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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9703603
That's most likely true, but I suspect that we do have some people from that crowd and from plenty of other interesting niches in IT as well as well as lots of non-IT people that somehow are attracted to HN.
So hence my question, What are you working on?
What field would you consider your niche and how is it working out for you?
Really tough going, but have a first customer in its initial incarnation: brodlist.com
Been an IT developer for most of my life but always found humans and how they work more interesting than computers and finally I figured out how to do something good with that interest.
Our tech stack is also pretty standard for a game of this era PHP and MySQL backend, frontend is HTML, CSS and JS. Version control with SVN.
It's definitely been eye opening for me, debugging old code that hasn't been touched since the mid-noughties can be a real challenge. However this has taught me to be more thoughtful about how I code, and to plan out how I'm going to build something efficient and maintainable.
And writing.
edit: I missed the "how's it working out?" part.
Not great. Cash starved from day 1. Funding for medical devices is quite, quite different than software (i.e., bad but getting better recently). We don't fit the model for many VCs, so that limits potential sources, and being in medical devices means that we need to deal with sophisticated investors that can run proper DD on us, further limiting potential sources. Funding has been (and still is) a struggle! It's also a little bit "lonely": we run into a lot of problems unique to this industry, but often we can't talk about it in detail, and even when we can, there aren't many people around to talk to.
Project management has been interesting. There's quite a number of consulting and industrial design groups out there, which helps to bring in expertise when needed and keep things lean overall. A big challenge has been in setting up the supply chain: it's not something I've done (or thought of) before, but consulting has helped out here as well. Basically, we'd be dead in the water without outside consultants.
Regulatory affairs is a pain, but I appreciate why it's there and it's not onerous per se, just slows everything down (not necessarily a bad thing). It more or less distills down to documenting "say what you're doing, and do what you're saying".
The technology side is a bit boring, honestly. We need to design things conservatively, unless we have a really, really good reason not to. We also need guaranteed years of availability for parts, which additionally tends to lead to conservative designs.
Surprising lessons learned: cable management (i.e., in the device) is a nightmare, and packaging is anything but a simple problem to solve. Also, may have learned more in 6 mos. tilting at these windmills than my entire undergrad + graduate career.
Definitely Niche. I've been doing it for about 15 years and I keep seeing the same consultants over and over again.
Here's the deal. Most manufacturing companies (think Big Pharma, Petrochemical, Chemical, Widget manufacturing, anything really) measure quality. Those quality measurements are probably done in a laboratory. Every laboratory generates data. All that data needs to be managed well so that the laboratory can maintain its accredidation.
Basically, LIMS systems manage samples and lab result data. In addition, they probably integrate with Instruments and instrument software to automate some of that data entry.
Other industries besides manufacturing are Govt (waste and wastewater treatment labs), Third-party labs (labs that do testing for other companies), Healthcare (clinical labs), Forensic Labs, and more.
Bottom line, there are tons of laboratories and they all need to manage their data.
The players in this space are downright stuck in the last decade. There is so much opportunity here for a few new players to come in and make a step-change.
I'm currently working on creating a modern LIMS to manage Laboratory data.