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My best idea to help came from when I was working at a Auto Body shop and I was able to help them optimize their books. They used to dread doing a simple expor

by bargl 8y ago

My best idea to help came from when I was working at a Auto Body shop and I was able to help them optimize their books. They used to dread doing a simple export from Excel into a Tax software system (I forget which one) but I converted it to some weird proprietary format and they could import it. It's not what I'd (personally) start a startup on, but the idea is there. I was also super green and coding in VB so I'm glad I let that miss. If you can get in with a small business owner and see where they're spending repeated human cycles for data entry, you can potentially have an idea.

LyndsySimon 8y ago
The problem with this is scaling - I've done similar things, but never invested the time necessary to wrap it in a nice UI and monetize it. The degree of customization necessary for each customer usually ends up being pretty high. My project that comes to mind is when I helped a NAPA parts store retrofit a new cash register into their inventory system. Their inventory system was running on AS/400, and their old register that failed was a beast that let them enter a part number for each item, then communicated with the AS/400 over a proprietary protocol to get the price. When the transaction was completed it decremented the stock. It took me about sixty hours to reverse engineer the protocol from the failed register, then another forty or so to write a Python web service that communicated with it and exposed an API and ran their dot-matrix receipt printer. I farmed out creating a web UI to someone on Upwork and left them with a documented solution that let them use off-the-shelf hardware to talk to a small server that then spoke AS/400. I've since replaced the server with a Raspberry Pi, but otherwise it's been in place since 2003. The front-end was originally a touch-screen Windows CE client I snagged at a freight auction, and the last time I stopped by (a couple of years ago) they'd replaced that with an Android tablet on a pedestal and another tablet that they could carry around. That sort of thing obviously has value to a lot of businesses, but each one is going to have a unique setup. There probably aren't a lot of parts houses out there that bought that particular vendor's inventory system in the 80s/90s, haven't upgraded, want to keep using the same backend, and are willing to upgrade their registers to something modern. I'd go so far as to say it's probably a unique situation.

by bargl 8y ago

LyndsySimon 8y ago

The problem with this is scaling - I've done similar things, but never invested the time necessary to wrap it in a nice UI and monetize it. The degree of customization necessary for each customer usually ends up being pretty high. My project that comes to mind is when I helped a NAPA parts store retrofit a new cash register into their inventory system. Their inventory system was running on AS/400, and their old register that failed was a beast that let them enter a part number for each item, then communicated with the AS/400 over a proprietary protocol to get the price. When the transaction was completed it decremented the stock. It took me about sixty hours to reverse engineer the protocol from the failed register, then another forty or so to write a Python web service that communicated with it and exposed an API and ran their dot-matrix receipt printer. I farmed out creating a web UI to someone on Upwork and left them with a documented solution that let them use off-the-shelf hardware to talk to a small server that then spoke AS/400. I've since replaced the server with a Raspberry Pi, but otherwise it's been in place since 2003. The front-end was originally a touch-screen Windows CE client I snagged at a freight auction, and the last time I stopped by (a couple of years ago) they'd replaced that with an Android tablet on a pedestal and another tablet that they could carry around. That sort of thing obviously has value to a lot of businesses, but each one is going to have a unique setup. There probably aren't a lot of parts houses out there that bought that particular vendor's inventory system in the 80s/90s, haven't upgraded, want to keep using the same backend, and are willing to upgrade their registers to something modern. I'd go so far as to say it's probably a unique situation.