Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
This has been asked previously here [1] but it has been over a year. The thread actually has suggestions to do this monthly to get insights into other industries but I guess that did not happen. Anyway I think it's been over a year and I think we should have a discussion about this.
34 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 74.8 ms ] threadIt is the person who has experienced the problem that will fully understand the nuances of the problem and the potential users of the solution.
An alternative question might be: “how does one engage and learn about problems in your industry?”
I understand that this is difficult, but this is what investors want to see.
1. Customer original bill (variable - user provided) e.g. 100
2. Saving (variable - user provided) e.g. 9
3. Saving percentage (calculated) e.g. 9%
4. Billed Percentage (variable based on savings percentage?) e.g. 25% x 9
So you would have a billed percentage "rate card" that depends on variable factors like the customer bill plan, the amount/percentage saved etc? Is that the tricky bit?
Our product is performance-based, rather than unit-based, and there's no exposed API. We would like to have a detailed itemized invoice (think a phone bill). Our options are build from scratch or shoe-horn existing solutions. It'd be nice to not have to reinvent the wheel and also keep our customers within our UI.
It has a concept of percentage-based billing where you can specify an input amount and you can specify to bill a percentage of that and handles generating a detailed invoice.
Whenever there's no pricing it immediately says "not for me, move on". Maybe that's your intention!
A related problem related to data creation and subsetting is that one person (and practically nobody) knows the entire data relationships between subsystems, but you still need them to create your data.
This would enable DIY kitchens to be sold to a much larger market. Alternatively small kitchen installers could handle the sales and installation. Manufacturing can already be done by many 3rd parties. The expensive part is in design.
Maybe you can add a simulator that estimates the efficiency of a particular layout. For example I felt I needed more floor space, but in retrospect I have to move around a lot more to reach things, making my layout less efficient. A simulator could have told me to put the counters closer to each other.
Thanks to Ikea there is not much point trying to compete in that space.
Mid range cabinetry still needs more customer support in the design time.
Also Ikea cabinet construction is not great. I'd recommend not using them in your house. Maybe in a cheap rental.
Adding the aforementioned usage simulator and maybe using it to suggest starting layouts doesn’t seem like it would depend on the market positioning of the cabinet company, surely it would be just as applicable for low end as for midrange.
Let alone standalone kitchen joints ... this seems like a pretty much solved problem
These people will always use a kitchen designer and often get bespoke cabinets. The cost of doing business that way is orders of magnitude higher than IKEA or Home Depot. Those offerings also suffer from very low product quality.
But it is time-consuming - why spend 30 minutes going, grabbing, and coming when you can spend 30m at home waiting for it to arrive?
There are plenty of tools that lets you plan, organise and bikeshed over all the things you want to do, like Jira, but I think a much bigger efficiency booster would be one that helps you decide what not to bother doing at all.
How can we quantify the investment without invasive surveillance and micromanagement of developers, and how can we quantify the return without reading the customer’s mind?
I mean identifying features with a negative return on investment, features that you should avoid building. What makes the problem even harder is to consider not only the developer hours, but the opportunity cost of not building a different, more valuable feature.