Yes, I've run into a few of these points often enough to see that we really need to find a better way to bring ease of use and intuitive designs for technology aimed at people who did not grow up with it.
Having moved from the east coast to the west, I often will try to find a way to get my mom to Skype/Google+ so we can see and talk to each other. However, it usually winds up turning into a phone call and me emailing pictures to her.
I love all that technology has to offer, but at the same time I hate the perceived limitation that we've made leaps and bounds when things like the above still are an issue.
*note: I'm speaking only about the benefit of consumer tech to parents/baby boomers, and not about things such as advancements in the medical field, automobiles, etc.
This is the problem with the ad-supported walled-garden closed-system model.
My grandma can't see my stuff on G+, due to its awful usability, but if they opened up a nice API, someone could build a client app suited to audiences like the 80+ set.
Actually, the biggest problem among my parents is that they don't. My dad makes less than half what I do and he's incredibly knowledgeable, skilled, and hard working (a lot more than I am). If there's one thing I could do for him it'd be finding him a better paying job. But I don't know if there's any app that can fix being in a dying, underpaid industry. Sometimes I daydream about writing him a portfolio site or something, but I have no idea if that would help.
Do you mind sharing what skills your dad has? Maybe you could help him teach those skills to other people who would be willing to pay for them? Platforms like Udemy, Skillshare and training courses like patio11's deliver a lot of value for some people.
Even if your dad's skills are in a specific dying industry, he probably has some transferable skills which others want to learn.
For lack of a better term, he's a woodworker. He spent decades building really snazzy museum exhibits and booths for trade shows. He's usually identified as the most skilled person in whichever shop he goes to, but there doesn't seem to be a very high ceiling (again, I make below the US average for developers and he makes less than half that)
How exactly is 3d printing an industry, though? You either do CAD, or you make the printers. Neither really requires any woodworking skill.
I do think you should make him a portfolio, though. If he's in the top 1% and willing to travel, he can avoid being a commodity and start doing one-offs for more affluent clients. Those people are few, and they likely aren't where he is, so communication is key.
A random thought: I work as a software engineer. Also, I can think about 3-dimensional structures and sketch them on paper sufficiently to record the idea for later thought or sharing.
But, darn, all CAD software seems incredibly tedious to me -- even that which people say is "easy" to learn. It kind of reminds me a lot of every time I try to use IDEs for developing software (I'm the sort of person who likes a good text editor and the unix shell for software development.)
I'm wondering if this represents a valuable insight into what is lacking in existing CAD software, or if it's an just a necessary learning curve I haven't climbed that's inherent to the problem space.
Full disclosure: I have almost zero experience in this area.
I'm under the impression that CAD users learn the scripting language that goes with the software to automate a lot of the tedium. They're also the people who buy those crazy mice with the eight macro buttons and extension ports.
Two things I've noticed with Photoshop and 3D modelling software like Blender:
- There's always a faster way to do what you want, but you have to know about it. It seems like every photoshop tutorial I see introduces a new, difficult brush or technique. I guess the only way to be acquainted with these is to spend a ton of time in the software, messing with everything. Essentially, you need to make a career - or life-consuming hobby of it. Otherwise you have a very small set of tools which can do everything, but excruciatingly slowly.
- Artists spend hours doing even simple things, because it's a craft and they want it to be perfect. Programmers are used to knocking out quick iterations and seeing immediate results. I'm not sure if this takes a different sort of mindset, longer attention span, or just a real dedication to what you do. I suspect OP's dad has this mindset, because fine woodworking would be similar in this respect.
I've just accepted that I'm not cut out for art; I take photos, but I don't even have the patience to do post. It's a very foreign mindset to me - it seems tedious, but every choice really does require human interaction, and skilled interaction at that.
Take a look at OpenSCAD or SolidPython. They're 3D cad programs where models are explicitly created as programs - it might be an easier way to think about it.
Being a very skilled woodworker in an Ikea-centric world is difficult.
You're making incredible stuff that will likely last forever, but fundamentally performs the same tasks as something that costs 1/10 as much.
While you can find people who are willing to pay 10x Ikea for your wares, they're few and far between, and aren't likely to be repeat customers if the products are sturdy enough.
I feel for your dad. Unfortunately, skilled artisan labor in the face of mass produced items that work similarly and undercut cost greatly is not the greatest place to be.
I think there's a positive way of looking at the same situation.
There's no doubt that cheaper mass produced goods will replace more expensive manually produced ones. But as techies, we often overestimate the speed at which this change actually happens in the world.
I bet there are thousands of people who really value high quality handmade wooden goods. The internet and mobile tech now makes it easier than ever before to find these people. So, there's probably enough money to be made in selling to these people. There'll also be less competition.
>There's no doubt that cheaper mass produced goods will replace more expensive manually produced ones. But as techies, we often overestimate the speed at which this change actually happens in the world.
If your furniture is not older than 20 years, I doubt that you have manually produced furniture. Ikea was the pioneer and the rest somehow followed.
Probably almost nothing that you own is hand-made.
>You're making incredible stuff that will likely last forever, but fundamentally performs the same tasks as something that costs 1/10 as much.
Yes, fundamentally for the first one year. Maybe I am the only one who gets weird feelings when furniture starts to degenerate each time it is in use. Ikea is cheap and good looking, at least for a short amount of time.
If you don't like that, you can buy luxury furniture - or buy the high-priced Ikea stuff that somehow has reasonable prices.
I think hand made stuff is in high demand, as long as it is affordable. AFAIK it's not... for me. :)
Couldn't disagree more. As a craftsman, you are fundamentally not in the same business as Ikea, any more than Ferrari is in the same business as Hyundai.
While you can find people who are willing to pay 10x Ikea for your wares, they're few and far between, and aren't likely to be repeat customers if the products are sturdy enough.
Again, that falls into the "not even wrong" category. First of all, you sell at 20x-50x Ikea, not 10x. People at that end of the market are socially gregarious, wealthy, often into conspicuous consumption... and they always have friends just like them.
Maybe your dad should start a blog? The technical background story behind your link is at least interesting to the HN crowd and Do It Yourself is popular as well.
There are probably highly paid jobs for doing unique things with wood, but the problem is finding and getting them. The general way is networking. Having a blog would help with getting known.
Maybe an online blog is not the right thing in his world, which is probably "lower-tech". Maybe an email newsletter?
Not to my knowledge; that's why I suggested creating one. That might be a good idea, but I honestly don't know how feasible it is. I did once know a guy who made conference tables and he seemed to be doing fairly well.
AFAIK restauration works are well paid and in demand. A friend of mine does this... And I once saw a documentary about some folks restaurating homes from the early 20th century or even 19th. They basically turned sh*t into luxury homes.
I saw the exact same situation before. We were looking to make few custom pieces for our apartment and found a guy, in his early 50s, who did an incredible job. I also chatted with him and he too was complaining that the client stream is dwindling.
His (and probably your dad's) problem is that he was still grasping at straws and willing to have the old world order back. He was longing to build custom kitchens that serve more to demonstrate his woodworking skills rather than to appeal to modern taste. He was also (erroneously) considering middle class to be his ideal clientele.
The solution is right there on the surface. You can't compete with IKEA, so don't. You've got unique skill and it can be applied to make unique pieces. For those who do not shop at IKEA and find the quality of "affordable Swedish crap" simply appalling. For people who don't really mind paying 2-5-10x the IKEA prices to get exactly what they want and in quality they want. It's the top of the market, but that's exactly where the demand for high-quality custom work is prevalent.
Also, the focus should really be not on the intricacy of the work, but on quality. The reason being is that the taste of carpenter is not likely to be aligned with the taste of someone needing a piece for his minimalist penthouse loft. The fancier the design, the more it detracts for the quality angle. So if you are to build your dad a portfolio site, make sure to feature either simple, but casual things or something that is clearly there to demonstrate the skill and not the design.
... it may sound like I ramble, which I am, but it was painful to talk to our carpenter and see how helpless and lost he essentially was in modern reality. You are in a position to help your dad, if not with anything else but your understanding how the Internet works and how it can be used for self-promotion. Do it, dude. Stop day-dreaming and build him a simple tasteful site (e.g. square space). Go from there.
Completely agree. Think less craft and more art - a unique piece for each client at a unique price.
And may I say the 5-10x increase in prices is too low - ikea will sell me a compete kitchen for 2000 ukp. If you sell a hand made kitchen for less than 50,000 ukp you are in the wrong place. (Incl labour and the cut to the architect)
Does your dad do work on commission? I'm working on a website to help artists who do large scale commission artwork get more work. We do screen artists who apply for quality, but if you'd like I'd be happy to show the woman who does the screening this example to see if he would be a fit. Shoot me an email if you want to chat more. Email is in the about section of my profile.
He needs to match his skills with a better market. I know of pretty shitty woodworkers who make bank by selling to people with money to burn. Someone with real skills would not have issues pulling 100K a year. But maybe your dad is the type of person who just loves his craft and wont bother with the business side of it. Its quite common. People like this just treat their work as a a hobby and have issues with selling it because its not work.
>just loves his craft and wont bother with the business side of it. Its quite common.
Yes. I've suggested the possibility of a business before and I think he believe it's too risky or not lucrative enough. In fact, I've ran into this mindset very often with my family. For instance, I've been trying to convince my wife to sell things online for quite a while. She's convinced now, but for a long time she thought it was total pipe dream.
Note that very few people (percentage of total population) are interested in a business. When people are reluctant, it may be that they simply do not take to the idea. My wife does not like businesses at all. She is married to a marketing consultant/software engineer. :)
My dad has a friend who is an exceptional woodworker as well. Although for variety he has applied himself to property renovation (long term, personal, high quality joinery projects), his bread and butter is making and repairing bows for stringed instruments. These are about 2500USD a piece at a starting price; see http://www.ozbow.com/
HG is product based and what you describe sounds more about creating exhibits and environments. However, there might be similar intentions toward craftsmanship and construction. It does take time and work to set up a shop like HG (site is on Big Cartel), but with the right amount of SEO / Social referrals it is possible to find an audience that cares. Good luck!
>Even if your dad's skills are in a specific dying industry, he probably has some transferable skills which others want to learn.
My dad is in a similar predicament being, well, a shady dealer in a troubled part of the world. Unfortunately for both him and myself, he doesn't want to leave his "industry" despite the diminishing returns and the risk or prison (he has never been in prison). Even if he wanted to his industry probably wouldn't let him leave.
Posing this from a throwaway account for obvious reasons.
Have you ever heard of CustomMade? (www.custommade.com). It's an online matchmaker that helps Buyers looking for one-of-a-kind creations with Makers exactly like your dad! He can set up a portfolio and display his past work - Buyers can reach out to him if they like what they see or we alert him of woodworking jobs in his price range, location, etc - whatever his preferences are. Full disclosure: I work there, but some of the comments here are pretty dead-on when it comes to market and competition. We prep Buyers that their request is going to cost more than Ikea and we only let professional and passionate Makers on the site, rather than people who just do things as a hobby. Check it out, and let me know if you have questions! (tess@custommade.com) What gets me going every day is helping artists like your dad do what they love to do. :)
The retirement problem is particularly interesting. There are folks like my father who has spent > 40 years in the foundry industry about to retire, for whom there will probably be serious demand for part-time consulting (to answer questions for the 3 or so 20-somethings straight out of IIT they hire to replace him).
There's probably a business there in the connecting people (possibly over Skype, etc.) and handling all the billing and tax-related issues for mostly-retired people who are collecting social security and are computer-friendly but not heavily computer-savvy. I'm sure my dad would use it... from a nice part of the country where there are a ton of golf courses.
Ah! Finally a submission about what hackers can do to find business opportunities for which my age and lack of experience hacking is no barrier to me having something to say.
As mentioned in the second reply comment here, the "your parents have money" comment is mistaken relative to many of the hackers reading this site. A lot of young hackers, it appears to me, are leveraging their parents' investment in their own education to move into occupations with high economic returns, after the parents didn't have the same opportunity in their generation.
On the other hand, "someday you will be like your parents" is a probable future that most people forget too readily, so the point is well taken that if you want to build a better world for yourself in the future, you might get a reality check on your plans by building a better world for your parents today.
I can't speak to the issue of what single parents need. I know I would dread having to use any current kind of dating site if (God forbid) my wife predeceased me. Health information is always popular here on Hacker News, even among the young participants, so it stands to reason that anything that can help people a generation older than you are keep good health must have wide appeal. Even in an era of steadily increasing life expectancy at all ages,
When you say health, all I can think of is a fitbit for older folks. I wonder if a small device like that could collect enough different kinds of data to be useful to doctors.
Given that someone was looking at getting medically relevant data out of patterns in the amount of time it takes people to answer the phone, I expect there would be plenty of useful information there. The problem is making the relevant information accessible and understandable.
Healthcare spending in the US is something like 15% of GDP. It's a trillion dollar industry. Think health insurance, pharmaceuticals, nursing, dentistry etc.
Revised Idea: A fitbit-like device could be distributed by health insurers just like Progressive's "Snapshot" program. It would discern which patients led healthier lives, and give them discounts.
Just a warning: you are going to have a very difficult time marketing to retirees if that is your target market. Hacker News or blog spam through techy circles on Facebook is simply not going to cut it - you're going to need massive funding and do television, newspaper and physical signposts in order to hit any kind of critical mass for that audience.
Good luck, and may huge amounts of venture capital be with you!
Indeed. I make iPhone/iPad games that are somewhat aimed at seniors, and there is essentially zero point in my following the usual paths of hoping for reviews from gaming or iOS blogs that seniors don't even know exist.
Over 50? I'm 44 & doing my own start-up and expect to have a good time working hard for the next 20 years. It's fun and gives me something to focus on.
Meanwhile, my mom had a stroke 6 months ago and lost some communication skills, so she needs to keep writing / talking to people to recover. She's semi-tech savvy, but not professionally, so we brought her on to develop our user manuals. Aside from start-up user development skills, by the time she's done here she'll also be adept at Wordpress & UserVoice.
Please re-read 'Crossing the Chasm'. If you want to create a truly innovative business, its better to target early adopters/innovators than people traditionally known to be conservative with new products.
If you want to rehash existing ideas (e.g. an affiliate network thats easy to use) then this idea/model works fine.
You should come back and check out all the progress we've made on going way beyond an affiliate network. I'm writing this post to think, and solving my parents problems is certainly top of mind for me. I called my Mom about 30 minutes ago and she told me she had just been searching on the Internet for movies to go see, since it is raining in Seattle today and she can't ride the horses.
Helping people figure out how to live well and spend their time and money in a way that leaves them satisfied is a universal problem, and certainly one my parents have.
My mom was one of those part-time people for 22 years (younger brother), and I'm very proud of her. She got out of college with some basic understanding of computers, but didn't really get much opportunity to become a technie at work. Now, at 53, she is teaching herself Python so that she has a better understanding of the kinds of issues tech people she is interfacing with from the management side encounter so that she can better understand what they're saying and also better prevent poor decisions from higher up from getting to them (like "hey, let's just add <foo> to the site, that should be easy right?"). I don't know how successful she'll be, but she's smart, focused, and organized enough that while it may take a while I'm sure it will make some impact.
Point is, 50s and 60s is not too young to learn new skills, including tech skills. Arguably you have better perspective on which tech skills actually matter because of better life skills.
I should also say that the 50 and 60 year old hackers I encounter at hacker spaces or in the course of my work are usually some of the most incredibly impressive people I ever encounter.
I learned everything I know about analog electronics from a retired electrical engineer -- and I am vastly better at it from an intuitive side than anyone in my age group I've talked to. And I'm not even an EE; I only ever took two courses in the field (introduction, and microcontroller lab). Meanwhile, he's building state-of-the-art electron microscope accelerators and x-ray detectors in his garage.
At the same time, he is not a fan of programming, and happily finds 20 somethings to deal with that stuff for him.
Moral of that story -- do what you've spent your life developing the skills to do, and extend from there instead of trying to start from scratch. It's hard to start over at 60 or 70. It's not nearly as hard to push forward from where you are.
For anyone hardware inclined, if there is an industry that needs to be disrupted it's the hearing aid industry. My dad had to get a new set, and I couldn't believe how much prescription hearing aids are. And the non-prescription are junk. My dad is extremely frugal, but even he pops for the prescription ones - hearing is just too important.
Here's a recap of the market from Consumer Reports:
You don't even have to be old to have this problem. I'm 31 and wear hearing aids due to tinitus -- $4000 for far less sophisticated tech than is in a phone from a decade ago. The medical devices industry is a total racket, but IMHO hearing aids are the worst of the worst.
A friend of similar age has worn hearing aids his whole life, but has shared a somewhat different experience. While current-gen hearing aids are very expensive (~$9k), they can pair with his phone and function as bluetooth headphones for all the reasons you'd normally wear headphones (no mic, though).
At least they could if his insurance covered the expense. Instead, he wears tech that's a few years outdated.
Not terribly cool now, but hearing aids are becoming cyborg tech. Better hearing than your peers with broad device interoperability - it might be enough to make folks with decent hearing to consider buying aids, like athletes and lasik / performance contact lenses. We're not far from slightly-outdated hearing aids being pretty cool.
And no, I'm not making light of his deafness - I'm just echoing his own excitement.
Hearing aids are limited in what they can do and will be limited in the near future. Hearing aids never restore full hearing let alone actually improve your hearing.
Hearing aids operate only on the outer ear and are basically just amplifiers with some smartness built in (trying to cut out background noise, amplify foreground etc). So they're really limited in what they can achieve.
The two greatest hopes for the hard of hearing are 1. Cochlear Implants 2. Flawless speech to text translation. You want to be working on either of those two.
I have heard from a guy with same hard-of-hearing problem and he was quite against implants ... his impression was that they are practically impossible to upgrade, and they replace whatever ability of hearing you might have left. Conversation has happened 3 years ago, so maybe things have changed for the better. (Another of his concerns was, that he felt pressured by his MD to get an implant)
I have a friend who has been tinkering with a disruptive product for this market (backburnered whilst he works on other stuff). I'll point him to this subthread - thanks.
The hard part about disrupting the hearing aid industry is that most of what people are paying for is service. First there are a lot of reasons that people could have hearing loss where a hearing aid isn't the right choice, like a tumor. Then they need to figure out how to get the darned things in and configured the way they want. Then they need to figure out that they don't like it when they're on then phone, then you tweak the programming. Then they call because they can't figure out how to replace the battery, then they hate it because they can hear the fridge running again, then they finally go out and find out it doesn't work in noisy places, so you tweak it again, and so on.
Plus hearing aid programming isn't prescriptive, like determining a vision prescription. People have different expectations and experiences of hearing as well as different audio environments in their lives. Automating testing or programming is a almost a wicked problem and then you'll get to face the American Association of Audiologist.
I'd love to see it happen but I spent a year helping a company with deep pockets try and it's a lot less simple than it seems. Driving down manufacturing costs isn't enough to truly disrupt that industry.
Ditto insulin pump. A friend's insurance plan just changed coverage and the unit friend uses is no longer "in plan". New unit costs $7000. Kicker, for me, is the consumable nature. There's a transmitter with a non-serviceable battery. When it dies, you're just supposed to get a new one. $1400.
Another friend just bought a hearing aid. The (other) comment about product + service is absolutely true. This friend marvels at the sophisticated DSP stuff going on. This friend is also grumpy that the internals are proprietary, so there's no way hack it, or even do adjustments. It's probably better for most people to have the expert do it, hearing is complicated stuff, but the principle stands.
With the costs of R&D, manufacturing, sales/service/support, and especially regulation/approval, it's not clear to me how the markets for low volume products are going to be disrupted.
Just so you know, because I take particular pride in it, I throw some of the best parties in tech. If you've ever been to a Twilio party, or various unnamed events/dinners or SXSW stuff, you'll know. No hard feelings, but you'll have to find some other turn of phrase for saying I must be a boring conversational partner for people who would rather turn off their brains. BOOM!
Pretty sure someone here would - look at the comments on any similar HN post from one of these blog personalities. Not everything has to be about sexism.
HR and hiring software for companies that don't make software is so incredibly, gob-smackingly broken that it's disgusting.
My dad lost his job in the Hostess bankruptcy (save yr Twinkies jokes) and seeing the difficulty of navigating the labyrinthian, poorly-designed interfaces set up by the kind of companies hiring stationary and facilities engineers was shocking. And a lot of it isn't just bad, it's literally broken, like, full of bugs that would preclude you from actually submitting a resume if you didn't have your kid around to think of a clever workaround.
I think this is partly due to the fact that professions like my dad's are basically invisible to hackers, so even if you are making killer HR and hiring software, your sales department probably isn't even aware of some of these companies.
He kept saying, over and over, "hey, you should start a company to fix this mess", but I can't fathom the idea of spending even 5 years doing something that boring (even though it would be incredibly lucrative). Any takers out there?
Here's what my dad said: the resume submission systems for DST Output (this one is completely broken), Kaiser, Dignity Health, Sutter Health, and, shockingly, Stanford University, are particularly bad (I don't know who the vendors are).
He said a big part of the frustration is the resume formatting requirement — some systems will only take resumes in either PDF or Word, and sometimes Word 97 or lower, and sometimes these requirements aren't explicit, or the application system will take a file format the HR department won't actually accept.
He said another problem is the lack of an automatic "receipt", or some kind of response letting you know a resume has been received or when it's been rejected.
He also said that in general, he feels like the automatic screening performed by some of these tracking systems (for instance, looking for key words from the job description) weeds out qualified applicants and selects for people that are best at gaming the software.
DST Output is Brassring/Kenexa, Kaiser, Dignity, and Sutter are Taleo, and Stanford is Trovix. Taleo and Kenexa are both market leaders in the corporate ATS space.
The standardized formats are so the ATS can do keyword matching and place a score on the candidate. Qualified candidates are often screened out for not choosing the right words, while others jump to the top for keyword stuffing.
IMO, the quickest way towards a job is typically to circumvent HR and reach out directly to the hiring manager, department head, or get referred in if you have a connection there. In this economy, HR departments are simply dealing with such a high volume of unqualified candidates applying for anything and everything, that its hard to filter through to find the qualified ones without the help of an automated system.
I'm actually working on something for this problem, but it's been slow finding a web designer to help make the interface. On the upside, the core technology for solving the problem is dirt simple.
So any web-design help or interest from a potential customer would be really helpful.
- For many companies, the main buying criteria for an ATS is EEOC compliance and the ability to report on their % diversity, veteran, etc hires.
- The buyer in an ATS sale in many cases is the CFO, not the HR dept. HR is often not seen as a strategic part of the organization, so even if they understand the value of a streamlined applicant process, they don't always have the policitcal capital to lobby for a better system.
- Often an ATS is purchased as part of a suite of other software (payroll, onboarding, etc.) and a software vendor basically just needs to check the ATS box.
- The switching cost for replacing an existing ATS is high, so even if there are better alternatives, many companies will avoid changing unless they have to.
- Application processes are sometimes designed to be more cumbersome than they need to be to screen out more candidates upfront. This is common especially in lower level positions.
- Certain more user friendly application workflows are patented.
It's an extremely crowded market with long buying cycles that requires an enterprise sales force and also requires you to keep up with employment law in 50 states. Your best bet is to specialize on a niche with unique demands.
Obviously this won't be the case for our generation.
It won't? I often wonder what new technology my kids will get into in 30 years that I won't understand or care about. Obviously, it is different for geeks as we tend to keep up with technology better than the average person, but it seems naive to think that our generation as a whole is resistant to losing touch with the bleeding edge.
May I add another? Your parents are increasingly finding themselves irrelevant to younger people.
While predictable, this is a great loss to the younger people, and perhaps a frustration for your parents. A mentoring network, content or career service that helps older people communicate with younger people may be useful.
I can imagine that Google or the Yellow Pages can be a bit of a confusing mess for older types. What if people could gift their parents access to a simple service directory with trustworthy agents who picked from, and made arrangements with, quality suppliers? Like a virtual assistant but who specialised in things like getting a reliable plumber around, or helping in the garden, or even just calling for a chat, etc.
I think this absolutely makes a lot of sense. Particularly the idea of getting outside the tech echo chamber. For me, I maintain a group of stringently non-technically inclined friends. They use facebook and that is about it. So I use my time with them to recalibrate my senses and understand where normal people are in terms of adoption. I always gain new perspective from those conversations.
This is more like solving my grandparents' problems, but one idea I had is to help the elderly stay in touch with their grandkids by selling them tablets or netbooks that are customized to make it easy to check Facebook etc. You could sell them through retirement homes along with training sessions. Help people see photos of their grandkids!
Another idea is to help the elderly tell their stories. It's a shame so many are passing away in silence. What about some way of helping retirement communities get their populations to write, perhaps by blogging? The customer here might be the retirement home, which would pay you to set up a community of blogs. It would be a way for members to write, and also give the retirement home something to show off.
Maybe you miss some opportunities but I've the highest motivation if I solve a personal problems since I am not thinking about how big is the market, how to target which demographics. No, I just want to build a nice product for myself and I am happy even if it's just me who will use it.
Usually, these products get perfect and extremely well designed because you are the user yourself and care about every detail and at the same time you deploy and use a MVP very early since you don't care about anyone looking at your product. Worked for me and market is success is usually one step away. I couldn't work one second for a product where I won't be the user, I did it few times and it's awful.
It could also be a psychological phenomena since when you do something just for yourself you don't put too much pressure on yourself and the product, you don't force success like becoming the market leader or getting venture capital -- you are relaxed and in the zone which are the best premises to build an awesome product (compare to 'The Inner Game of Tennis').
My problem is that I don't have any problems. All the software I need is already available in most Linux distributions. The only software I pay for is Games and Windows(which I need to play games).
My folks are 81 and 82, they have iPhones, Kindles, cameras, camcorders, two computers (one each), lots of free time that they spend touring the world, and not many problems.
You wouldn't believe the number of people who have spent their lives in a lucrative but creatively unfulfilling career. They hit retirement and their coiled creative spring just has to get out.
The wisdom gained over a lifetime in the craft is like pure gold, but only if it is shared. Technology gives the custodians of these skills the opportunity to teach a large number of paying apprentices at once.
Google Rob Cosman or Paul Sellers and you begin to get an idea of the potential. True craftsmanship has been prized for thousands of years, it's not about to dry up and blow away just because someone invented computers or flat pack furniture.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadI love all that technology has to offer, but at the same time I hate the perceived limitation that we've made leaps and bounds when things like the above still are an issue.
*note: I'm speaking only about the benefit of consumer tech to parents/baby boomers, and not about things such as advancements in the medical field, automobiles, etc.
My grandma can't see my stuff on G+, due to its awful usability, but if they opened up a nice API, someone could build a client app suited to audiences like the 80+ set.
Actually, the biggest problem among my parents is that they don't. My dad makes less than half what I do and he's incredibly knowledgeable, skilled, and hard working (a lot more than I am). If there's one thing I could do for him it'd be finding him a better paying job. But I don't know if there's any app that can fix being in a dying, underpaid industry. Sometimes I daydream about writing him a portfolio site or something, but I have no idea if that would help.
Even if your dad's skills are in a specific dying industry, he probably has some transferable skills which others want to learn.
Here's an example: http://www.designdimension.com/projects/cranium-connection-h...
Is that something somebody would pay to learn? I don't know. Maybe.
I would be very very surprised if there's no one who would pay good money to learn that.
I do think you should make him a portfolio, though. If he's in the top 1% and willing to travel, he can avoid being a commodity and start doing one-offs for more affluent clients. Those people are few, and they likely aren't where he is, so communication is key.
If his dad knows to carve beautiful things out of blocks of wood, he can probably pick up CAD software quite easily.
[1] http://www.judegomila.com/2012/12/manufacturing-renaissance-...
But, darn, all CAD software seems incredibly tedious to me -- even that which people say is "easy" to learn. It kind of reminds me a lot of every time I try to use IDEs for developing software (I'm the sort of person who likes a good text editor and the unix shell for software development.)
I'm wondering if this represents a valuable insight into what is lacking in existing CAD software, or if it's an just a necessary learning curve I haven't climbed that's inherent to the problem space.
I'm under the impression that CAD users learn the scripting language that goes with the software to automate a lot of the tedium. They're also the people who buy those crazy mice with the eight macro buttons and extension ports.
- There's always a faster way to do what you want, but you have to know about it. It seems like every photoshop tutorial I see introduces a new, difficult brush or technique. I guess the only way to be acquainted with these is to spend a ton of time in the software, messing with everything. Essentially, you need to make a career - or life-consuming hobby of it. Otherwise you have a very small set of tools which can do everything, but excruciatingly slowly.
- Artists spend hours doing even simple things, because it's a craft and they want it to be perfect. Programmers are used to knocking out quick iterations and seeing immediate results. I'm not sure if this takes a different sort of mindset, longer attention span, or just a real dedication to what you do. I suspect OP's dad has this mindset, because fine woodworking would be similar in this respect.
I've just accepted that I'm not cut out for art; I take photos, but I don't even have the patience to do post. It's a very foreign mindset to me - it seems tedious, but every choice really does require human interaction, and skilled interaction at that.
You're making incredible stuff that will likely last forever, but fundamentally performs the same tasks as something that costs 1/10 as much.
While you can find people who are willing to pay 10x Ikea for your wares, they're few and far between, and aren't likely to be repeat customers if the products are sturdy enough.
I feel for your dad. Unfortunately, skilled artisan labor in the face of mass produced items that work similarly and undercut cost greatly is not the greatest place to be.
There's no doubt that cheaper mass produced goods will replace more expensive manually produced ones. But as techies, we often overestimate the speed at which this change actually happens in the world.
I bet there are thousands of people who really value high quality handmade wooden goods. The internet and mobile tech now makes it easier than ever before to find these people. So, there's probably enough money to be made in selling to these people. There'll also be less competition.
If your furniture is not older than 20 years, I doubt that you have manually produced furniture. Ikea was the pioneer and the rest somehow followed.
Probably almost nothing that you own is hand-made.
It really depends on where you live; some places, people buy things that are more expensive but last forever.
Yes, fundamentally for the first one year. Maybe I am the only one who gets weird feelings when furniture starts to degenerate each time it is in use. Ikea is cheap and good looking, at least for a short amount of time.
If you don't like that, you can buy luxury furniture - or buy the high-priced Ikea stuff that somehow has reasonable prices.
I think hand made stuff is in high demand, as long as it is affordable. AFAIK it's not... for me. :)
You just have to know where to sell it and how to get work commissioned.
You need to understand that volume is not important but demand is.
While you can find people who are willing to pay 10x Ikea for your wares, they're few and far between, and aren't likely to be repeat customers if the products are sturdy enough.
Again, that falls into the "not even wrong" category. First of all, you sell at 20x-50x Ikea, not 10x. People at that end of the market are socially gregarious, wealthy, often into conspicuous consumption... and they always have friends just like them.
There are probably highly paid jobs for doing unique things with wood, but the problem is finding and getting them. The general way is networking. Having a blog would help with getting known.
Maybe an online blog is not the right thing in his world, which is probably "lower-tech". Maybe an email newsletter?
http://woodgears.ca/
He's huge with the DIY and home projects crowd :)
His (and probably your dad's) problem is that he was still grasping at straws and willing to have the old world order back. He was longing to build custom kitchens that serve more to demonstrate his woodworking skills rather than to appeal to modern taste. He was also (erroneously) considering middle class to be his ideal clientele.
The solution is right there on the surface. You can't compete with IKEA, so don't. You've got unique skill and it can be applied to make unique pieces. For those who do not shop at IKEA and find the quality of "affordable Swedish crap" simply appalling. For people who don't really mind paying 2-5-10x the IKEA prices to get exactly what they want and in quality they want. It's the top of the market, but that's exactly where the demand for high-quality custom work is prevalent.
Also, the focus should really be not on the intricacy of the work, but on quality. The reason being is that the taste of carpenter is not likely to be aligned with the taste of someone needing a piece for his minimalist penthouse loft. The fancier the design, the more it detracts for the quality angle. So if you are to build your dad a portfolio site, make sure to feature either simple, but casual things or something that is clearly there to demonstrate the skill and not the design.
... it may sound like I ramble, which I am, but it was painful to talk to our carpenter and see how helpless and lost he essentially was in modern reality. You are in a position to help your dad, if not with anything else but your understanding how the Internet works and how it can be used for self-promotion. Do it, dude. Stop day-dreaming and build him a simple tasteful site (e.g. square space). Go from there.
And may I say the 5-10x increase in prices is too low - ikea will sell me a compete kitchen for 2000 ukp. If you sell a hand made kitchen for less than 50,000 ukp you are in the wrong place. (Incl labour and the cut to the architect)
Yes. I've suggested the possibility of a business before and I think he believe it's too risky or not lucrative enough. In fact, I've ran into this mindset very often with my family. For instance, I've been trying to convince my wife to sell things online for quite a while. She's convinced now, but for a long time she thought it was total pipe dream.
http://www.herriottgrace.com/ and http://shop.herriottgrace.com/
HG is product based and what you describe sounds more about creating exhibits and environments. However, there might be similar intentions toward craftsmanship and construction. It does take time and work to set up a shop like HG (site is on Big Cartel), but with the right amount of SEO / Social referrals it is possible to find an audience that cares. Good luck!
The ingenuity, lateral thinking, and sincere desire to help someone you guys have never even met on display today are just mindblowing.
My dad is in a similar predicament being, well, a shady dealer in a troubled part of the world. Unfortunately for both him and myself, he doesn't want to leave his "industry" despite the diminishing returns and the risk or prison (he has never been in prison). Even if he wanted to his industry probably wouldn't let him leave.
Posing this from a throwaway account for obvious reasons.
There's probably a business there in the connecting people (possibly over Skype, etc.) and handling all the billing and tax-related issues for mostly-retired people who are collecting social security and are computer-friendly but not heavily computer-savvy. I'm sure my dad would use it... from a nice part of the country where there are a ton of golf courses.
As mentioned in the second reply comment here, the "your parents have money" comment is mistaken relative to many of the hackers reading this site. A lot of young hackers, it appears to me, are leveraging their parents' investment in their own education to move into occupations with high economic returns, after the parents didn't have the same opportunity in their generation.
On the other hand, "someday you will be like your parents" is a probable future that most people forget too readily, so the point is well taken that if you want to build a better world for yourself in the future, you might get a reality check on your plans by building a better world for your parents today.
I can't speak to the issue of what single parents need. I know I would dread having to use any current kind of dating site if (God forbid) my wife predeceased me. Health information is always popular here on Hacker News, even among the young participants, so it stands to reason that anything that can help people a generation older than you are keep good health must have wide appeal. Even in an era of steadily increasing life expectancy at all ages,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2810516/
people still like to be healthier rather than sicker, and to live longer rather than die sooner.
Huh, I know some wonderful success stories for this use case.
Good luck, and may huge amounts of venture capital be with you!
Word of mouth is my savior :-)
Meanwhile, my mom had a stroke 6 months ago and lost some communication skills, so she needs to keep writing / talking to people to recover. She's semi-tech savvy, but not professionally, so we brought her on to develop our user manuals. Aside from start-up user development skills, by the time she's done here she'll also be adept at Wordpress & UserVoice.
If you want to rehash existing ideas (e.g. an affiliate network thats easy to use) then this idea/model works fine.
Helping people figure out how to live well and spend their time and money in a way that leaves them satisfied is a universal problem, and certainly one my parents have.
By this metric it's not actually a requirement that I do anything new.[0]
[0]: Or even that it's anything different from a traditional small business.
Point is, 50s and 60s is not too young to learn new skills, including tech skills. Arguably you have better perspective on which tech skills actually matter because of better life skills.
I learned everything I know about analog electronics from a retired electrical engineer -- and I am vastly better at it from an intuitive side than anyone in my age group I've talked to. And I'm not even an EE; I only ever took two courses in the field (introduction, and microcontroller lab). Meanwhile, he's building state-of-the-art electron microscope accelerators and x-ray detectors in his garage.
At the same time, he is not a fan of programming, and happily finds 20 somethings to deal with that stuff for him.
Moral of that story -- do what you've spent your life developing the skills to do, and extend from there instead of trying to start from scratch. It's hard to start over at 60 or 70. It's not nearly as hard to push forward from where you are.
Here's a recap of the market from Consumer Reports:
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/2012/12/hear-well-in-a-no...
At least they could if his insurance covered the expense. Instead, he wears tech that's a few years outdated.
Not terribly cool now, but hearing aids are becoming cyborg tech. Better hearing than your peers with broad device interoperability - it might be enough to make folks with decent hearing to consider buying aids, like athletes and lasik / performance contact lenses. We're not far from slightly-outdated hearing aids being pretty cool.
And no, I'm not making light of his deafness - I'm just echoing his own excitement.
Hearing aids are limited in what they can do and will be limited in the near future. Hearing aids never restore full hearing let alone actually improve your hearing.
Hearing aids operate only on the outer ear and are basically just amplifiers with some smartness built in (trying to cut out background noise, amplify foreground etc). So they're really limited in what they can achieve.
The two greatest hopes for the hard of hearing are 1. Cochlear Implants 2. Flawless speech to text translation. You want to be working on either of those two.
Another friend just bought a hearing aid. The (other) comment about product + service is absolutely true. This friend marvels at the sophisticated DSP stuff going on. This friend is also grumpy that the internals are proprietary, so there's no way hack it, or even do adjustments. It's probably better for most people to have the expert do it, hearing is complicated stuff, but the principle stands.
With the costs of R&D, manufacturing, sales/service/support, and especially regulation/approval, it's not clear to me how the markets for low volume products are going to be disrupted.
Who is really trying to tie the death of their parents into a technical blog?
My dad lost his job in the Hostess bankruptcy (save yr Twinkies jokes) and seeing the difficulty of navigating the labyrinthian, poorly-designed interfaces set up by the kind of companies hiring stationary and facilities engineers was shocking. And a lot of it isn't just bad, it's literally broken, like, full of bugs that would preclude you from actually submitting a resume if you didn't have your kid around to think of a clever workaround.
I think this is partly due to the fact that professions like my dad's are basically invisible to hackers, so even if you are making killer HR and hiring software, your sales department probably isn't even aware of some of these companies.
He kept saying, over and over, "hey, you should start a company to fix this mess", but I can't fathom the idea of spending even 5 years doing something that boring (even though it would be incredibly lucrative). Any takers out there?
It really is terrible. I got the job, at least.
He said a big part of the frustration is the resume formatting requirement — some systems will only take resumes in either PDF or Word, and sometimes Word 97 or lower, and sometimes these requirements aren't explicit, or the application system will take a file format the HR department won't actually accept.
He said another problem is the lack of an automatic "receipt", or some kind of response letting you know a resume has been received or when it's been rejected.
He also said that in general, he feels like the automatic screening performed by some of these tracking systems (for instance, looking for key words from the job description) weeds out qualified applicants and selects for people that are best at gaming the software.
The standardized formats are so the ATS can do keyword matching and place a score on the candidate. Qualified candidates are often screened out for not choosing the right words, while others jump to the top for keyword stuffing.
IMO, the quickest way towards a job is typically to circumvent HR and reach out directly to the hiring manager, department head, or get referred in if you have a connection there. In this economy, HR departments are simply dealing with such a high volume of unqualified candidates applying for anything and everything, that its hard to filter through to find the qualified ones without the help of an automated system.
So any web-design help or interest from a potential customer would be really helpful.
- For many companies, the main buying criteria for an ATS is EEOC compliance and the ability to report on their % diversity, veteran, etc hires.
- The buyer in an ATS sale in many cases is the CFO, not the HR dept. HR is often not seen as a strategic part of the organization, so even if they understand the value of a streamlined applicant process, they don't always have the policitcal capital to lobby for a better system.
- Often an ATS is purchased as part of a suite of other software (payroll, onboarding, etc.) and a software vendor basically just needs to check the ATS box.
- The switching cost for replacing an existing ATS is high, so even if there are better alternatives, many companies will avoid changing unless they have to.
- Application processes are sometimes designed to be more cumbersome than they need to be to screen out more candidates upfront. This is common especially in lower level positions.
- Certain more user friendly application workflows are patented.
It's an extremely crowded market with long buying cycles that requires an enterprise sales force and also requires you to keep up with employment law in 50 states. Your best bet is to specialize on a niche with unique demands.
So, IMO it would be very hard to bring disruptive technology to a segment of the population that is very reluctant to change.
Obviously this won't be the case for our generation.
It won't? I often wonder what new technology my kids will get into in 30 years that I won't understand or care about. Obviously, it is different for geeks as we tend to keep up with technology better than the average person, but it seems naive to think that our generation as a whole is resistant to losing touch with the bleeding edge.
While predictable, this is a great loss to the younger people, and perhaps a frustration for your parents. A mentoring network, content or career service that helps older people communicate with younger people may be useful.
Another idea is to help the elderly tell their stories. It's a shame so many are passing away in silence. What about some way of helping retirement communities get their populations to write, perhaps by blogging? The customer here might be the retirement home, which would pay you to set up a community of blogs. It would be a way for members to write, and also give the retirement home something to show off.
Maybe you miss some opportunities but I've the highest motivation if I solve a personal problems since I am not thinking about how big is the market, how to target which demographics. No, I just want to build a nice product for myself and I am happy even if it's just me who will use it.
Usually, these products get perfect and extremely well designed because you are the user yourself and care about every detail and at the same time you deploy and use a MVP very early since you don't care about anyone looking at your product. Worked for me and market is success is usually one step away. I couldn't work one second for a product where I won't be the user, I did it few times and it's awful.
It could also be a psychological phenomena since when you do something just for yourself you don't put too much pressure on yourself and the product, you don't force success like becoming the market leader or getting venture capital -- you are relaxed and in the zone which are the best premises to build an awesome product (compare to 'The Inner Game of Tennis').
Facetime usually doesn't work.
The wisdom gained over a lifetime in the craft is like pure gold, but only if it is shared. Technology gives the custodians of these skills the opportunity to teach a large number of paying apprentices at once.
Google Rob Cosman or Paul Sellers and you begin to get an idea of the potential. True craftsmanship has been prized for thousands of years, it's not about to dry up and blow away just because someone invented computers or flat pack furniture.