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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?

#61

Post by Stranger43 »

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…

And all of it highly digitized with 3-4 generations of technical debt and path dependencies that needs to be dealt with before any mobile/saas solution will be anything but a waste of time/money for the organizations involved.

Where you see badly digitized enterprise organizations with high admin overhead you always find an hugely expensive mid/late 90ies windows PC centric client/server environment in place blocking nearly all attempts to migrate back to anything centralized enough to support an modern saas solution. i.e. the problem is rarely that they are undeserved but that they are stuck with an nearly good enough computer platform and too much complexity for anyone to attempt an big bang replacement.

i work in one of the niche's you mention and we are 110% digitized with about 5 different solutions in place for every task causing an ton of manual cleanup when they inevitable fail to talk to each other correctly.

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

#62

Post by svavs »

The grain industry. Specifically grain elevators.

There are a few mid-sized companies that control a large chunk of that industry. Since they don't have much competition, innovation is more or less at a stand still. Companies like bushel ag are changing that, but lots of opportunity.

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

#64

Post by dhruvkar »

Stranger43 wrote: post #61
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…

And all of it highly digitized with 3-4 generations of technical debt and path dependencies that needs to be dealt with before any mobile/saas solution will be anything but a waste of time/money for the organizations involved. Where you see badly digitized enterprise organizations with high admin overhead you always find an hugely expensive mid/late 90ies windows PC centric client/server environment in place blocking…

>> problem is rarely that they are undeserved but that they are stuck with an nearly good enough computer platform and too much complexity

This is true for large, enterprisey companies. But I'm talking about companies in $7-15M range who have bookkeepers downloading 35 excels each month and then run their custom Excel process to enter into a basic ERP system, so they can send out emails to each of the 35 employees to collect receipts. That kind of thing is so prevalent and accepted, the biggest hurdle here is convincing that there is a better way rather than "hire another bookkeeper".

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

#65

Post by dhruvkar »

frequentnapper wrote: post #58
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.

agreed, a lot of it is niche knowledge that you could only gain by working in such a field or having close access to a company.

Consulting within a niche is one way to do this.

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

#66

Post by gumby »

Agriculture.

There are plenty of companies trying to serve ag with what they think ag needs. Most of them fail.

Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees. They are NOT dumb hayseeds like they are often portrayed! But they typically don’t have a lot of domain knowledge around software. Smaller farmers are used to making and fixing their own tools (all know how to weld); bigger farmers run corporations with a lot of employees.

They are unlikely to be interested in a SSAS. Why? The tax law for farmers in the USA and Europe revolves around tax treatment which favors cap ex (which makes sense — they need to buy big equipment which is used only briefly each year. It’s hard to share since all the other farmers in your area need that equipment at the same time). So understand your market and figure out what their specific need is, then meet it.

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

#67

Post by travisjungroth »

spaceandshit wrote: post #33
travisjungroth wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not obviously, but it could be. Reducing idling time and improving routes both increase fuel efficiency without changing the airplane. Maybe software could help with those. Edit: my reply was to the original comment which was something like "how is this a software problem?"

> Reducing idling time and improving routes both increase fuel efficiency without changing the airplane Do you think idling time is a software problem? Aircraft idle for various time based on other requirements and needs, for example, spooling up the engines or inerting the fuel tanks. Routes are already optimized by air traffic for the fastest, and cheapest route. They have no incentive to increase flight times as t…

Software can't fix aircraft idling, but maybe it can help. And ATC has the final say on routes for IFR aircraft (except emergencies), but there are a thousand VFR airplanes in the air right now. I think it's possible we can do better than GPS direct.

I don't have a solution for either of these things, just enough intuition as a pilot and software engineer to say "maybe there's something there".

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

#68

Post by travisjungroth »

frequentnapper wrote: post #58
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.

That's what's exciting for me. If I have two strengths related to startups, it's being able to write code and get up to speed in new fields quickly.

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

#69

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

jtolmar wrote: post #46
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but it's too hard to sell to the government for a small startup. The RFP process is so long and brutal, and most of the time you need to have a man on the inside and basically go through that process as a formality because you are already guaranteed the contract.

What about the RFP process itself then? Can a company make it easier for startups to sell to the government?

Ha ha ha. I LOVE the way you think.

But some things are broken in Government on purpose, so this would be very difficult, and it couldn't just be a Turbo Tax like software for submitting documents.

But some type of marketplace where you could hire agents to guide your software company through the RFP process and help land you contracts could definitely be a thing.

I'm thinking something that would basically be like E-Lance/UP-Work but for Lobbyists.

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

#70

Post by erisinger »

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…

In the US this is precisely the traditional approach. The country was built by immigrants who would arrive in an area -- San Francisco or New York for example -- decide that if they didn't want to work in a sweat shop they would have to start a business, then look around to see what their neighborhood needed, and build it. Laundromat, restaurant, feed store, etc.

They didn't need to be intrigued by a problem or have a background that set them up to solve one. They decided to start a business and began by figuring out in what way their region was underserved, then built something to fill the gap. Voila.

There's no obvious reason this approach couldn't work in tech as well.

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