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Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

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Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#61

Post by Swizec »

imgabe wrote: post #46

Not just software, but everything. Look around you. Everything around you was made somewhere. The example I like to use is shower curtain rings. Those plastic or metal things that hold your shower curtain onto the rod. Somewhere, there's a factory that makes those. The person who owns that factory is probably rich. My first job out of college was working for a company that makes tilt-tray sorter systems. These are gi…

You know the ends of shoeleaces, those little plastic bits? Roughly a 800,000,000/year industry

Cardboard box industry in USA is bigger than the NFL, NHL, NBA, and the other major sports leagues combined

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#62

Post by jacques_chester »

This is because of a few factors, mostly availability bias. We find it easy to think of high-profile examples of tech companies, so we assume they are the industry.

Previous comment with fancier wording: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17994976

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#64

Post by pascalxus »

dpcan wrote: post #45

I keep running into organizations or industries that don't spend money on tech. They don't put it in the budget, or they choose to continue to use volunteers to accomplish tasks that really should be done with software. I am in situation after situation where I want to create software to make someone's life easier, but I know that in doing so, I won't make any money and it will make my life harder. I wish there was a…

the fact that organizations don't want software "they need" shows that those industry's companies are not competing against each other. If they were and the software really did make a big difference in their bottom line, then the ones that used the software would be stealing market share from those that don't use it. unfortunately, with a burgeoning govt and ever more companies that have monopolies, there's getting to be less and less competition and efficiency in the world

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#65

Post by nathanbarry »

Thanks for mentioning ConvertKit! We're happily building our niche product for creators and growing quickly.

Just a couple corrections, at the end of 2019 we were just under $20M ARR (Not $24M). Today we are at $22M ARR and 30,000 customers.

You can see all our numbers (updated in realtime) here on Baremetrics: http://convertkit.baremetrics.com

I'm happy to answer any questions.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#66

Post by pascalxus »

voidfunc wrote: post #5

This does not just apply to software..., tons of small and medium sized businesses and opportunities out there. For engineers you will most likely never notice them if you're caught up in the Silicon Valley / VC thing. Of course it requires getting out of your comfort zone... a lot of dev's just want to exchange labor for cash and grind out code because it is comfortable and cozy (right now). There are tons of small…

the types of opportunities that lead to SaaS businesses, are extroadinarily hard to find. I've gone to dozens of dozens of networking events and talked to dozens of people from a variety of industries. I've done informational interviews, etc. It's very difficult to find problems that don't have good enough solutions. Most of the time people are pretty happy to continue dealign with the problem the way they have been.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#67

Post by abiogenesis »

Ice_cream_suit wrote: post #48
ivalm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused That’s pretty dismissive. I work at a company with ~80B in revenue, I never interacted or heard of SAP in work context. In fact it is only incidentally that I’ve heard of them previously. There are hundred of thousands of engineers working in com…

Your firm (KP) does use SAP's BusinessObjects business intelligence software along with SAS analytics tools and to "support its data analysis activities against it's Oracle EHR system". Since you are in the machine learning silo, your perspective may be a little skewed.

To be fair BusinessObjects is not SAP. It's just one of its acquisitions.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#68

Post by MattGaiser »

dillonmckay wrote: post #33
MattGaiser wrote: post #14

I’ve had four jobs in my life and have always been stunned by what is still done by hand. Every company had a task which could be heavily automated but was instead consuming 4-30 people. So if you think the software market is large, consider all the stuff software never reached.

We are always looking for ideas! Can you give a few examples, please?

Sure

A tool where you are given a picture/scan of a table and it spits out a table that can be pasted into Excel. This was at a bank where numerous people spent half their days manually typing in scanned documents into the same table in Excel. You would double a $70,000 a year financial analyst's productivity with this.

A portal to manage employee and employer documents. I.e where both you and your employer can easily access your T$ (Canadian tax form), offer letter, certifications, police checks, etc.

Software to manage which options a client ordered and what their selection was of that option as well as autogenerate the appropriate SQL queries from a client config template. The current process consisted of a mega word document with people fiddling around manually with it.

Happy to provide more.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#69

Post by pascalxus »

MattGaiser wrote: post #11
CyberDildonics wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't land a job as a junior programmer, you don't want to go around to businesses and end up responsible for promises you can't keep.

What a lot of these businesses need is very simple stuff. Plenty of small businesses would have use for what would consider “toy” programs. A friend of mine built a text message to email system for this rural delivery guy for the purpose of letting his office assistant manage invoices, but also allowing him to fulfill orders on the go without talking on the phone as his customers can just text him. Charges him $500 a…

but how do you find these small businesses that need these types of things?
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