14 ms·

Startup Ideas 2020

359 points by saadalem 7y ago

rmac 7y ago
"I’ve yet to see anyone properly tackle the more rudimentary, “boring” and lucrative approach: an on-prem search appliance, similar to GSE, that indexes internal intranet, wikis as well as email." Is there a reason to believe this is something enterprises actually want? Was GSE too early?
- sjg007 7y ago
  Probably yes. I think there are a few companies that are hesitant to put everything on the cloud. There are probably hybrid options worth exploring. But lucidworks.com is in this space so ... I think you can be self-hosted or managed.
- lowercased 7y ago
  whether they want it or not, they probably need it. the last few enterprises I've been in, I could never find anything. And because people couldn't find stuff, it was a disincentive to document stuff (because no one would ever be able to find it anyway). Getting everyone to put everything in confluence - for example - helps, but... there are entire categories of data that don't end up getting stored in confluence, so... it wouldn't get found. And, fwiw, the confluence search always seems to be not very helpful whenever I'm needing to find something - but I often can't tell up front if the search is bad or the data just isn't there (or I'm searching for the wrong terms). If they don't want it, though, they won't buy it, whether it's helpful to people on the front-lines or not.
- vkou 7y ago
  Enterprises want this. Source: Every single company, tech or otherwise, everywhere in the world, is a complete mess when it comes to discovering information you need to do your job. Whether or not you can actually make enough money from building a selling on-prem search is another question. It is an incredibly difficult space to develop for, because every one of these messes has a vastly different IT stack. [1][2][3] You could take the easy way out and build search for Slack + Jira + Email, but that would help less than 1% of businesses world-wide. [1] The first full-time job I worked had an unholy amalgamation of HP Quality Center, SeaPine source control, something about Sharepoint, and random documents stored in people's shared folders. Oh, yeah, and it had an on-premise Google Enterprise Search (Or whatever it was called back in 2011), which was almost entirely useless. [2] The second was a mix of Jira and TikiWiki. [3] The current job my wife holds has a bunch of files in a shared directory, a database that is installed from four floppy disks, and an IT stack that quite prominently includes Windows 2003.
  - eitland 7y ago
    > It is an incredibly difficult space to develop for, because every one of these messes has a vastly different IT stack. I have a strong feeling that Google Desktop Search had a lot of this sorted. That was 10 years ago. With all the advances that has been happening in the meantime and assuming businesses are interested enough to adjust a tiny bit to simplify crawling this doesn't seem impossible at all if a well-funded team started working on it.
    - vkou 7y ago
      The technical problem is solvable, the deployment and technical support, and sales problem, and getting customers to upgrade, and the technical support, and did I mention the technical support problem would be a complete nightmare. You can't actually leverage any of the economies of scale that you can get from building software, when you have to hold the hand of every single customer you deal with. Someone like Oracle[1] can get away with this sort of thing (While charging an arm and a leg for it), but this is not the problem that your typical startup can solve. [1] The other difference is that your Oracle database + solution is business critical, and businesses have no problem with paying $XY,000/year for business-critical solutions. Intranet search is a nice-to-have, and businesses balk at paying $5/user/month for that sort of stuff.
  - mish15 7y ago
    Totally agree. We looked at providing tech in this space and it means you have to plug into literally every system. It’s an endless problem. Slack search is awful and they have a full team on it. Jira is a mess. Gmail search is pretty good already, which is one of the things that makes frontapp far less useful also.
maverick19221 7y ago
An aside, I love the metaphor rich writing: > Privacy might be the digital spinach > As this chewing gum loses flavor > A startup idea that hits the seed ecosystem like a fashion fad, with a surprising number of founders suddenly all wearing the same ripped jeans > The market has priced in the trade war in atoms, but not in bits. Any suggestions on how to get better at writing like this?
- ases 7y ago
  Read a lot of content like it, really the same as any sort of writing. Then practice. You could additionally look to use a memorisation tool (something like Anki perhaps) to store new words and phrases that you like, so they are in your head, ready to be retrieved as you're hammering away at the keys.
- snarf21 7y ago
  Read a lot and think about what makes this writing good or bad. Then try to duplicate it and show people and get feedback. Show it to everyone and anyone. This is how I approach physical board game design. Play as many games as I can and contemplate the choices made. Why do people like this game even if I don't. Then make my own and have anyone and everyone play them. Modify and test again until strangers ask me when they can buy the game they just played.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Practice creative writing daily. I'm not too convinced reading a lot is part of it, as the other comments suggest. Else we'd all be great writers. I'd argue that consumption is the least important part of being a good creator. Else we'd all be good creators with our endless content consumption. But I guarantee you will notice results if, every morning, you write at least a few paragraphs answering some sort of creative writing prompt. After a while, creative ideas will just come out of your head as you try to write. Just like how words and phrases magically come to you as you get better at another language. https://old.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/ https://old.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/ is a great resource. I like to read a few ideas in the morning and consider them in the shower. Then I brew a coffee and write as much as I can before I start my day, even if my idea completely sucks. I just try to treat my crappy idea as a constraint and run with it.
davnicwil 7y ago
> Just like Javascript made programming more accessible to a broader audience I think this is entirely cart before horse. What actually happened was the web made programming relevant to a much broader audience and JavaScript is the language you use to program for the web, so everyone learnt that.
- cambalache 7y ago
  Correct, all the assumed authority of the author flew out of the window as I read that sentence.
  - chupa-chups 7y ago
    Could you explain why you think this? Programming is 75-90% repetition of patterns. The remaining 10-15% are the difference between a simple translation of usual human language into a foreign language vs. developing algorithms and/or logic to solve a problem. If we can get rid of the non-algorithm, non-logic part we'd be better off, and this is what i read into this sentence.
    - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
      repetition of patterns is the easy part, so getting rid of the easy part and leaving the difficult part might not make much difference in the end. Especially as the easy part can be an access point to the more complicated.
      - chupa-chups 7y ago
        Still it takes easily 50% of the time available for actual coding, even using modern IDEs.
        wolco 7y ago
        Use a framework and/or abstract your patterns.
        7y ago
justinzollars 7y ago
I agree with this question: "Will it [TikTok] be in the US App Store by years end?"
- smbullet 7y ago
  Interesting thought. If TikTok got banned they would probably release a web interface for Americans or Android phones would suddenly become really popular among teens.
  - blackrock 7y ago
    So teens would dump iPhone for Android just to get TikTok? That would be very interesting indeed. The other year, teens were surprised when they got a green bubble on their iMessage, indicating the other person was not using an iPhone. Admittedly, TikTok does appear to be more fun and interesting (for teens) than Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, because the point is to just watch fun and pointless stuff. And maybe learn something new, or do something yourself to imitate them.
jpm_sd 7y ago
> DuckDuckGo is small, but it’s growing 50% year-over-year. As of last week, it is also a search option on every European Android device. If the growth rate were to double, DDG would surpass Google in 6 years. That's what we call a "Big If". And doesn't DDG just rent someone else's index?
- luhn 7y ago
  Yeah, search results are provided by Bing.
  - krick 7y ago
    Wow, I didn't know that. So what exactly is a DDG then? Just a page to query Bing (anonymously?)? They don't crawl any data themselves?
    - pb7 7y ago
      Yep. They do a small amount of crawling solely to populate their "instant answers" for limited topics.
      - sansnomme 7y ago
        Their marketing and brand are the most important aspects. Bing proxies are a-dime-a-dozen but only DuckDuckGo has achieved tremendous media attention and funding.
        moretai 7y ago
        Their marketing got me. I was duped.
        pb7 7y ago
        One of the proxies had to win out, right? We're only talking about DuckDuckGo and not BearBearClaw because they survived. I don't think they're doing anything particularly special. They're also a much older company with a lot smaller search volume than people realize.
dsalzman 7y ago
"3. The New Meme: Enterprise Search “Enterprise search” is shaping up to be in 2020 what RPA was in 2019. A startup idea that hits the seed ecosystem like a fashion fad, with a surprising number of founders suddenly all wearing the same ripped jeans. I’ve seen about a dozen teams and companies working on next-generation enterprise search in the past few weeks. They’re all attempting to build the same thing: a search/feed/discovery product that helps you find things amongst Slack, Gmail and Salesforce clouds. I’ve yet to see anyone properly tackle the more rudimentary, “boring” and lucrative approach: an on-prem search appliance, similar to GSE, that indexes internal intranet, wikis as well as email. On-prem software is annoying to build, something many founders shy away from." At my old startup Pinecone, we built something similar called Ask Pinecone. It would index everyone's emails and internal wiki's on premise. Then you could send an email with a question to ask@youcompany.com some Bayesian based modeling would then forward the email to the most appropriate person at the company based on the contents of their inbox and your email.
- citilife 7y ago
  > I’ve yet to see anyone properly tackle the more rudimentary, “boring” and lucrative approach: an on-prem search appliance, similar to GSE, that indexes internal intranet, wikis as well as email. On-prem software is annoying to build, something many founders shy away from." It's hard because you need to access the documents and from a security perspective that's not ideal. We took a different approach which actually builds a search graph based on what's discussed (plugs into email, slack, etc.): https://insideropinion.com/ https://insideropinion.com/ Works very well and doesn't need access to the source document (so more secure), although that'd improve the search.
pascalxus 7y ago
LOLZ: >"Now Instagram has too many ads and finding a genuine phone charger on Amazon requires a degree in investigative journalism."
ajsharp 7y ago
> While consumer privacy might be overrated, enterprise ephemerality is underrated. Yep, this is the core assumption underlying Sharesecret - https://sharesecret.co https://sharesecret.co.
alexfromapex 7y ago
Re: the first point, Amazon is terrible now. I’m afraid to buy things because of all of the fake reviews. How are you supposed to buy products sight-unseen with fake reviews abound?
- mosburger 7y ago
  I wonder if a curated, moderated Amazon could work? Probably wouldn't scale very well, but perhaps if there were more live humans involved in the process of choosing which items were available for purchase, it'd work a little better? I sorta feel like the future is in smaller more boutique sites for specific things. Like Wayfair for home furnishings or Chewy for pet supplies. A bit like going to the local pet store instead of Walmart for your dog food.
  - dbenamy 7y ago
    I’ve increasingly been using https://thewirecutter.com https://thewirecutter.com for this.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      You also have to stay away from Amazon anyway, to not get a fake sent because of their inventory commingling. But yes, I use the Wirecutter for recommendations too, and I never regretted purchasing anything they recommended.
pascalxus 7y ago
> Remote is acceptable, even encouraged. 11% of all SE jobs posted on Stackoverflow in the last 4 months or so were Remote: https://skilldime.com/app.php?PieChart2=Remote https://skilldime.com/app.php?PieChart2=Remote I like the way the blog post is so well written in a witty style that's both entertaining and interesting to read.
- atupis 7y ago
  Remote will be huge and there is definitely a need for tools to enable remote working and communication.
  - overcast 7y ago
    What exactly is missing from remote working/communication? I honestly can't handle anymore stupid messaging/conferencing systems.
    - ollifi 7y ago
      Exactly, they are stupid. If they worked the experience would be the same as sharing the same space. The tech should be more or less invisible.
    - y-c-o-m-b 7y ago
      I'm also curious what tooling is missing. Slack, Zoom, and Outlook has covered 100% of our very large (over 1000 employees) remote company's needs. Seems the issue is more about reducing the number of tools rather than acquiring new ones.
      - jslove 7y ago
        Slack easily replaced by Keybase etc. For me the killer would be something that makes meetings more efficient via AI.
    - redisman 7y ago
      VR cubicles
citilife 7y ago
> 3. The New Meme: Enterprise Search Exactly what we're doing: https://insideropinion.com/ https://insideropinion.com/ Seems like most people aren't thinking of search the exact same way though. It's a huge problem (having worked in large fortune 100 companies).
MediumD 7y ago
For #3: If anyone is looking for an enterprise search they can boot up "cloud-prem" (in their VPC), that's exactly what we're building at https://landria.io/customers/why-landria https://landria.io/customers/why-landria.
- mish15 7y ago
  What search tech are you building it on out of interest?
skinkestek 7y ago
Here's one non-abstract idea that you can get for free, even though I might try myself as well: Give Confluence a run for its money. Confluence is so bloated that a clean install takes longer to start than it takes to boot my laptop and log in. Plugin SDK documentation is a mess. As far as I can see it only sells because of the brand and because of network effects. If anyone could manage to create a real wiki (remember, it means quick!) and market it they might have a chance at some nice cash that would otherwise flow to a company that keeps wasting peoples time. End of rant ;-)
- drywater 7y ago
  No company will buy products just because they are better. They buy the brand, the support, the advertising.
  - ska 7y ago
    I would adjust this. No company will buy products just because they are a bit better. You have to completely knock that out of the park to be compelling. OTOH, I'll grant if you really fail on support etc. you will probably fizzle out anyway.
  - frandroid 7y ago
    What support does anyone need to use Confluence? How many people _use_ that support?
    - dflock 7y ago
      > How many people _use_ that support? That's not really relevant to Enterprise sales.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    They'll buy it if the places the existing product is lacking pisses off the decision maker.
- mosburger 7y ago
  Sounds a bit like Tettra? https://tettra.com/ https://tettra.com/ Our company uses Quip for this sort of use case, but that's not really the same thing as what you're asking for.
tempsy 7y ago
Half the bullet points on here all fall into enterprise SaaS... In my opinion the shift from big game changing ideas like Airbnb, Lyft/ Uber, and Stripe to a dozens enterprise SaaS apps popping up in San Francisco has been one of the biggest reasons why I've felt for the last year that there doesn't feel like there's been a "big next thing" for awhile. I just can't get excited by another dressed up note taking app, and wouldn't be excited to work for one.
- redisman 7y ago
  At least SaaS as a business model is a lot more palatable to me than the OG unicorns' ads and data harvesting. Generally I don't see why customer-facing technology is supposedly objectively better and sexier and more "real" engineering.
  - tempsy 7y ago
    It’s more exciting to work at a company that is actually game changing. Some SaaS cos fit into that bucket as well, but majority I see funded today fill some niche project management use case that just isn’t that appealing to me. I didn’t say anything about it being “realer”.
40acres 7y ago
A start-up at the intersection of 'developer tools' and 'NoCode' would be very exciting to me. I'd love to see tools that reflect some of the principles outlined in Bret Victor's blog. http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
- sansnomme 7y ago
  Just remember that the tool has to be useful and practical at the end of the day. Red's obsession with crypto tokens and the failure of Eve reflects badly on the rapid application development ecosystem (on the other extreme, you have Embarcadero Delphi and SAP, each costing n-figures). Microsoft's suite is for some reason on life support. Access, Visual Basic are all pale shadows of their former selves.
  - zubairq 7y ago
    Visual Basic died because Microsoft chose not to continue development of the VB6 comatible ecosystem. It was a multibillion dollar a year business in the 1990s
- tablet 7y ago
  Have a look at https://fibery.io https://fibery.io
bluedevil2k 7y ago
Haven't we been hearing about "software that doesn't require any tech skills to build" for 25 years now? It seems like a pipe dream. It's built on some innate belief that someone can create tools that work for every kind of business possible, which is crazy. I can think in the past few years I've worked on health care registration websites, diamond auction websites, oil reserve management software - nothing would have been tied together with any common tool and all required extensive amounts of custom code for their business logic. I think it's time we drop this dream of normal "business analysts" writing all the software in a company.
- rcurry 7y ago
  No Code is the Duke Nukem Forever of software development.
- milesskorpen 7y ago
  But a lot of things that used to require custom software ... don't, anymore. I think what happens is that the kinds of jobs that are stitched together with Iftt/Zapier/Google sheets/whatever stop being classified as "software," so we've got an ever-moving-target. There'll always be a frontier that requires deeper technical expertise. But that frontier will keep moving.
  - sanderjd 7y ago
    This is the correct answer. I view my career through this lens now: I aim to find things to work on that I believe are very likely to remain in that frontier that remains classified as "software". I find this useful when thinking about companies and projects. If they seem to be building a CRUD app with clients for different platforms, at a small to medium scale, that might not be far enough into the frontier for me. This is purely a matter of taste or personality. Another very useful (and probably more lucrative) thing to do is to find ways to leverage the ever-increasing ability to build that kind of simple but useful application for some domain without writing much or any of your own "software". But for me, that just doesn't match my interests as well.
- perlgeek 7y ago
keithwhor 7y ago
Everybody in this specific social group of investors continues to list Developer Tools as, effectively, an Evergreen space. What’s baffling to me is that the amount of innovation in Developer Tool businesses (not tools, businesses) is surprisingly small. There are three factors that influence this, IMO: (1) The OSS community has trended towards an insular culture incentivized by OSS popularity where stars and Twitter followers are status signals. In this world, it’s hard for talented engineers to stop seeking “star status” and transition to the business ecosystem where they’re bottom rung of the ladder. (2) The space is extremely sophisticated — with longer R&D cycles — and VCs routinely incentivize suboptimal growth trajectories when they’ve identified apparent winners and miss opportunities with more practically iterative companies. (Expecting growth at all costs in a space where continuous delivery + R&D is the norm.) This blows up some companies early and prematurely kills other promising technologies. I think the 18mo expected cycle time probably needs to be adjusted for these companies, especially early stage. (3) Founders are heavily pressured towards exits. Long R&D cycle time, the pressure cooker of VC growth expectations, and the rarity of high-ownership, customer-oriented developer tool + engineering talent makes early exits extremely attractive for both founding teams and acquirers. How do we fix this? Between Daniel, Elad and a bunch of folks who keep writing this stuff — I think it’s time for a new developer-oriented fund, backed by the people and companies passionate about the space. I’ve been a major sponsor of Vue.js for years. I’d like to do more to help talented developers start businesses in the future, when possible. If anybody thinks something like this is interesting, give me a holler.
- sansnomme 7y ago
  Also more importantly: monetisation is hard. There has only been one Jetbrains.
  - keithwhor 7y ago
    I think monetization is difficult IFF you don’t think about asking for money from the get-go. I’m actually of the opinion that open source projects are not well-equipped to build companies around, but can serve as an early guide to nascent market demand. Monetization looks difficult because people keep building free things and then trying to figure out how to charge for them. From my perspective, the better bet is to build a free thing, prove the market, and then figure out what the paid thing might look like — even if totally different. I think there’s a decade ahead of us where developers can start asking, “how can I turn this {useful tool} into a SaaS product?” We've been seeing this for years, I just think folks can start getting more ambitious about it. :)
a13n 7y ago
More like "VC Compatible Startup Ideas 2020" It's totally feasible to start a successful company outside of these ideas. I think this list is helpful because they answer the "why now" question that VCs are looking for. In other words, this list is helpful if you're trying to start a $10B company today.
- keithwhor 7y ago
  Not to be too cheeky, but this is mostly a list of trends dictated by companies started three or more years ago. Meaning it's actually "VC Compatible Startup Ideas 2017." Outside of Developer Tools (I'm a fan!) I would say your advice -- it's feasible to start a company outside of these ideas -- is probably exactly where you want to be looking if you're starting a company today. Daniel's an investor, so he's casting a net for startups / founding teams he hasn't heard of yet. Content marketing is dealflow 101. That said, if you're a founder in one of these spaces, he has a fantastic reputation, so you should absolutely reach out. He wouldn't have posted it if he wasn't looking for awesome people!
  - a13n 7y ago
    Yeah good point, if you're starting one of these today you might already be a bit late.
rokhayakebe 7y ago
Privacy Judging by what people are posting on IG, FB, and what I hear they are posting on SNAP, I have come to the conclusion that Privacy is a niche product.
russellbeattie 7y ago
Bytedance?? OK, I guess... But Lark's home page blurb seems a bit direct: "Hey look, the Chinese government is going to hack into your servers and look at all your corporate secrets sooner or later, why not just make it easy for both of us and use this service now? Sign up here."
shreyshrey 7y ago
Lark looks very similar to what we are trying to accomplish with AirSend (https://www.airsend.io https://www.airsend.io). I guess interesting days ahead.
tito 7y ago
Completely agree on the "Carbon and Climate" section. Negative makes a carbon negative bracelet made with carbon dioxide pulled from the atmosphere. I created the company to make carbon more personal. http://gonegative.co/ http://gonegative.co/
harrisreynolds 7y ago
Re 2. Saying Yes to NoCode ... We are working on an MVP in this space called Webase. It is still very early but we are starting with basic CRUD operations and then will be layering on more sophistication going forward. Check it out here: https://www.webase.com https://www.webase.com
- mritchie712 7y ago
  what does it do? do you have a video demo?
  - harrisreynolds 7y ago
    Today it allows you to define data models and then auto generates views that you can use to perform CRUD operations. This is a view of the app editor creating a simple Blog app: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cu4hs6fdgabd4wh/Screenshot%202020-01-17%2015.32.30.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/cu4hs6fdgabd4wh/Screenshot%202020-... After you define your data models, then you can create and edit live views of the data model. Here is a screenshot of the Blog app where I am creating a new post: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dmxrbr1c44zkp8h/Screenshot%202020-01-17%2015.34.00.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/dmxrbr1c44zkp8h/Screenshot%202020-... I need to create a video of this to make it easier to show off. The UX is still a bit rough, but the core pieces are there for building CRUD apps. Thanks for asking!
  - harrisreynolds 7y ago
    Also... I tried to check out SeekWell from your profile but it didn't load. Are you still working on it?
    - mritchie712 7y ago
      try this link https://app.seekwell.io/ https://app.seekwell.io/
    - mritchie712 7y ago
      just saw you were CTO of Shipt, we (SeekWell) had a couple users there. Just followed you on Twitter, DM if you want to chat some time.
OkGoDoIt 7y ago
Was this published in 2019 or 2020? There’s a line pretty far down the page in the Enterprise Dabblers section that says “As of today (January 2019), we see a half dozen pitches a week for automation software” Maybe that was a typo? Or maybe this is a slightly updated article from a year ago?
zackbrown 7y ago
When it comes to winner-takes-all (the bread & butter of VC economics,) it strikes me as dissonant to bet both on no-code and on dev tools. No-code’s winner-takes-all scenario presumes full automation of developers. It’s in the name: no code, no developers. Postulate: software developers will remain necessary as long as human brains don’t natively speak “Von Neumann.“ Thus the winner-who-takes-all is going to be “with-code,” not “no-code.” “No-code” is a misnomer and a dead-end.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ArtWomb 7y ago
Well, thanks for introducing me to Vayyar at least ;) If I understand their value prop, they provide a single sensor solution that is essentially a black box. And the output is the wide-range 4D point cloud. Power consumption is ultra-low. But the fidelity is still very high. It's up to the partner to design the software that consumes the data. Vayyar just provides the black box. If it works. The total market here seems on order of "replacing cameras" in retail, manufacturing and surveillance! https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/20/vayyar-nabs-109m-for-its-4d-radar-tech-which-detects-and-tracks-images-while-preserving-privacy/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/20/vayyar-nabs-109m-for-its-4...
miguelmota 7y ago
Does "No Code" just mean having a UI? What I mean is the examples it gave for "No Code" look like regular Saas companies so I don't see what's the difference between something labeled "No code" and a regular software product that you use a UI to do things since the code is abstracted away. The majority of web based products don't require the user to code so "No code" seems like a buzzword more than anything.
aantix 7y ago
Sidekiq is a one man band. Perham owns the space. Good for him.
kiwicopple 7y ago
> 2. Saying Yes to NoCode > 9. Developer Tools While these two may seem contradictory, I see this as a great trend for developers. Developers of 10 years ago would focus on building common solutions like blogs and landing pages. Now there are slew of NoCode startups that allow non-developers to do it themselves. This frees up developers to focus on more complex problems. The Developer Tool startups of today should be asking - "what are the common tasks that developers are doing today, that will be easy for non-devs in 10 years?" Perhaps my thesis if wrong, but that's what we're hoping to achieve at https://supabase.io https://supabase.io In our case the "complex task" is creating CRUD APIs. Creating these are monotonous and developers could be spending time on much more valuable tasks. We're starting to see this with the rise of amazing tools like GraphQL/PostgREST. Other areas to watch will be the "simplification" of databases. Think "MS Access" for advanced databases like Postgres. Metabase is a good start here, focusing on the reporting aspect of the data. The next steps may be database design and data entry, - Retool seem like they could do well in this area.
- petra 7y ago
  It's a good question. Possibly, In 10 years low code will dominate enterprise development, IOT and quite likely , also most consumer crud apps. And today, many people develop very similar services across companies. In the future most of those services will be available online. On the other hand software will become dominant in many more fields. SO that will require more infrastructure, and more software engineers dealing with machine learning, unstructured data, data science, 3d objects and worlds, machine creativity, experts in optimization.
davidjnelson 7y ago
> Given free transcription and the drive of remote work to video conferencing, we’re about to witness a Cambrian explosion of cataloged meeting information. What was previously oral knowledge will be automatically documented by machines. We’ll see many opportunities come out of this. Automatic searchable transcripts for video chats. Now that sounds useful!
- distantaidenn 7y ago
  My startup is currently working on this now. One of my major concerns is data security and client confidence. One hurdle I haven't figured out how to get over is reassuring clients that their data is safe with us -- i.e. we aren't reading/listening in on every conversation.
  - davidjnelson 7y ago
    I wonder if there’s a failsafe way you can prove it’s off when they want to turn it off.
huac 7y ago
I wrote a post about the so-called "law of advertiser atrophy": https://hua.substack.com/p/everything-i-have-ever-learned-about https://hua.substack.com/p/everything-i-have-ever-learned-ab.... TLDR: the author correctly identifies an issue, but misdiagnoses its root cause and how it will play out moving forward. In fact, I would endorse short AMZN, long GOOG/FB, as an investment strategy (but not as investment advice)!
joering2 7y ago
Interesting read but none of these ideas actually explain what problems they solve. Programming is my hobby and being financially secure, I’m in position where I could easily spent half a day writing someones code for nothing more than “thank you, good job”. Seriously, so long as I know someone’s problem is being solved. I wish there were website like “thank you for programming dot com” where people with low or no budget could post problems that programing can solve and programmers could tackle those at zero financial gain, maybe only as a extra point in their resumee.
joddystreet 7y ago
We tried building NoCode (used to be hosted at noapp.mobi), I think around January 2017. The project has been abandoned since then, you can find the project at - 1. Docs - https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-docs/wiki https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-docs/wiki 2. Core - https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-core https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-core 3. Backend - https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-api/tree/develop https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-api/tree/develop 4. Mobile App - https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-app/tree/feat-offline https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-app/tree/feat-offline 5. Mobile App - https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-client https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-client Quick demo (forced under 2 minutes time, we tried to take this to TechCrunch), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfZT75rduPg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfZT75rduPg This was a POC project. It was quite suitable for simple business process management based apps. One of our customers has been using a conference room manager built on this platform, for 3 years now.

Startup Ideas 2020

359 points by saadalem 7y ago

rmac 7y ago

"I’ve yet to see anyone properly tackle the more rudimentary, “boring” and lucrative approach: an on-prem search appliance, similar to GSE, that indexes internal intranet, wikis as well as email." Is there a reason to believe this is something enterprises actually want? Was GSE too early?

sjg007 7y ago
Probably yes. I think there are a few companies that are hesitant to put everything on the cloud. There are probably hybrid options worth exploring. But lucidworks.com is in this space so ... I think you can be self-hosted or managed.
lowercased 7y ago
whether they want it or not, they probably need it. the last few enterprises I've been in, I could never find anything. And because people couldn't find stuff, it was a disincentive to document stuff (because no one would ever be able to find it anyway). Getting everyone to put everything in confluence - for example - helps, but... there are entire categories of data that don't end up getting stored in confluence, so... it wouldn't get found. And, fwiw, the confluence search always seems to be not very helpful whenever I'm needing to find something - but I often can't tell up front if the search is bad or the data just isn't there (or I'm searching for the wrong terms). If they don't want it, though, they won't buy it, whether it's helpful to people on the front-lines or not.
vkou 7y ago
Enterprises want this. Source: Every single company, tech or otherwise, everywhere in the world, is a complete mess when it comes to discovering information you need to do your job. Whether or not you can actually make enough money from building a selling on-prem search is another question. It is an incredibly difficult space to develop for, because every one of these messes has a vastly different IT stack. [1][2][3] You could take the easy way out and build search for Slack + Jira + Email, but that would help less than 1% of businesses world-wide. [1] The first full-time job I worked had an unholy amalgamation of HP Quality Center, SeaPine source control, something about Sharepoint, and random documents stored in people's shared folders. Oh, yeah, and it had an on-premise Google Enterprise Search (Or whatever it was called back in 2011), which was almost entirely useless. [2] The second was a mix of Jira and TikiWiki. [3] The current job my wife holds has a bunch of files in a shared directory, a database that is installed from four floppy disks, and an IT stack that quite prominently includes Windows 2003.
- eitland 7y ago
  > It is an incredibly difficult space to develop for, because every one of these messes has a vastly different IT stack. I have a strong feeling that Google Desktop Search had a lot of this sorted. That was 10 years ago. With all the advances that has been happening in the meantime and assuming businesses are interested enough to adjust a tiny bit to simplify crawling this doesn't seem impossible at all if a well-funded team started working on it.
  - vkou 7y ago
    The technical problem is solvable, the deployment and technical support, and sales problem, and getting customers to upgrade, and the technical support, and did I mention the technical support problem would be a complete nightmare. You can't actually leverage any of the economies of scale that you can get from building software, when you have to hold the hand of every single customer you deal with. Someone like Oracle[1] can get away with this sort of thing (While charging an arm and a leg for it), but this is not the problem that your typical startup can solve. [1] The other difference is that your Oracle database + solution is business critical, and businesses have no problem with paying $XY,000/year for business-critical solutions. Intranet search is a nice-to-have, and businesses balk at paying $5/user/month for that sort of stuff.
- mish15 7y ago
  Totally agree. We looked at providing tech in this space and it means you have to plug into literally every system. It’s an endless problem. Slack search is awful and they have a full team on it. Jira is a mess. Gmail search is pretty good already, which is one of the things that makes frontapp far less useful also.

maverick19221 7y ago

An aside, I love the metaphor rich writing: > Privacy might be the digital spinach > As this chewing gum loses flavor > A startup idea that hits the seed ecosystem like a fashion fad, with a surprising number of founders suddenly all wearing the same ripped jeans > The market has priced in the trade war in atoms, but not in bits. Any suggestions on how to get better at writing like this?

ases 7y ago
Read a lot of content like it, really the same as any sort of writing. Then practice. You could additionally look to use a memorisation tool (something like Anki perhaps) to store new words and phrases that you like, so they are in your head, ready to be retrieved as you're hammering away at the keys.
snarf21 7y ago
Read a lot and think about what makes this writing good or bad. Then try to duplicate it and show people and get feedback. Show it to everyone and anyone. This is how I approach physical board game design. Play as many games as I can and contemplate the choices made. Why do people like this game even if I don't. Then make my own and have anyone and everyone play them. Modify and test again until strangers ask me when they can buy the game they just played.
hombre_fatal 7y ago
Practice creative writing daily. I'm not too convinced reading a lot is part of it, as the other comments suggest. Else we'd all be great writers. I'd argue that consumption is the least important part of being a good creator. Else we'd all be good creators with our endless content consumption. But I guarantee you will notice results if, every morning, you write at least a few paragraphs answering some sort of creative writing prompt. After a while, creative ideas will just come out of your head as you try to write. Just like how words and phrases magically come to you as you get better at another language. https://old.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/ https://old.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/ is a great resource. I like to read a few ideas in the morning and consider them in the shower. Then I brew a coffee and write as much as I can before I start my day, even if my idea completely sucks. I just try to treat my crappy idea as a constraint and run with it.

davnicwil 7y ago

> Just like Javascript made programming more accessible to a broader audience I think this is entirely cart before horse. What actually happened was the web made programming relevant to a much broader audience and JavaScript is the language you use to program for the web, so everyone learnt that.

cambalache 7y ago
Correct, all the assumed authority of the author flew out of the window as I read that sentence.
- chupa-chups 7y ago
  Could you explain why you think this? Programming is 75-90% repetition of patterns. The remaining 10-15% are the difference between a simple translation of usual human language into a foreign language vs. developing algorithms and/or logic to solve a problem. If we can get rid of the non-algorithm, non-logic part we'd be better off, and this is what i read into this sentence.
  - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    repetition of patterns is the easy part, so getting rid of the easy part and leaving the difficult part might not make much difference in the end. Especially as the easy part can be an access point to the more complicated.
    - chupa-chups 7y ago
      Still it takes easily 50% of the time available for actual coding, even using modern IDEs.
      - wolco 7y ago
        Use a framework and/or abstract your patterns.
      - 7y ago

justinzollars 7y ago

I agree with this question: "Will it [TikTok] be in the US App Store by years end?"

smbullet 7y ago
Interesting thought. If TikTok got banned they would probably release a web interface for Americans or Android phones would suddenly become really popular among teens.
- blackrock 7y ago
  So teens would dump iPhone for Android just to get TikTok? That would be very interesting indeed. The other year, teens were surprised when they got a green bubble on their iMessage, indicating the other person was not using an iPhone. Admittedly, TikTok does appear to be more fun and interesting (for teens) than Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, because the point is to just watch fun and pointless stuff. And maybe learn something new, or do something yourself to imitate them.

jpm_sd 7y ago

> DuckDuckGo is small, but it’s growing 50% year-over-year. As of last week, it is also a search option on every European Android device. If the growth rate were to double, DDG would surpass Google in 6 years. That's what we call a "Big If". And doesn't DDG just rent someone else's index?

luhn 7y ago
Yeah, search results are provided by Bing.
- krick 7y ago
  Wow, I didn't know that. So what exactly is a DDG then? Just a page to query Bing (anonymously?)? They don't crawl any data themselves?
  - pb7 7y ago
    Yep. They do a small amount of crawling solely to populate their "instant answers" for limited topics.
    - sansnomme 7y ago
      Their marketing and brand are the most important aspects. Bing proxies are a-dime-a-dozen but only DuckDuckGo has achieved tremendous media attention and funding.
      - moretai 7y ago
        Their marketing got me. I was duped.
      - pb7 7y ago
        One of the proxies had to win out, right? We're only talking about DuckDuckGo and not BearBearClaw because they survived. I don't think they're doing anything particularly special. They're also a much older company with a lot smaller search volume than people realize.

dsalzman 7y ago

"3. The New Meme: Enterprise Search “Enterprise search” is shaping up to be in 2020 what RPA was in 2019. A startup idea that hits the seed ecosystem like a fashion fad, with a surprising number of founders suddenly all wearing the same ripped jeans. I’ve seen about a dozen teams and companies working on next-generation enterprise search in the past few weeks. They’re all attempting to build the same thing: a search/feed/discovery product that helps you find things amongst Slack, Gmail and Salesforce clouds. I’ve yet to see anyone properly tackle the more rudimentary, “boring” and lucrative approach: an on-prem search appliance, similar to GSE, that indexes internal intranet, wikis as well as email. On-prem software is annoying to build, something many founders shy away from." At my old startup Pinecone, we built something similar called Ask Pinecone. It would index everyone's emails and internal wiki's on premise. Then you could send an email with a question to ask@youcompany.com some Bayesian based modeling would then forward the email to the most appropriate person at the company based on the contents of their inbox and your email.

citilife 7y ago
> I’ve yet to see anyone properly tackle the more rudimentary, “boring” and lucrative approach: an on-prem search appliance, similar to GSE, that indexes internal intranet, wikis as well as email. On-prem software is annoying to build, something many founders shy away from." It's hard because you need to access the documents and from a security perspective that's not ideal. We took a different approach which actually builds a search graph based on what's discussed (plugs into email, slack, etc.): https://insideropinion.com/ https://insideropinion.com/ Works very well and doesn't need access to the source document (so more secure), although that'd improve the search.

pascalxus 7y ago

LOLZ: >"Now Instagram has too many ads and finding a genuine phone charger on Amazon requires a degree in investigative journalism."

ajsharp 7y ago

> While consumer privacy might be overrated, enterprise ephemerality is underrated. Yep, this is the core assumption underlying Sharesecret - https://sharesecret.co https://sharesecret.co.

alexfromapex 7y ago

Re: the first point, Amazon is terrible now. I’m afraid to buy things because of all of the fake reviews. How are you supposed to buy products sight-unseen with fake reviews abound?

mosburger 7y ago
I wonder if a curated, moderated Amazon could work? Probably wouldn't scale very well, but perhaps if there were more live humans involved in the process of choosing which items were available for purchase, it'd work a little better? I sorta feel like the future is in smaller more boutique sites for specific things. Like Wayfair for home furnishings or Chewy for pet supplies. A bit like going to the local pet store instead of Walmart for your dog food.
- dbenamy 7y ago
  I’ve increasingly been using https://thewirecutter.com https://thewirecutter.com for this.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    You also have to stay away from Amazon anyway, to not get a fake sent because of their inventory commingling. But yes, I use the Wirecutter for recommendations too, and I never regretted purchasing anything they recommended.

pascalxus 7y ago

> Remote is acceptable, even encouraged. 11% of all SE jobs posted on Stackoverflow in the last 4 months or so were Remote: https://skilldime.com/app.php?PieChart2=Remote https://skilldime.com/app.php?PieChart2=Remote I like the way the blog post is so well written in a witty style that's both entertaining and interesting to read.

atupis 7y ago
Remote will be huge and there is definitely a need for tools to enable remote working and communication.
- overcast 7y ago
  What exactly is missing from remote working/communication? I honestly can't handle anymore stupid messaging/conferencing systems.
  - ollifi 7y ago
    Exactly, they are stupid. If they worked the experience would be the same as sharing the same space. The tech should be more or less invisible.
  - y-c-o-m-b 7y ago
    I'm also curious what tooling is missing. Slack, Zoom, and Outlook has covered 100% of our very large (over 1000 employees) remote company's needs. Seems the issue is more about reducing the number of tools rather than acquiring new ones.
    - jslove 7y ago
      Slack easily replaced by Keybase etc. For me the killer would be something that makes meetings more efficient via AI.
  - redisman 7y ago
    VR cubicles

citilife 7y ago

> 3. The New Meme: Enterprise Search Exactly what we're doing: https://insideropinion.com/ https://insideropinion.com/ Seems like most people aren't thinking of search the exact same way though. It's a huge problem (having worked in large fortune 100 companies).

MediumD 7y ago

For #3: If anyone is looking for an enterprise search they can boot up "cloud-prem" (in their VPC), that's exactly what we're building at https://landria.io/customers/why-landria https://landria.io/customers/why-landria.

mish15 7y ago
What search tech are you building it on out of interest?

skinkestek 7y ago

Here's one non-abstract idea that you can get for free, even though I might try myself as well: Give Confluence a run for its money. Confluence is so bloated that a clean install takes longer to start than it takes to boot my laptop and log in. Plugin SDK documentation is a mess. As far as I can see it only sells because of the brand and because of network effects. If anyone could manage to create a real wiki (remember, it means quick!) and market it they might have a chance at some nice cash that would otherwise flow to a company that keeps wasting peoples time. End of rant ;-)

drywater 7y ago
No company will buy products just because they are better. They buy the brand, the support, the advertising.
- ska 7y ago
  I would adjust this. No company will buy products just because they are a bit better. You have to completely knock that out of the park to be compelling. OTOH, I'll grant if you really fail on support etc. you will probably fizzle out anyway.
- frandroid 7y ago
  What support does anyone need to use Confluence? How many people _use_ that support?
  - dflock 7y ago
    > How many people _use_ that support? That's not really relevant to Enterprise sales.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  They'll buy it if the places the existing product is lacking pisses off the decision maker.
mosburger 7y ago
Sounds a bit like Tettra? https://tettra.com/ https://tettra.com/ Our company uses Quip for this sort of use case, but that's not really the same thing as what you're asking for.

tempsy 7y ago

Half the bullet points on here all fall into enterprise SaaS... In my opinion the shift from big game changing ideas like Airbnb, Lyft/ Uber, and Stripe to a dozens enterprise SaaS apps popping up in San Francisco has been one of the biggest reasons why I've felt for the last year that there doesn't feel like there's been a "big next thing" for awhile. I just can't get excited by another dressed up note taking app, and wouldn't be excited to work for one.

redisman 7y ago
At least SaaS as a business model is a lot more palatable to me than the OG unicorns' ads and data harvesting. Generally I don't see why customer-facing technology is supposedly objectively better and sexier and more "real" engineering.
- tempsy 7y ago
  It’s more exciting to work at a company that is actually game changing. Some SaaS cos fit into that bucket as well, but majority I see funded today fill some niche project management use case that just isn’t that appealing to me. I didn’t say anything about it being “realer”.

40acres 7y ago

A start-up at the intersection of 'developer tools' and 'NoCode' would be very exciting to me. I'd love to see tools that reflect some of the principles outlined in Bret Victor's blog. http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

sansnomme 7y ago
Just remember that the tool has to be useful and practical at the end of the day. Red's obsession with crypto tokens and the failure of Eve reflects badly on the rapid application development ecosystem (on the other extreme, you have Embarcadero Delphi and SAP, each costing n-figures). Microsoft's suite is for some reason on life support. Access, Visual Basic are all pale shadows of their former selves.
- zubairq 7y ago
  Visual Basic died because Microsoft chose not to continue development of the VB6 comatible ecosystem. It was a multibillion dollar a year business in the 1990s
tablet 7y ago
Have a look at https://fibery.io https://fibery.io

bluedevil2k 7y ago

Haven't we been hearing about "software that doesn't require any tech skills to build" for 25 years now? It seems like a pipe dream. It's built on some innate belief that someone can create tools that work for every kind of business possible, which is crazy. I can think in the past few years I've worked on health care registration websites, diamond auction websites, oil reserve management software - nothing would have been tied together with any common tool and all required extensive amounts of custom code for their business logic. I think it's time we drop this dream of normal "business analysts" writing all the software in a company.

rcurry 7y ago
No Code is the Duke Nukem Forever of software development.
milesskorpen 7y ago
But a lot of things that used to require custom software ... don't, anymore. I think what happens is that the kinds of jobs that are stitched together with Iftt/Zapier/Google sheets/whatever stop being classified as "software," so we've got an ever-moving-target. There'll always be a frontier that requires deeper technical expertise. But that frontier will keep moving.
- sanderjd 7y ago
  This is the correct answer. I view my career through this lens now: I aim to find things to work on that I believe are very likely to remain in that frontier that remains classified as "software". I find this useful when thinking about companies and projects. If they seem to be building a CRUD app with clients for different platforms, at a small to medium scale, that might not be far enough into the frontier for me. This is purely a matter of taste or personality. Another very useful (and probably more lucrative) thing to do is to find ways to leverage the ever-increasing ability to build that kind of simple but useful application for some domain without writing much or any of your own "software". But for me, that just doesn't match my interests as well.
perlgeek 7y ago

keithwhor 7y ago

Everybody in this specific social group of investors continues to list Developer Tools as, effectively, an Evergreen space. What’s baffling to me is that the amount of innovation in Developer Tool businesses (not tools, businesses) is surprisingly small. There are three factors that influence this, IMO: (1) The OSS community has trended towards an insular culture incentivized by OSS popularity where stars and Twitter followers are status signals. In this world, it’s hard for talented engineers to stop seeking “star status” and transition to the business ecosystem where they’re bottom rung of the ladder. (2) The space is extremely sophisticated — with longer R&D cycles — and VCs routinely incentivize suboptimal growth trajectories when they’ve identified apparent winners and miss opportunities with more practically iterative companies. (Expecting growth at all costs in a space where continuous delivery + R&D is the norm.) This blows up some companies early and prematurely kills other promising technologies. I think the 18mo expected cycle time probably needs to be adjusted for these companies, especially early stage. (3) Founders are heavily pressured towards exits. Long R&D cycle time, the pressure cooker of VC growth expectations, and the rarity of high-ownership, customer-oriented developer tool + engineering talent makes early exits extremely attractive for both founding teams and acquirers. How do we fix this? Between Daniel, Elad and a bunch of folks who keep writing this stuff — I think it’s time for a new developer-oriented fund, backed by the people and companies passionate about the space. I’ve been a major sponsor of Vue.js for years. I’d like to do more to help talented developers start businesses in the future, when possible. If anybody thinks something like this is interesting, give me a holler.

sansnomme 7y ago
Also more importantly: monetisation is hard. There has only been one Jetbrains.
- keithwhor 7y ago
  I think monetization is difficult IFF you don’t think about asking for money from the get-go. I’m actually of the opinion that open source projects are not well-equipped to build companies around, but can serve as an early guide to nascent market demand. Monetization looks difficult because people keep building free things and then trying to figure out how to charge for them. From my perspective, the better bet is to build a free thing, prove the market, and then figure out what the paid thing might look like — even if totally different. I think there’s a decade ahead of us where developers can start asking, “how can I turn this {useful tool} into a SaaS product?” We've been seeing this for years, I just think folks can start getting more ambitious about it. :)

a13n 7y ago

More like "VC Compatible Startup Ideas 2020" It's totally feasible to start a successful company outside of these ideas. I think this list is helpful because they answer the "why now" question that VCs are looking for. In other words, this list is helpful if you're trying to start a $10B company today.

keithwhor 7y ago
Not to be too cheeky, but this is mostly a list of trends dictated by companies started three or more years ago. Meaning it's actually "VC Compatible Startup Ideas 2017." Outside of Developer Tools (I'm a fan!) I would say your advice -- it's feasible to start a company outside of these ideas -- is probably exactly where you want to be looking if you're starting a company today. Daniel's an investor, so he's casting a net for startups / founding teams he hasn't heard of yet. Content marketing is dealflow 101. That said, if you're a founder in one of these spaces, he has a fantastic reputation, so you should absolutely reach out. He wouldn't have posted it if he wasn't looking for awesome people!
- a13n 7y ago
  Yeah good point, if you're starting one of these today you might already be a bit late.

rokhayakebe 7y ago

Privacy Judging by what people are posting on IG, FB, and what I hear they are posting on SNAP, I have come to the conclusion that Privacy is a niche product.

russellbeattie 7y ago

Bytedance?? OK, I guess... But Lark's home page blurb seems a bit direct: "Hey look, the Chinese government is going to hack into your servers and look at all your corporate secrets sooner or later, why not just make it easy for both of us and use this service now? Sign up here."

shreyshrey 7y ago

Lark looks very similar to what we are trying to accomplish with AirSend (https://www.airsend.io https://www.airsend.io). I guess interesting days ahead.

tito 7y ago

Completely agree on the "Carbon and Climate" section. Negative makes a carbon negative bracelet made with carbon dioxide pulled from the atmosphere. I created the company to make carbon more personal. http://gonegative.co/ http://gonegative.co/

harrisreynolds 7y ago

Re 2. Saying Yes to NoCode ... We are working on an MVP in this space called Webase. It is still very early but we are starting with basic CRUD operations and then will be layering on more sophistication going forward. Check it out here: https://www.webase.com https://www.webase.com

mritchie712 7y ago
what does it do? do you have a video demo?
- harrisreynolds 7y ago
  Today it allows you to define data models and then auto generates views that you can use to perform CRUD operations. This is a view of the app editor creating a simple Blog app: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cu4hs6fdgabd4wh/Screenshot%202020-01-17%2015.32.30.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/cu4hs6fdgabd4wh/Screenshot%202020-... After you define your data models, then you can create and edit live views of the data model. Here is a screenshot of the Blog app where I am creating a new post: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dmxrbr1c44zkp8h/Screenshot%202020-01-17%2015.34.00.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/dmxrbr1c44zkp8h/Screenshot%202020-... I need to create a video of this to make it easier to show off. The UX is still a bit rough, but the core pieces are there for building CRUD apps. Thanks for asking!
- harrisreynolds 7y ago
  Also... I tried to check out SeekWell from your profile but it didn't load. Are you still working on it?
  - mritchie712 7y ago
    try this link https://app.seekwell.io/ https://app.seekwell.io/
  - mritchie712 7y ago
    just saw you were CTO of Shipt, we (SeekWell) had a couple users there. Just followed you on Twitter, DM if you want to chat some time.

OkGoDoIt 7y ago

Was this published in 2019 or 2020? There’s a line pretty far down the page in the Enterprise Dabblers section that says “As of today (January 2019), we see a half dozen pitches a week for automation software” Maybe that was a typo? Or maybe this is a slightly updated article from a year ago?

zackbrown 7y ago

When it comes to winner-takes-all (the bread & butter of VC economics,) it strikes me as dissonant to bet both on no-code and on dev tools. No-code’s winner-takes-all scenario presumes full automation of developers. It’s in the name: no code, no developers. Postulate: software developers will remain necessary as long as human brains don’t natively speak “Von Neumann.“ Thus the winner-who-takes-all is going to be “with-code,” not “no-code.” “No-code” is a misnomer and a dead-end.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ArtWomb 7y ago

Well, thanks for introducing me to Vayyar at least ;) If I understand their value prop, they provide a single sensor solution that is essentially a black box. And the output is the wide-range 4D point cloud. Power consumption is ultra-low. But the fidelity is still very high. It's up to the partner to design the software that consumes the data. Vayyar just provides the black box. If it works. The total market here seems on order of "replacing cameras" in retail, manufacturing and surveillance! https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/20/vayyar-nabs-109m-for-its-4d-radar-tech-which-detects-and-tracks-images-while-preserving-privacy/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/20/vayyar-nabs-109m-for-its-4...

miguelmota 7y ago

Does "No Code" just mean having a UI? What I mean is the examples it gave for "No Code" look like regular Saas companies so I don't see what's the difference between something labeled "No code" and a regular software product that you use a UI to do things since the code is abstracted away. The majority of web based products don't require the user to code so "No code" seems like a buzzword more than anything.

aantix 7y ago

Sidekiq is a one man band. Perham owns the space. Good for him.

kiwicopple 7y ago

> 2. Saying Yes to NoCode > 9. Developer Tools While these two may seem contradictory, I see this as a great trend for developers. Developers of 10 years ago would focus on building common solutions like blogs and landing pages. Now there are slew of NoCode startups that allow non-developers to do it themselves. This frees up developers to focus on more complex problems. The Developer Tool startups of today should be asking - "what are the common tasks that developers are doing today, that will be easy for non-devs in 10 years?" Perhaps my thesis if wrong, but that's what we're hoping to achieve at https://supabase.io https://supabase.io In our case the "complex task" is creating CRUD APIs. Creating these are monotonous and developers could be spending time on much more valuable tasks. We're starting to see this with the rise of amazing tools like GraphQL/PostgREST. Other areas to watch will be the "simplification" of databases. Think "MS Access" for advanced databases like Postgres. Metabase is a good start here, focusing on the reporting aspect of the data. The next steps may be database design and data entry, - Retool seem like they could do well in this area.

petra 7y ago
It's a good question. Possibly, In 10 years low code will dominate enterprise development, IOT and quite likely , also most consumer crud apps. And today, many people develop very similar services across companies. In the future most of those services will be available online. On the other hand software will become dominant in many more fields. SO that will require more infrastructure, and more software engineers dealing with machine learning, unstructured data, data science, 3d objects and worlds, machine creativity, experts in optimization.

davidjnelson 7y ago

> Given free transcription and the drive of remote work to video conferencing, we’re about to witness a Cambrian explosion of cataloged meeting information. What was previously oral knowledge will be automatically documented by machines. We’ll see many opportunities come out of this. Automatic searchable transcripts for video chats. Now that sounds useful!

distantaidenn 7y ago
My startup is currently working on this now. One of my major concerns is data security and client confidence. One hurdle I haven't figured out how to get over is reassuring clients that their data is safe with us -- i.e. we aren't reading/listening in on every conversation.
- davidjnelson 7y ago
  I wonder if there’s a failsafe way you can prove it’s off when they want to turn it off.

huac 7y ago

I wrote a post about the so-called "law of advertiser atrophy": https://hua.substack.com/p/everything-i-have-ever-learned-about https://hua.substack.com/p/everything-i-have-ever-learned-ab.... TLDR: the author correctly identifies an issue, but misdiagnoses its root cause and how it will play out moving forward. In fact, I would endorse short AMZN, long GOOG/FB, as an investment strategy (but not as investment advice)!

joering2 7y ago

Interesting read but none of these ideas actually explain what problems they solve. Programming is my hobby and being financially secure, I’m in position where I could easily spent half a day writing someones code for nothing more than “thank you, good job”. Seriously, so long as I know someone’s problem is being solved. I wish there were website like “thank you for programming dot com” where people with low or no budget could post problems that programing can solve and programmers could tackle those at zero financial gain, maybe only as a extra point in their resumee.

joddystreet 7y ago

We tried building NoCode (used to be hosted at noapp.mobi), I think around January 2017. The project has been abandoned since then, you can find the project at - 1. Docs - https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-docs/wiki https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-docs/wiki 2. Core - https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-core https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-core 3. Backend - https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-api/tree/develop https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-api/tree/develop 4. Mobile App - https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-app/tree/feat-offline https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-app/tree/feat-offline 5. Mobile App - https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-client https://github.com/veris-pr/v3-client Quick demo (forced under 2 minutes time, we tried to take this to TechCrunch), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfZT75rduPg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfZT75rduPg This was a POC project. It was quite suitable for simple business process management based apps. One of our customers has been using a conference room manager built on this platform, for 3 years now.