Someone looking for start up ideas?
I'd automate startup idea creation.
Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
171–180 of 258 posts
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#172I used to work in a big law firm working on startup-related corporate work. A substantial portion of my job looked like this: * Find a form or template for a document. Sometimes the "template" wasn't really a template but "we worked on a deal that was pretty similar to this one three months ago -- use that". Sometimes the template was "use this form except for this one section you should use from that form". * Tag fo…
That sounds.... painful... Totally does seem like something that can be nicely automated to some level. Even document tracking and associated metadata (like a list of participants and status of signatures per page, approval of document, etc) would help.
Of course it can be automated. The problem is that everyone involved in the process is extremely resistant to automation because clients are billed by the hour and automation would result in fewer hours spent on the case, which means decreased revenue.
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#173I work in pharma, and our biggest bottleneck is drafting and executing service agreements and statements of work with new vendors. A system to facilitate this workflow would be amazing (document templates, a queue for requests with weekly status updates, etc.) Of course there is manual work done by Legal that can't be easily automated, but that is just one component of the bottleneck.
hentrep, my startup solves this exactly and we are now live at three Fortune 1,000 firms. Previously, I was a healthcare consultant with mckinsey so I understand the unique challenges in pharma. I would love to chat. Feel free to ping me at jl@thevetted.com.
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
I strongly prefer remote over in-person. There are pros and cons to either. One of the interesting things that comes up in remote is confronting the conflation people have between work and a job. Work and a job are not the same thing. A lot of people conflate the two and rely on external things to enforce a work ethic and self-discipline, but a lot of that structure is no longer there when working remote. If anything…
> Related is that, when working on a distributed team as a remote worker, what feels like over-communicating to the point of harassment is probably the right amount of communication. Which gets at another problem of remote work: communication that feels effortless in-person becomes something that requires what feels like "harassment" (in your words) to be effective remotely. When I was working on a geographically spl…
That's a perceptual bias. There's a tendency for humans to resist changes just because they don't feel normal.
Humans might have spent at least hundreds of thousands of years talking to each other in person, but only a fraction of that commuting by cars, or even having the notion of jobs, or even the notion of "productivity". Further, the same arguments you made are the same arguments made in any given era.
I do think it is mentally healthier to not be so addicted to technology, to have 1-on-1 personal communications. But generally-speaking, the sense of self-worth, validation, etc. for the vast majority of people at their jobs is suspect. The quality of 1-on-1, personal communication has more to do with what mindfulness meditators call "presence": how much your awareness is in the presence in the here-and-now, and less to do with whether you are intermediating that communication through technology. Much of the social communication tend to be on the superficial side, even without technology.
Being present is either the most difficult thing you will ever do, or the most effortless.
Tangent: Buckminster Fuller once characterized words and language as human's first technology. One that follows the ephemeralization pattern such that it disappeared (we are no longer generally conscious of language as a technology).
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#175Creating multiple versions of share images for social media
This seems to me like a simple tool to do the job. Could you please elaborate on the requirements?
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Caffeine pills dispenser at your desk. Everyday at 9h it gives you a pill.
Just hook me up with an IV drip and call it a day.
Overkill. Caffeine can be absorbed by the skin. Make the keyboard and mouse output a small dose of caffeine during the day. You wouldn't even notice.
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#177Lawyers.
The problem is, that it's really time-consuming and expensive to get decent terms of service/privacy policy/other common legal document squeezed out of your local lawyer.
The initial version is basically a copy-paste of some template that just has your own company's name put in and does not anyhow describe the service you're building.
After a week or two with back-and-forward you'll get to settle for some English-like gibberish 15-page document that has been passed through the email and you're sure that after all the hours you've put in to try to make sense of the document your clients have no chance to understand even half of it so you're just putting it in since the whole service is already past the deadline and everyone's anyway blindly ticking the box without reading.
The reason why this hasn't changed is that lawyers get paid by the hour, so it's not wise for them to automate anything.
For personal projects I've used some of the 5$ templates from quick Google search, but the problem is that I have no-one who'd take the blame when the shit hits the fan.
In the perfect world this would be an automated computer program that'd ask me a few questions and produce a perfectly understandable and legally binding document that has some trustworthy corporation behind it making sure I won't get sued for trying to do simple business.
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#178I used to work in a big law firm working on startup-related corporate work. A substantial portion of my job looked like this: * Find a form or template for a document. Sometimes the "template" wasn't really a template but "we worked on a deal that was pretty similar to this one three months ago -- use that". Sometimes the template was "use this form except for this one section you should use from that form". * Tag fo…
Basically, you need a workflow engine.
Model that process on the engine, the engine takes care of everything else; notification, queueing, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds.... painful... Totally does seem like something that can be nicely automated to some level. Even document tracking and associated metadata (like a list of participants and status of signatures per page, approval of document, etc) would help.
Of course it can be automated. The problem is that everyone involved in the process is extremely resistant to automation because clients are billed by the hour and automation would result in fewer hours spent on the case, which means decreased revenue.
I'm a total outsider to this field, so forgive me if the answer to this is trivial/obvious, but why not sell a service like this directly to the client?
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Related is that, when working on a distributed team as a remote worker, what feels like over-communicating to the point of harassment is probably the right amount of communication. Which gets at another problem of remote work: communication that feels effortless in-person becomes something that requires what feels like "harassment" (in your words) to be effective remotely. When I was working on a geographically spl…
That's a perceptual bias. There's a tendency for humans to resist changes just because they don't feel normal. Humans might have spent at least hundreds of thousands of years talking to each other in person, but only a fraction of that commuting by cars, or even having the notion of jobs, or even the notion of "productivity". Further, the same arguments you made are the same arguments made in any given era. I do thin…
> Further, the same arguments you made are the same arguments made in any given era.
Communication is a mental process, transportation is not, so they're not really comparable areas of change. I'm not making some kind of Luddite argument for the way things were. The point I'm getting at is that remote work partisans often have a over-simplified model that misses the benefits of in-person presence. Human beings have a lot of support for communicating with each other in-person, verbally, non-verbally, unintentionally, etc. which often doesn't translate well to remote work scenarios. Many of the social aspects translate even more poorly.
I'm just going to skip the philosophical stuff about worth and meditation because it doesn't really have anything to do with what I was talking about.