytime you can reach out to your agent via phone, chat, or email.

When offers come in, they are displayed in "easy to understand" language and you can review then with you agent/listing account manager anytime.

When closing time comes, we dispatch a notary to the home and you exchange everything at the home. Super easy. Super convenient.

How we make money:

We retain a small fee at closing. When you go to buy your next home, we rebate that fee back to you when you use one of our vetted affiliate agents.

It is a win win. We keep the small fee and the agent "rebate" is essentially the acquisition fee for the guaranteed buyer. Agents don't waste their time working leads that will most likely not close (which is part of the reason why big commissions exist) and home sellers save thousands of dollars.

We operate in Colorado right now using brute force but V1 of our app will be released in January of 2017. We will be servicing Washington, Colorado, and Minnesota as of Februaury.

www.bluematchrealty.com

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

#653

Post by gentleteblor » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 11:34 PM UTC

bobosha wrote: post #645

gentleteblor wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these passwords for individual use (in SaaS apps for example) or are they passwords to enterprise assets (databases, document stores etc). I've used Azure Key Vault quite a bit and it might be a good solution to the latter scenario.

Those seem MS specific, something lightweight, dropbox-ish/slack-ish easy-to-use app for enterprise security sharing.

Key Vault is an MS service for sure, but you can use it for anything as it has rest api.

It's not as friendly as drobox/slack but it's far more secure.

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

#654

Post by pj_mukh » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 11:34 PM UTC

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.

P.S: I love using all the things that replace my mom and fully support them being built. But, there's obviously other problems to solve.

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

#655

Post by jondobbs » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 11:36 PM UTC

jondobbs wrote: post #652

jefftk wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

We are actually in the process of building out a platform that gives home sellers the power to sell their home with the support, guidance, and advice of an agent without the fees. Feedback is welcome. In less that 30 seconds, you can begin the process of listing your home with no contract or fees and includes MLS syndication. The app auto-dispatches photography, drop-ships signs and lock-boxes, and starts the documen…

Ps. We are currently working on a target fee of $995. We are testing various fee structures in different markets.

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

#656

Post by tommynicholas » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 11:47 PM UTC

brettlangdon wrote: post #564

tommynicholas wrote: post #233

BI for developers. Developers run many organizations and teams now, but most Business Intelligence-ish tools are either built for business people (Tableau, Domo) or for marketing (all analytics products, specifically GA). I feel like there's a big opportunity for a tool/tools that are installed in apps as a package and then customized from there. Many teams build a version of this in house (Instacart open-sources the…

Not 100% what you are looking for, since you specify "installed in apps as a package", but we are using https://redash.io/ and love it. They are open source and very easy to run ad-hoc queries, save/schedule queries and alerts, and build dashboards.

VERY nice

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

#657

Post by ThomPete » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 11:49 PM UTC

sah2ed wrote: post #631

ThomPete wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is were you are missing the bigger picture though. The solutions to the problem in your industry might not be based on the skills or insights of your industry. It might be that someone recognizes the similarity from another industry where the problem was solved in a specific way or that the insight just so happens to be solvable based on the knowledge of some specific technology. And it's NOT about ideas…

I think both of you are talking past each other here. The crux of your argument is that an outsider may be able to pattern-match better than industry insiders/domain experts. In other words, an outsider can recognize a potential solution by translating his/her experience with an efficient solution from a different industry. He is saying that you need to properly understand things from the perspective of an industry i…

But thats the whole point though. To combine knowledge from insiders with outsiders. Never said anything else.

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

#658

Post by qwerunf » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 12:01 AM UTC

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…

umi.kitchen

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

#659

Post by sitkack » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 12:08 AM UTC

stult wrote: post #633

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.

>Doesn't this take money away from your firm? No, because we are in fact competing on cost and client-recognized quality, and to a lesser extent time. Plus our fees are driven more by the market than by our actual costs, so if we billed fewer hours, we would simply bill at a higher rate to reach the same expected fee while still maintaining our position in the marketplace. Or if we could reduce our fee, we might be a…

This is great news! I did a PoC for a document search system for discovery, OCR and full-text search. We deemed it too hard of a sell for law firms. Maybe the landscape is changing.

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

#660

Post by nsoonhui » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 12:29 AM UTC

ggcdn wrote: post #632

nsoonhui wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was more leaning towards member design software, such as spColumn and S-Concrete. The utility of your software tools will be very limited if you are restricting yourself to only member design instead of total structure solutions like ETABS. Why should engineer pay you at all if they can use spreadsheet for free to do what you do with your SaaS? > No one I know is using the automated concrete design built into ana…

> Why should engineer pay you at all if they can use spreadsheet for free to do what you do with your SaaS? Why do businesses invest in new tech? Why pay for excel when I can use a pen and calculator? The answer is because it makes them more efficient. We have excel sheets to do the same thing, matlab code to do the same thing, and yet here we are paying for these member design tools because they are the most efficie…

Since you can already do the analysis (like ETABS), and you are planning to do individual member design, why put the two and two together and do an automated RC analysis+design software? There is no reason to distrust an automated software anymore than separate analysis+design software.