Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 176 posts

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

#151

Post by dhruvkar »

Riguad87 wrote: post #101
dhruvkar wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 35 spreadsheets represent an workflow that your generic app will likely not automate This is part of knowing the niche. The "app" doesn't need to be generic, or an app at all. Add-ons for existing industry software, integrations between industry software and generic inventory management app, etc. are all ways to provide immense value. >> not an empty market Yes, but they are often flooded with generic apps. "Inven…

In the "35 spreadsheets" scenario, I have found Quantrix to be the killer app. Very occasionally, Sharepoint and server side Excel is viable, but if you can import cleanly, Quantrix is almost there for claiming small proprietor mindshare. The beauty of anything that is easily understood as more robust logic, in a proprietors view, is the path that opens for you to work on the tricky bits they'd never let you touch ot…

>> Quantrix

Hadn't heard of it, I will check it out, thanks!

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

#152

Post by dhruvkar »

basch wrote: post #114
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 there are a couple big exit paths. Autodesk, Trimble, Oracle, Nemetschek, RIB and for more specialized software InEight. If Procore stays independent, and goes from innovator to incumbent, they may start to absorb new combing competitors as well (like Instagram and whatsapp, were hedges against market share loss.) CMiC, IFS, Oracle Axonex and Trimble Viewpoint (including Spectrum) can't be ignored. If you're look…

>>The other thing construction doesn't do is edi

This was a struggle for us, and we decided not to pursue it. Trying to get our company, which is not in the logistics field, set up to receive EDI updates is a pain. Getting all freight forwarders to add you as a notifying party, paying for an EDI service or setting up your own. Getting approved by shipping lines that don't recognize you as part of the supply chain.

Instead I've opted for taking all freight forwarder PDFs and parsing them (with some ML) to build our own dashboard of what material is coming in.

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

#153

Post by grawprog »

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 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

About the closest I came to getting a client to separate from their spreadsheet was modifying it with some VBA macros so that instead of manually inputting numbers into about 15 different sheets in the book and then manually copying them into a report, they would enter about 10 numbers on one page, press a button and have a nice shiny report fully generated.

The client was extremely pleased with this and had no idea excel could do this.

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

#154

Post by arthurcolle »

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…

Interesting that you mention construction, since Procore just filed their S-1 and they seem to be focused on this industry.

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

#155

Post by patel011393 »

Scientific software for doing research is awful in many ways. There is a great deal of need at all levels to upgrade how scientists read, recruit participants, analyze data, and more. However, inside knowledge is needed to be successful. The research field has many unique practices that are important to work around.

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

#156

Post by [deleted] »

byoung2 wrote: post #124
joezydeco wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 A…

[deleted]

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

#157

Post by wenc »

spaceandshit wrote: post #39
yarper wrote: post #5

If you know aviation, literally anything that will decrease fuel usage. Also maintenance & repair operations (a whole lot of dirty fingerprints going on there).

Convince regulators that advanced control techniques can be used on flight software (model-based predictive control, optimal control, etc.) We know how to do these, maybe not as safe as we can with simpler methods today, but convincing the public and regulators will always be the challenge in aviation/aerospace. Probably the only realistic (software related) method in today's world without a materials/battery improve…

So I don't know the first thing about aircraft control, but I'm a control engineer by training.

What control scheme do aircraft use today? I always thought it was a form of MPC (well GPC = generalized predictive control) with a state estimator like a linear Kalman filter.

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

#158

Post by otagekki »

smabie wrote: post #125

I would say finance. Excel has it’s uses, but managing a billion dollar portfolio isn’t one of them. It’s a hard space though, firms have such drastically different needs that tt’s difficult to create an app that serves everyone.

Finance is a mature and highly regulated market with loads of expensive software and consultants to do all you need. ERPs and off-the-shelf financial software with in-house specific developments do the heavy lifting and spreadsheets macros do the rest.

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

#159

Post by [deleted] »

peterwoerner wrote: post #149
thfuran wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Generally, grant money cannot be spent on software Really? That seems a few decades behind the times.

That was the case for me and I graduated about 2 years ago. Professors were paying from their salary to get e.g. Matlab. More specifically, software is usually not a direct expense so it needs to be paid from the grant overhead, but the university frequently wants to build new buildings or something else instead. It's the same for private government contractors.

[deleted]

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

#160

Post by ProZsolt »

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

You can do basically anything in Excel. My favorite video on this topic is from Joel Spolsky.

You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

Post reply on HN