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YC: Requests for Startups

ycombinator.com

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Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#521

Post by skrbjc »

ricardobeat wrote: post #385
Animats wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US currently imports only 17% of its steel, mostly from Canada and Mexico. The US also exports steel, but imports are about 4x exports. So the US steel industry is doing OK. 60% of US steel consumption is now from recycled steel. Nucor became the largest US steel manufacturer by making that work.

Is the percentage of steel imports relevant, when most of the metal consumer products are coming from abroad? Simple stuff like pots and pans, cutlery, potato mashers. Then industrial parts. Farm equipment. Eventually, cell phone frames and more sophisticated stuff. I think this is what the parent comment is alluding to.

Ywes, but if we have cheap materials here, it makes it more enticing to manufacture here as well.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#522

Post by lukan »

khokhol wrote: post #513
lukan wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have so little ammunition, that they have to think 2 or 3 times about every artillery and even more so every anti air shot they have to take. With resserves are shrinking and less and less on the way. It is hard, waging war this way. Russia on the other hand is now in war economy mode. They produce ammunition and tanks way, way faster, than the west. So if there would be a startup saying, we can build a automate…

Right, but making statements that are plainly and objectively false (simply for alarmist effect) doesn't help make that happen.

Natural language is not mathematically precise. Effectivly Ukraine is out of critical ammunition, when they have to evaulate every shot.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#523

Post by mamcx »

RowanH wrote: post #277
brettv2 wrote: post #51

> NEW ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING SOFTWARE Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off. There's so much value to be unlocked but it's just impossible to break through. I've personally met three very talented founders that tried and failed (one was accepted to YC as a mid-market ERP and successfully pivoted into an application tracking system) and failed very quickly. I'm guessing an important feature would be…

The problems with ERP is (1) in order to be a big player you have to cater for so many use cases it starts becoming a glorified development tool without any room for providing actual ROI to the vertical that wants to buy it. (2) it's very, very easy to fall into the trap of saying "well, process x is really no different in industry y, we can adapt the ERP system". In reality there's so many nuances that the platform…

Yeah, this is the way for the small/mid tier (this is also how I do for https://www.bestsellerapp.net)

What make this complicated is that each company turns into a different project. So is like have several branches:

    ERP
       /CompanyA
       /CompanyB
This is high maintenance the more successful you are (and puts a serious barrier to adapting to certain customers).

It gets to a point where after a certain # of customers you can't grow, and now is where you think about making your own DB, programming language, ... :)

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#524

Post by mamcx »

nslindtner wrote: post #481
brettv2 wrote: post #51

> NEW ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING SOFTWARE Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off. There's so much value to be unlocked but it's just impossible to break through. I've personally met three very talented founders that tried and failed (one was accepted to YC as a mid-market ERP and successfully pivoted into an application tracking system) and failed very quickly. I'm guessing an important feature would be…

I have allways wondered why there isn't a "headless" erp-system. I have worked with cms-systems. And in this world it is accepted, you need different frontends for different tasks. Therefore a world of systems - calling themselve headless - support only the backend part of cms management. Worked with Strapi that support this kind of thinking. How come something similar doesn't exist in the ERP world ?

One major reason is that both developers/customers who ask for it think in UI first, all the time.

Most developers I know are at the far-end of development practices (one of the ERPs I integrate has tables like `F0001, F0002, ...` and fields `F00001, F00002`), and this ERPs then uses old tools like Cobol, Fox, (Old) Delphi, (OLD) VB where it has a better UI history.

And it causes to be very hard to build an API (you can't image how much torture is when an ERP vendor says "we have an API!" instead of using plain text or direct SQL)

For this, you need people that know how to do good APIs. And the good API for an ERP is NOT Rest, GraphQL, JSON, ... (ideally, you need a DB!)

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#525

Post by austin-cheney »

technics256 wrote: post #437
austin-cheney wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you selling to? Anybody with a budget. That could be other contractors. Any enduring units. Any commands. A JavaScript application could be anything that loads in a webpage but not necessarily from a server or domain. That could mean pasted into the console as you suggested, a SharePoint utility, any web page that does not sending data to the server, as well as pages opened from the local file system. The pri…

The primary requirement outside of the necessary JS skills would be a security clearance I assume, correct?

As a follow up comment I would say let the business requirements of a given client dictate the need for clearance. However, it takes so long to achieve a clearance it costs less to simply hired cleared people or pay for the clearance as a part of employee on-boarding.

If I were to do this as a real business I would always impose formal language training in the JavaScript language, so prior JavaScript experience is a largely irrelevant indicator of compatibility. That is because experiences writing the language professionally vary wildly in the market place and quality of code authorship is exceedingly rare. Producing high quality output is not challenging, but most people doing this for a job completely lack proper guidance or shouldn't be there in the first place.

Therefore the most ideal candidates are people who can be trained to a very high standard. I would filter for that first and then optionally filter for clearance secondly. You will be investing in these people so be choosy by potential, intelligence, writing skills, and organizational capacity.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#527

Post by cooljoseph »

hef19898 wrote: post #491
yaacov wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it wouldn’t. That makes no sense. You have no idea what “excludable” and “rivalrous” mean. Please read a few Wikipedia articles.

Maybe you can rephrase in a way us peasants understand your point as well without a dictionary?

Excludable = you can exclude people from benefiting from it. (E.g., Fixing global warming is not excludable while temperature control in your own house is.)

Rivalrous = more people getting it leads to less for others. (E.g., Software is not rivalrous, but hardware is.)

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#529

Post by happytiger »

fakedang wrote: post #454
happytiger wrote: post #312

I spent a great while inside of medical during the pandemic and it was… interesting. There are some incredibly large interests in the space that wield intense power and control over various markets. There is also a profound degree of inefficiency in a lot of what’s happening. The question is whether many of those inefficiencies are technology problems or if they are intentionally constructed for the many reasons thes…

> And there is also a ton of interesting businesses in generics. Can you please elaborate on this? We are currently exploring a project in the same space, and I would love to discuss.

Well I met with a company doing surgical supply and viewed their facility, and at the time (2021) they were one of only a few vial generic manufacturers based in the United States. They were mostly supplying GPOs, but there is precious little manufacturing capacity in North America for the stuff.

That’s just one example.

The market for surgical supply is wildly inefficient but there aren’t that many people operating manufacturing domestically right now. I think it’s a r potential opportunity.

Cuban’s Cost Plus drug play really showed another weak spot in generics: the entire business he’s in is simply shortening the inefficient supply chain. That can be done in a lot of ways, and can be bundled with financing in many other ways and that can be a big deal (b2b) in this space. That’s what I’ve consulted on in the past.

https://costplusdrugs.com/

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#530

Post by SilentM68 »

The first priority should be, "BRING MANUFACTURING BACK TO AMERICA", as that will create a sustainable and strong economy, but in my view, A.I. will takeover that job sector along with many others. So, the question is, when AI takes over the world, who will hire humans to work so that they can pay for goods and services. The answer to this of course depends on whether money will still be in use. Just a thought :)
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