Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup? • Hacker News Board

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

#581

Post by terrib1e » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 5:01 PM UTC

nihonde wrote: post #377

throw9322 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a family member who is a lawyer and who has a similar type of software setup. The biggest obstacle I notice in the legal industry is that many simply don't care. They actively dismiss software as being unimportant even though they rely on it every day. It's a very bizarre case of the legal industry hating the very industry that could help them. Note: perhaps my experiences aren't representative of the industry…

This is exactly correct. As a lawyer and a software developer, I long ago gave up on the idea of selling software to solve the problems of lawyers and/or law firms. Lawyers tend to be terrible customers of technology, if for no other reason than that they have established completely backward incentives that reward inefficiencies and information deficits. The only "legal tech" that can succeed (in my opinion) is the k…

I agree with eliminating the need for lawyers for most things, but the biggest problem about it is that in small cities/towns (maybe big ones too, I just have no experience in that domain) judges and lawyers are "buddies". People with the exact same charges can get radically different sentences depending on if they have a paid lawyer vs no lawyer or a public defender. There's a public defender in my town who also has his own private firm, and it's amazing how differently the judge and DA respond to whether or not you hired him or the town did. If all of that isn't bad enough, you can see the judge, DA , and lawyers all making backroom deals and exchanging favors. And they do it fairly blatantly in my town. I've rarely seen an objective case and it's a shame because law is perceived as a "sacred" domain where objectivity rules.

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

#582

Post by roshan_arhsim » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 5:03 PM UTC

paraplegic wrote: post #576

tbrooks wrote: post #565

I used to work in the keynote speaking industry as an agent. This industry is horribly inefficient and intentionally so. It's mostly east-coast based - NY/DC but functions similarly to the LA entertainment industry. The main problem is this: You are a meeting planner (not your job title, you are actually a marketing person or executive assistant) and your boss just tasked you with find a speaker for your next company…

Careful, you might get 'Clintons'.

and then loose them to THE TRUMP :P

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

#583

Post by _raoulcousins » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 5:11 PM UTC

richard___ wrote: post #480

A meal prep service for bodybuilders. The hardest part of bodybuilding is eating right. Something that is affordable, nutritious, and calorie dense would be extremely valuable. There is no meal delivery service I know of that satisfies the last criterion. $10 should get you at least 1000 healthy calories

Each Blue Apron meal is supposed to be for two. Can you just eat the whole thing yourself, or is it a problem of macros + price with the existing meal prep?

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

#584

Post by paraplegic » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 5:12 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #562

I do embedded Linux porting. The big job is writing drivers and building the device tree. This would be so much simpler if schematics could be annotated with scrapable clues about pin connections and device parameters (e.g. device tree fragments). Its all derivable from the schematic and chip specs, but that part could be automated almost completely. It would put me out of a job, but better than shooting myself in th…

Manufacturers are starting to produce register maps in the form of SVD's (an xml doc?). Would starting with this not be a good start in producing the FDT?

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

#585

Post by ThomPete » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 5:13 PM UTC

mathgeek wrote: post #577

ThomPete wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started the original thread last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007 and the discussion was so valuable and resulted in this essay https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4... We been talking about doing it monthly. And I have been talking with a few people about creating a conference around it. No pitches, no ted-lets save the world speaks. Just problems and people who are looking…

> No pitches, no ted-lets save the world speaks. Just problems and people who are looking for problems to solve. What ideas have you come up with to efficiently match up the problems with the solvers? Seems like pitches would still be involved somehow.

I am thinking that pitches are for solutions. So I don't think that would be a problem.

The problems would be conversations.

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

#586

Post by noonespecial » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 5:15 PM UTC

ninjamayo wrote: post #325

Bret Victor-style dashboard and visualisation systems. I 've been using Qlikview, Tableau and Excel for years and they are all very limited in what they can do. New dashboard solutions come out every hour but everyone is copying each other. I want something that I can mould to my problem, that I can touch and fully interact with. Hard, hard problem but worth spending time on this. Make it work in real-time scenarios…

Wish this jumped higher in the thread. I mounted a cheap digital projector and a web cam pointed down over a white melamine table in my workshop thanks to Bret's "Seeing Spaces" talk.

Just being able to record and play back what happened on the table has changed the way I work on things. A commercial version of this project would be huge.

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

#587

Post by saosebastiao » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 5:19 PM UTC

ThomPete wrote: post #84

saosebastiao wrote: post #56

These questions pop up every now and then, and while I get the intent, you're not gonna get anything useful out of it. The idea that someone who knows how to code can disrupt an industry that they are not a part of is disingenuous, and the examples that you can find are exceptions, not the rule. It's also extremely naive and presumptuous...what makes you think people in the industry haven't already tried? People who…

This just as wrong as anything can be and you have nothing to back it up. Furthermore you seem to have missed why they are asked. The problems in many industries er hidden problems which can only be understood by those in the industry, but the solutions are often made by people outside the industries in partnership with insighters. So they are imensly useful and many time more relevant than most other discussions abo…

I probably shit on the idea more than I needed to, simply because it's entirely possible that you could be looking to form a team and rally around a serious problem, and that team could be composed of people who deeply understand the problem in addition to fresh faces with a different approach. And I would fully support that approach.

Lately I've been approached by a lot of "startups" who have made it inadvertently apparent that they know about a serious problem in the industry but have no experience in the industry, are taking absolutely idiotic and long-discredited approaches to solving the problem, and don't even speak enough industry lingo to be understood. These are the people I tried to address with my comment.

If you'll notice, I was actually the top commenter on your original discussion [0]. I still stand by everything I've said in that comment. It is a potential multi-billion dollar idea, and the market size can be verified by pretty much anybody with basic market research experience. And while I have plenty of valuable and marketable experience in the Supply Chain and Logistics industry, even I am well short of qualified to lead a company trying to tackle that problem. I would definitely consider being a part of a team that was formed to solve the problem, but here's the thing: If you learned about the idea from an Ask HN thread, I almost certainly wouldn't join your team. Maybe if Elon Musk vouched for you and Marc Andreesen was throwing money at you. Maybe if you and 9 other committed engineers had a collective 100 man years of proven experience solving hard problems across a variety of industries. But trying to be the leader of a team trying to solve a problem that you didn't know about and don't fully understand is a huge obstacle to overcome. And I think it is perfectly reasonable of me to try to dissuade the average HN reader from even trying.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799851

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

#588

Post by sah2ed » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

agentgt wrote: post #536

lucaspiller wrote: post #462

Surprised nobody has mentioned the elephant in our industry yet: recruiters and recruitment companies. I'm not talking about those employed by big companies, but those who are independent. For the last year and a bit I've been contracting with a company, and the recruiter who found me has fees of around 10% per day of my work, which they bill the company. They found me via LinkedIn, sent me a couple of emails, arrang…

I'm the founder of a recruiting software company (SnapHop) and I will tell the recruiting industry like the real estate industry is actually shockingly difficult to disrupt. This is in part because recruiting is basically sales. Except your not selling a simple widget but a massive change. A career change for many is filled with as much trepidation as public speaking (I'll find the source shortly). The other problem…

> That is give the candidates drip campaigns and automated sales replies and beautiful personal career portfolio websites. That is allow smart candidates to sell to recruiters and company at scale.

Not sure I follow. Large companies generally follow a pre-determined hiring process. How would automated sales replies work for a candidate? There has to be a hiring event -- a trigger, for the reply to be relevant and be seen by the right person.

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

#589

Post by terrib1e » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 5:37 PM UTC

NPMaxwell wrote: post #561

As specific organs reduce functioning, some seniors living at home need to revise their recipes to avoid complex collections of foods just as TIAs and other problems reduce their ability to deal with the challenges. To-go food does not work. For some families, hospital-style food may mimic the diet they are accustomed to, but for immigrants, traditional hospital food may be horrific. Older people tend to rely on a ve…

I completely agree. I think that one of the big problems, aside from someone cooking a family recipe while also modifying it slightly so its diet appropriate, is somehow going beyond just making and delivering this food. My grandfather is 89, his wife is 17 years younger than him so she still cooks for him and makes sure hes eating. On the flipside, once my grandfather died on the other side of the family, my grandmother fell to pieces and alzheimer's rapidly set in. Is there somehow a cost effective way of creating these dishes either at the client's house or maybe delivering the meal and providing an hour of genuine conversation? I mean I guess it'd be a specialized home health aide at that point or something. I guess just sticking with the family recipe modified for dietary needs is the smart way to start off. You could follow this up with partnering with old age communities/nursing homes and providing this custom service en masse.

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

#590

Post by vegabook » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 5:39 PM UTC

blobwalker wrote: post #567

vegabook wrote: post #158

Finance, specifically fixed income: Regulations will unbundle research from liquidity provision starting sometime in 2018 (moving regulatory target, but theme seems clear). Sellside will have lower incentive to pay large research groups; buyside will have to pay explicit fees for research advisory. There is a big opportunity in providing platforms, with macro and market data live, where researchers can interact with…

Are you suggesting an extension of CSA into fixed income, or a platform for selling/distributing research?

apologies the only "CSA" I know is the Credit Support Annex between counterparties, which seeks to minimize risk on mark to market of derivative contracts. Is this what you are referring to?