Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?
Successful software companies are mostly founded by software engineers, or at least other white collar professionals. And since people mostly work on what they know (which is good) this seems to leave a lot of industries behind. What blue-collar industries do you know that could really be helped by better software?
For more background, I'm in the early stages of forming a startup, and just narrowing down problems. I'm trying to get a friend on board as a cofounder. He's great at mobile, and I can handle the backend. We also both worked other careers before switching to software (oil and aviation). I've got B2B sales experience.
When you put this all together, it makes an interesting combo of an app for non-office businesses. I'd really like to make something that's more of a tool than just an app. Think "mobile phones in airplanes tracking your rental fleet" over "weather app".
Any direction-pointing is very welcome!
175 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadThey're also founded by people that know the business they're dealing with. If you know oil and aviation, think about where customers are feeling pain and focus your effort there.
I worked as a contract software engineer and I built quite a few MVPs for niche businesses I would never have thought of. I built a dashboard for rental management companies to track vendors (e.g. plumbers, electricians, pool cleaners) to make sure their licenses, insurance, and background checks are up to date. I built a tool for companies to track and calculate multistate tax withholding for traveling employees (apparently there is a complex algorithm based on the number of days you worked in the state, your home state, etc). There are thousands of these business ideas out there that some domain expert is running in a spreadsheet but could be turned into a SaaS product.
Did the domain knowledge come from the person paying you, or did you figure it out yourself?
Don't be afraid to work on problems where the solution might not be a software solution. Also you need to have experienced the problem yourself in order to have skin the game. (This was one of the take-aways from an IDEO design thinking workshop I attended — you have to find ways to empathize with the user you’re designing for)
Chances are a software solution will likely emerge anyway (in this day and age, everything runs on software), but by focusing on solving the problem, you ensure your solution has value, and you're not just trying to find a use case to write software for.
Understanding the problem domain prior to presuming the solution space almost always works better than the other way around. (speaking as someone who has tried the approach problems from both ends in a non-tech field) The latter usually results in products that have no flair and no market uptake.
Tobi Luetke started out trying to sell snowboards on-line but didn't find any suitable eCommerce software so ended up writing what eventually became Shopify.
Apart from writing full blown avionics systems for engine/flight control - what are you suggesting?
Edit: my reply was to the original comment which was something like "how is this a software problem?"
Do you think idling time is a software problem? Aircraft idle for various time based on other requirements and needs, for example, spooling up the engines or inerting the fuel tanks.
Routes are already optimized by air traffic for the fastest, and cheapest route. They have no incentive to increase flight times as there would be fewer aircraft flying then.
I don't have a solution for either of these things, just enough intuition as a pilot and software engineer to say "maybe there's something there".
The airline I work for is nearing a paperless cockpit. Flight attendants have handhelds loaded with tools for their job, credit card readers, and all of their manuals. Mechanics are joining soon with paperless aircraft logbooks, manuals, and line maintenance dispatching.
Almost all of this stuff is developed in-house or through contractors. It’s so customized to the existing data systems and airline operations that I don’t see how a SaaS could break into it. SaaS May work for smaller airlines who would be more willing to mold their operation to fit a tool.
As far as fuel usage goes that is unfortunately more a symptom of ATC. You can make the best flight profile in the world for fuel planning but as soon as ATC needs to change your profile it all goes out the window.
We know how to do these, maybe not as safe as we can with simpler methods today, but convincing the public and regulators will always be the challenge in aviation/aerospace.
Probably the only realistic (software related) method in today's world without a materials/battery improvement, but we won't get there for a while.
What control scheme do aircraft use today? I always thought it was a form of MPC (well GPC = generalized predictive control) with a state estimator like a linear Kalman filter.
I haven't worked on flight control (but control on specific aircraft systems, which are at the same level), and they're all basically PID control thrown together.
Advanced control can be deterministic -- through parameterization. Explicit MPC [1] does this. It pre-computes the quadratic optimization problem offline, so all the solutions are enumerated and stored, and are verifiable. However, as far as I know no one has implemented this commercially.
Interesting that it's all PID. Not surprised though because PID is tried-and-true (but even so, has a lot of tiny nuances which takes years to understand).
[1] https://www.mathworks.com/help/mpc/explicit-mpc-design.html
Many legal professionals are barely computer-literate, of course (and that is a big issue) but many are increasingly savvy and feel constrained by various proprietary solutions.
(Edit: typo and further commentary)
In immigration or family law there is lots of procedural work, the lawyer might be solo, and the client is an individual or family. In this case the lawyer can generally not charge thousands per hour, they're doing most or all of the work, and the work has lots of steps that are repeated every case. This is a good case for the use of software to increase efficiency.
In big corporate law the work is specialized, the lawyer belongs to a firm, the client is a multi-national, paralegals and associates do a lot of the work, and the firm can charge thousands per hour. Here there's not a lot of incentive for efficiency.
Practice management software targeted to solos and small firms is very successful, look at https://www.clio.com/
Thanks for sharing
Add: I often saved them countless hours with some simple Excel VBA or running a loop over a database table. Really simple stuff.
Now most of my consulting now is:
- Bringing web-apps up to date (mainly by getting rid of a lot of jQuery that could just be JavaScript, or shockingly common could just be CSS)
- Refactoring hard/impossible to understand 2000+ line methods (least favorite - so risky)
- And cleaning up the dead-code and inaccurate comments that accumulate over the years from the ghosts of contractors past.
I'm basically a janitor for "enterprise" software code-bases.
Maybe I'm just weird, but for me that's one of the most satisfying things to do.
Like reaching a big boss in a video game and having to slice pieces off him until he's no longer a problem.
I'm with you, but also agree with the GP. It's super satisfying to get stuff like that cleaned up, but one of the most shocking things I've come across is callers who do absolutely bizarre things that rely on side effects from those methods. More than once, refactoring a big method like that has spiraled out of control fixing all of the callers as well.
I don't really market myself other than through networking. I try to keep up with everyone I've ever worked with. Especially if they manage tons of contractors without any real web development experience. The more of these "enterprise contractors" you have touching a project, the more value a person like me can add in cleaning everything back up.
> "if it ain't broke it, don't fix it"
This is true, and they only come to me when it is broke.
For instance - today I was fixing a bug for a client that has gone through ~20 contractors in the last 4 years. They had a view that was now displaying incorrectly. They were using a single table broken up by empty rows with no side borders to look like a space between tables, instead of using multiple tables with margin between them. Then they used jQuery to color the background of the odd rows. Doing a git blame showed dozens of hands on this view, and looking at the history, some very creative ways to color the background (all using jQuery).
Now that "table 1" had a new row added to it, there was a blue space (instead of white) between the two "tables".
It took me about 45 minutes to break the table apart properly, get the various attributes back in working order and remove the 10 lines of jQuery they were using to add various styles based on even/odd/first/last rows, and replace them with approximately the same number of lines of CSS, and another 30 minutes to replace the dozens of references to the same jQuery selector of the main table, with a single reference of the element returned from document.querySelector, another hour to fix the duplicate ID attributes scattered throughout the view which led to some JavaScript issues that then took another hour to resolve.
I do a lot of this. I'm hired to to quickly fix one problem, but while fixing it, I compile a list of dozens-hundreds of other ticking-time-bombs, and estimate about how long it would take to address them all. Easily turn a $500-1000 fix into $5-10k minimal extra work.
My impression so far is that there's so much variability in what they encounter, that most tasks are best handled ad hoc by experienced tradesmen. But I'm not certain; it's possible that that's just the status quo, not how it needs to be.
I feel like truss factories could use some help with quality control with machine vision probably. A problem is trusses are built by alcoholic meth heads making minimum wage rather than carpenters on site to save time and money, but then the truss factory has to send out an engineer to fix it on site, usually missing or wrong gang nails or its just out of alignment.
Temp laborers could probably use some software to help with tracking hours etc. Typically all the hours are tracked with just the supervisor writing down on a carbon copy how long they worked and gives it to the laborers to take back to their office which is then manually input to the billing system to pay the laborers at the end of the day.
Keep in mind there's a much larger population of non-smartphone users that only use flipphones in construction especially day labor so any sort of app meant for the workers or laborers to use would just go unused.
You're exactly right on this one and it exists in Vancouver, Canada: https://faberconnect.com/
"Keep in mind there's a much larger population of non-smartphone users that only use flipphones in construction especially day labor so any sort of app meant for the workers or laborers to use would just go unused."
Right on the first point, wrong on the second. The app is used by a different crowd - mostly younger, and many newcomer professionals or working holiday visa holders. This crowd doesn't need the daily pay to buy a 12-pack after work, and a cash advance in the morning to get smokes and a bus ticket.
I've used both types of service regularly over the last couple of years to fill in the gaps while I work on my startup.
If you'd like an introduction, my contact details are in my profile.
[0] http://buildermt.com/
Having had renovated my 1970s flat, I can confirm it's not a productive industry and I doubt residential sector will suddenly get very productive for the reason you gave : small custom tasks
Please note that n=2, but both myself and a friend of met have met people working in life science labs that were assigning research assistants to manually count cells in images, and manually sweeping through images to find stills that were in focus.
The LIF is a binary blob wrapped in an XML structure. There has been some good work done by the people Open Microscopy Environment building some Java libraries for parsing these files, but to be quite frank I'm a bit rough around the edges when it comes to working with Java and all the computer vision stuff I know is in Python and C++.
If you're serious about this offer, then I can look into getting you some samples (if you can't easily find them yourself). But full disclosure, I don't think any PI or lab that I know of would be able to afford GPU compute hours, but most of them have access to a cluster, so if you can deliver a JAR (or a Docker container) I could demonstrate how they could quickly deploy that themselves on their own hardware.
1:https://cam.facilities.northwestern.edu/588-2/z-stack/
I can take a Stab, but the file format and Java stuff could be a problem. Let's see
I enjoyed my time there a lot, I was building tools to help very smart and motivated people solve cool science problems. My users sat across the lab bench from me (the original open office plan?) and iteration/feedback cycles were super fast. People were appreciative and I could see how much time I was saving them. It was very motivating. Some of the more useful stuff I built got picked up by other labs in the group.
Maybe I'll do that kind of thing again someday, if I decide I've had my fill of megacorp programming.
e.g., a month ago I made a small machine for a dental research lab that basically added a feature to a piece of test equipment. The feature was so basic and obvious, I have no idea why the equipment didn't already have it. But it was an opportunity for me to step in and make a small piece of hardware to do what they need at little cost.
A few months before that I made a GUI for a customized bit of veterinary equipment, and so on... These jobs are out there. They're quick and easy for an experienced engineer but the problem is finding them consistently. My main focus these days is trying to do just that.
The image processing was pretty simple. Object identification and cell counting, mostly. There are already good open-source tools to do this kind of thing, so my contribution was mostly integrating those tools into the lab's workflows to make people more efficient.
I wrote some simple embedded code and MATLAB programs to create a better user interface for one of our custom-built microscopes. The users could specify the types of scans they wanted at a higher level and the system would automatically gather the data, then present the results and let the user re-run with adjusted parameters.
The bioinformatics thing was the coolest and most ambitious project, although we only partially realized our goal in the time I was there. It helps automate some of the more tedious and easy-to-screw-up bits of planning cloning/transgenic experiments.
Really? That seems a few decades behind the times.
More specifically, software is usually not a direct expense so it needs to be paid from the grant overhead, but the university frequently wants to build new buildings or something else instead. It's the same for private government contractors.
They develop open-source platforms that are inspired by and seek to solve problems lived firsthand by collaborators (such as myself) and the greater scientific community.
The Broad has created an environment and provided resources to enable engineers to do great work. The DSP feels like a blend between tech company and academic research institution. The people I've interacted with are technically superb (and also nice).
If you are interested in contributing to the intersection of life science and compute, would strongly recommend you check them out.
This may be off topic if you consider above to not be sufficiently "blue collar", but biomedicine in general (from the entire spectrum of basic science all the way to care delivery) is in dire need of smart computational folks.
The RFP process is so long and brutal, and most of the time you need to have a man on the inside and basically go through that process as a formality because you are already guaranteed the contract.
But some things are broken in Government on purpose, so this would be very difficult, and it couldn't just be a Turbo Tax like software for submitting documents.
But some type of marketplace where you could hire agents to guide your software company through the RFP process and help land you contracts could definitely be a thing.
I'm thinking something that would basically be like E-Lance/UP-Work but for Lobbyists.
Sure, you can get some points for diversity, but in the end, diversity only gets a few small contracts here and there while the establishment rakes in the Lion's share.
It's a broken process; you keep chasing various people to add their input, you end up with "RFP for Client A version 2 version C with input from Frank version 3.xlsx"
I'm not sure why that is. Perhaps the existing SaaS/online solutions are too intrusive to setup, or people don't want that stuff in the cloud. Whatever reason it is, the current process is broken.
Generally RFPs have to be easy for the buyer; the vendor is kind of supposed to bend over backward anyway, especially at this point of the sales process.
I'm writing from non-US perspective but I suppose that it's as usual and same story to some degree in every country in the world - as an outsider you don't have slightest chance, you just need to know the right people then it might happen that your offer is chosen in public tender/contract.
I'm not saying you can't or wont' succeed. I have no idea.
But it seems like the first thing that happened is that you decided you wanted to start a business. Usually it's the reverse - you get inspired by discovering a problem and realize you have the skillset and motivation to solve it and then you come to the realization that you need to start a business to do that. For founders/entrepreneurs with experience having done that previously, this is likely a scenario with a much higher probability of success.
But I imagine the success rate of people who say "I want to start my own business" and then look for a business to start have much lower success rates.
I'm not trying to rain no your parade at all. Just wanted to give you something to think about before you spend a fortune in time and/or money starting something. I could easily be wrong, though. Just food for thought.
And I'm not sure business schools are a big help here. The vast majority of MBAs end up joining mid-sized to large existing companies as high flyers, and I think the curriculum aims to support that.
Anyway, why speculate? It's easy to find online articles and research showing why people have started their businesses, or the reasons why people would want to start one but haven't yet. Truth is that it's all the above and more.
Want to sell essential oils for me?
They didn't need to be intrigued by a problem or have a background that set them up to solve one. They decided to start a business and began by figuring out in what way their region was underserved, then built something to fill the gap. Voila.
There's no obvious reason this approach couldn't work in tech as well.
Just because your neighbors a welder, doesn’t mean you can whip out a materials inventory app for welders everywhere.
But two, I'd like to see some evidence that people really did entirely arbitrary things based on demand, without relation to other factors. If we look at a well-known example, the way Indian-Americans have dominated the motel industry, there's pretty clear evidence that wasn't just driven by looking around the neighborhood to see what was needed. E.g.: https://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/06/11/why-indian-am...
None of them told you that this is how they went about it, because it's a bad story.
Outside of tech, the standard entrepreneurship story is "I want to be my own boss; hmm, maybe I'll franchise a McDonald's".
It's only in tech that we end up equating entrepreneurship with things like innovation, solving brand new problems, etc. That's because the most successful tech entrepreneurs are the ones that did innovation (for the most part).
But that's not at all required - even in tech.
And just to be clear, I'm not thinking of Bezos as an example of small business owners. He's just the only person I've ever heard of who successfully said, "I'm starting a business. I wonder what it should sell?" As you say, I think he's an enormous outlier.
I'm still going forward, because I think starting a business still has a better expected outcome for me than working at a job.
If you are a company looking for a problem to solve, it's not going to work unless you get lucky. Find something you're passionate about and that is what will drive you to keep going, so that you don't just abandon your customers when things get tough.
We have compilers and databases but those only cover a (very important) slice of the human process of going from vague idea to value to users and then revenue.
As that process scales the number of people, roles and interactions between them become very hard to manage and we have no good tools to help with that.
A transportation company relies on software to manage their processes, giving everyone involved direct access to their particular slice of the process (think an ERP where logistics, sales, billing, executives collaborate).
In software we store code, the source of truth, which is fundamentally structured information, in text files. That source of truth is not usually not accessible by PMs, designers, or copywriters, they each have their own corner in Dropbox to store their Google Docs or Sketch files. Add conflicts/versioning problems to the pile. And that’s just a taste of what needs improvement.
If the transportation company worked that way it’d be utterly dysfunctional.
In software, I believe, this translates to reliability problems, projects taking too long... in summary: less value for our users and then less revenue.
I believe there is a better way :)
That would open up a whole bunch of possibilities that no one is looking at. Much better than competing with 2000 others at the next soon-to-be-obsolete app.
I've built a great career by asking customers to consider the "low tech solution" first, then building upon it. Amazing how often they love it so much that the "building upon" step never comes.
As I sit here on a client's system with 14 useless windows open, being bombarded by skype, email, voice, chat, webex, outlook, office, text, jira, confluence, and sharepoint notifications from 14 others with their own 14 useless windows open, none of us getting any real work done, I wonder why 2 guys like you who know how to get shit done don't come in and just fix this for us.
Couldn’t help myself, the number is even the same!
What do you think a solution to this problem (too complex, too many things to monitor) would look like? And all-in-one like Basecamp? Or maybe a super system that puts stuff in one place?
It's easier than most people think.
I work in natural stone. There are several different types of companies just in this niche. Usually the flow of product is:
quarries -> factories -> distributors (us) -> fabricators -> kitchen and bath shops -> end user
There are maybe 5-7 major pieces of software for the first four stages. "Under-served" is an understatement.
Similarly, there are 10s (if not hundreds) of other niches within construction, each with its own vertical. Tons of niche software is missing.
When I see another niche analytics/forms/site chatbot/automate social media startup, I slap myself to make sure I'm not crazy.
There's a whole ocean out there, but most software startup companies are running into each other in Depoe Bay.
Consulting within a niche is one way to do this.
Where you see badly digitized enterprise organizations with high admin overhead you always find an hugely expensive mid/late 90ies windows PC centric client/server environment in place blocking nearly all attempts to migrate back to anything centralized enough to support an modern saas solution. i.e. the problem is rarely that they are undeserved but that they are stuck with an nearly good enough computer platform and too much complexity for anyone to attempt an big bang replacement.
i work in one of the niche's you mention and we are 110% digitized with about 5 different solutions in place for every task causing an ton of manual cleanup when they inevitable fail to talk to each other correctly.
This is true for large, enterprisey companies. But I'm talking about companies in $7-15M range who have bookkeepers downloading 35 excels each month and then run their custom Excel process to enter into a basic ERP system, so they can send out emails to each of the 35 employees to collect receipts. That kind of thing is so prevalent and accepted, the biggest hurdle here is convincing that there is a better way rather than "hire another bookkeeper".
At the end of the day the 35 spreadsheets represent an workflow that your generic app will likely not automate, it's also not an empty market as every region have 5+ companies selling the magic silver bullet for mid-sized company bookkeeping, and all of them have an high degree of lock-in and cannot simply export it's data in an rigidly standardized format.
The experienced small company manager know that an experienced bookkeeper can make the administration spreedsheetwork be an low frustration experience, and that the previous software vendor could not deliver the same.
This is part of knowing the niche. The "app" doesn't need to be generic, or an app at all. Add-ons for existing industry software, integrations between industry software and generic inventory management app, etc. are all ways to provide immense value.
>> not an empty market
Yes, but they are often flooded with generic apps. "Inventory management for SMBs" because there isn't anything more specific. Until a company is large (enterprisey) enough to bake their home-made solution.
>> experienced bookkeeper can make the administration spreedsheetwork be an low frustration experience Not always. Definitely not true for our last two bookkeeping hires in the last 6 years. Part of it will always be a slog and as the load gets higher, sometimes the right answer is "hire another bookkeeper".
Hadn't heard of it, I will check it out, thanks!
There is space for both viewpoints.
>> Specific Region - the US.
>> Specific Supply Chain - consisting for 100s of companies
In my metro area alone (not in the top 20), there are hundreds of one type of company, not counting the others in the supply chain.
Catering to a niche like that, i.e. building software where the customer base < 1000 companies is still a potential multi-million dollar software business.
You are absolutely right, if you niche too far down, you'll get stuck customizing for each customer and that may not be worth it.
If you're looking for ideas, look for things those companies don't do, or largely do with legacy components to their suites. Up and comers include Revitzto, Katerra, Alice, BuildSafe, Rhumbix, BioSite
The other thing construction doesn't do is edi. Compared to logistics, all POs between firms accounting systems are pdfs and data entry. Interoperable accounting systems will be a huge paradigm shift, where blockchain could be more than a buzzword.
The real future in BIM is around things like Autodesk Plasma and Forge. https://www.aecmag.com/technology-mainmenu-35/1821-beyond-re...
This was a struggle for us, and we decided not to pursue it. Trying to get our company, which is not in the logistics field, set up to receive EDI updates is a pain. Getting all freight forwarders to add you as a notifying party, paying for an EDI service or setting up your own. Getting approved by shipping lines that don't recognize you as part of the supply chain.
Instead I've opted for taking all freight forwarder PDFs and parsing them (with some ML) to build our own dashboard of what material is coming in.
There are a few mid-sized companies that control a large chunk of that industry. Since they don't have much competition, innovation is more or less at a stand still. Companies like bushel ag are changing that, but lots of opportunity.
There are plenty of companies trying to serve ag with what they think ag needs. Most of them fail.
Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees. They are NOT dumb hayseeds like they are often portrayed! But they typically don’t have a lot of domain knowledge around software. Smaller farmers are used to making and fixing their own tools (all know how to weld); bigger farmers run corporations with a lot of employees.
They are unlikely to be interested in a SSAS. Why? The tax law for farmers in the USA and Europe revolves around tax treatment which favors cap ex (which makes sense — they need to buy big equipment which is used only briefly each year. It’s hard to share since all the other farmers in your area need that equipment at the same time). So understand your market and figure out what their specific need is, then meet it.
That's a very astute observation. I've found it crazy hard to try and improve existing spreadsheet workflows for farmers as we dig deeper into the domain.
I think in general industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets could possibly benefit from specialized software solutions. Think someone called it the unbundling of spreadsheets or something
That would be all of them. Spreadsheets always end up running a business, because the ultimate measure of business is money / resources, which is inevitably expressed in numbers.
Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the latter area are worth the loss of freedom in the former area.
That's not untrue, but perhaps too reductive a view on business, as it ignores "soft" market factors like being primarily risk-oriented vs revenue-oriented, the company's reputation, leadership vision, employee fitness to perform, technical debt, etc.
Yes, they all boil down to more or less revenue, profit and growth, but if you only ever look at the spreadsheets, you'll be divorced from reality.
> Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the latter area are worth the loss of freedom in the former area.
A major selling point for custom software beyond the simple Excel-like CRUD variants is its adoption of sectoral or company assumptions and goals. Yes, that introduces rigidity, but not all rigidity is bad. Most if not all sectors have standards and regulations to comply with, as well as market constraints.
I would suggest good rigidity is the kind that keeps you from making mistakes, forces you to get to know your audience or develop your business, whereas bad rigidity is due to leaky abstractions or poorly bounded contexts. The latter indicates the product is maladapted to day-to-day business operations.
Another reason would be scale. The flexibility in spreadsheets usually goes hand in hand with having to deal with inconsistencies and from what we've seen that mechanism is usually a person or persons which does eventually break down at a certain volume.
e.g. a farmer getting 20 different purchase orders a week, all in their weird unique format and trying to convert all of it into a single format by hand
About the closest I came to getting a client to separate from their spreadsheet was modifying it with some VBA macros so that instead of manually inputting numbers into about 15 different sheets in the book and then manually copying them into a report, they would enter about 10 numbers on one page, press a button and have a nice shiny report fully generated.
The client was extremely pleased with this and had no idea excel could do this.
You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
Automatic and connected moisture sensors are definitely a big thing, and I’m sure that large growing operations have all kinds of tools in their belt.
Most of the small growers I work with seem to run things by feel and by spending large amounts of time in the vineyard day after day.
So if your idea doesn't interlock with the existing tax code forget it. But if it can, sure.
* ag consolidation has followed the same permissive path that other industries have over the last 40 years thanks to supine antitrust regulators. And that consolidation has lead to modern sharecropping which I think is bad all around. But my point stands.
I had to laugh at this as it took me back. I grew up on a citrus farm, raised by my grandparents. My grandfather knew how to stick and MIG weld but did not know how to TIG weld. As more and more parts where being created in non iron based metals, he bought a TIG welder and made me learn how to TIG weld as he did not want to learn anything new at that stage in his life. That is also how I learned how to rebuild automatic transmissions, anyways it's amazing how many times knowing how to weld has come in useful over the years.
A big problem with a renovation is the uncertain number of surprises that the contractor will encounter when tearing out the existing material. The contractor doesn't want to get stuck cleaning up that black mold for free.
Navient is terrible. A decent UI would go a long way.
Nothing is made for men. It's made for users. Even something as manly as a razorblade for shaving facial hair is used by women too.
The women I know tend to have different creatives hobbies than men's creative hobbies (think crocheting vs woodworking). I'm willing to be there are more woodworking CAD programs than equivalent programs for crocheting in the market.
There are fishing lure design applications. Can you think of something similar for a more feminine hobby?
It used to be that women had a lot less disposable income than men. But I don't think that is true in most western countries now.
BTW I'm not trying to be sexist or patronizing. I know that plenty of women are also into ju-jitsu, riding motorbikes, mountaineering etc. But some hobbies and careers clearly have a higher percentage of females.
I expect that markets for the elderly are also under served. Technical support might be a challenge though!
My father had a bypass surgery last year, and the entire documentation process was a nightmare. It was like reams and reams of paper work, bills, prescriptions. The funny part was they would scan the paper forms and send to each other(blood banks, insurance, clinics etc) for quick response. They might as well have online forms and invoices.