HACKER Q&A
📣 anthropodie

What problem in your industry is a potential startup?


This has been asked previously here [1] but it has been over a year. The thread actually has suggestions to do this monthly to get insights into other industries but I guess that did not happen. Anyway I think it's been over a year and I think we should have a discussion about this.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139638

  👤 jschveibinz Accepted Answer ✓
The question is valid, but there is something missing from the equation from a startup perspective: experience.

It is the person who has experienced the problem that will fully understand the nuances of the problem and the potential users of the solution.

An alternative question might be: “how does one engage and learn about problems in your industry?”

I understand that this is difficult, but this is what investors want to see.

👤 2rsf
Test Environments and Test Data in big enterprises. Scaling from small to huge is as challenging as building the product itself. Spinning new environment on the fly that includes 100's of subsystems, creating an anonymized subset copy of production on demand or generating enough synthetic data on the fly are huge challenges even though some of the tooling exists.

A related problem related to data creation and subsetting is that one person (and practically nobody) knows the entire data relationships between subsystems, but you still need them to create your data.

👤 Tabular-Iceberg
An anti-bloat tool for software development.

There are plenty of tools that lets you plan, organise and bikeshed over all the things you want to do, like Jira, but I think a much bigger efficiency booster would be one that helps you decide what not to bother doing at all.

👤 xupybd
Designing a kitchen requires a human designer. If you could feed a cabinet and benchtop range into a design AI and allow people to use the AI online to design their ideal kitchen, you wouldn't need a designer.

This would enable DIY kitchens to be sold to a much larger market. Alternatively small kitchen installers could handle the sales and installation. Manufacturing can already be done by many 3rd parties. The expensive part is in design.

👤 quickthrower2
Technical debt. How do you quantify it? Which tech debt to work on first. Can static analysis tools identify it?
👤 cosmodisk
Complex scheduling. I'm yet to see a product that would allow me to enter multiple constraints/availability or related resources and it would automatically calculate the best options for everyone involved.
👤 bdcravens
There are many billing solutions geared toward SaaS providers, but not many for service businesses that bill monthly (at least in the API sense).