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"I'm not interested in building an other B2B Invoicing SaaS app" I think I made the very 1st one of those and I'm working on an upgrade now. lol. A few areas

by oblib 9y ago

"I'm not interested in building an other B2B Invoicing SaaS app" I think I made the very 1st one of those and I'm working on an upgrade now. lol. A few areas come to mind that are obvious, like food, shelter, income, energy. There's a lot of work being done on growing food for personal and community use with controlled systems but there looks (to me) like there's plenty of room for improvement and innovation there still. From what I've read recently inexpensive, durable, and accurate soil moisture sensors are needed. It looks like a "Pick one feature" situation there right now. I've been pondering that a bit lately. I've seen some interesting innovation in how weeds are managed in large scale agriculture that include using organic "grit" to "sandblast" weeds with remote controlled mechanically articulated nozzles using image recognition software to direct the blast. This eliminates the need for herbicides so it attempts to solve a very pressing issue. I recently saw a robotic "weed whacker" on a social funding site that got a lot of attention, but the prototype they showed didn't inspire confidence in me that it'd do much. Pest control is another obvious pressing problem in agriculture, as is efficient use of water. I'm currently designing a simple experiment to grow salad veggies outdoors in the winter using low hoop row covers and passive solar heating. Growing food closer to where it's consumed has the potential to greatly reduce costs, environmental impact, and hunger, and it looks to me like there's a lot of headroom there for improvement.

nachiketkumar 9y ago
I couldn't agree more re. growing food for personal and community use. I'm currently in the very early stages of designing an app for small farmers and CSAs. Hard to get many farmers to respond to giving me input and share their knowledge. I see a tremendous scope for improvement in the entire user and customer experience of finding and signing up for a CSA (from the end customer side) and then effectively managing and nurturing your customers and reducing churn (from the small farmer's side).
- troycarlson 9y ago
  Not sure how you're soliciting feedback but you'd probably have pretty good luck volunteering for them and observing/conversing while getting first hand experience. Plus you'd make some friends (beta users).
  - nachiketkumar 9y ago
    yep- much harder to find the time to go volunteer but you're right on that. I don't consider myself a good salesman but I need to sell the idea that doing this would improve their bottom line.

by oblib 9y ago

nachiketkumar 9y ago

I couldn't agree more re. growing food for personal and community use. I'm currently in the very early stages of designing an app for small farmers and CSAs. Hard to get many farmers to respond to giving me input and share their knowledge. I see a tremendous scope for improvement in the entire user and customer experience of finding and signing up for a CSA (from the end customer side) and then effectively managing and nurturing your customers and reducing churn (from the small farmer's side).

troycarlson 9y ago
Not sure how you're soliciting feedback but you'd probably have pretty good luck volunteering for them and observing/conversing while getting first hand experience. Plus you'd make some friends (beta users).
- nachiketkumar 9y ago
  yep- much harder to find the time to go volunteer but you're right on that. I don't consider myself a good salesman but I need to sell the idea that doing this would improve their bottom line.