Ask HN: choose between 2 startup ideas

Translation. This is a huge area. I'm working on an app that would benefit from "instantaneous" (unseen live bodies doing the work - NOT software) translation between texting parties. Also I work in a broadcast environment where we send English transcripts from Vancouver to Montreal and have to wait for days to get the French copy back. FYI the cost for that is $1.50 per WORD.

FYI: http://mygengo.com/ provides a platform for crowd-sourced translations. Of course, the market is big enough for multiple players..

1. There is alot of work being done in this space to my knowledge. I know pg has mentioned that there at least a couple YC startups working on this problem and there is already a contingent of sites out there.

There are many different problems in the hiring process and thus opportunity to attack it from many different angles. See some of these:

http://www.simplicant.com/ http://www.iapplicants.com/ http://www.applicantstack.com/ http://www.theresumator.com/ (sexy!)

I've never met anyone that was perfectly content with the way they find and hire people. Not that my experience is huge in this area, but I think there is plenty of room for disruption. And with that comes plenty of room for competition.

2. I've never heard of anything like this, but it sounds like a useful tool. From my anecdotal experience with translators, it seems most of them are in such high demand that they don't need a marketplace (I know 1 in Chinese, 2 in Arabic). Then again, these are full time jobs for the people I know, it might be different for those who work as contractors on shorter projects. The bottom line is that this idea seems like it will require heavy networking effort and may not work out; I'd want to do some market testing really early to test the viability of it.

----

If I had to choose between one of these, I'd probably pick #1 and tightly focus on a very specific problem. If you could make an elegant solution for just one piece of the hiring puzzle, you get two outs: a standalone product or a potential acquisition target as this space develops over the coming years. A translation marketplace sounds interesting but building the network/community will be challenging and time-consuming; regardless of your technical solution, you could still fail at creating critical mass. This adds risk of spending much time before you know it will fail; without market validation, I'd be hesitant.

----

(shameless plug) If you'd like to discuss your ideas more, I've got an invitation to http://www.sparkmuse.com with your name on it. Sparkmuse is a community site I'm building where internet entrepreneurs can gather to get feedback, refine, and act on their ideas. We just started the alpha last week~

I think the best way to pick, is to choose the one that gets you excited and keeps you up at night.

Funny as I have also considered to tackle both of these problems.

Translation is a big problem where I work, we waste lots of time going back and forth between developers and copywriters. This should really be streamlined.

Hiring is painful now. I'm also thinking of making something in that area. I actually wrote a blog post: Things to fix: hiring software developers. http://sparklewise.com/?p=462

Out of the two, I agree with other commenters that the hiring app seems more promising.

1) My gut feeling is this is a harder problem than it seems at face value, with plenty of competition.

Take the auto-submit part, which might seem like a simple development problem but it far more of a sales/marketing one than an app development one. Thousands[1] of job boards employ many different ways of submitting and paying for job ads with many of the most important and relevant job boards selling and updating their ads with good old-fashioned labour-intensive phone, fax and email[2]. Old fashioned, but provides the chance to keep pushing the message that 85.2% of jobseekers surveyed prefer TradePub Weekly's industry-leading job boards and you can have a print ad and a banner in their e-newsletter for half price if you sign before the end of the week.

Probably the tech solution to the numerous boards is to encourage them adapt their boards to accept submissions via your API and centralised payments. But since they're often part of conservative media companies and you're cutting them off from their highly prized client relationships they're only going to make these changes if they see indications that you're sending a lot of advertisers their way (Giving the tool free to HR depts and trying to negotiate a commission from the job board owners is your best hope for traction). The guys currently selling ads, who spend all day on the phone trying to bring advertisers in and face redundancy if you successfully disrupt their market, will be very keen to see you don't succeed.

[1] sure, you could start with a small number, but to make your app valuable to hirers it needs to have most of the outlets they'd consider advertising in. Including the vertical/local ones. The inefficiency and expense to them of old-media outlets is tolerable if the candidates applying through those sources are better. [2] also the preferred methods of recruiters, who might feasibly make up a major segment of your apps end user base

2. There seems to be quite a bit of competition emerging at the bottom end of the market with crowdsourced or Mechanical-Turk approach to human translation and improvement in automated translation. The higher end of the market might well be worth testing though, particularly if you can make it easy to find translators with knowledge of industry-specific terminology.