12 ms·

Ask HN: What products or services do you wish existed for your startup?

57 points by memn0nis 7y ago

What products or services (software or not) do you wish existed for your startup? I'm taking 6 months off and looking for projects to work on (most of my experience is in B2B software, so ideally would work on a project in that space). Any ideas like "I wish someone produced X or Y" would be helpful!

mikece 7y ago
Horizontizally scalable RDBMS that can grow by adding commodity hardware and storage and can be queries with ANSI SQL. And MIT/BSD licensed. (Not a Six month project, I know....)
arberavdullahu 7y ago
A product that finds me the best deal for my customized services, for example servers, emails, hardwares, etc.
- memn0nis 7y ago
  Have you checked out Vendr for software?
- freehunter 7y ago
  This takes up so much of my time as a founder... trying to determine where I should be hosting, what technologies (VPS, Serverless, SQL vs NoSQL, Azure vs AWS, etc) I should be using, etc. If I’m paying $20/mo to DigitalOcean would the bill be cheaper at Amazon? Would their extra technologies make me more effective? Does it even matter? Why don’t vendors have a list saying “if you need this, use that” for all their horribly named services that all overlap themselves? Don’t get me started on email hosting. I don’t even know what’s possible in the email world so I’m 100% sure I’m overpaying but I don’t have the time to figure it out.
sergiotapia 7y ago
Something to simplify FTP. When you partner with a business in b2b most data is delivered through sftp channels. Make a tool that vastly simplifies that. Be it onboarding, offboarding, alerting, emailing, the works.
- memn0nis 7y ago
  How is this different than file sharing (e.g., Dropbox)?
  - jvagner 7y ago
    Based on own experience, there are a lot of systems out there that will only injest certain kinds of data via an FTP drop off. They won’t change or update their systems, but everyone who wants better visibility to the data they’re dropping into the ftp system will have to write something to cover that. So, you’d probably need to build both halves of the FTP chain, but each would still need to deliver the value add if only half of the new system was being used.
    - memn0nis 7y ago
      Interesting... would you mind giving me an example of the type of data you are referring to? Or perhaps an example use case / real world example?
      - jvagner 7y ago
        Real world example: uploading product, inventory and pricing data to ChannelAdvisor for processing and then republishing out to multiple e-commerce platforms (Amazon, Jet, Rakuten, etc). CA is a big complex powerful system, and my team was uploading FTP files every few minutes. We had the same kind of issues that E2E email delivery and receipt testing would be important for. In our case, we needed to know more about how many of those files were being read, injested, etc. There were dependent processes that could only be triggered if the data had made it into the system. We relied on process scheduling intervals to get close, but knowing more about the state of the ftp pickup itself could’ve improved yields to what we were trying to do.
wethebestcoder 7y ago
Mentorship after a successful Kickstarter.
- throwGuardian 7y ago
  I think there's plenty needed to get to a fully funded Kickstarter too
du_bing 7y ago
A user gateway. I need a product that can help me process user registration, login, session and other user identity logic. Than I can add my own user experiences using programming languages. The present user processing tools are too complicated and makes non sense.
- e9 7y ago
  Check out AWS Cognito
  - du_bing 7y ago
    yeah, I checked it. Thanks!
- masonhensley 7y ago
  Like this? (Open source) https://www.keycloak.org/ https://www.keycloak.org/
  - du_bing 7y ago
    seems great, but how to use it in other programming language? How to add my backend logic?
    - pharaohgeek 7y ago
      Keycloak is an identity/authentication provider. Your app would leverage it using OpenID Connect (OAuth 2). Keycloak would handle the heavy lifting related to identity management, registration, password changes, authentication, etc. Your app would handle everything else.
- peterbozso 7y ago
  Azure AD B2C https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/active-directory-b2c/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/active-directory-...
  - 7y ago
TomMarius 7y ago
"Virtual" scrum master
- wingerlang 7y ago
  Could you expand on this? I recently took over scrum master role and I've built my own JIRA visualisation to help me (and the team) during standups that basically highlights progress-over-time (rather than JIRA's 'just now'). It basically helps us to compare each day against yesterday to see trends. It also does some status magic by looking at story point progression, time logged and so on to highlight tickets that "should" have progress but doesn't (so that we can converse about it). It also helps me specifically by calculating story points per day / per person etc for the next sprints, how much to add etc. I figured I could even add some slack bot to send messages automatically about e.g. "tickets in trouble" to further remove some manual work. Rambling on here but, does it sound anything at all to what you're looking for?
mister_hn 7y ago
A better Scrum Board and Issuer tracker than Jira
- mikekchar 7y ago
  To be fair, as far as I can tell Jira's Scrum Board is pretty good (I only test drove it, though). It gets a lot of stuff right. It's main problem is that it's connected to Jira. There appears to be a lot of baggage there. If I were to do this (and I've been tempted), I would make the UI pretty similar to Jira's and remove most of the complexity underneath. Of course the downside to this is that the complexity underneath is there for a reason: People who are not programmers want a whole bunch of weird stuff. However, I think there may be a small market for a programmer focused Scrum board that has basic reporting capabilities (which Trello, unfortunately lacks: Screenfull is quite good, but necessarily fiddly). Probably would fit into a 6 month project.
- latchkey 7y ago
  There is a myriad of excellent alternative products to Jira in this space and it list keeps growing. The problem is that once a company has something like Jira ingrained in the culture, it is near impossible to switch.
tnolet 7y ago
A service that hooks into Stripe or whatever and sends a nice "welcome / swag" package to the address of whoever just signed up. It should take care of ordering and stocking t-shirts, mugs etc. with my design and then shipping it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ian0 7y ago
A financial modelling tool that also has API access for booking revenue.
- lazycder 7y ago
  +1 Running an e-commerce store, would definitely pay for something that could help me track margins on my products, when I break even, etc.
ReD_CoDE 7y ago
I think one of the main issues in startups is building cross-platform products as quickly as possible, so I think this is why some companies like Google work on some new technologies/methodologies like Kotlin But there's a big issue, most of the times founders are not programmers and looking for some codeless solutions And I think there're not any countable solutions in the market. The somewhat countable solution that exists is Bubble.io but even Bubble has some limitations and even issues but has a very good UI interface and logic behind I decided when our startup officially launched for our next startups and projects we build an invaluable solution and I think I have the answer in mind