How ebooks that are distributed in pdf are so hard to read on small screens, and the lack of properly working pdf->reflowable format (epub) tools. This is a hard problem and I'd pay for a 80% solution. It would have to recognize and properly fix/insert chapter titles, initial caps, tables of content, other leader/footer material, ... It would have to properly insert images in a sensible spot yet remove background images. Also it needs to properly recognize and format paragraphs. Columns would be nice but those are in the 20% I can live without.
Funnily enough, I was going to talk about ePub as well. A lot is now resting on it, but the format is in desperate need of an overhaul. I'm running a BarCamp in London next month and hoping to get both geeks and publishers along to discuss the issues.
Because it is basically a glorified frontend (as far as pdf to other formats conversion is concerned) for pdftohtml. It treats every line as a paragraph, can't intelligently decide on what is a chapter heading etc. The problem I'm describing is AI hard, it can't be done be some rule based matching. I know that Calibre has some regex based rules for finding chapters etc. but that is way too hard and only solves part of the problem, besides many book don't use the 'Chapter 1: xxx' format anyway.
We may have different goals in mind... I have a bunch of PDFs I need to get to my sony reader, for example academic papers. I want them to look basically OK, which I don't "think" is an AI hard problem. Detecting any text that represents a chapter certainly is... but I'm OK with writing regex to get my data out. I'll be posting in the mobileread forums about this at some point in the coming weeks if you're interested in whatever solution I hack out.
Academic papers especially are a PITA, at least those formatted in columns, so it depends on the journal I guess. Plus you need detection of paragraphs to get line breaks at the proper locations. If it's not in columns and if you are willing to tweak the algorithm parameters to each conversion (paper), then it won't be that hard (just detect increased line spacing, or indented first line), but a commercial application would have to work almost automatically. or otherwise have a very quick feedback cycle (preview/edit settings/redo conversion). That's another one of my gripes with Calibre, the epub/fb2 preview application is so so slow that it's almost unusable. Yeah let me know if you find a working solution, although I do have dozens of hours worth of scripts laying about to do custom conversions, so real one-off hackjobs I have so many of that I don't need any more :)
I would pay to outsource the risk of being a PayPal merchant. I want to be able to serve my users with the option of paying with PayPal, but PayPal for merchants is totally unreliable. Especially in the virtual good/currency industry they seem to have the tendency to lock your account for no reasons at all, and you can be without money for over 180 days.
I want a personal assistant for 5-10 hours a week. Not a virtual one because most of the things I want done are in meat space. Stuff like filling out forms, doing my laundry, waiting in line for me at the DMV, and dropping off my netflix returns in the mail. It sounds petty, but I really hate running errands and filling out forms. I'm considering hiring someone off craigslist.
Related, there are various indian companies that offer the virtual equivalent, but I've never signed up because of:
a) worries about cultural fit
b) they all seem to make the signup process that little bit too painful
c) there's always a slightly offline feel about the process, I want something more web 2.0, on the level of raising a bugzilla ticket for someone to book me a holiday.
I think most people would like this, if they trusted the person. This is the kind of role a equerry/butler fulfilled in the 18th and 19th centuries.
In the 20th century, you could expect a secretary to do this kind of thing (maybe not laundry!), even if it was not strictly company related. I think this made sense for businesses since secretaries were cheaper than you, and some things you have to do on work time - e.g. banking, government interaction, mail.
Now, personal secretaries are all but gone and personal assistants are only really available at board level. So although companies are paying less for payroll, they are losing out since I know phone the bank at work, on work time. I also hate forms and errands, so the company is further disadvantaged by the ego-depletion doing such things causes.
(N.B. I have nothing to back this stuff up, just seems like the way things used to be vs now)
I've often wanted the same. The main problem seems to be that it is probably hard to make a living as a personal assistant at the prices you and I are willing to pay.
There is also the trust issue: would you really trust a stranger enough to do sensitive things?
It just so happened that the previous day when my girlfriend asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I gave her a list of errands to run, people to call, and forms to fill out. She says I should just pay her instead of hiring someone, since she admittedly does do a lot of this crap for me anyways, but something doesn't feel right about hiring my girlfriend to be my personal assistant.
Regarding the business side of things, it might be feasible if you had a central service that could distribute the load of multiple clients among a stable of assistants. You sign up for X hours per week, and you get an assistant on retainer. Maybe you pay a premium if you prefer to work with one person exclusively. Locality could be a problem though, because you would ideally want your assistant to be pretty close to where you work/live.
The main problem seems to be that it is probably hard to make a living as a personal assistant at the prices you and I are willing to pay.
I'm not sure it's the actual rate of pay. I'd pay $20 an hour for these services no problem, and that's far above minimum wage. The problem is I'd ultimately be paying far more to do all the paperwork, have this person treated as an "employee", taxes, and red tape. If it was just handing cash to someone "under the table" the rate isn't too prohibitive.
Labor laws hurt employees as much as they protect them.
Taking care of taxes and red-tape should be scalable, though, right? Meaning that it should be possible for a company to set all that stuff up and then contract out the people. A consultancy for personal assistants.
New question: is there enough demand and margin to make this worth it for a company to do? Is there enough supply of people who want to be personal assistants? My guesses would be no and yes, respectively.
So, they already exist, you just have to find them. They call themselves a "Personal Concierge Service" so perhaps you could do a search for that in your local area.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find something similar when I moved back to Perth.
Hmm, interesting. I could see this being a service that charges you a monthly fee. I'm sure that a lot of people(migrants mostly) would be more than fine working for fees which we consider really low. In more detail, if you make 100 an hour, giving 10/h actually earns you another 100/h every time that person runs a task for you.
Here's what you can't find among a plethora of web design consultancies, cms systems, off-the-shelf website design services, html templates...
A small business/startup website solution that is compact, editable, live and clearly describes the product and company.
No, its not vague or different every time. It should:
1) Clearly describe the product
2) Clearly describe the company and what it does.
3) Does not look mediocre. (E.g. those static html sites based on those usual narrow rectangular templates with links at the side or top).
4) Easily changeable. (i.e. updates on parts of it without much html tweaking)
Extra:
5) An easy-to-update company blog, ability to upload multimedia content such as embed product videos. A startup is changing quick, and so should the website.
I have all this data that I collect and it's very difficult to make sense of it or to break it down into a form that tells me what steps I should be taking next to improve my bottom line.
We have similar problems. For example, I'm fairly certain some sort of bayesian model could tell me valuable things about my data. Someone who could run with that provide me an automated way to extract probabilities of desirable outcomes from my data would get money very quickly.
I have the product you need sitting in version control. We never released it to market because when we went to start marketing it, it seemed too difficult to go up against the big guys so we scrapped it and integrated it into a product where it's in use to this day.
Yes, its so hard to target a product like this. I think we'll just leave it sitting in version control, as I'm not passionate about solving industry specific problems other than the ones we built it for! :P
I have sometimes wondered whether the concept of a profiler could be applied outside programming. I'll bet if you put all expenses of an average big company into a profiler (plug: such as sysprof), you'd find tons of things that could be cut.
Though I guess this is what operations research was supposed to do.
I would need a decent 2D CAD for linux. 3D even sweeter. problem is that dudes who usually code and dudes who usually draw with CAD are two totally different breeds. And that's why we don't allready have a good CAD for linux.
I would be possibly willing to pay 200eur for a copy(but I want to see a proper demo first), and I don't think I'm alone.
And I don't need anything fancy like Autodesk's "AutoCAD revit architechture visual suite", just basic "draw lines and circles" kind of functionality.
Something I was looking for recently (slightly UK specific).
I like to buy FSF-level free hardware and software - ie no binary blobs, free software bios if you can get it, no binary only video drivers.
I couldn't find a store clearly focussed on selling this to me in the UK. Existing linux related online vendors often provide software that requires binary drivers, and don't clearly indicate the details of this sort of thing.
Existing stores like kd85.com are in the direction of what I'm thinking of.
Ask teachers, dentists, gardeners, councillors, vets (both the animal-doctor and the ex-military kind), fish owners, fish eaters, mechanics, little old ladies who don't know whether to trust their mechanic, landlords, concierges...
You're more likely to get responses you would never even have considered.
Look at it this way. It is often said that the best teams / startups are formed of people with different backgrounds, different thinking styles, different worldviews. So you're not going to add much to yourself by asking people (broadly speaking) similar to yourself. Find people totally unlike you. Think of a business you've never even encountered. Does it suck to own a fast food franchise and be totally at the mercy of the brand? Who knows? Maybe it does. Maybe you can help a little. Is it tough to be a guitar teacher nowadays when I can sort-of learn from youtube? I bet it does. Can you help them stand out?
Ask your friends about their friends. Who do they know who is in a weird business or industry you're unlikely to know anything about? Maybe they do something hardly anyone knows anything about? I met someone who told me about a friend of theirs who works as a food arranger. For photographing food for cookbooks. She's not the photographer. Or the cook. She's just really good at arranging the food. I had no idea that even existed as a job.
So step outside HN and the other places you might frequent online. You might just be able to fix a problem no-one capable of fixing has ever even heard of.
Clearly the people you describe often have problems for which they would appreciate solutions for which they would be willing to exchange money.
On the other hand, news.yc users ALSO tend to have both money and problems, and the best tools are generally ones where the creator had the problems themselves.
I guess my point is we could possibly have an interesting conversation about which market is most profitable, but you can't deny the people here are a market you might want to target.
Yes, you're absolutely right. It's good if you have some experience of your market.
But it is a bit of a problem when your market (say, HNers / web/tech types) are the obvious market for anyone in that market seeking to start a business. Hence the incredible variety of programming text editors, for example.
My point is that the intersection of sets of problems had by HNers could be a set of problems that has already been explored, or is at least targeted, by huge numbers of people, simply because it is their first imagined market (i.e. themselves). And in quite a few cases you will be going up against incredibly talented people (or teams) willing to give away their work for free because they believe in free/open source software. Which is a great thing, obviously, but it makes it hard to compete.
So yes, you are right. But sometimes it can be good to look outside.
I mainly react to the way that people seem to suggest not that targeting tech types is perhaps unwise due to it being a fairly saturated market, but that it's almost morally wrong in some way.
Personally my area of focus is on areas where I think my personal interests overlap with a significant potential userbase, and I'm slowly trying to convince myself I can do mySekritProject better than google, or at least, find a niche they're not going for.
I was going to respond to your post anyway, but given that my mom was a food arranger [at least it was a common task at her marketing firm] for some years now I really had to throw that in there...
Definitely right question, wrong place. It's kind of like asking your competition, this belongs in a bizdev forum. I think hacker news is going to be the last place I announce my site or hint at the idea. I mean there's only a few thousand devs that are really competent enough to be trouble and I really want to avoid them seeing my ideas before the bakers, photogs and food arrangers.
a) I probably agree with this, although people can be evangelists offline too you know. It's just called word of mouth.
b) This is almost certainly wrong. You think people who aren't tech-savvy are unqualified to define what they consider to be useful?
c) Back this up, taking into consideration the fact that you might be competing with open source / a pool of equally or more talented developers who could undercut you or do your product better.
Agreed, I've had some success with this in the past. However if you fix a specific problem common to many people here (as opposed, say, specific to Doctors) you can reach them instantly with one post. Your entire seed market is one click away :)
> You think people who aren't tech-savvy are unqualified to define what they consider to be usefu
No, but there is a pre-established forum for feedback (i.e. here). If you post an app here your going to get great feedback - if people are using your app I argue the feeback will be better/more specific
The only difference with other types of users is not that they don't know what they want but that a) they sometimes dont get what is possible/impossible and more importantly b) have trouble communicating their needs to you (that's not an unfixable problem Im sure)
> Back this up
This was probably something of a leap. However we often see people saying "I would pay X if you gave me Y" - usually from the already successful entrepreneur types. Im suggesting that people here are perhaps more likely to see value/not begrudge payment for a useful service.
Another problem I'd be very tempted to pay money to solve right now:
I'm taking lessons in French. It's pretty cool. I'd like to find ways to improve my French at home. I'd love a site that would make it easy to find someone to video chat with eg skype with some (possibly minimal) teaching skills so I could practice conversation.
Have you tried/seen LiveMocha? http://www.livemocha.com It's social networking for language learners, mixing and matching native speakers (I have no affiliation with them).
I need a way to add a simple white label site search feature for my customers. We run a service that hosts thousands of websites. We would like a service with an api that allows to have a site indexed and add a search box. Sort of like a google custom search engine but all with api access for each site. We looked a Lijit, but they don't allow searches without advertising (our customers don't want that). And with all that my team has their plate we really don't want to try to run our own search (ala Solr) ourselves.
I need a software solution to model best legal outcomes and other options for people to help become aware of their options:
(i) If law is based on Acts of Parliament which are written in a tree structure;
(ii) Then Information can be placed into software complying with the tree structure in (i), so we can dynamically model the outcomes possible? Else
(iii) Information is missing to complete the modelling of outcomes. What information is missing?
This would aid with the understanding of the law and clients/individuals would be more knowledgeable and prepared for the options available.
My preference would be in the area of IP law such as copyright, patents, trademarks etc since we can model these areas of law more easily with yes/know answers.
Better online take-away service, I used justeat at the moment but it leaves a lot to be desired (have to enter credit card everytime, lack of details, poor search, food reviews, etc.)
Instant online quotes/price comparison for taxi services
Quickbooks. Quickbooks is the single worst piece of software that I have ever had to deal with on a regular basis. I want to be able to reliably pull in all the financial transactions that occur for my company, and categorize them as quickly as possible. Quickbooks does this, but it fails on the reliably, all, and quickly aspects.
I also need to be able to import invoicing information from my billing software, and match that to bank deposits and credit card settlements.
I know this might sound odd, but I'd like a "privacy policy" and "terms and conditions" generator that doesn't suck.
I'd be willing to part with cash for something where I just tick off the various things I want and it would generate those documents for my site.
Better yet, it would be nice if it was able to make these documents be localised to be legal in whatever jurisdiction (of my choosing) at creation time.
I don't have a business, just an office drone; but I have to find out about legal ownership of companies all the time, when our customers issue purchase orders we have to make sure that the names on the invoices we generate match them.
Changing the names in our CRM/ERP systems is a laborious process and we have to get the customer to sign legal documents confirming that all the software licenses owned by the previous company are now owned by the acquirer/new merger.
I think that a website containing all the name change documents, press releases and possibly a service that tracks legal ownership (though this could be hard to scale) could be worth pursuing, along the lines of a Duns and Bradstreet ( http://www.dnb.com ) type company.
It could be something like a more focused docstoc or perhaps a legal wolfram alpha.
73 comments
[ 9.5 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadThe target audience is HN readers... and we still make for bad consumers.
We've a burger kiosk very close to and far better than McDonalds (IMO) but everyone still goes to McDonalds. Brand loyalty, advertising, etc..
a) worries about cultural fit
b) they all seem to make the signup process that little bit too painful
c) there's always a slightly offline feel about the process, I want something more web 2.0, on the level of raising a bugzilla ticket for someone to book me a holiday.
In the 20th century, you could expect a secretary to do this kind of thing (maybe not laundry!), even if it was not strictly company related. I think this made sense for businesses since secretaries were cheaper than you, and some things you have to do on work time - e.g. banking, government interaction, mail.
Now, personal secretaries are all but gone and personal assistants are only really available at board level. So although companies are paying less for payroll, they are losing out since I know phone the bank at work, on work time. I also hate forms and errands, so the company is further disadvantaged by the ego-depletion doing such things causes.
(N.B. I have nothing to back this stuff up, just seems like the way things used to be vs now)
There is also the trust issue: would you really trust a stranger enough to do sensitive things?
It just so happened that the previous day when my girlfriend asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I gave her a list of errands to run, people to call, and forms to fill out. She says I should just pay her instead of hiring someone, since she admittedly does do a lot of this crap for me anyways, but something doesn't feel right about hiring my girlfriend to be my personal assistant.
Regarding the business side of things, it might be feasible if you had a central service that could distribute the load of multiple clients among a stable of assistants. You sign up for X hours per week, and you get an assistant on retainer. Maybe you pay a premium if you prefer to work with one person exclusively. Locality could be a problem though, because you would ideally want your assistant to be pretty close to where you work/live.
A reasonably priced non-awful option therefore sounds good.
I'm not sure it's the actual rate of pay. I'd pay $20 an hour for these services no problem, and that's far above minimum wage. The problem is I'd ultimately be paying far more to do all the paperwork, have this person treated as an "employee", taxes, and red tape. If it was just handing cash to someone "under the table" the rate isn't too prohibitive.
Labor laws hurt employees as much as they protect them.
Taking care of taxes and red-tape should be scalable, though, right? Meaning that it should be possible for a company to set all that stuff up and then contract out the people. A consultancy for personal assistants.
New question: is there enough demand and margin to make this worth it for a company to do? Is there enough supply of people who want to be personal assistants? My guesses would be no and yes, respectively.
http://www.thelifestylersgroup.com.au/
So, they already exist, you just have to find them. They call themselves a "Personal Concierge Service" so perhaps you could do a search for that in your local area.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find something similar when I moved back to Perth.
A small business/startup website solution that is compact, editable, live and clearly describes the product and company.
No, its not vague or different every time. It should:
1) Clearly describe the product
2) Clearly describe the company and what it does.
3) Does not look mediocre. (E.g. those static html sites based on those usual narrow rectangular templates with links at the side or top).
4) Easily changeable. (i.e. updates on parts of it without much html tweaking)
Extra:
5) An easy-to-update company blog, ability to upload multimedia content such as embed product videos. A startup is changing quick, and so should the website.
Do the first 4, I'll buy it. Then add 5.
Examples:
http://www.rethinkdb.com/
http://pivotallabs.com/
I have researched and both have spent considerable amount of time building theirs, and they have all 5. Why not do it off the shelf?
In the end it filled with affiliate marketers (it seems it was useful for them :P) so I had to scrap it.
Even so, email me if you want to talk about it.
You too, Max.
How would you market a product like this?
So I'd break this up into individual plugins that just work, and that handle a specific problem.
So I send my data into your system, and you have different pipelines I can send the data into that provide me with different intelligence things.
And then afterwards, just approach all the business in the niche directly.
I have sometimes wondered whether the concept of a profiler could be applied outside programming. I'll bet if you put all expenses of an average big company into a profiler (plug: such as sysprof), you'd find tons of things that could be cut.
Though I guess this is what operations research was supposed to do.
Not that new software ideas are hard to come by, but it'd be interesting to build up a list of specific pain points with eg) email.
I would be possibly willing to pay 200eur for a copy(but I want to see a proper demo first), and I don't think I'm alone.
And I don't need anything fancy like Autodesk's "AutoCAD revit architechture visual suite", just basic "draw lines and circles" kind of functionality.
http://www.blender3darchitect.com/2009/07/blender-3d-as-a-ca...
I like to buy FSF-level free hardware and software - ie no binary blobs, free software bios if you can get it, no binary only video drivers.
I couldn't find a store clearly focussed on selling this to me in the UK. Existing linux related online vendors often provide software that requires binary drivers, and don't clearly indicate the details of this sort of thing.
Existing stores like kd85.com are in the direction of what I'm thinking of.
Try to maximize # of customers * $ revenue per customer
Yes, I learned programming with GoTo. I am old.
Ask teachers, dentists, gardeners, councillors, vets (both the animal-doctor and the ex-military kind), fish owners, fish eaters, mechanics, little old ladies who don't know whether to trust their mechanic, landlords, concierges...
You're more likely to get responses you would never even have considered.
Look at it this way. It is often said that the best teams / startups are formed of people with different backgrounds, different thinking styles, different worldviews. So you're not going to add much to yourself by asking people (broadly speaking) similar to yourself. Find people totally unlike you. Think of a business you've never even encountered. Does it suck to own a fast food franchise and be totally at the mercy of the brand? Who knows? Maybe it does. Maybe you can help a little. Is it tough to be a guitar teacher nowadays when I can sort-of learn from youtube? I bet it does. Can you help them stand out?
Ask your friends about their friends. Who do they know who is in a weird business or industry you're unlikely to know anything about? Maybe they do something hardly anyone knows anything about? I met someone who told me about a friend of theirs who works as a food arranger. For photographing food for cookbooks. She's not the photographer. Or the cook. She's just really good at arranging the food. I had no idea that even existed as a job.
So step outside HN and the other places you might frequent online. You might just be able to fix a problem no-one capable of fixing has ever even heard of.
Clearly the people you describe often have problems for which they would appreciate solutions for which they would be willing to exchange money.
On the other hand, news.yc users ALSO tend to have both money and problems, and the best tools are generally ones where the creator had the problems themselves.
I guess my point is we could possibly have an interesting conversation about which market is most profitable, but you can't deny the people here are a market you might want to target.
But it is a bit of a problem when your market (say, HNers / web/tech types) are the obvious market for anyone in that market seeking to start a business. Hence the incredible variety of programming text editors, for example.
My point is that the intersection of sets of problems had by HNers could be a set of problems that has already been explored, or is at least targeted, by huge numbers of people, simply because it is their first imagined market (i.e. themselves). And in quite a few cases you will be going up against incredibly talented people (or teams) willing to give away their work for free because they believe in free/open source software. Which is a great thing, obviously, but it makes it hard to compete.
So yes, you are right. But sometimes it can be good to look outside.
I mainly react to the way that people seem to suggest not that targeting tech types is perhaps unwise due to it being a fairly saturated market, but that it's almost morally wrong in some way.
Personally my area of focus is on areas where I think my personal interests overlap with a significant potential userbase, and I'm slowly trying to convince myself I can do mySekritProject better than google, or at least, find a niche they're not going for.
Definitely right question, wrong place. It's kind of like asking your competition, this belongs in a bizdev forum. I think hacker news is going to be the last place I announce my site or hint at the idea. I mean there's only a few thousand devs that are really competent enough to be trouble and I really want to avoid them seeing my ideas before the bakers, photogs and food arrangers.
Indeed if you solve one of our problems then you have two big advantages:
a) a huge pool of tech-savvy seed users
b) A much higher likelihood of useful feedback
c) I would suggest, also, much better chance of revenue generation
But to respond to your 'advantages':
a) I probably agree with this, although people can be evangelists offline too you know. It's just called word of mouth.
b) This is almost certainly wrong. You think people who aren't tech-savvy are unqualified to define what they consider to be useful?
c) Back this up, taking into consideration the fact that you might be competing with open source / a pool of equally or more talented developers who could undercut you or do your product better.
Agreed, I've had some success with this in the past. However if you fix a specific problem common to many people here (as opposed, say, specific to Doctors) you can reach them instantly with one post. Your entire seed market is one click away :)
> You think people who aren't tech-savvy are unqualified to define what they consider to be usefu
No, but there is a pre-established forum for feedback (i.e. here). If you post an app here your going to get great feedback - if people are using your app I argue the feeback will be better/more specific
The only difference with other types of users is not that they don't know what they want but that a) they sometimes dont get what is possible/impossible and more importantly b) have trouble communicating their needs to you (that's not an unfixable problem Im sure)
> Back this up
This was probably something of a leap. However we often see people saying "I would pay X if you gave me Y" - usually from the already successful entrepreneur types. Im suggesting that people here are perhaps more likely to see value/not begrudge payment for a useful service.
I'm taking lessons in French. It's pretty cool. I'd like to find ways to improve my French at home. I'd love a site that would make it easy to find someone to video chat with eg skype with some (possibly minimal) teaching skills so I could practice conversation.
This would aid with the understanding of the law and clients/individuals would be more knowledgeable and prepared for the options available.
My preference would be in the area of IP law such as copyright, patents, trademarks etc since we can model these areas of law more easily with yes/know answers.
I place this need on my blog recently: http://1place.com.au/wptest.php
Instant online quotes/price comparison for taxi services
I also need to be able to import invoicing information from my billing software, and match that to bank deposits and credit card settlements.
I'd be willing to part with cash for something where I just tick off the various things I want and it would generate those documents for my site.
Better yet, it would be nice if it was able to make these documents be localised to be legal in whatever jurisdiction (of my choosing) at creation time.
Changing the names in our CRM/ERP systems is a laborious process and we have to get the customer to sign legal documents confirming that all the software licenses owned by the previous company are now owned by the acquirer/new merger.
I think that a website containing all the name change documents, press releases and possibly a service that tracks legal ownership (though this could be hard to scale) could be worth pursuing, along the lines of a Duns and Bradstreet ( http://www.dnb.com ) type company.
It could be something like a more focused docstoc or perhaps a legal wolfram alpha.