Ask HN: What are you working on?

I am working on wrinq[1] an application that helps people manage their rental property. Not a niche domain (or maybe it is since I don't see many applications for the real estate sector except for listings) but we are using niche technologies.

It is built with openresty and couchdb both of which I feel are terribly underrated technologies.

"How is it working out?"

On the technology side. Everything is going great. I read a thread on micro-services a while ago and with couchdb (if you take time to think through) it is really easy to have micro-services that can be distributed. We've got 5. While they are not independently deployed yet they can be at any time. It's only a mater of replicating the existing data(very easy) and changing the urls(easy but needs some thorough testing).

openresty makes it really easy to communicate to in house as well as some third party services we use. I smile every time I write:

`local res1,res2,res3 = ngx.location.capture_multi{{"url1"},{"url3"},{"url3"}}

It is very satisfying to see the results of different independent apis coming together in a single call.

Both of these technologies are very resource efficient,openresty in particular. And we have tested high loads of traffic on cheap servers without making any effort to optimize.

On the business side. We are doing okay. Making sales is always a challenge but people are interested in talking to us which is a good sign, I feel. Only a matter of time before we perfect our product and pitch. We are in no hurry :)

[1]https://www.wrinq.com/

You are totally on point about the one-size-fits LIMS for QC Labs not working in the research lab. It's my observation that research labs need a solution that is much more dynamic than the traditional LIMS.

I like your comments regarding OWL/RDF. I will have to look into that. I know of a few Chemical / Polymer mfg. companies who are still using their homegrown LIMS-slash-PLM systems to manage new materials research.

The thing I love about this field the most is working along side very intelligent chemists and engineers and helping them automate their labs. The appreciation factor is through the roof when you can remove manual data entry and help them advance their laboratory throughput.

I would definitely invest in a better landing page, especially one with some screenshots of the software. I googled 'landlord software' and found a fair few - http://www.landlordvision.co.uk/ seems to be the most popular and their landing page looks pretty decent.

I am, admittedly, surprised by the lack of SaaS landlord sites. There are a fair few but most look very dated and uninviting.

If you haven't heard of it, have a play with PC Part Picker. Making something like this for your site would be really interesting IMO.

I'm working with two SaaS startups to build analytics-driven marketing platforms based on an open source CMS. Both clients create tools for technical teams, and both are solidly profitable. One of them is from the Bay Area and on Series D. The other if from Scandinavia and on series A. In both instances, the previous version of their web presence was developed by the same dev team as their core product, and their marketing/growth team was competing for development time from the same devs who were building their core product. The platform we've developed enables non-technical marketing teams to easily push out new initiatives and new content, rapidly measure their results and correcting course. At the same time, their team can be confident that their site will work smoothly across a broad range of devices and platforms. By combining software development skills with knowledge of marketing tools and best-practices, we've created a nice niche for ourselves.

I'm also working with a Fortune 100 client to develop an intranet platform for them. It's an awesome project, and I wish I could say more than that, but we're under a rather restrictive NDA. We're working on producing a case study, and getting it approved by their legal department. We've done some other large intranet projects before (federal agencies and global NGOs) so this is another strong niche for us.

I often encourage developers to combine their technical skills with another domain-specific specialty to create a compelling value proposition. It's great to be a "Javascript developer" or "Python developer" but with that positioning, you are easily commoditized. By combining technical skills with a non-technical specialty you are much more resistant to commoditization.