9 ms·
Ask HN: What problem in your business is worth paying 10k/y for?
- paulskah 9y agoDepends on the company, really. But raising the effectiveness of a sales team by 5% if each sales person brings $100k in revenue each year makes sense with over 2 employees. Bumping up the conversion rate within a sales funnel. A company is making $1,000,000 a year selling dog food. Improve the conversion rate by 1% and you have yourself 10k.
- omarforgotpwd 9y agoCredit card fees.
- dijit 9y agoSlack. Apparently.
- Rjevski 9y agoMy current employer doesn't use Slack and instead uses XMPP and a web front-end called "Movim". I can tell you right away, it is shit. I'd gladly pay 10k/year for the privilege of using Slack, so please don't bash on it until you realise how bad the alternatives are.
- CryoLogic 9y agoDiscord is free and in many ways better. If you don't mind the gamer vibe.
- edgartaor 9y agoIn what ways?
- literallycancer 9y agoIt doesn't have (as much) performance issues. Seriously, loading a couple hundred messages shouldn't take even a second, what are we, living in 1990?
- user5994461 9y agoWait until you get Slack, then you can revise your statement.
- Rjevski 9y agoI've used it for talking to third-party clients that hire us and I don't see why should I revise my statement. It just works, it does the job just fine. The only complaint is that the desktop client melts my battery but given that I run it in the browser it isn't that big of a deal. Also, I forgot to mention - we did have an Slack clone called Mattermost running and the overall response from the dev team has been positive. The only reason it was shut down is because of some open-source fanatics who thought Mattermost wasn't open-source enough (apparently the fact that it's backed by a big company providing support is a sin) so we've switched to this XMPP abomination.
- literallycancer 9y agoMaybe they'd like matrix? https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html
- Rjevski 9y agoWell we already had a proven self-hosted Slack alternative called Mattermost that pretty much everyone enjoyed. The push for XMPP is because some of those fanatics live in a parallel world where everyone is using XMPP and they'd be able to talk to people on other servers with it. Of course reality is very different. I'm leaving soon anyway so I wish them the best of luck with this (and I feel bad for some of the people who actually wanted to get work done instead of fighting with broken and outdated tools).
- it33 9y agoMattermost team here, glad to hear we're making a difference! Yes, we do have people wanting connectivity via XMPP, IRC, Discord, Slack, etc. There's "matterbridge" that offers those options for Mattermost: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
- n_coats 9y agoEver checked out Rocket Chat? Open source solution that is extremely similar to Slack and you can self host. https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/
- forkLding 9y agoSlack reminds me of that saying that there are some software/programming languages that everyone hates and those that nobody uses. Its almost as if Slack is the JS of the team chat world.
- tunetine 9y agoEveryone might hate it but they're definitely using it. Agile is too trendy.
- superzamp 9y agoOn the fly image processing & optimization.
- ZenoArrow 9y agoInteresting. You mean something more advanced than you can do with some command-line scripting?
- matthewking 9y agoTake a look at https://www.cloudimage.io https://www.cloudimage.io
- pier25 9y agoLike https://www.imgix.com/ https://www.imgix.com/ ?
- superzamp 9y agoExactly.
- wiredfool 9y agoUploadcare.com?
- plaidfuji 9y agoImage processing tends to be quite application-specific. What's the application?
- CyberDildonics 9y agoWhat context and what does that mean exactly? Image processing is not usually a difficult hurdle.
- superzamp 9y agoAs pier25 suggested, I was thinking about imgix. We (a marketplace) stopped using our hand-rolled image processing service for Imgix, and now enjoy their performance and suite of clever tricks to deliver the least bytes the fastest to the user. The impact on SEO and conversion is non-negligible.
- CryoLogic 9y agodatabases, migration tools
- cdevs 9y agoI've written a sql to elasticsearch mapping tool I feel I should of released. Eleasticsearch is in desperate need of many tools we take for granted in sql land, like a command line client you can easily punch in queries on the fly because trying to write multi line json into the commandline curl is death so I'm forced to install kibana.
- yazr 9y agoCan you give a few more examples ? I am interested because writing these support tools IS effort+time+focus but not usually a technical problem.
- cdevs 9y agoMostly emulating what phpMyAdmin can do, the time spent for a elasticsearch beginner trying to figure out how to clear a index without losing or having to rebuild their mapping is insane, basically the answer is just don't and just copy your mapping but if something could easily extract that and say flush index then awesome. Creating mappings is a nightmare if you don't remember what types they have and it would be insanely simple to do the phpMyAdmin style of create table where you type in a "column" name and then use the drop down for the type "string, date, geo point".
- kibrad 9y agosaving 20k/y (cloud bills, for example)
- cdevs 9y agoAnything that any salesman or customer service employee mentions that plugs into salesforce. A mail button for sales force ? A print button for salesforce ? A make my phone call customer button inside salesforce button? Oh sweet only $20 per month per salesman....so we have 50 people on salesforce so only 1,000 a month, only $12,000 a year? This should help get us out of dept so fast !!! FML.
- ZenoArrow 9y agoI'm guessing you weren't pushing for Salesforce, but out of interest, did your company evaluate any other CRM platforms? If so, do you know why they chose Salesforce?
- tunetine 9y agoYou would incur the same type of thing in Dynamics. It's a hit or miss trying to figure out if a feature is even possible and how to implement on your own. There really isn't an open-source collection like you would hope. Subscription or dev. consultant?
- ZenoArrow 9y agoThere's not an open-source CRM I'm aware of that's a strong enough competitor to Salesforce, however there are much cheaper options available. Are you in the market for one?
- cdevs 9y agoThey bought into it when they were a tiny company over 7-8 years ago and barely used it for a few years, a few yeas ago me and some other devs joined and said why do you have this and why spend this much money for storing a customers email and some notes when we you also have 2 other systems doing the same thing. We tried to pull them away and build a small system for their small needs but that's when they dug the hole ten times deeper with numerous integration. No matter how big or small the integration the prices add up quickly. They were a company with out developers at one point and still never learned to ask if we can do something vs buying into mailchimp or salesforce plugin. No matter what the CEO wants he's afraid to take away the salesmans costly toys.
- tunetine 9y agoTableau. We pay far more than $10k/year even after the pricing model change.
- tommynicholas 9y agoThink about running your own Superset instance. Could be the solution and IMO it's much better than Tableau.
- thisisit 9y agoIs Superset mature enough? We have been exploring a lot of BI tools so much so that we near scraping the bottom of the barrel. But Caravel/Superset never came up because it is still under incubation and that doesn't go well with the enterprise managers. It doesn't help that there have been constant name changes.
- tommynicholas 9y agoIt's great and IMO pretty damn mature. They use it widely in prod at Airbnb so the only ways in which it's not "mature" are in customizability.
- thisisit 9y agoWhat kind of customization?
- tommynicholas 9y agoI think there are just certain scenarios it may not support, like at one point writing queries in the editor for JSONB fields in Postgres was either hard or impossible, things like that. But generally it's pretty great and ready to be used IMO.
- tomascot 9y agoWhat do you use it for?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- slackoverflower 9y agoThis is good thread for anyone wanting to figure out what B2B SaaS business to build.
- fairpx 9y agoan AR headset that allows us to work on 50, 60 inch displays where ever we are, without having to mount large displays to walls etc.
- softwareqrafter 9y agoWhat's your business that you guys like to work on large displays?
- fairpx 9y agoWe design User Interfaces for Web and Mobile development teams (http://fairpixels.pro http://fairpixels.pro). Working on large displays seriously increases productivity.
- deepnotderp 9y agoBetter EDA tools. Oh my god, i would pay so much for that...
- pspeter3 9y agoWhat does EDA stand for?
- frisco 9y agoElectronic design automation, e.g. Chip design. This is not low hanging fruit.
- Tomminn 9y agoI'm interested in this field. What are the current pain points with EDA tools? And are we talking device level, process level, circuit level or all levels?
- deepnotderp 9y agoPretty much everything. There's a landmine of bugs in even the best EDA software. I'd just like for the software to run nicely once, like TensorFlow... sigh. If you're thinking getting into this field, I might suggest a modular software architecture where the non-proprietary parts are open source and everything NDA-sensitive is kept closed source (pretty much anything the foundry touches/provides).
- Tomminn 9y agoSuper super interesting. So this is the case for the big expensive commercial products like those that come out of shops like Synopsys? It strikes me that helping to improve (device side) EDA is probably a pretty sound investment of my time, since I've got some phys chops and it's pretty important to the global economy.
- deepnotderp 9y ago
- Overtonwindow 9y agoFundraising.
- fiatjaf 9y agoAdvertising.
- fiatjaf 9y agoCorrectly identifying if the customers are going to pay their bills or run after two months without paying, leaving a bill of ~1000 (consider that the State justice system doesn't work and the customers are individuals).
- gsylvie 9y agoDo you report them to any credit agencies?
- fiatjaf 9y agoNo, because they can sue me if I do and even if I'm right I don't want the risk of having to pay an indemnification, Brazilian judges are crazy.
- thisisit 9y agoI maybe wrong but some people in my team were building a Customer HUB at a point. My understanding from the project was you could buy third party data to help you out with this.
- bgia 9y agoExtracting data from PDF in a reliable way.
- cdevs 9y agoWe do a decent amount of work in this, lots of scraping the web and extracting. Unfortunately we dont do it against pdfs that have any strict format or even a loose format at all, I wish it were government forms or any type of forms. Would you say the pdfs you guys are looking at have some type of format and the readers are just hit or miss?
- vram22 9y agoExtracting at least text from PDFs is not always 100% perfect, due to inherent issues with the PDF format (partly because it is a graphic format, and does not have a one-to-one mapping to text, also maybe because of some weird decisions they made). I both read about this and was told about this by a key person at a PDF software product company, whose product I researched and then used in a project. The product was xpdf (a C library, it also had binaries or EXEs), from Glyph and Cog. I was contracted by a client to research PDF libraries for extraction of text from PDF; found and evaluated a few, then recommended xpdf to the client, and used it in the project. That is how I know this. The only guaranteed way to get 100% accurate text from PDF is ... to not do it :) Instead, get the text from the same source that is used to generate the PDF. Obviously, that will not always be possible, but when it is, it is the better solution.
- giblet 9y agoWould this help <https://www.pdfdata.io/> https://www.pdfdata.io/>?
- ocrcustomserver 9y agoI am a freelancer doing exactly this. Drop me a line if interested.
- Walkman 9y agomaybe CI
- lox 9y agoAnything that increases team productivity significantly. If my team of developers is > 10 then I'm probably spending about 100k per year in supporting tools: - source code management - server monitoring and metrics - payment processing - testing tools - continuous integration tools Any of those could easily cost 10K/year, or more, depending on what the team is doing and how fast they are growing. Beyond that, anything that ties back to revenue. Email marketing, PPC, SEO. Also possibly things that optimize finances, analytics or anti-fraud.
- adius 9y agoWould https://feram.io https://feram.io fall into this category? (Disclaimer: I'm a cofounder)
- cdevs 9y agoI'd like to hear how your pitch to upper management differs on spending for tools for a revenue team vs spending for tools for a development team. Customer service and sales gets whatever they want at my job but it's pulling teeth asking for anything for increasing programmer efficiency.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- notadoc 9y agoGreat question, there are many opportunities here. Network with entrepreneurs, sole proprietors, private practice physicians/dentists/etc, and other small business owners and you'll often hear similar complaints or pain points. As a general rule I'd say nearly any business would pay 10k/year for: - Anything that would offer 2x that (or greater) in ROI - Anything that would automate or handle routine tasks that otherwise an expensive person must perform (there are many of these if you think about it) - Anything that saves 10k+ worth of someones time (this is not too hard to identify if you focus on the expensive persons) - Anything that generates 12k+ of new revenue - Anything that replaces 10k+ worth of annual contractor/consulting work - Anything that undercuts competition charging more for the same service, without a degradation in service quality You probably want specifics, so two areas I often see smaller businesses struggle with are email lists and security/software updates. There is substantial opportunity in finding new ways to monetize the boring old email/customer list in nearly every industry. I frequently hear small, medium, and even some larger businesses struggle to monetize an email list in any meaningful way, and so instead the primary metric is always about 'engagement' and other buzzword centric statistics that rarely translate into revenue. Private practice doctors and dentists often struggle with this, as do everything from bakeries, app developers, web sites, authors, interest groups, etc. There are many businesses with large customer lists or customer prospects in the form of email lists that make $0 from those lists. Another is anything related to security, particularly anything that takes a perceived complicated task and makes it easy or handles it outright without any downtime or complication to the end user(s). Whether it's routine client and server software updates, routine security audits, moving web apps/sites to https, maintaining and keeping up with web/email/crm/accounting software updates for small businesses, etc, there is huge opportunity out there for much of this to be a subscription type service rather than expensive periodic consultant or contract work that is often very distracting for the small business to implement. Anyway, those are just two simple ideas that I see/hear frequent issues with. Usually a focus on something common that already exists but needs improvement will be much easier than trying to do something completely unique.
- cdevs 9y agoExtra good point for security. It's easy for us to say we are using 10k security product to make 60k customer happy but we can also brag to any customer from there on.
- featherverse 9y agoCurious. About 1 week ago I saw a post on reddit that asked "What product would you pay $20,000 for?" I thought that was odd, typically that's not how you plan a business, you find something or create something of value and then you sell it. You don't start from how much you want to earn and then look for ways to earn that much. Now here's a similar post, what would you pay "$10,000/yr" for. You can label me a skeptic, but I wouldn't buy anything from anyone who's primary motivation for starting their business is to make X amount of dollars in Y timeframe.
- thinkingemote 9y agoIt's a standard way of finding business ideas. look for where there is a need. hackernews has these every week, I actually think they provide interest, even if the intention is business rather than discussion.
- featherverse 9y agoFair enough, I just think that people should look for their career by either finding ways to monetize activities which they already enjoy, or by looking for ways to create new kinds of value for the world. If you do those things, revenue often comes. By contrast, every disgusting corrupt snake who has ruined the world for everyone else has started out with the goal of making X dollars in Y timeframe. So while I'm not saying they're all going to be evil, all of the evil ones share that trait.
- owebmaster 9y agoSomeone with the right skillset can get some ideas from the discussion. Not randomly pick a good one, but the one that fits you.
- ellius 9y agoI do fraud investigations for a bank. We spend an insane amount on labor costs because all of our transactional data resides in different systems. Want to review credit card data? Go pull system X. Want to review wire transfers? Go pull system Y. Etc etc. some of these things have to be separated out of necessity (e.g. card data is stored in a particular way due to regulations), but I would easily pay 10k / y to be able to get a complete view of customer transaction activity from a single place. We'd save millions in labor costs if someone could pull it off correctly.
- marcofatica 9y agohow are these systems implemented? are they all proprietary systems? do you have access to the back-end data?
- jackgolding 9y agoThis is Robotic process automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation that all the big consultancies are pushing
- tixocloud 9y agoI'm in a bank as well but I reckon 10k won't be enough to solve the issue. We've built an enterprise data warehouse that pulls everything together and it still hasn't been perfect. What we do well though was extract the data at a higher level of abstraction - we came across a tool called Thoughtspot that also helped us join things together and drill down but from what I heard, it's pricey.
- gm 9y agoFor a dev shop, anything that brings in more than (more or less) $20k /year. Otherwise also fundraising (as someone else said). Though for both of these, if the business is cash-strapped, the results would have to be pretty much assured.
- maxwin 9y agoEnterprise pays the most for ERP. If you can create a better SAP, then you will make millions. I am saying as an SAP user, it is good but really expensive.
- badshar 9y agoThere are already tons of ERPs and the space is crowded at this point.
- hakanderyal 9y agoCreating an standard ERP system is not the hardest part (it's still really hard tho). Deploying ERP for enterprise customers means writing tons of custom modules & processes specific to the customer. That's why integrating an ERP for the first time or switching vendors is costly and risky. Most successful ERP systems for enterprise customers are basically domain-specific frameworks to create customer-specific solutions. However, there is still a big market for business management software for SMBs. The market is so big and ever expanding that I doubt it can ever be saturated. Aside from english-speaking market, there are even bigger opportunities for localized solutions.
- TomMarius 9y agoAcquisition of high-quality clients for my software agency is a problem for which solution I'd be willing to pay 100k/year.
- fairpx 9y agothose are some pretty high quality clients then. What type of projects do you do. We've implemented a pretty good model for our agency to attract quality clients without networking and doing all sorts of stuff that we don't like. Happy to help.
- miguelxt 9y agoWhat's your contact info?
- fairpx 9y agoin my profile. Just replied above with an overview.
- BjoernKW 9y agoWould you be willing to share your model? For me networking so far has been the only consistent way of attracting quality clients. I don't dislike networking at all but it takes up a considerable amount of my most finite resource: Time. Therefore I'm always eager to hear about alternative approaches especially if those are more scalable than me personally having to put in time for networking efforts.
- TomMarius 9y agoI'd be very happy if you sent me a message about your model, my address is marius@tolud.com. We tend to describe ourselves as "the tech team for your (tech) startup", our goal is to be a one stop shop for tech-heavy startups and companies. We work with Node.js, TypeScript and React/React Native. We've created a bunch of quite unique libraries and components that help us develop a lot faster and with less bugs (I can get into detail over e-mail). The company is new (founded in March 2017) and so far I just used my contacts from the past to find us work (7 developers, 2 analysts/consultants), but this source is quickly drying up. Right now we're finishing our website and my plan is to go to some meetups, but I'm not entirely sure it's going to help and I'm afraid I'm going to lose time. Our biggest problem is that we don't have much of a portfolio, only a bunch of internal applications we can't really show. Clients I found online don't trust us and/or want our services extremely cheaply, which is a problem because our developers are senior guys that charge a bit - but that was a deliberate choice, we want to make high-quality software.
- jbob2000 9y agoI need an easier way to send my clients quotes, invoices, and reminders. Quickbooks is nice if you're an accountant who likes entering stuff into tables. But I am not an accountant and I'm bad about keeping on top of my accounts. It takes too many clicks to send a stupid little invoice once in a while. This is a space that could really use chat bot support. I want to quickly type something or go through a wizard to do my accounting. "Hey Accounty, can you send Client B an invoice for The Big Package at $200 for 12 months? Make it recur annually". And Accounty goes and sets everything up and sends the emails. No interface. Completely automated. When an account is overdue, it'd message me and say "Hey, Client A is overdue, shall I send a reminder?" If someone replies to the invoice email, it'd say "Hey, Client C replied to the invoice and asks 'Can I pay later?', how do you want to respond?". Wire that up Siri or some other speech to text engine and I can do my accounting on the drive in to work.
- thepredestrian 9y agoWhat industry do you work in? I'm surprised there isn't a lightweight accounting software for freelancers / consultants
- tixocloud 9y agoHave you tried Freshbooks before? I reckon they are one of the easier tools out there.
- cdiamand 9y agoIf you're looking for more of these problems: 1K - 10K https://www.oppslist.com/?payment_level=4 https://www.oppslist.com/?payment_level=4 10K - 100K https://www.oppslist.com/?payment_level=5 https://www.oppslist.com/?payment_level=5