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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?

#71

Post by thfuran »

peterwoerner wrote: post #57
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.

>Generally, grant money cannot be spent on software

Really? That seems a few decades behind the times.

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

#72

Post by conductr »

edw519 wrote: post #32

I think a better question for 2 experienced guys like you is, "What industries are overserved by software?" That would open up a whole bunch of possibilities that no one is looking at. Much better than competing with 2000 others at the next soon-to-be-obsolete app. I've built a great career by asking customers to consider the "low tech solution" first, then building upon it. Amazing how often they love it so much tha…

I can’t turn on notifications like that. Just reading it makes me want to smash your laptop

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

#74

Post by drivingmenuts »

erisinger wrote: post #70
wpietri wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, but they were literally neighbors back then. The world has changed since then and we don’t necessarily have neighbors from a completely different walk of life. Additionally, non-tech work has a different domain of deep knowledge necessary to properly serve industry knowledgeably.

Just because your neighbors a welder, doesn’t mean you can whip out a materials inventory app for welders everywhere.

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

#75

Post by travisjungroth »

inerte wrote: post #59
wpietri wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A common approach is people believing they can be their own bosses.

Want to sell essential oils for me?

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

#76

Post by ping_pong »

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…

Startups that are founded by people that don't have a lot of skin in the game are exactly the ones that will close up shop after a year, leaving their customers high and dry. It's a meme now about startups with their "Thanks for joining us on our journey, stay tuned for our next startup!"

If you are a company looking for a problem to solve, it's not going to work unless you get lucky. Find something you're passionate about and that is what will drive you to keep going, so that you don't just abandon your customers when things get tough.

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

#77

Post by dmode »

I just went through extensive home remodeling. This is a big industry and there are a lot of opportunities to improve it by software. It was impossible for me to get a good visualization of what the end state of my home would look like. I needed to hire designers for that. It was difficult to know what various paint options would look like. And then there is the whole construction / contractor / material aspect of it. It is still based on good old connections and negotiations.

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

#78

Post by Stranger43 »

dhruvkar wrote: post #64
Stranger43 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem is that it kind of isn't because there is no clear way for your app to work with the app their employee's use for taxes or the desktop apps used by their supplier/customers.

At the end of the day the 35 spreadsheets represent an workflow that your generic app will likely not automate, it's also not an empty market as every region have 5+ companies selling the magic silver bullet for mid-sized company bookkeeping, and all of them have an high degree of lock-in and cannot simply export it's data in an rigidly standardized format.

The experienced small company manager know that an experienced bookkeeper can make the administration spreedsheetwork be an low frustration experience, and that the previous software vendor could not deliver the same.

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

#79

Post by exolymph »

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…

> 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.

None of them told you that this is how they went about it, because it's a bad story.

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

#80

Post by jermaustin1 »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #11

When I was contractor I did a lot of niche apps for small businesses. I think it comes down to your ability to sell. I suck at it so not much success for me. But there is a ton of opportunity if you are willing to talk to people about their needs and then go out to sell. You won’t be the next unicorn but you can make decent money and it’s fun working with small business owners. Add: I often saved them countless hours…

Some of my very first consulting gigs were around access and excel automation with VBA. They paid well for being a 19-year-old kid still living with mom and dad.

Now most of my consulting now is:

- Bringing web-apps up to date (mainly by getting rid of a lot of jQuery that could just be JavaScript, or shockingly common could just be CSS)

- Refactoring hard/impossible to understand 2000+ line methods (least favorite - so risky)

- And cleaning up the dead-code and inaccurate comments that accumulate over the years from the ghosts of contractors past.

I'm basically a janitor for "enterprise" software code-bases.

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