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Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

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Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#201

Post by contingencies »

DanBC wrote: post #190
contingencies wrote: post #13

Normally I live in China, and rarely eat western breakfast. Recently I returned to Australia to spend some Christmas time with my extended family. A few mornings ago, I put some real bread I cut from a sourdough loaf in a toaster. Due to its irregular size, when it popped it didn't pop out completely, resulting in a sort of "toaster is too hot to insert fingers, toast is too hot to hold, toast is ready, find metallic…

> Someone should really fix toasters. They have. They're called dualit. https://www.amazon.com/Dualit-20293-2-Slice-Toaster-Chrome/d...

Lots of very bad reviews.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#204

Post by biztos »

weaksauce wrote: post #176
contingencies wrote: post #13

Normally I live in China, and rarely eat western breakfast. Recently I returned to Australia to spend some Christmas time with my extended family. A few mornings ago, I put some real bread I cut from a sourdough loaf in a toaster. Due to its irregular size, when it popped it didn't pop out completely, resulting in a sort of "toaster is too hot to insert fingers, toast is too hot to hold, toast is ready, find metallic…

To be fair there shouldn't be any voltage inside the toaster basket area when the toast has popped up. Unless they did something stupid when designing the toaster. And you can always unplug it before sticking utensils in there.

I've had the same thing happen with toasters, and at least as of a few years ago it was completely possible for a piece of toast (of just the wrong size) to get stuck such that it not only didn't pop up, the toaster didn't turn off. So the toast starts to burn, you grab a knife, what could possibly go wrong?

This happened pretty regularly as it was a European toaster designed for perfectly uniform extruded wonder-"toast" and I kept sticking hand-cut slices from round loaves into it.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#205

Post by [deleted] »

ggcdn wrote: post #37

As a structural engineer, I see a good opportunity to make reinforced concrete design software available in a SaaS format. The competition is outdated, clunky, requires local installation and messing about with licenses. Design firms are paying $1000-$3000/year per user/seat for what amounts to a pretty basic app. Unfortunately, there are very few people that understand both computer science and structural engineerin…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#206

Post by dbuxton »

flamesnare3 wrote: post #35
chollida1 wrote: post #27

Data management. 1) Cleaning the data as it comes in rather than in batches so we can use it sooner, invalid data is discarded, outlier detection, normalizing inputs etc.... 2) Warehousing of the data with proper indexes so you can perform some advanced queries on unstructured data 3) Some data is sent in bulk at the end of day, some of the data is streamed in fire hose style. How can we preprocess the fire hose data…

I think Palantir provides solutions to this problem

The Palantir solution, from what I understand, boils down to "lots of consultants (FDEs) writing glue code".

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#207

Post by Achshar »

patmcguire wrote: post #128
ggcdn wrote: post #37

As a structural engineer, I see a good opportunity to make reinforced concrete design software available in a SaaS format. The competition is outdated, clunky, requires local installation and messing about with licenses. Design firms are paying $1000-$3000/year per user/seat for what amounts to a pretty basic app. Unfortunately, there are very few people that understand both computer science and structural engineerin…

I have a friend who works in construction glass. (It's NYC, that's a big market). They ship millions of dollars of complex, custom molded glass every year. Everything's kept track of by emailing excel spreadsheets.

That's disgusting. I feel filthy. I replaced a system in my first client school that also used excel attachments for tracking student data, exams results, attendance, assignments, etc. I could physically feel better once I saw my own implementation replacing email attachment system. Since then email-excel has been a sensitive topic for me.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#208

Post by conductr »

takinola wrote: post #10

As a SaaS provider, one of the key indicators of a customer at risk of churn is the presence of another competitor in their account. A service which notifies you once an account signs up for a competing service would be immensely valuable in helping to target retention activities.

As a user, I'm not a fan of this.

1) how about you find ways to make retention a continuous objective 2) get used to the fact that not all customers will be retained. I try stuff all the time that I have no idea if it will solve my specific problem. If you do #1 right, I would know that you want to hear about my specific problems and offer ideas on how your saas can solve them. That's the most you can hope for if your service doesn't immediately do what I initially hoped it would (or is more burdensome to implement that I thought, etc)

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#209

Post by jsingleton18 »

chollida1 wrote: post #27

Data management. 1) Cleaning the data as it comes in rather than in batches so we can use it sooner, invalid data is discarded, outlier detection, normalizing inputs etc.... 2) Warehousing of the data with proper indexes so you can perform some advanced queries on unstructured data 3) Some data is sent in bulk at the end of day, some of the data is streamed in fire hose style. How can we preprocess the fire hose data…

Hey - we did this. We should talk. Well not #2 exactly...but we solve most of your problems.

www.watchful.io

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#210

Post by anthonyaragues »

chollida1 wrote: post #27

Data management. 1) Cleaning the data as it comes in rather than in batches so we can use it sooner, invalid data is discarded, outlier detection, normalizing inputs etc.... 2) Warehousing of the data with proper indexes so you can perform some advanced queries on unstructured data 3) Some data is sent in bulk at the end of day, some of the data is streamed in fire hose style. How can we preprocess the fire hose data…

I've been working on similar issues, and developing towards solving them. I work with mixed schemas, handle user defined processes inline and allow you to gather stats and show everything as it streams + accommodate a workflow. I'm only 1 month from launching my beta and want to give away licenses to people who can use it and give me feedback. here is the landing page for it: http://ohm.ai OH and it uploads nothing... it all runs in your browser anthony dot aragues at gmail dot com if interesed
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