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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?

#121

Post by nmaley »

dullroar wrote: post #29
peter-m80 wrote: post #10

Lawyers and justice

My ex-wife worked for a legal software firm. One thing to note is they were threatened with lawsuits ALL THE TIME, because, after all, their customers were lawyers. So any bug or whatever else would end up with some nasty email from some customer exclaiming, "We're going to sue!" In reality, not many (if any) actually carried through with it, but if that sort of threat makes you queasy, better be (or have) a really g…

So true! I built a solution for a legal services outfit a few years ago. First bug they see, they want to sue you. Forget about working with the vendor to refine the solution. They just want to sue you. Never want to work with lawyers again.

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

#122

Post by kamaal »

Hospitals and Healthcare. There is simply too much paper work that goes on.

My father had a bypass surgery last year, and the entire documentation process was a nightmare. It was like reams and reams of paper work, bills, prescriptions. The funny part was they would scan the paper forms and send to each other(blood banks, insurance, clinics etc) for quick response. They might as well have online forms and invoices.

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

#123

Post by unlinked_dll »

janee wrote: post #82
gumby wrote: post #66

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 corpor…

>Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees That's a very astute observation. I've found it crazy hard to try and improve existing spreadsheet workflows for farmers as we dig deeper into the domain. I think in general industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets could possibly benefit from specialized software solutions. Think someone called it the unbundling of spreadsheets or something

I once read on this forum, "your competition is Excel."

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

#124

Post by byoung2 »

joezydeco wrote: post #60
byoung2 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The client supplied the domain knowledge...in more than a few cases they were doing things manually, and I automated them. For example the vendor verification involved manually looking up licenses, or doing data entry on ACORD25 insurance forms. I automated it, so that given a license number, trade, and state, a crawler would fetch the data on a schedule. I also wrote a parser that could read insurance data from an ACORD25 form and put it in a database. The client was tracking all of this in spreadsheets, and I just copied the logic from there.

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

#128

Post by smabie »

jsutton wrote: post #45
lazyeye wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it because lawyers charge for their time and have zero incentive to be more efficient

There is always an incentive for saving time. For example, lawyers can use that time to take on more clients or simply be more thorough.

Or they can just lie about their time and chill. Either way, lawyers have an incentive to be more efficient.

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

#130

Post by Blake_Emigro »

jatgoodwin wrote: post #42
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.

I currently work with a lot of residential construction and repair. I feel like truss factories could use some help with quality control with machine vision probably. A problem is trusses are built by alcoholic meth heads making minimum wage rather than carpenters on site to save time and money, but then the truss factory has to send out an engineer to fix it on site, usually missing or wrong gang nails or its just o…

"Temp laborers could probably use some software to help with tracking hours etc. Typically all the hours are tracked with just the supervisor writing down on a carbon copy how long they worked and gives it to the laborers to take back to their office which is then manually input to the billing system to pay the laborers at the end of the day."

You're exactly right on this one and it exists in Vancouver, Canada: https://faberconnect.com/

"Keep in mind there's a much larger population of non-smartphone users that only use flipphones in construction especially day labor so any sort of app meant for the workers or laborers to use would just go unused."

Right on the first point, wrong on the second. The app is used by a different crowd - mostly younger, and many newcomer professionals or working holiday visa holders. This crowd doesn't need the daily pay to buy a 12-pack after work, and a cash advance in the morning to get smokes and a bus ticket.

I've used both types of service regularly over the last couple of years to fill in the gaps while I work on my startup.

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