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Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

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Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#51

Post by wpietri »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #25
turc1656 wrote: post #23

At the risk of sounding less than helpful or pessimistic, the first thing that jumped out at me when reading your post is that you are going about this backwards. I'm not saying you can't or wont' succeed. I have no idea. But it seems like the first thing that happened is that you decided you wanted to start a business. Usually it's the reverse - you get inspired by discovering a problem and realize you have the skil…

It sounds like you are describing the Silicon Valley ideal, but things like "finding a good business to start" are very much a traditional approach, and I am confident they will teach you about how to do market research to this end in business schools.

Is it a traditional approach? I've met a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners, and I have heard of almost nobody starting from "I have started a business, now what should we do" being successful. Bezos arguably took that approach, but that story gets told so much precisely because it was unusual. More often it turns out like Webvan, where the lack of deep domain knowledge means making noob mistakes that kill the business.

And I'm not sure business schools are a big help here. The vast majority of MBAs end up joining mid-sized to large existing companies as high flyers, and I think the curriculum aims to support that.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#52

Post by wenc »

travisjungroth wrote: post #4
joezydeco wrote: post #2

Successful software companies are mostly founded by software engineers, or at least other white collar professionals They're also founded by people that know the business they're dealing with. If you know oil and aviation, think about where customers are feeling pain and focus your effort there.

That's where my main focus is right now. I want to push it out just a bit further. The best outcome of this thread for me is someone mentions something that I have a connection with (maybe friends with an expert I could get involved) that I didn't even think of.

I get what you're trying to do. Let me also suggest something different -- instead of tackling things from the solution end (software), why don't you immerse yourself into a few verticals (in whatever ways you can -- job, conference, connections, etc.) to really understand the unsolved problems without presuming a software solution?

Don't be afraid to work on problems where the solution might not be a software solution. Also you need to have experienced the problem yourself in order to have skin the game. (This was one of the take-aways from an IDEO design thinking workshop I attended — you have to find ways to empathize with the user you’re designing for)

Chances are a software solution will likely emerge anyway (in this day and age, everything runs on software), but by focusing on solving the problem, you ensure your solution has value, and you're not just trying to find a use case to write software for.

Understanding the problem domain prior to presuming the solution space almost always works better than the other way around. (speaking as someone who has tried the approach problems from both ends in a non-tech field) The latter usually results in products that have no flair and no market uptake.

Tobi Luetke started out trying to sell snowboards on-line but didn't find any suitable eCommerce software so ended up writing what eventually became Shopify.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#53

Post by [deleted] »

turc1656 wrote: post #23

At the risk of sounding less than helpful or pessimistic, the first thing that jumped out at me when reading your post is that you are going about this backwards. I'm not saying you can't or wont' succeed. I have no idea. But it seems like the first thing that happened is that you decided you wanted to start a business. Usually it's the reverse - you get inspired by discovering a problem and realize you have the skil…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#55

Post by chudi »

mynegation wrote: post #47
titanomachy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned programming in order to do my job more effectively while I was employed as a research assistant in a university neuroscience lab. At some point I realized that programmers in industry get paid 10x more (not an exaggeration, literally 10x) so I left after a couple years. I enjoyed my time there a lot, I was building tools to help very smart and motivated people solve cool science problems. My users sat acros…

Out of curiosity - what are the typical tools that you built? I am in industry but sometimes have a crisis of meaning. I would not be able to sit next to researches but was wondering if there is a gap in open source tools that I (or someone else) could help to cover.

I did similar work at a neurosciences lab, my work was usually building experiments at large (think html5, android games that were actual experiments), building infrastructure, connecting some kind of sensor to a computer and saving the data, guiding bachelors students with their final project that required some kind of programming, not very different from my usual work but with a lot of emphasis in reproducibility and log about every single metric that you can track that may be of the interest of the scientist.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#56

Post by poutrathor »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #13

I've started looking at software to help with residential construction tasks, i.e. the construction of a single-family house. My impression so far is that there's so much variability in what they encounter, that most tasks are best handled ad hoc by experienced tradesmen. But I'm not certain; it's possible that that's just the status quo, not how it needs to be.

TheEconomist had an article a few years back on software in construction. It was at the time an obvious void but hard to fill. Found it ! https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/08/17/the-constructio... It was actually more about the general lack of productivity.

Having had renovated my 1970s flat, I can confirm it's not a productive industry and I doubt residential sector will suddenly get very productive for the reason you gave : small custom tasks

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#57

Post by peterwoerner »

dwrodri wrote: post #14

There is a non-trivial amount of work being done at university research labs that has yet to feel the effects of the machine learning revolution because PIs aren’t investing (or cannot afford) programmers, and scientific equipment is manufactured by a small handful of companies who have little incentive to innovate. Please note that n=2, but both myself and a friend of met have met people working in life science labs…

True, there is a nontrivial amount of very useful software which could be written for universities across the science and engineering fields, but very little money to pay for it. Generally, grant money cannot be spent on software so investment in tools is negligible.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#58

Post by frequentnapper »

dhruvkar wrote: post #36

Construction is a big field, and there are many niche industries within it. I work in natural stone. There are several different types of companies just in this niche. Usually the flow of product is: quarries -> factories -> distributors (us) -> fabricators -> kitchen and bath shops -> end user There are maybe 5-7 major pieces of software for the first four stages. "Under-served" is an understatement. Similarly, ther…

the problem is having access to these niche fields and knowing enough to be able to create something useful.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#59

Post by inerte »

wpietri wrote: post #51
fennecfoxen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you are describing the Silicon Valley ideal, but things like "finding a good business to start" are very much a traditional approach, and I am confident they will teach you about how to do market research to this end in business schools.

Is it a traditional approach? I've met a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners, and I have heard of almost nobody starting from "I have started a business, now what should we do" being successful. Bezos arguably took that approach, but that story gets told so much precisely because it was unusual. More often it turns out like Webvan, where the lack of deep domain knowledge means making noob mistakes that kil…

A common approach is people believing they can be their own bosses. Not so much about business opportunity or an itch to scratch.

Anyway, why speculate? It's easy to find online articles and research showing why people have started their businesses, or the reasons why people would want to start one but haven't yet. Truth is that it's all the above and more.

Re: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

#60

Post by joezydeco »

byoung2 wrote: post #3
joezydeco wrote: post #2

Successful software companies are mostly founded by software engineers, or at least other white collar professionals They're also founded by people that know the business they're dealing with. If you know oil and aviation, think about where customers are feeling pain and focus your effort there.

They're also founded by people that know the business they're dealing with I worked as a contract software engineer and I built quite a few MVPs for niche businesses I would never have thought of. I built a dashboard for rental management companies to track vendors (e.g. plumbers, electricians, pool cleaners) to make sure their licenses, insurance, and background checks are up to date. I built a tool for companies to…

I worked as a contract software engineer

Did the domain knowledge come from the person paying you, or did you figure it out yourself?

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