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

I&#x27;ll take a startup in a box. I want Kubernetes, Elastic, Kibana, FileBeat, Prometheus, Consul, Grafana, databases, HTTP gateways, etc all set up on on the cloud (or set of servers) of my choice and a dashboard that lets me add users (e.g. like a modern Webmin&#x2F;cPanel+WHM) and make minor config changes if I don&#x27;t want to run these myself. I want those things HA and I want stable hostnames for them (e.g. Consul DNS on every box). Then I want an empty app template where I can provide a few things: commands to build my app (including dependencies), a systemd conf for start&#x2F;stop of my app, a config value to tell you where the logs will be, a config value to tell you how to consume metrics from me (e.g. a local HTTP path for prometheus), etc. I feel like we&#x27;re close with Helm and Kubernetes but I&#x27;ll be damned if coordinating and setting all of this stuff up HA, getting notified of failures, getting notified when I need to add more servers, being cloud-independent, etc isn&#x27;t an extreme burden to entry.<p>I want to write code and deploy, not spend most of my time on ops or marry myself to a cloud vendor. I started my company as the only tech person and I feel like I have to be more admin than dev even though I&#x27;m doing the same thing as everyone else.

I do B2B sales (specifically, customer support for consumer-facing businesses), and I&#x27;d pay ~$1,000&#x2F;mo for a service that solves this problem:<p><i>Which warm intros should I ask for?</i> There are ~1,000 companies in my ideal customer profile. I&#x27;ve got ~500 friends who I&#x27;d feel comfortable asking for warm intros, and say these friends each have ~500 friends. After deduplicating, that&#x27;s ~100,000 second-degree connections, some of whom are decision-makers at companies I&#x27;d like to sell to.<p>I&#x27;d want someone to go through my LinkedIn&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;Instagram&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;etc., and tell me something along the lines of: &quot;Ben might know decision-makers at Companies A, B, C, D, and E.&quot; And, conversely, I&#x27;d like to know all the possible warm introductions that could lead me to Company A (e.g. &quot;Ben, Max, and Jennifer could possibly introduce you to Alice, Bob, and Cameron at Company A&quot;).<p>All of this information is available to me; it&#x27;s just a total O(N^2) pain to clean and aggregate it. Like, I can certainly spend an hour listening to podcasts and looking through Ben&#x27;s LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends, Instagram followers - and seeing if any of them are COOs at CPG brands. But I&#x27;ll run out of podcasts eventually, and then it&#x27;s not a very high-leverage use of my time to repeat that process for Max, Jennifer, Nate, Christy, et al.

A next generation internal &#x2F; corporate portal. Everyplace I have worked at had either a really bad implementation of an internal portal or had a bunch of wiki pages clubbed together. It was incredibly difficult to get even basic info, such as where is the conference room, who works in the security team, what is the expense policy, so on a so forth. In my current multi billion dollar company, when I am meeting with someone new, I have to actually go to LinkedIn to understand what they do in the company and in what is their focus area.

Software development infrastructure in a box plus strong training materials &#x2F; guidance for scientists. Increasing numbers of scientists are writing code without any formal CS training, and the outputs are predictably awful and unreliable. It is very common to find no testing, no acceptance criteria, no version control, no formal planning, no code review, no style guide being employed, sparse commenting, fragmented development environments &#x2F; dependency hell etc. People frequently know that what they are doing is suboptimal, but it is hard to convince them that they should put in the work to use industry best practices for a variety of reasons.<p>If someone could create a product (probably infrastructure plus a Python IDE) which made doing things the &quot;right way&quot; easy for these users, and which would provide case studies or tutorials to show them WHY doing things correctly is beneficial using analogies to good lab behavior, it would be hugely valuable.

I work in the humanitarian field in a poor country ravaged by war and famine. We have a number of humanitarian actors currently working in this country and no one actually has access to accurate population statistics. Well, none exists. The last census was conducted in 1975. I believe someone could use technology to get a much better estimate of the population. One thing that always springs to my mind is the possibility of using aerial imagery. It doesn&#x27;t have to be exactly that, though.<p>I think this need, a real need that is, can potentially make millions for the enterprising type, here.<p>Why don&#x27;t I try the same, you might ask. But, while I have some ideas, I am may not be able to raise the resources needed, at the moment.

Inter-operable video and phone conferencing without prior setup required. Probably half the video conferences I’ve tried to participate in in the last year have been a disaater, with people having technical problems dialing in, dropping out, etc. Even phone confernces (using VOIP conference providers) have awful quality. I want to be able to email some people a link, and with no account creation, registration, or software install required, get an extrwmely high quality low latency (comparable to FaceTime) voice&#x2F;video conference.

Working for a German Big four Car OEM. We need the following for measurement data and we simply have no solution (except matlab, which is not good enough).<p>We want to plot big data (up to terabytes). Columns should be selectable by gui and nameable. The Data then should be be added to database with an ID. Everything should be usable without use of a scripting language.<p>Right now the terabytes of data have to be loaded in to ram just to see the first few lines and determine what the columns stand for. Now I know that there are editors that can load data partially but these have to be reinstalled which requires admin rights etc. This is a huge burden in a big company! The process of simply plotting, selecting and storing data takes a huge amount of time. The solution should be web based because no admin rights are availabe.<p>Often I am impressed how many tools and hacks exist simply to get one thing done: visualize measurement data. Excel is not enough because even the import of dot vs comma vs tab etc takes too much time and everytime has to be relearned. Engineers have to plot the data sometimes every few months and then you have a new excel version that autocorrects measurement data to dates or whatever.<p>In my opinion this would solve an obscene amount of work. Right now every engineer is hacking together some scripts that are extremely inflexible. When just csv-type data has to be handled.<p>Edit: this also applies to smaller amounts of data of megabytes. How can we plot them more robust than excel and then select x and y axis? I am pretty sure that we would love to buy a product that solves these issues.

I do some illustration and have noticed on twitter how much every illustrator who gets some experience with 3d-tools likes to use 3d modelling to create block-outs for scenes they want to draw. By creating a simple scene out of blocks and shapes you can make your perspective work while drawing a lot easier. A tool that could be really populair would be something that makes making 3d mock-ups easier for 2d artstists without 3d experience.

I am a network engineer for a medium size company (I have worked for very large enterprises too) and there a a lot of opportunities for startups in network engineering.<p>1)Simple network automation platform that works for &quot;My&quot; custom environment, simply and effortlessly and also it should not break any existing network. (I don&#x27;t mean like HP Network Automation)<p>2) Network diagram software - Seriously, any experienced network engineer will agree that this one needs a lot of disruption. Visio is very expensive and even then it is a pain to use. And Lucidchart or Cacoo or draw.io or other online tools too have their flaws&#x2F;drawbacks.<p>3)Network monitoring tools - It is a pity that CA Spectrum, which is a ugly and non user-friendly tool, in my opinion, is among the most used network monitoring software. Network monitoring tools are bread and butter of NOC (Network Operation Center) teams.<p>4) Network devices configuration management tool and Change and topology visualization tool - Netbrain seemed promising in the start. But it seems to do too many things and has still room for improvement.<p>It is high time that more and more programmers should start building and contributing in network engineering field. There are numerous tools for each and every function. But there is lot of room for improvement in making those tools more elegant, easier to use and more reliable.<p>Yes, there is Software Defined Networking (SDN) where the vendors (Cisco, Silverpeak, Riverbed etc) themselves provide a nice visual dashboard. But the current &quot;non-SDN&quot; devices are going to stay for quite some time. And also why do we need to depend on one vendor and hence the Vendor provided dashboard? There will always be customers who would want vendor agnostic architecture and common tools to manage the infrastructure.<p>Note: A lot of the current tools (especially the ones I have mentioned above) do work very well and are used by large enterprises for a reason. But Tesla did disrupt the market of cars in its own way when reliable Toyotas and fast Ferraris already existed.

A tool for managing software development that doesn’t suck. Especially if your developers are doing a lot of small projects, that while too small to have their own sprint or their own kanbanboard are too big to fit into a single card on Trello.<p>Possibly something that mixes business and process models into it, but again, something simple where you attach a single bpmn drawing and maybe an architectural sketch to the process. Add time management, deadlines and maybe a tie in to the web services of an ESDH system and it might even work for task management in case working.<p>Everything is build for theoretical approaches. Like we do SCRUM, but really, we’re doing scrumish things. We have an odd schedule, we work on multiple projects at once, depending on what resources are available and what has higher priority, sometimes something breaks and then we’re all doing operations rather than development, sometimes the mayor has a direct request and so on. I think we’ve tried all the tools from atlassian to trello and nothing fits, it’s all too textbook for a messy place like ours and often I think we should go back to postits and a fucking excel schedule but I really don’t want to ever print an excel sheet ever again.<p>Interestingly I do a lot of networking with other managers in the public set for, and everyone had this problem, not just in digitization. There isn’t a single efficient tool for managing your workforce in the public sector.<p>There are excellent tools, don’t get me wrong, but we can’t have our workers spend hours on them because we can’t sell those hours to anyone.

I&#x27;m on the board of my condo building&#x27;s HOA which has a number of things that would be helpful.<p>* We pay $200&#x2F;mo for a basic website with forum, some billing things, some file storage and other stuff I never use. It looks like it was written 20 years ago. (If someone can recommend something already out there that would be helpful)<p>* Doorman accepts dozens of package deliveries each day which get sent email and tracked in above system when picked up. Needs to write apt number on box and have its own tracking system<p>* I have to approve lots of expenses not knowing what fixing the hvac unit should cost<p>* we&#x27;re getting screwed by insurance company - I have no idea if our policy is good or not<p>* Insurance claims for damage is a huge s<i></i>* show<p>* Energy management is horrible, we dont know where our electricity is going or how we can cut down<p>* Contractors are unreliable - I want to know who is blacklisted from neighbouring buildings because they suck<p>* How do our expenses compare to others? I have no idea.

I work in health tech. Here are some problems: * Helping patients select the right doctor. Currently most people use Yelp or through referrals. The problem is that Yelp has little correlation to quality of care. It&#x27;s very difficult for patients to evaluate a doctor - usually what they end up doing is evaluating the customer service aspect of the doctor (did they speak to me nicely, did they make me wait for an appointment, etc.) but no one is able to evaluate doctors based on the quality of care. * Helping doctors and patients estimate costs - Neither doctors or patients understand costs. it is very routine for a doctor to suggest getting a lab test from X place because they have experience working with the center. They have no idea that for your specific insurance plan this will cost you 2x another place and so you with an unhappy patient who blames their doctor for ripping them off. There should be tools to patients and doctors estimate costs. * Helping patient select a health care plan from their employer or a marketplace - most patients have no idea what health care plan they are best on. However, theoretically if you have their history of claims and some guess on their future behavior, you should be able to tell them which health care plan makes the most sense for them * Helping patients manage their chronic conditions. Most people are very lax about managing their health conditions, they skip appointments, choose brand names over generics, ignore refills, etc. Technology should be able to nudge them in the right direction and help them optimize on quality and costs. * Building technology that encourages health behavior - A majority of the diseases attacking Americans are caused by lifestyle issues (diet, stress, drugs, exercise). If you could build technology solutions that help nudge people to healthier behavior, you would make solve a billion dollar problem for insurance companies; they would love to reduce the risk pool of their patients. This is a tough battle because even people who care about health are inundated with false information (think Dr. Oz or anti-vaxxers or people who insist every person in the world is a celiac and should go gluten free).<p>As you can see the bulk of the problems in the health care industry is understanding how to navigate the huge mess of the US healthcare system. A longer term solution is for us to build a single payer system and incentivize patient care over patient procedures but I doubt that will happen.

Journalism needs a WYSIWYG editor for stylized content -- content that is more visually diverse&#x2F;interesting than the linear text+image+embed format, but not SO so custom&#x2F;new as to truly require a developer to build it.

We run background checks, and there is definitely a space for public record aggregation.<p>We directly interface with those interested in the results of the check, and there is an overwhelming amount of work in building integrations with schools, applicant tracking systems, hospitals, public records, courts...<p>We spend most of our time building XML and JSON parsers to cram their data into our models.<p>If there was a company that provided a single interface to this data, you could write your own ticket. I know we aren&#x27;t the only company in this space with this issue.

What is the current state of the art in financial modelling in corporate finance departments?<p>I used to be a management consultant. We often built financial models of company operations or parts of their value chain, and then looked at the change from process improvement, restructuring or bolting on new business lines. Everything was done in Excel. For the annual strategic planning and budgeting cycle, large companies used expensive proprietary systems to aggregate divisional financial plans.<p>I now work for a big bank, building out a Jupyter-based data science and machine learning platform. We have hooks in to SDLC with code reviews, commit history, and all the good stuff that software engineers nowadays take for granted.<p>So what if Finance departments dropped Excel and instead used our dev tools and methodologies? I&#x27;m genuinely curious if any companies are doing this, or if any startups are building such solutions.

Technology adoption. I&#x27;m not necessarily talking about change management (although that could be a feature), but technology adoption in the broader sense. For example: if I&#x27;m a Health IT executive, how can I ensure the adoption of say, Kubernetes is the right path for my organization? I may have 20+ stakeholders, from actual practitioners, to finance pushing me in various directions. It&#x27;s almost like there&#x27;s space for adoption assurance, or some type of 3rd party integrator that sits in front of the bleeding edge of technology and helps dinosaur industries move faster through adoption. A layer that could understand my IT footprint, and recommend tools&#x2F;improvements&#x2F;etc. Like CreditKarma, but for IT.

This is a really simple but basic one. Market size might not be billions of dollars, but a basic learning management system along the lines of Teachable&#x2F;Udemy that allows for code with built-in testing would be used overnight by a dozen code bootcamps and would pull a lot of people out of the other platforms.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s just a feature, not a full product, but it makes any &quot;learn to code&quot; MOOC unusable.

The process of getting quotes, sending POs, receiving invoices, paying them Net30 etc. is an extremely manual process. Companies have dedicated employees that all they do is send quotes, receive POs, and receive payments. The process is so painful.<p>Edit: I am in the industrial space. Basically all large equipment purchases work via a [Quote &gt; PO &gt; Pro Forma Invoice &gt; Final Invoice &gt; Payment &gt; Receipt] process.

In healthcare billing with patient insurance companies, hospitals and doctors are contractually prohibited (and sometimes illegal) from sharing how much they get paid per procedure unit (RVU) from insurance co&#x27;s. However, if you are a third party for the hospitals and have access to the billing info of a metropolitan area you could create some kind of price comparison system for all of the hospitals.

Will someone <i>please</i> convince the trucking industry that &quot;communicating&quot; by swapping text files over FTP in an absolutely incomprehinsible, proprietary format is simply no way to live?<p>Especially with the recent push by the fed to put electronic logging systems in every truck, this system is absolutely ripe for disruption. Downside is you&#x27;ll be fighting entrenched companies like IBM for ground.

Well, I guess journalism needs a way to be profitable again, and creators in general need a way to sell their work without requiring long term subscriptions or ads. But given the many, many companies who&#x27;ve tried to fix this issue (by allowing users to pay for certain bits of content via microtransactions or bundling subscriptions together ala Blendle), I&#x27;m not sure what the answer would be.<p>I also feel game development needs a way for creators to commission help with various aspects of the process too. Oh sure, there&#x27;s the odd forum where you can pay for graphics assets or music, but what if your problems are code related? Or game design based? It&#x27;s a lot harder to request that sort of thing online, let alone find a way to pay for it. Where can I say, hire a level designer or game programmer independently of a studio?<p>As far as I can tell, nowhere, which makes it awfully hard when I&#x27;m stuck and just need a bit of help to finish a mostly complete project.<p>Anyone who solves that would get a lot of my money, I&#x27;ll say that much.

Secure internet for people who travel frequently or work from coffee shops. Filter the “free” internet connection through a TOR router and protect your network&#x2F;browsing.

A huge problem with CRMs is the lack of staff engagement. A company will spend $30 million to customize their Salesforce workflow (or their SAP workflow, or any other workflow or CRM tool) but the staff will hate it and so the investment seems wasted. That’s why Natural Language Processing seems like it could be a win for this space. A salesperson should be able to write a quick text message on their phone, and that message should be parsed by an NLP script and then put into Salesforce. The promise of this idea, as well as the problems, I detailed here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0998997617&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps&#x2F;dp&#x2F;09...</a>

just wrote a blog post on this exact topic for the biopharma industry: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newbio.tech&#x2F;blog&#x2F;bio_charts.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newbio.tech&#x2F;blog&#x2F;bio_charts.html</a><p>its a $600B industry that is in decline because its traditional R&amp;D engine is sputtering out, and big pharma has been amazingly acquisitive the last five years to replace off-patent blockbuster drugs (more IPOs and big M&amp;A than software the last 5 years despite getting 1&#x2F;5 of venture funding)<p>tons of really interesting new tech for startups to explore: synthetic biology, cell and gene therapy, bioelectronic medicine, many many others

Not necessarily an idea for a startup, but I want a Chrome plugin that changes the click behavior of an email address. If I click on the domain part of the email address, I want it to open that domain&#x27;s website on a new tab.

Digital marketing and programmatic advertising - TRAFFICKING. Everyone hates it. It&#x27;s 100% required but no one has solved the issue. It can eat up so much time and if you make a mistake can cost valueable data.

An app for installing and maintaining mixed fleets of lora&#x2F;sigfox&#x2F;... IoT sensors.<p>When installing these at scale in existing buildings you have to be able to send out local workforce to properly install and activate thousands of sensors, as well as maintain them afterwards, without prior training. It’s one of those things that sounds easy on the surface but is riddled with complexity, like how to register which sensor is installed where in a foolproof way, or how to easily locate faulty sensors for replacement.

I am working on content AI platform (preadr). Preadr brings to you Internet&#x27;s finest stories&#x2F;content. It is a content discovery platform that helps you discover quality content that is relevant to you.<p>The Problem<p>There are currently three main ways we discover an ever-growing amount of content on the web: news, social networks, and search. There is a fourth category that is missing: relevance—a break from the noise on the Internet to discover what&#x27;s relevant to us.<p>News delivers what’s happening in the world right now. Social networks let us know what’s happening with our friends. Search is great at finding the needle in the haystack. But how do we discover things from around the web that are new and relevant to us?<p>Incentives on existing platforms are such that new and entertaining content wins. We need a better system that can filter the signal out of the noise.<p>The Solution<p>We’re building Preadr to tackle the relevance problem and bring forward quality content. A platform that helps you discover most relevant content based on your interests, for both, leisure as well as learning.<p>Every day we analyze an ever-growing amount of new links and create a storyline of the most relevant ones. We curate content from the most trusted sources on the internet and let our algorithms do their work to filter the relevant from the non-relevant. Since quality is not limited by the format of content, we offer a mix of different formats i.e. articles, videos, podcasts, etc.

ctrl+f &quot;construction&quot; = 0 results.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;angel.co&#x2F;construction" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;angel.co&#x2F;construction</a><p>small construction companies are still in the stone age. plangrid and submittal exchange exist but not much else is popular.<p>textura is owned by oracle, and everything else is owned by trimble and autodesk.<p>theres a plethera of attempts at field document management, and timecards, but 0 great medium-large business size erps. procore is like half an erp without an accounting system.<p>there is a huge untapped thirst for something that &quot;just works&quot; regarding labor productivity tracking and document management.<p>construction is one of the places where I think an enterprise blockchain could actually apply better than a traditional database. imagine a construction project with one blockchain, and every general contractor, sub, and vendor participating. shares, payments, todo, gantt charts, drawings, the model itself. they can all access the database from whatever supported client their firm uses (think email clients all working with each other) but on the backend working on one shared distributed database. I think you could turn down the bad actor security a bit, similar to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;azure.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;announcing-microsoft-s-coco-framework-for-enterprise-blockchain-networks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;azure.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;announcing-microsoft-...</a>

Some sort of enabler for content. I work in content marketing (not click bait shit but helping b2b companies tell their story without hiring a full design&#x2F;marketing&#x2F;dev team).<p>Our process and system is super efficient recording video + sending notifications to team members to edit, add captions, strip audio for your podcast, set up your podcast, set up your alexa flash briefing, etc.<p>But it takes hours to do all of this if youre on your own and thats ONLY if you know how to do it all. Content is the black box most have no idea how to do. If you don&#x27;t pay our agency to do it for you you are kind of out of luck.<p>We sell a book on our process now and sell about 50 copies a week. These people are validated and want to learn how to do it, and are willing to pay to learn.<p>It only makes sense to build the platform that automates this process for these people and offer it to them. They&#x27;ve already paid to learn. Might as well offer the platform to do it.

Patch distribution for games. Every desktop game does its own thing, with its own CDN, incompatible with other engines.

From a technical side of things: - data management - faster analytics software - test and learn optimisation - faster model deployment<p>From a business side of things: - loyalty program&#x2F;rewards - pricing optimization - financial services to underserved customers including entrepreneurs, families, millennials, freelancers, etc.

Open hardware and software for PLCs for manufacturing.

I want to see a good identity and user manager SaaS oriented towards smaller customers. There used to be Stormpath, which was pretty amazing, but they got bought by Okta, which is less friendly to small teams and more enterprise oriented.

I work as a fitness instructor and I want to have an holistic control panel to monitor my customers health and program, I want them to speak to each others and share. I want them to see their historic datas too

A startup in the multi media field would basically be tooling creators. Innovation in the sense of just creating things easier to use, a jackknife agency that can develop specific tools per department.

Replacement for - Login with Facebook.

The music industry as a whole. Who owns what song, what percentage, what role (writer, publisher), who recorded it, who collects for which industry, who collects mechanical royalties, performance royalties, would I make more money with ascap, bmi, sesac or gmr? How about this publisher, vs this other one? Tell me how often the music I own is played on radio, spotify, etc. Was my royalty here calculated correctly?

Modular template based responsive html email builder with version control, comments and approvals.<p>Our marketing department sends 10+ campaigns&#x2F;week, each goes through multiple changes and compliance approval. It’s very time consuming, especially when someone needs to touch the code.

A new operating system that allows peripherals like network cards, monitors, sata disks, bluetooth, speakers, fmri scanners, etc. to be used interchangeably between machines, locally and over the net.<p>Edit: I&#x27;m in the computing industry. Have you heard of it?

API Management and Api gateways for regulated industries like banking, finance government etc. With an eye on governance, IAM, auditing etc.<p>All solutions out there are horrible....

Out-of-wallet challenge questions or knowledge based authentication for developing countries. There is a lot of money to be made there. LOTS OF MONEY.

Half-joke, but a real problem: quality documentation for AWS. I&#x27;d pay good money for this.

A messaging&#x2F;texting device with a long battery life and decent keyboard.

In my industries, all of them.