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Ask HN: What software would you pay for right now?
Looking for some ideas on what to build for small-medium sized businesses/startups.
- sharemywin 11y agoI had a pretty good idea that I thought would be good to sell to small-medium businesses but I realized I'm not a sales person and so I "pivoted" to a business that only required the skills I had. Just don't want you to fall into the trap I was in. If you or a partner don't want to spend all the time calling on businesses I would find something else to go after. my 2 cents.
- tixocloud 11y agoThanks for the tip. It's definitely a concern of mine. If you don't mind me asking, how did you pivot to a business that only required the skills you had?
- humbleMouse 11y agoI would pay for a stripped down better designed version of soundcloud that was targeted for music producers and djs to share samples.
- askafriend 11y agoCan you explain the problem that you have that something like a stripped down SoundCloud would solve? What are your thoughts on bandcamp?
- humbleMouse 11y agoI am a triathalon biker and also go to the gym multiple times per week. As such, I always have my phone strapped to my arm. Soundcloud's interface for liking/saving songs is basically unusable with my phone strapped to my arm. The whole mobile app is a complete piece of shit in terms of UX desgin and usability. As a producer, there is not even a button to click to access a list of my own tracks I have posted on soundcloud! I test mixes on different speakers all the time and it is a major headache to have to search for your own damn song on soundcloud just to be able to find it!!! I should be able to click a button called "my tracks" and see a list of all my tracks I have uploaded instantly. Also, soundcloud is just unreliable in general. Even on my laptop with fiber internet I find myself running into ajax calls that timeout. I always have to refresh the page and whatnot to get songs to play. I could honestly write a small book about all the things I hate about soundcloud. Now that they have ads I really hope that a small competitor steals their pie. If I didn't have to work a silly enterprise job 9-5 I would just write a new platform myself.... A stripped down version of soundcloud would include: no stupid animations when I click any buttons. no 100 ajax calls every time I load a page. a mobile interface that didnt suck - and had an easy button for getting to "my tracks". A page that showed a history of every song I have ever played in chronological order so I could go back and find things I missed. Smaller album art for each song (ie. more songs displayed per screen space unit). No ads. No fullscreen play/next buttons on mobile - screws me up all the time while biking/running/driving. The buttons are too big. As for bandcamp - I don't use it. The few times I have used it have been fine though. TLDR: I think soundcloud is the best source for finding new artists and music, but the platform from a UX and technical standpoint is shitty.
- edoceo 11y agoI saw this once, c2002. Wish I could remember the name
- demolished23 11y agolike this? https://clyp.it/ https://clyp.it/
- humbleMouse 11y agoI will check this out when I am at home not blocked by my company firewall.
- muzani 11y agoA portal where small companies could apply for bespoke enterprise technical projects, without the hassle of bribing officials or writing long tenders.
- tixocloud 11y agoWould it be something like a job board for small companies? I've been in a consulting firm and I'm still trying to understand whether a portal would help solve that issue.
- muzani 11y agoSorry, I meant for something like government projects and huge companies like banks. Because a lot of them have nowhere to list. The process is not fair, and in developing countries, people exploit this. Usually one person has the power to recommend and significantly affect the decision. That one person tends to get a lot of free lunches and free phones. The lack of competition also leads to overinflated prices on the buyer's end and over promising on the seller's end. If the average applicant offered to Project A for $1,000,000 in 4 months, and suddenly company 13 offers to do it for $400,000 in 1 month, something sticks out. If there were only 1-4 applicants, as usually happens for this situation, the shady inexperienced one will not stick out so much. As a result, a lot of these companies take these jobs and get burned, which damages the industry as a whole.
- tixocloud 11y agoI can see it working for governments but for private banks, not sure. Even in Canada, we see a lot of value placed on business relationships and even though there's plenty of transparency, many times there are things that get swept under. However, in Canada, we do have a system like that for government projects so it could definitely be a step in the right direction. Especially for developing countries.
- krmmalik 11y ago1.Better automated webinar software. The existing solutions are good feature wise but the UX's are awful. This space needs some serious innovation. 2. Customer journey automation tools. Autopilot is really good but its good to see competition in this area 3. Something that makes the burden of making data more accurate at the logging end better to report to business intelligence tools 4. Something that allows me to leverage my knowledge expertise as a consultant and better helps me deploy group coaching and accountability. Again there's some software out there for this already but nothing I like 6. Most important. A really good CRM. I've tried soooooooo many. Not a single silver bullet solution. Can't believe it given its 2016.
- tixocloud 11y agoWow. Many ideas and all of them seem really good. For 6, what's the biggest problem will all the CRMs out there these days? What makes you cringe? 2. is something that I did think about but am unsure about the market for the tool. I'd also like to learn more about 1. and 4. in greater detail. 3. I know how you feel - I've been in BI and logging data accuracy is just a pain. You'll also have to balance to make sure that the UX is not affected by having all these logging events.
- krmmalik 11y agoGlad you like :) For 6, all the tools despite promising minimal data entry don't actually deliver on their promise (at least not in my experience) and don't play as nice with other tools as they could. Customer journey automation is a growing market and CRM systems are not paying that area enough attention. It's not that they need to build something that can address automation itself -- they just need to play nice , very nice, with other tools. For number 1 check out Stealth Seminar and EverWebinar. They're the two best in the business which says a lot. For 4. What else would you like to know? What kind of detail would you like me to share?
- tixocloud 11y agoThanks. Would love to discuss with you further about 6 .. and the customer journey automation piece. Maybe something we could collaborate together. Would love to know what's out there for 4.
- rgovind 11y agoI would pay for a way to manage my google search results. I sometimes go to 10th page on google, I make extra effort to avoid some websites and I keep expanding my search words. If I search for Donald trump now and two minutes later I search for "Donal Trump, Hillary comment", I don't want to see the results I got from my first search query. Either google should have a way of not showing these results or some 'note taking chrome addon' can remove those results for me. For what it is worth, sometimes my search string is as follows (India related). As you can see, I am searching for narendra modi minus major news sites. narendra modi -timesofindia -ndtv -ibnlive -thehindu -Firstpost -facebook -indianexpress -hindustantimes -news -indiatimes
- tixocloud 11y agoWhat it sounds like you're describing is a way to filter out certain websites?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kliao 11y agoYouTube offline mode
- angryasian 11y agoIf you sign up for youtube red you can download videos. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6308116?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6308116?hl=en
- andrei_says_ 11y agoOr get Swift on iOS
- tmaly 11y agogoogle analytics with automated filtering of referral spam
- pcmaffey 11y agoI'm consistently amazed that Google doesn't do this already.
- OhSoHumble 11y agoI would pay for a service that allows me to view an aggregate of all the board game meetups in my area. In fact, I've started a project to make that a reality.
- miguelrochefort 11y agoI would pay for one app/service that does 80% of what all other apps/services do. One app which I can use to sell things, buy things, send messages, review things, control things, get notifications, track my health, learn things, etc. This doesn't seem like something that would be too hard to do, considering that all apps pretty much do the same things. But that would make people's life so much better.
- prmph 11y agoI think this is a major challenge facing software technology now. Seems to be related to my question at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10883322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10883322 One way to solve this is to create a modular super-app for which developers can write components. This is much more than just the idea of plug-ins or extensions, because the super-app will be built from the ground up, and at various layers, to be highly modular, which almost every aspect being replaceable with user-chosen components. Also, the basic structure of the app and the its extension points cannot be changed unless by majority vote of registered users. For example, imagine a task super-app. The user should be able to choose from various competing workflows, UIs, or 3rd-party integrations. These components could be purchased outright from a gallery, subscribed to, or paid per use. So if I have a little idea about how to improve todo lists, I don't have to build an entire app from scratch to do it, I can just define a UI flow.
- insoluble 11y ago> One way to solve this is to create a modular super-app for which developers can write components I am pretty sure they call this an operating system. Moreover, most operating systems do provide built-in or pre-installed functionality, such as for scheduling, messenging, and note-taking.
- prmph 11y agoOk, but most consumers have no stomach to go mucking around with OS components. The modularity of OSs is at too technical a level. And most third-party apps are trying to solve slightly different issues, with lots of overlap in functionality. There are no well-defined, standardized extensibility points are needed In any case, if I were to write an app for any OS, I still have to think about authentication, UI, storage, etc. There is no tight environment where I can just submit a more performant file sorting algorithm, for example, and be paid by users who choose to use that in the OS. That is the idea.
- eecks 11y agoA cheaper but as useful dropbox
- banterfoil 11y agoDo you find that the prices are too expensive? I have always thought that their prices were quite reasonable
- EvanPlaice 11y agoIf you only need infrequent syncing to S3 you could always use grunt-aws-sync. It wouldn't require a monumental effort to create something similar that uses a file watcher to only sync specific directories that have changed.
- a_lifters_life 11y agoWhat does 'useful' mean? In what regard?
- alok-g 11y agoI am always struggling to find good educational games for kids. Something like http://betterexplained.com/ http://betterexplained.com/, but for younger kids (mine is currently ~8 years), would be great.
- thiht 11y agoA Linux desktop environment that: * works as well as Windows or OSX _out of the box_ * is beautiful and usable It just doesn't exist at the moment unfortunately, but I'm confident PapyrOS, Pantheon or Cinnamon will come to solve this soon.
- aspirin 11y agoElementary OS gets pretty close: https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/