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Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

192 points by travisjungroth 7y ago

Successful software companies are mostly founded by software engineers, or at least other white collar professionals. And since people mostly work on what they know (which is good) this seems to leave a lot of industries behind. What blue-collar industries do you know that could really be helped by better software? For more background, I'm in the early stages of forming a startup, and just narrowing down problems. I'm trying to get a friend on board as a cofounder. He's great at mobile, and I can handle the backend. We also both worked other careers before switching to software (oil and aviation). I've got B2B sales experience. When you put this all together, it makes an interesting combo of an app for non-office businesses. I'd really like to make something that's more of a tool than just an app. Think "mobile phones in airplanes tracking your rental fleet" over "weather app". Any direction-pointing is very welcome!

joezydeco 7y ago
Successful software companies are mostly founded by software engineers, or at least other white collar professionals They're also founded by people that know the business they're dealing with. If you know oil and aviation, think about where customers are feeling pain and focus your effort there.
- byoung2 7y ago
  They're also founded by people that know the business they're dealing with I worked as a contract software engineer and I built quite a few MVPs for niche businesses I would never have thought of. I built a dashboard for rental management companies to track vendors (e.g. plumbers, electricians, pool cleaners) to make sure their licenses, insurance, and background checks are up to date. I built a tool for companies to track and calculate multistate tax withholding for traveling employees (apparently there is a complex algorithm based on the number of days you worked in the state, your home state, etc). There are thousands of these business ideas out there that some domain expert is running in a spreadsheet but could be turned into a SaaS product.
  - joezydeco 7y ago
    I worked as a contract software engineer Did the domain knowledge come from the person paying you, or did you figure it out yourself?
    - byoung2 7y ago
      The client supplied the domain knowledge...in more than a few cases they were doing things manually, and I automated them. For example the vendor verification involved manually looking up licenses, or doing data entry on ACORD25 insurance forms. I automated it, so that given a license number, trade, and state, a crawler would fetch the data on a schedule. I also wrote a parser that could read insurance data from an ACORD25 form and put it in a database. The client was tracking all of this in spreadsheets, and I just copied the logic from there.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- travisjungroth 7y ago
  That's where my main focus is right now. I want to push it out just a bit further. The best outcome of this thread for me is someone mentions something that I have a connection with (maybe friends with an expert I could get involved) that I didn't even think of.
  - wenc 7y ago
    I get what you're trying to do. Let me also suggest something different -- instead of tackling things from the solution end (software), why don't you immerse yourself into a few verticals (in whatever ways you can -- job, conference, connections, etc.) to really understand the unsolved problems without presuming a software solution? Don't be afraid to work on problems where the solution might not be a software solution. Also you need to have experienced the problem yourself in order to have skin the game. (This was one of the take-aways from an IDEO design thinking workshop I attended — you have to find ways to empathize with the user you’re designing for) Chances are a software solution will likely emerge anyway (in this day and age, everything runs on software), but by focusing on solving the problem, you ensure your solution has value, and you're not just trying to find a use case to write software for. Understanding the problem domain prior to presuming the solution space almost always works better than the other way around. (speaking as someone who has tried the approach problems from both ends in a non-tech field) The latter usually results in products that have no flair and no market uptake. Tobi Luetke started out trying to sell snowboards on-line but didn't find any suitable eCommerce software so ended up writing what eventually became Shopify.
yarper 7y ago
If you know aviation, literally anything that will decrease fuel usage. Also maintenance & repair operations (a whole lot of dirty fingerprints going on there).
- howardhughes 7y ago
  > If you know aviation, literally anything that will decrease fuel usage Apart from writing full blown avionics systems for engine/flight control - what are you suggesting?
  - travisjungroth 7y ago
    Not obviously, but it could be. Reducing idling time and improving routes both increase fuel efficiency without changing the airplane. Maybe software could help with those. Edit: my reply was to the original comment which was something like "how is this a software problem?"
    - spaceandshit 7y ago
      > Reducing idling time and improving routes both increase fuel efficiency without changing the airplane Do you think idling time is a software problem? Aircraft idle for various time based on other requirements and needs, for example, spooling up the engines or inerting the fuel tanks. Routes are already optimized by air traffic for the fastest, and cheapest route. They have no incentive to increase flight times as there would be fewer aircraft flying then.
      - travisjungroth 7y ago
        Software can't fix aircraft idling, but maybe it can help. And ATC has the final say on routes for IFR aircraft (except emergencies), but there are a thousand VFR airplanes in the air right now. I think it's possible we can do better than GPS direct. I don't have a solution for either of these things, just enough intuition as a pilot and software engineer to say "maybe there's something there".
  - 7y ago
tvanantwerp 7y ago
Was just reading a long list of complaints about poor software quality from a variety of industries' vendors. Might be some good opportunities in there. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/fdorvf/scum_of_the_earth_xray_vendors/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/fdorvf/scum_of_th...
- travisjungroth 7y ago
  That thread is gold. Thanks.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
peter-m80 7y ago
Lawyers and justice
- rcarmo 7y ago
  This. So MUCH this. Legal-related software is mostly souped-up search engines, there is so much to be done here. Many legal professionals are barely computer-literate, of course (and that is a big issue) but many are increasingly savvy and feel constrained by various proprietary solutions. (Edit: typo and further commentary)
  - lazyeye 7y ago
    Is it because lawyers charge for their time and have zero incentive to be more efficient
    - jsutton 7y ago
      There is always an incentive for saving time. For example, lawyers can use that time to take on more clients or simply be more thorough.
      - smabie 7y ago
        Or they can just lie about their time and chill. Either way, lawyers have an incentive to be more efficient.
      - Blake_Emigro 7y ago
        It really depends on the area of law, type of firm, type of client, etc. In immigration or family law there is lots of procedural work, the lawyer might be solo, and the client is an individual or family. In this case the lawyer can generally not charge thousands per hour, they're doing most or all of the work, and the work has lots of steps that are repeated every case. This is a good case for the use of software to increase efficiency. In big corporate law the work is specialized, the lawyer belongs to a firm, the client is a multi-national, paralegals and associates do a lot of the work, and the firm can charge thousands per hour. Here there's not a lot of incentive for efficiency. Practice management software targeted to solos and small firms is very successful, look at https://www.clio.com/ https://www.clio.com/
Ididntdothis 7y ago
When I was contractor I did a lot of niche apps for small businesses. I think it comes down to your ability to sell. I suck at it so not much success for me. But there is a ton of opportunity if you are willing to talk to people about their needs and then go out to sell. You won’t be the next unicorn but you can make decent money and it’s fun working with small business owners. Add: I often saved them countless hours with some simple Excel VBA or running a loop over a database table. Really simple stuff.
- jermaustin1 7y ago
  Some of my very first consulting gigs were around access and excel automation with VBA. They paid well for being a 19-year-old kid still living with mom and dad. Now most of my consulting now is: - Bringing web-apps up to date (mainly by getting rid of a lot of jQuery that could just be JavaScript, or shockingly common could just be CSS) - Refactoring hard/impossible to understand 2000+ line methods (least favorite - so risky) - And cleaning up the dead-code and inaccurate comments that accumulate over the years from the ghosts of contractors past. I'm basically a janitor for "enterprise" software code-bases.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    I always found excel and access coding much more rewarding than working on web apps. Problem is that the money is in web apps....
  - gitgud 7y ago
    > Refactoring hard/impossible to understand 2000+ line methods (least favorite - so risky) Maybe I'm just weird, but for me that's one of the most satisfying things to do. Like reaching a big boss in a video game and having to slice pieces off him until he's no longer a problem.
    - tonyarkles 7y ago
      > Maybe I'm just weird, but for me that's one of the most satisfying things to do. I'm with you, but also agree with the GP. It's super satisfying to get stuff like that cleaned up, but one of the most shocking things I've come across is callers who do absolutely bizarre things that rely on side effects from those methods. More than once, refactoring a big method like that has spiraled out of control fixing all of the callers as well.
DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
I've started looking at software to help with residential construction tasks, i.e. the construction of a single-family house. My impression so far is that there's so much variability in what they encounter, that most tasks are best handled ad hoc by experienced tradesmen. But I'm not certain; it's possible that that's just the status quo, not how it needs to be.
- jatgoodwin 7y ago
  I currently work with a lot of residential construction and repair. I feel like truss factories could use some help with quality control with machine vision probably. A problem is trusses are built by alcoholic meth heads making minimum wage rather than carpenters on site to save time and money, but then the truss factory has to send out an engineer to fix it on site, usually missing or wrong gang nails or its just out of alignment. Temp laborers could probably use some software to help with tracking hours etc. Typically all the hours are tracked with just the supervisor writing down on a carbon copy how long they worked and gives it to the laborers to take back to their office which is then manually input to the billing system to pay the laborers at the end of the day. Keep in mind there's a much larger population of non-smartphone users that only use flipphones in construction especially day labor so any sort of app meant for the workers or laborers to use would just go unused.
  - Blake_Emigro 7y ago
    "Temp laborers could probably use some software to help with tracking hours etc. Typically all the hours are tracked with just the supervisor writing down on a carbon copy how long they worked and gives it to the laborers to take back to their office which is then manually input to the billing system to pay the laborers at the end of the day." You're exactly right on this one and it exists in Vancouver, Canada: https://faberconnect.com/ https://faberconnect.com/ "Keep in mind there's a much larger population of non-smartphone users that only use flipphones in construction especially day labor so any sort of app meant for the workers or laborers to use would just go unused." Right on the first point, wrong on the second. The app is used by a different crowd - mostly younger, and many newcomer professionals or working holiday visa holders. This crowd doesn't need the daily pay to buy a 12-pack after work, and a cash advance in the morning to get smokes and a bus ticket. I've used both types of service regularly over the last couple of years to fill in the gaps while I work on my startup.
dwrodri 7y ago
There is a non-trivial amount of work being done at university research labs that has yet to feel the effects of the machine learning revolution because PIs aren’t investing (or cannot afford) programmers, and scientific equipment is manufactured by a small handful of companies who have little incentive to innovate. Please note that n=2, but both myself and a friend of met have met people working in life science labs that were assigning research assistants to manually count cells in images, and manually sweeping through images to find stills that were in focus.
- technics256 7y ago
  I'm a consultant and work in AI and cloud stuff - do these lab instruments have cameras or ways to feed the images into an ai model? I can see about creating something basic for you.
  - dwrodri 7y ago
    The images are z-stacks[1] and the images are in a proprietary format called LIF (Leica Image Format). The images are taken from this camera[2]. I was actually doing some of my own research into doing this, but as I mentioned it appears that Leica has put very little effort into making the output of their hardware easy to work with. The LIF is a binary blob wrapped in an XML structure. There has been some good work done by the people Open Microscopy Environment building some Java libraries for parsing these files, but to be quite frank I'm a bit rough around the edges when it comes to working with Java and all the computer vision stuff I know is in Python and C++. If you're serious about this offer, then I can look into getting you some samples (if you can't easily find them yourself). But full disclosure, I don't think any PI or lab that I know of would be able to afford GPU compute hours, but most of them have access to a cluster, so if you can deliver a JAR (or a Docker container) I could demonstrate how they could quickly deploy that themselves on their own hardware. 1:https://cam.facilities.northwestern.edu/588-2/z-stack/ https://cam.facilities.northwestern.edu/588-2/z-stack/
    - technics256 7y ago
      Thanks! I have a lot of credits to play with..your email is not on your profile. But mine is, can you message me there so we can chat offline? I can take a Stab, but the file format and Java stuff could be a problem. Let's see
math0ne 7y ago
I know there are lots of players in the field but I know a few lawyers and the software the work with on a daily basis is terrible!
dpix 7y ago
Government. Often plagued by bad or outdated software rather than the lack of it
- ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
  That's true, but it's too hard to sell to the government for a small startup. The RFP process is so long and brutal, and most of the time you need to have a man on the inside and basically go through that process as a formality because you are already guaranteed the contract.
  - jtolmar 7y ago
    What about the RFP process itself then? Can a company make it easier for startups to sell to the government?
    - ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
      Ha ha ha. I LOVE the way you think. But some things are broken in Government on purpose, so this would be very difficult, and it couldn't just be a Turbo Tax like software for submitting documents. But some type of marketplace where you could hire agents to guide your software company through the RFP process and help land you contracts could definitely be a thing. I'm thinking something that would basically be like E-Lance/UP-Work but for Lobbyists.
    - kls 7y ago
      you would be better off just making an American Indian, female, midget your CEO so you can short circuit the process. If you think that is a joke, it's not, each one of those items scores high points in the RFP process and sets you ahead of the pack. That is the problem with a software solution for it and that is that it is innately a human process. A combination of who you know and who you are. The rest is just fluff on paper.
      - jjeaff 7y ago
        You say that, but take a look at all the biggest companies that supply to governments. There is a very good chance they are run by grey haired white men. Sure, you can get some points for diversity, but in the end, diversity only gets a few small contracts here and there while the establishment rakes in the Lion's share.
turc1656 7y ago
At the risk of sounding less than helpful or pessimistic, the first thing that jumped out at me when reading your post is that you are going about this backwards. I'm not saying you can't or wont' succeed. I have no idea. But it seems like the first thing that happened is that you decided you wanted to start a business. Usually it's the reverse - you get inspired by discovering a problem and realize you have the skillset and motivation to solve it and then you come to the realization that you need to start a business to do that. For founders/entrepreneurs with experience having done that previously, this is likely a scenario with a much higher probability of success. But I imagine the success rate of people who say "I want to start my own business" and then look for a business to start have much lower success rates. I'm not trying to rain no your parade at all. Just wanted to give you something to think about before you spend a fortune in time and/or money starting something. I could easily be wrong, though. Just food for thought.
- fennecfoxen 7y ago
  It sounds like you are describing the Silicon Valley ideal, but things like "finding a good business to start" are very much a traditional approach, and I am confident they will teach you about how to do market research to this end in business schools.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    Is it a traditional approach? I've met a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners, and I have heard of almost nobody starting from "I have started a business, now what should we do" being successful. Bezos arguably took that approach, but that story gets told so much precisely because it was unusual. More often it turns out like Webvan, where the lack of deep domain knowledge means making noob mistakes that kill the business. And I'm not sure business schools are a big help here. The vast majority of MBAs end up joining mid-sized to large existing companies as high flyers, and I think the curriculum aims to support that.
    - inerte 7y ago
      A common approach is people believing they can be their own bosses. Not so much about business opportunity or an itch to scratch. Anyway, why speculate? It's easy to find online articles and research showing why people have started their businesses, or the reasons why people would want to start one but haven't yet. Truth is that it's all the above and more.
n-exploit 7y ago
The non-profit/social sector - and we need it here. Why hire software developers when you can afford 8-10 part-time staff for the same price. Sincerely, a non-profit Technology Director.
- justaguyhere 7y ago
  Could you please provide some examples of tasks that can be improved with software in non-profit/social sector?
luisobo 7y ago
Software. We have compilers and databases but those only cover a (very important) slice of the human process of going from vague idea to value to users and then revenue. As that process scales the number of people, roles and interactions between them become very hard to manage and we have no good tools to help with that. A transportation company relies on software to manage their processes, giving everyone involved direct access to their particular slice of the process (think an ERP where logistics, sales, billing, executives collaborate). In software we store code, the source of truth, which is fundamentally structured information, in text files. That source of truth is not usually not accessible by PMs, designers, or copywriters, they each have their own corner in Dropbox to store their Google Docs or Sketch files. Add conflicts/versioning problems to the pile. And that’s just a taste of what needs improvement. If the transportation company worked that way it’d be utterly dysfunctional. In software, I believe, this translates to reliability problems, projects taking too long... in summary: less value for our users and then less revenue. I believe there is a better way :)
edw519 7y ago
I think a better question for 2 experienced guys like you is, "What industries are overserved by software?" That would open up a whole bunch of possibilities that no one is looking at. Much better than competing with 2000 others at the next soon-to-be-obsolete app. I've built a great career by asking customers to consider the "low tech solution" first, then building upon it. Amazing how often they love it so much that the "building upon" step never comes. As I sit here on a client's system with 14 useless windows open, being bombarded by skype, email, voice, chat, webex, outlook, office, text, jira, confluence, and sharepoint notifications from 14 others with their own 14 useless windows open, none of us getting any real work done, I wonder why 2 guys like you who know how to get shit done don't come in and just fix this for us.
- travisjungroth 7y ago
  https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ Couldn’t help myself, the number is even the same! What do you think a solution to this problem (too complex, too many things to monitor) would look like? And all-in-one like Basecamp? Or maybe a super system that puts stuff in one place?
  - edw519 7y ago
    Start over. Remove everything and add back only what's actually needed. It's easier than most people think.
- conductr 7y ago
  I can’t turn on notifications like that. Just reading it makes me want to smash your laptop
dhruvkar 7y ago
Construction is a big field, and there are many niche industries within it. I work in natural stone. There are several different types of companies just in this niche. Usually the flow of product is: quarries -> factories -> distributors (us) -> fabricators -> kitchen and bath shops -> end user There are maybe 5-7 major pieces of software for the first four stages. "Under-served" is an understatement. Similarly, there are 10s (if not hundreds) of other niches within construction, each with its own vertical. Tons of niche software is missing. When I see another niche analytics/forms/site chatbot/automate social media startup, I slap myself to make sure I'm not crazy. There's a whole ocean out there, but most software startup companies are running into each other in Depoe Bay.
- frequentnapper 7y ago
  the problem is having access to these niche fields and knowing enough to be able to create something useful.
  - dhruvkar 7y ago
    agreed, a lot of it is niche knowledge that you could only gain by working in such a field or having close access to a company. Consulting within a niche is one way to do this.
    - Riguad87 7y ago
      In the eighties, my best friend's father was into organic farming in the following manner : he'd squish the slugs he happened to find while walking through his crops and that was his pest control over the top of great land husbandry in the tenth generation. My friend taught himself turbo pascal then vb and the farm tax deduction provided a 286 of my unfulfilled dreams. The son was shortly trading in commodity supplies and even derivatives and taking delivery of GPS equipped combines. But I doubt he could have been successful had he not grown up with his father's wisdom.
    - jasonlhy 7y ago
      I would say the biggest challenge of this kind of field is it is so big so no one actually know everything. The rule also varies between countries. For example, the construction rule in England may be different from the rule in the US
rawoke083600 7y ago
Also keep in mind sometimes... the "undeserved industries" are "undeserved" for a reason... like politics, culture, and or refusal to change etc..
svavs 7y ago
The grain industry. Specifically grain elevators. There are a few mid-sized companies that control a large chunk of that industry. Since they don't have much competition, innovation is more or less at a stand still. Companies like bushel ag are changing that, but lots of opportunity.
gumby 7y ago
Agriculture. There are plenty of companies trying to serve ag with what they think ag needs. Most of them fail. Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees. They are NOT dumb hayseeds like they are often portrayed! But they typically don’t have a lot of domain knowledge around software. Smaller farmers are used to making and fixing their own tools (all know how to weld); bigger farmers run corporations with a lot of employees. They are unlikely to be interested in a SSAS. Why? The tax law for farmers in the USA and Europe revolves around tax treatment which favors cap ex (which makes sense — they need to buy big equipment which is used only briefly each year. It’s hard to share since all the other farmers in your area need that equipment at the same time). So understand your market and figure out what their specific need is, then meet it.
- janee 7y ago
  >Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees That's a very astute observation. I've found it crazy hard to try and improve existing spreadsheet workflows for farmers as we dig deeper into the domain. I think in general industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets could possibly benefit from specialized software solutions. Think someone called it the unbundling of spreadsheets or something
  - unlinked_dll 7y ago
    I once read on this forum, "your competition is Excel."
  - toyg 7y ago
    > industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets That would be all of them. Spreadsheets always end up running a business, because the ultimate measure of business is money / resources, which is inevitably expressed in numbers. Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the latter area are worth the loss of freedom in the former area.
    - etripe 7y ago
superkitty 7y ago
agriculture!!
dmode 7y ago
I just went through extensive home remodeling. This is a big industry and there are a lot of opportunities to improve it by software. It was impossible for me to get a good visualization of what the end state of my home would look like. I needed to hire designers for that. It was difficult to know what various paint options would look like. And then there is the whole construction / contractor / material aspect of it. It is still based on good old connections and negotiations.
- ijaffrey 7y ago
  Sorry to hear about your pain on the remodel! Been there. We're working on a company called Skipp (www.skipp.co) to address exactly the problems you mentioned. We're currently in beta and if you're up for it we'd love to get your feedback.
- Blake_Emigro 7y ago
  And then there is the whole construction / contractor / material aspect of it. A big problem with a renovation is the uncertain number of surprises that the contractor will encounter when tearing out the existing material. The contractor doesn't want to get stuck cleaning up that black mold for free.
hermitcrab 7y ago
Most software is written by men for men. Try writing something aimed at women.
- twiclo 7y ago
  What does that even mean? Do you want developers to put flowers over their UIs?
  - seoulsubway 7y ago
    It's a sexist making a sexist comment attempting to brigade some sort of emotion from anyone that reads it. Nothing is made for men. It's made for users. Even something as manly as a razorblade for shaving facial hair is used by women too.
  - pnako 7y ago
    Women have different hobbies, or indeed careers, than men. Not much competition in the market for manicure salons, for example (I'm aware of Phorest). The women I know tend to have different creatives hobbies than men's creative hobbies (think crocheting vs woodworking). I'm willing to be there are more woodworking CAD programs than equivalent programs for crocheting in the market. There are fishing lure design applications. Can you think of something similar for a more feminine hobby?
- smabie 7y ago
  Like...?
  - hermitcrab 7y ago
    Off the top of my head: related to pilates, menstrual cycle tracking, childcare, crochet, knitting, home schooling, interior design, manicure, fashion, cooking. I would guess that any of these areas are less well-served by software than an equivalent sized market aimed at men. It used to be that women had a lot less disposable income than men. But I don't think that is true in most western countries now. BTW I'm not trying to be sexist or patronizing. I know that plenty of women are also into ju-jitsu, riding motorbikes, mountaineering etc. But some hobbies and careers clearly have a higher percentage of females. I expect that markets for the elderly are also under served. Technical support might be a challenge though!
tempsy 7y ago
Loan servicing. Navient is terrible. A decent UI would go a long way.
- mokarma 7y ago
  As someone creating software in that industry, I agree. Although my team recently made a large dent via a selling a chunk of our software to an industry leader.
Swtrz 7y ago
Most law enforcement applications are the same : a monolithic crud .net client connecting to a version of sql server and each one is god awful. They need strong saas apps, Im tired of managing them.
- kls 7y ago
  I pick up contracts from a law enforcement software vendor and can confirm that most of the software in the industry is abominable. When I picked up the contract their system was a win32 C/C++ GUI, communicating to a custom built geo server. I felt like I was back in the late 80's early 90's doing development again. Anyways I modernized their stack to web and mobile tech and people in the industry think their are wizards of dark magic. It's amazing how behind the times that industry is.
wasdfff 7y ago
A lot of business and accounting is excel hell
kamaal 7y ago
Hospitals and Healthcare. There is simply too much paper work that goes on. My father had a bypass surgery last year, and the entire documentation process was a nightmare. It was like reams and reams of paper work, bills, prescriptions. The funny part was they would scan the paper forms and send to each other(blood banks, insurance, clinics etc) for quick response. They might as well have online forms and invoices.
smabie 7y ago
I would say finance. Excel has it’s uses, but managing a billion dollar portfolio isn’t one of them. It’s a hard space though, firms have such drastically different needs that tt’s difficult to create an app that serves everyone.
- otagekki 7y ago
  Finance is a mature and highly regulated market with loads of expensive software and consultants to do all you need. ERPs and off-the-shelf financial software with in-house specific developments do the heavy lifting and spreadsheets macros do the rest.
  - smabie 7y ago
    For banks sure. But the PE, VC, and hedge fund space have almost no regulations and very little software to serve their needs. I worked at a startup that provided portfolio analytics software and it never was able to actually break into the market in a real way (our valuation was and still is stuck at 200m for 8 years). It’s a really hard problem but if someone can crack it, they potentially could be the next Bloomberg.
imvetri 7y ago
Anything that doesn't disturb young minds.
thusjustin 7y ago
The justice system
stmw 7y ago
Healthcare - which affects all of us and is 18% of GDP - is by far the most underserved by software. It is a bad version of the 90's for doctors, nurses, patients and everyone else. There are a number of firms that are trying to make this better. (plug: at Commure - developer.commure.com, we are one of them, but that's independent of the larger point).
- Optimal_Persona 7y ago
  Commure looks fascinating, I was hoping something like this existed! I work in publicly-funded mental health/social services. Our programs use 5 different EHRs, then we have to interact with 4 more supplied by county funders for billing and compliance. It's a real Tower of Babel shitstorm to transfer data between systems in the absence of interoperability standards like FHIR. As you note, the current fragmented state of health tech has significant human and economic impacts.
  - stmw 7y ago
    Thank you, glad to hear you say that - you certainly have a wonderfully colorful way of describing the problem we are trying to fix!
chrisMyzel 7y ago
If you have already expertise in Aviation in-house - why not aviation. It's currently still a very slow moving industry but spacecrafts were once too. Further there's General Aviation which has already a strong software market around tablet/pc based navigation and flight planning but lacks to see anything truly "disruptive".
pkalinowski 7y ago
Well, navigation systems for competitive hot air balloons pilots could use some competition. The one widely used is from 1998. Total market size is about 50 people, though :)
- __initbrian__ 7y ago
  Sounds like market research would be a blast
- travisjungroth 7y ago
  What do they need that a modern handheld aircraft GPS doesn’t provide?
patel011393 7y ago
Scientific software for doing research is awful in many ways. There is a great deal of need at all levels to upgrade how scientists read, recruit participants, analyze data, and more. However, inside knowledge is needed to be successful. The research field has many unique practices that are important to work around.
atari800 7y ago
There's almost nothing in the manufactured housing (AKA "mobile home", AKA "trailer" AKA "HUD-code home") industry. The industry experienced a severe contraction even before the Great Recession, declining in the 2000's from its most recent boom years of the 90's. In that earlier era, there were several vertical software companies selling Windows and DOS dealership management systems to the many independent (mom-and-pop) dealerships of manufactured homes By the time the industry started to recover in the last several years, they had all gone out of business. Because of the timing of the near-death of the MH industry, none of those companies even tried to move to web-based SaaS products. As far as I know, the only new dealership management (line of business) system for the industry is my own SaaS product, which I started selling a year ago. I'm a software developer, but my family owned a dealership for decades, so I know the business well. The industry is weird, and different enough from automobiles and motor homes that software for those (seemingly related) industries isn't really a good fit. I've had some success bootstrapping my business. The industry is big enough at this point that I can make pretty good money as a small player, but it's still small enough that it's unlikely to attract any big operators. The market is too small for them, I'm pretty sure. I think it would be difficult for someone who doesn't know the way things are done in the industry to create software for it. It's certainly possible, but for sure you'd have to partner with someone who has expertise already. But I guess that's true of almost any niche industry.
copperfitting1 7y ago
Imagine how many people never used a chat app in a business context before. Maybe this is hard, as you can’t imagine who they could be — or you don’t remember a time _before_ the ubiquity of chat apps in the workplace. But trust me those people are a majority of the workforce.
bjourne 7y ago
There's a lot of software you could build to help grassroots mobilization efforts. However, there's not a lot of money in that business.

joezydeco 7y ago

Successful software companies are mostly founded by software engineers, or at least other white collar professionals They're also founded by people that know the business they're dealing with. If you know oil and aviation, think about where customers are feeling pain and focus your effort there.

byoung2 7y ago
They're also founded by people that know the business they're dealing with I worked as a contract software engineer and I built quite a few MVPs for niche businesses I would never have thought of. I built a dashboard for rental management companies to track vendors (e.g. plumbers, electricians, pool cleaners) to make sure their licenses, insurance, and background checks are up to date. I built a tool for companies to track and calculate multistate tax withholding for traveling employees (apparently there is a complex algorithm based on the number of days you worked in the state, your home state, etc). There are thousands of these business ideas out there that some domain expert is running in a spreadsheet but could be turned into a SaaS product.
- joezydeco 7y ago
  I worked as a contract software engineer Did the domain knowledge come from the person paying you, or did you figure it out yourself?
  - byoung2 7y ago
    The client supplied the domain knowledge...in more than a few cases they were doing things manually, and I automated them. For example the vendor verification involved manually looking up licenses, or doing data entry on ACORD25 insurance forms. I automated it, so that given a license number, trade, and state, a crawler would fetch the data on a schedule. I also wrote a parser that could read insurance data from an ACORD25 form and put it in a database. The client was tracking all of this in spreadsheets, and I just copied the logic from there.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
travisjungroth 7y ago
That's where my main focus is right now. I want to push it out just a bit further. The best outcome of this thread for me is someone mentions something that I have a connection with (maybe friends with an expert I could get involved) that I didn't even think of.
- wenc 7y ago
  I get what you're trying to do. Let me also suggest something different -- instead of tackling things from the solution end (software), why don't you immerse yourself into a few verticals (in whatever ways you can -- job, conference, connections, etc.) to really understand the unsolved problems without presuming a software solution? Don't be afraid to work on problems where the solution might not be a software solution. Also you need to have experienced the problem yourself in order to have skin the game. (This was one of the take-aways from an IDEO design thinking workshop I attended — you have to find ways to empathize with the user you’re designing for) Chances are a software solution will likely emerge anyway (in this day and age, everything runs on software), but by focusing on solving the problem, you ensure your solution has value, and you're not just trying to find a use case to write software for. Understanding the problem domain prior to presuming the solution space almost always works better than the other way around. (speaking as someone who has tried the approach problems from both ends in a non-tech field) The latter usually results in products that have no flair and no market uptake. Tobi Luetke started out trying to sell snowboards on-line but didn't find any suitable eCommerce software so ended up writing what eventually became Shopify.

yarper 7y ago

If you know aviation, literally anything that will decrease fuel usage. Also maintenance & repair operations (a whole lot of dirty fingerprints going on there).

howardhughes 7y ago
> If you know aviation, literally anything that will decrease fuel usage Apart from writing full blown avionics systems for engine/flight control - what are you suggesting?
- travisjungroth 7y ago
  Not obviously, but it could be. Reducing idling time and improving routes both increase fuel efficiency without changing the airplane. Maybe software could help with those. Edit: my reply was to the original comment which was something like "how is this a software problem?"
  - spaceandshit 7y ago
    > Reducing idling time and improving routes both increase fuel efficiency without changing the airplane Do you think idling time is a software problem? Aircraft idle for various time based on other requirements and needs, for example, spooling up the engines or inerting the fuel tanks. Routes are already optimized by air traffic for the fastest, and cheapest route. They have no incentive to increase flight times as there would be fewer aircraft flying then.
    - travisjungroth 7y ago
      Software can't fix aircraft idling, but maybe it can help. And ATC has the final say on routes for IFR aircraft (except emergencies), but there are a thousand VFR airplanes in the air right now. I think it's possible we can do better than GPS direct. I don't have a solution for either of these things, just enough intuition as a pilot and software engineer to say "maybe there's something there".
- 7y ago

tvanantwerp 7y ago

Was just reading a long list of complaints about poor software quality from a variety of industries' vendors. Might be some good opportunities in there. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/fdorvf/scum_of_the_earth_xray_vendors/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/fdorvf/scum_of_th...

travisjungroth 7y ago
That thread is gold. Thanks.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

peter-m80 7y ago

Lawyers and justice

rcarmo 7y ago
This. So MUCH this. Legal-related software is mostly souped-up search engines, there is so much to be done here. Many legal professionals are barely computer-literate, of course (and that is a big issue) but many are increasingly savvy and feel constrained by various proprietary solutions. (Edit: typo and further commentary)
- lazyeye 7y ago
  Is it because lawyers charge for their time and have zero incentive to be more efficient
  - jsutton 7y ago
    There is always an incentive for saving time. For example, lawyers can use that time to take on more clients or simply be more thorough.
    - smabie 7y ago
      Or they can just lie about their time and chill. Either way, lawyers have an incentive to be more efficient.
    - Blake_Emigro 7y ago
      It really depends on the area of law, type of firm, type of client, etc. In immigration or family law there is lots of procedural work, the lawyer might be solo, and the client is an individual or family. In this case the lawyer can generally not charge thousands per hour, they're doing most or all of the work, and the work has lots of steps that are repeated every case. This is a good case for the use of software to increase efficiency. In big corporate law the work is specialized, the lawyer belongs to a firm, the client is a multi-national, paralegals and associates do a lot of the work, and the firm can charge thousands per hour. Here there's not a lot of incentive for efficiency. Practice management software targeted to solos and small firms is very successful, look at https://www.clio.com/ https://www.clio.com/

Ididntdothis 7y ago

When I was contractor I did a lot of niche apps for small businesses. I think it comes down to your ability to sell. I suck at it so not much success for me. But there is a ton of opportunity if you are willing to talk to people about their needs and then go out to sell. You won’t be the next unicorn but you can make decent money and it’s fun working with small business owners. Add: I often saved them countless hours with some simple Excel VBA or running a loop over a database table. Really simple stuff.

jermaustin1 7y ago
Some of my very first consulting gigs were around access and excel automation with VBA. They paid well for being a 19-year-old kid still living with mom and dad. Now most of my consulting now is: - Bringing web-apps up to date (mainly by getting rid of a lot of jQuery that could just be JavaScript, or shockingly common could just be CSS) - Refactoring hard/impossible to understand 2000+ line methods (least favorite - so risky) - And cleaning up the dead-code and inaccurate comments that accumulate over the years from the ghosts of contractors past. I'm basically a janitor for "enterprise" software code-bases.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I always found excel and access coding much more rewarding than working on web apps. Problem is that the money is in web apps....
- gitgud 7y ago
  > Refactoring hard/impossible to understand 2000+ line methods (least favorite - so risky) Maybe I'm just weird, but for me that's one of the most satisfying things to do. Like reaching a big boss in a video game and having to slice pieces off him until he's no longer a problem.
  - tonyarkles 7y ago
    > Maybe I'm just weird, but for me that's one of the most satisfying things to do. I'm with you, but also agree with the GP. It's super satisfying to get stuff like that cleaned up, but one of the most shocking things I've come across is callers who do absolutely bizarre things that rely on side effects from those methods. More than once, refactoring a big method like that has spiraled out of control fixing all of the callers as well.

DoofusOfDeath 7y ago

I've started looking at software to help with residential construction tasks, i.e. the construction of a single-family house. My impression so far is that there's so much variability in what they encounter, that most tasks are best handled ad hoc by experienced tradesmen. But I'm not certain; it's possible that that's just the status quo, not how it needs to be.

jatgoodwin 7y ago
I currently work with a lot of residential construction and repair. I feel like truss factories could use some help with quality control with machine vision probably. A problem is trusses are built by alcoholic meth heads making minimum wage rather than carpenters on site to save time and money, but then the truss factory has to send out an engineer to fix it on site, usually missing or wrong gang nails or its just out of alignment. Temp laborers could probably use some software to help with tracking hours etc. Typically all the hours are tracked with just the supervisor writing down on a carbon copy how long they worked and gives it to the laborers to take back to their office which is then manually input to the billing system to pay the laborers at the end of the day. Keep in mind there's a much larger population of non-smartphone users that only use flipphones in construction especially day labor so any sort of app meant for the workers or laborers to use would just go unused.
- Blake_Emigro 7y ago
  "Temp laborers could probably use some software to help with tracking hours etc. Typically all the hours are tracked with just the supervisor writing down on a carbon copy how long they worked and gives it to the laborers to take back to their office which is then manually input to the billing system to pay the laborers at the end of the day." You're exactly right on this one and it exists in Vancouver, Canada: https://faberconnect.com/ https://faberconnect.com/ "Keep in mind there's a much larger population of non-smartphone users that only use flipphones in construction especially day labor so any sort of app meant for the workers or laborers to use would just go unused." Right on the first point, wrong on the second. The app is used by a different crowd - mostly younger, and many newcomer professionals or working holiday visa holders. This crowd doesn't need the daily pay to buy a 12-pack after work, and a cash advance in the morning to get smokes and a bus ticket. I've used both types of service regularly over the last couple of years to fill in the gaps while I work on my startup.

dwrodri 7y ago

There is a non-trivial amount of work being done at university research labs that has yet to feel the effects of the machine learning revolution because PIs aren’t investing (or cannot afford) programmers, and scientific equipment is manufactured by a small handful of companies who have little incentive to innovate. Please note that n=2, but both myself and a friend of met have met people working in life science labs that were assigning research assistants to manually count cells in images, and manually sweeping through images to find stills that were in focus.

technics256 7y ago
I'm a consultant and work in AI and cloud stuff - do these lab instruments have cameras or ways to feed the images into an ai model? I can see about creating something basic for you.
- dwrodri 7y ago
  The images are z-stacks[1] and the images are in a proprietary format called LIF (Leica Image Format). The images are taken from this camera[2]. I was actually doing some of my own research into doing this, but as I mentioned it appears that Leica has put very little effort into making the output of their hardware easy to work with. The LIF is a binary blob wrapped in an XML structure. There has been some good work done by the people Open Microscopy Environment building some Java libraries for parsing these files, but to be quite frank I'm a bit rough around the edges when it comes to working with Java and all the computer vision stuff I know is in Python and C++. If you're serious about this offer, then I can look into getting you some samples (if you can't easily find them yourself). But full disclosure, I don't think any PI or lab that I know of would be able to afford GPU compute hours, but most of them have access to a cluster, so if you can deliver a JAR (or a Docker container) I could demonstrate how they could quickly deploy that themselves on their own hardware. 1:https://cam.facilities.northwestern.edu/588-2/z-stack/ https://cam.facilities.northwestern.edu/588-2/z-stack/
  - technics256 7y ago
    Thanks! I have a lot of credits to play with..your email is not on your profile. But mine is, can you message me there so we can chat offline? I can take a Stab, but the file format and Java stuff could be a problem. Let's see

math0ne 7y ago

I know there are lots of players in the field but I know a few lawyers and the software the work with on a daily basis is terrible!

dpix 7y ago

Government. Often plagued by bad or outdated software rather than the lack of it

ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
That's true, but it's too hard to sell to the government for a small startup. The RFP process is so long and brutal, and most of the time you need to have a man on the inside and basically go through that process as a formality because you are already guaranteed the contract.
- jtolmar 7y ago
  What about the RFP process itself then? Can a company make it easier for startups to sell to the government?
  - ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
    Ha ha ha. I LOVE the way you think. But some things are broken in Government on purpose, so this would be very difficult, and it couldn't just be a Turbo Tax like software for submitting documents. But some type of marketplace where you could hire agents to guide your software company through the RFP process and help land you contracts could definitely be a thing. I'm thinking something that would basically be like E-Lance/UP-Work but for Lobbyists.
  - kls 7y ago
    you would be better off just making an American Indian, female, midget your CEO so you can short circuit the process. If you think that is a joke, it's not, each one of those items scores high points in the RFP process and sets you ahead of the pack. That is the problem with a software solution for it and that is that it is innately a human process. A combination of who you know and who you are. The rest is just fluff on paper.
    - jjeaff 7y ago
      You say that, but take a look at all the biggest companies that supply to governments. There is a very good chance they are run by grey haired white men. Sure, you can get some points for diversity, but in the end, diversity only gets a few small contracts here and there while the establishment rakes in the Lion's share.

turc1656 7y ago

At the risk of sounding less than helpful or pessimistic, the first thing that jumped out at me when reading your post is that you are going about this backwards. I'm not saying you can't or wont' succeed. I have no idea. But it seems like the first thing that happened is that you decided you wanted to start a business. Usually it's the reverse - you get inspired by discovering a problem and realize you have the skillset and motivation to solve it and then you come to the realization that you need to start a business to do that. For founders/entrepreneurs with experience having done that previously, this is likely a scenario with a much higher probability of success. But I imagine the success rate of people who say "I want to start my own business" and then look for a business to start have much lower success rates. I'm not trying to rain no your parade at all. Just wanted to give you something to think about before you spend a fortune in time and/or money starting something. I could easily be wrong, though. Just food for thought.

fennecfoxen 7y ago
It sounds like you are describing the Silicon Valley ideal, but things like "finding a good business to start" are very much a traditional approach, and I am confident they will teach you about how to do market research to this end in business schools.
- wpietri 7y ago
  Is it a traditional approach? I've met a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners, and I have heard of almost nobody starting from "I have started a business, now what should we do" being successful. Bezos arguably took that approach, but that story gets told so much precisely because it was unusual. More often it turns out like Webvan, where the lack of deep domain knowledge means making noob mistakes that kill the business. And I'm not sure business schools are a big help here. The vast majority of MBAs end up joining mid-sized to large existing companies as high flyers, and I think the curriculum aims to support that.
  - inerte 7y ago
    A common approach is people believing they can be their own bosses. Not so much about business opportunity or an itch to scratch. Anyway, why speculate? It's easy to find online articles and research showing why people have started their businesses, or the reasons why people would want to start one but haven't yet. Truth is that it's all the above and more.

n-exploit 7y ago

The non-profit/social sector - and we need it here. Why hire software developers when you can afford 8-10 part-time staff for the same price. Sincerely, a non-profit Technology Director.

justaguyhere 7y ago
Could you please provide some examples of tasks that can be improved with software in non-profit/social sector?

luisobo 7y ago

Software. We have compilers and databases but those only cover a (very important) slice of the human process of going from vague idea to value to users and then revenue. As that process scales the number of people, roles and interactions between them become very hard to manage and we have no good tools to help with that. A transportation company relies on software to manage their processes, giving everyone involved direct access to their particular slice of the process (think an ERP where logistics, sales, billing, executives collaborate). In software we store code, the source of truth, which is fundamentally structured information, in text files. That source of truth is not usually not accessible by PMs, designers, or copywriters, they each have their own corner in Dropbox to store their Google Docs or Sketch files. Add conflicts/versioning problems to the pile. And that’s just a taste of what needs improvement. If the transportation company worked that way it’d be utterly dysfunctional. In software, I believe, this translates to reliability problems, projects taking too long... in summary: less value for our users and then less revenue. I believe there is a better way :)

edw519 7y ago

I think a better question for 2 experienced guys like you is, "What industries are overserved by software?" That would open up a whole bunch of possibilities that no one is looking at. Much better than competing with 2000 others at the next soon-to-be-obsolete app. I've built a great career by asking customers to consider the "low tech solution" first, then building upon it. Amazing how often they love it so much that the "building upon" step never comes. As I sit here on a client's system with 14 useless windows open, being bombarded by skype, email, voice, chat, webex, outlook, office, text, jira, confluence, and sharepoint notifications from 14 others with their own 14 useless windows open, none of us getting any real work done, I wonder why 2 guys like you who know how to get shit done don't come in and just fix this for us.

travisjungroth 7y ago
https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ Couldn’t help myself, the number is even the same! What do you think a solution to this problem (too complex, too many things to monitor) would look like? And all-in-one like Basecamp? Or maybe a super system that puts stuff in one place?
- edw519 7y ago
  Start over. Remove everything and add back only what's actually needed. It's easier than most people think.
conductr 7y ago
I can’t turn on notifications like that. Just reading it makes me want to smash your laptop

dhruvkar 7y ago

Construction is a big field, and there are many niche industries within it. I work in natural stone. There are several different types of companies just in this niche. Usually the flow of product is: quarries -> factories -> distributors (us) -> fabricators -> kitchen and bath shops -> end user There are maybe 5-7 major pieces of software for the first four stages. "Under-served" is an understatement. Similarly, there are 10s (if not hundreds) of other niches within construction, each with its own vertical. Tons of niche software is missing. When I see another niche analytics/forms/site chatbot/automate social media startup, I slap myself to make sure I'm not crazy. There's a whole ocean out there, but most software startup companies are running into each other in Depoe Bay.

frequentnapper 7y ago
the problem is having access to these niche fields and knowing enough to be able to create something useful.
- dhruvkar 7y ago
  agreed, a lot of it is niche knowledge that you could only gain by working in such a field or having close access to a company. Consulting within a niche is one way to do this.
  - Riguad87 7y ago
    In the eighties, my best friend's father was into organic farming in the following manner : he'd squish the slugs he happened to find while walking through his crops and that was his pest control over the top of great land husbandry in the tenth generation. My friend taught himself turbo pascal then vb and the farm tax deduction provided a 286 of my unfulfilled dreams. The son was shortly trading in commodity supplies and even derivatives and taking delivery of GPS equipped combines. But I doubt he could have been successful had he not grown up with his father's wisdom.
  - jasonlhy 7y ago
    I would say the biggest challenge of this kind of field is it is so big so no one actually know everything. The rule also varies between countries. For example, the construction rule in England may be different from the rule in the US

rawoke083600 7y ago

Also keep in mind sometimes... the "undeserved industries" are "undeserved" for a reason... like politics, culture, and or refusal to change etc..

svavs 7y ago

The grain industry. Specifically grain elevators. There are a few mid-sized companies that control a large chunk of that industry. Since they don't have much competition, innovation is more or less at a stand still. Companies like bushel ag are changing that, but lots of opportunity.

gumby 7y ago

Agriculture. There are plenty of companies trying to serve ag with what they think ag needs. Most of them fail. Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees. They are NOT dumb hayseeds like they are often portrayed! But they typically don’t have a lot of domain knowledge around software. Smaller farmers are used to making and fixing their own tools (all know how to weld); bigger farmers run corporations with a lot of employees. They are unlikely to be interested in a SSAS. Why? The tax law for farmers in the USA and Europe revolves around tax treatment which favors cap ex (which makes sense — they need to buy big equipment which is used only briefly each year. It’s hard to share since all the other farmers in your area need that equipment at the same time). So understand your market and figure out what their specific need is, then meet it.

janee 7y ago
>Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees That's a very astute observation. I've found it crazy hard to try and improve existing spreadsheet workflows for farmers as we dig deeper into the domain. I think in general industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets could possibly benefit from specialized software solutions. Think someone called it the unbundling of spreadsheets or something
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  I once read on this forum, "your competition is Excel."
- toyg 7y ago
  > industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets That would be all of them. Spreadsheets always end up running a business, because the ultimate measure of business is money / resources, which is inevitably expressed in numbers. Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the latter area are worth the loss of freedom in the former area.
  - etripe 7y ago

superkitty 7y ago

agriculture!!

dmode 7y ago

I just went through extensive home remodeling. This is a big industry and there are a lot of opportunities to improve it by software. It was impossible for me to get a good visualization of what the end state of my home would look like. I needed to hire designers for that. It was difficult to know what various paint options would look like. And then there is the whole construction / contractor / material aspect of it. It is still based on good old connections and negotiations.

ijaffrey 7y ago
Sorry to hear about your pain on the remodel! Been there. We're working on a company called Skipp (www.skipp.co) to address exactly the problems you mentioned. We're currently in beta and if you're up for it we'd love to get your feedback.
Blake_Emigro 7y ago
And then there is the whole construction / contractor / material aspect of it. A big problem with a renovation is the uncertain number of surprises that the contractor will encounter when tearing out the existing material. The contractor doesn't want to get stuck cleaning up that black mold for free.

hermitcrab 7y ago

Most software is written by men for men. Try writing something aimed at women.

twiclo 7y ago
What does that even mean? Do you want developers to put flowers over their UIs?
- seoulsubway 7y ago
  It's a sexist making a sexist comment attempting to brigade some sort of emotion from anyone that reads it. Nothing is made for men. It's made for users. Even something as manly as a razorblade for shaving facial hair is used by women too.
- pnako 7y ago
  Women have different hobbies, or indeed careers, than men. Not much competition in the market for manicure salons, for example (I'm aware of Phorest). The women I know tend to have different creatives hobbies than men's creative hobbies (think crocheting vs woodworking). I'm willing to be there are more woodworking CAD programs than equivalent programs for crocheting in the market. There are fishing lure design applications. Can you think of something similar for a more feminine hobby?
smabie 7y ago
Like...?
- hermitcrab 7y ago
  Off the top of my head: related to pilates, menstrual cycle tracking, childcare, crochet, knitting, home schooling, interior design, manicure, fashion, cooking. I would guess that any of these areas are less well-served by software than an equivalent sized market aimed at men. It used to be that women had a lot less disposable income than men. But I don't think that is true in most western countries now. BTW I'm not trying to be sexist or patronizing. I know that plenty of women are also into ju-jitsu, riding motorbikes, mountaineering etc. But some hobbies and careers clearly have a higher percentage of females. I expect that markets for the elderly are also under served. Technical support might be a challenge though!

tempsy 7y ago

Loan servicing. Navient is terrible. A decent UI would go a long way.

mokarma 7y ago
As someone creating software in that industry, I agree. Although my team recently made a large dent via a selling a chunk of our software to an industry leader.

Swtrz 7y ago

Most law enforcement applications are the same : a monolithic crud .net client connecting to a version of sql server and each one is god awful. They need strong saas apps, Im tired of managing them.

kls 7y ago
I pick up contracts from a law enforcement software vendor and can confirm that most of the software in the industry is abominable. When I picked up the contract their system was a win32 C/C++ GUI, communicating to a custom built geo server. I felt like I was back in the late 80's early 90's doing development again. Anyways I modernized their stack to web and mobile tech and people in the industry think their are wizards of dark magic. It's amazing how behind the times that industry is.

wasdfff 7y ago

A lot of business and accounting is excel hell

kamaal 7y ago

Hospitals and Healthcare. There is simply too much paper work that goes on. My father had a bypass surgery last year, and the entire documentation process was a nightmare. It was like reams and reams of paper work, bills, prescriptions. The funny part was they would scan the paper forms and send to each other(blood banks, insurance, clinics etc) for quick response. They might as well have online forms and invoices.

smabie 7y ago

I would say finance. Excel has it’s uses, but managing a billion dollar portfolio isn’t one of them. It’s a hard space though, firms have such drastically different needs that tt’s difficult to create an app that serves everyone.

otagekki 7y ago
Finance is a mature and highly regulated market with loads of expensive software and consultants to do all you need. ERPs and off-the-shelf financial software with in-house specific developments do the heavy lifting and spreadsheets macros do the rest.
- smabie 7y ago
  For banks sure. But the PE, VC, and hedge fund space have almost no regulations and very little software to serve their needs. I worked at a startup that provided portfolio analytics software and it never was able to actually break into the market in a real way (our valuation was and still is stuck at 200m for 8 years). It’s a really hard problem but if someone can crack it, they potentially could be the next Bloomberg.

imvetri 7y ago

Anything that doesn't disturb young minds.

thusjustin 7y ago

The justice system

stmw 7y ago

Healthcare - which affects all of us and is 18% of GDP - is by far the most underserved by software. It is a bad version of the 90's for doctors, nurses, patients and everyone else. There are a number of firms that are trying to make this better. (plug: at Commure - developer.commure.com, we are one of them, but that's independent of the larger point).

Optimal_Persona 7y ago
Commure looks fascinating, I was hoping something like this existed! I work in publicly-funded mental health/social services. Our programs use 5 different EHRs, then we have to interact with 4 more supplied by county funders for billing and compliance. It's a real Tower of Babel shitstorm to transfer data between systems in the absence of interoperability standards like FHIR. As you note, the current fragmented state of health tech has significant human and economic impacts.
- stmw 7y ago
  Thank you, glad to hear you say that - you certainly have a wonderfully colorful way of describing the problem we are trying to fix!

chrisMyzel 7y ago

If you have already expertise in Aviation in-house - why not aviation. It's currently still a very slow moving industry but spacecrafts were once too. Further there's General Aviation which has already a strong software market around tablet/pc based navigation and flight planning but lacks to see anything truly "disruptive".

pkalinowski 7y ago

Well, navigation systems for competitive hot air balloons pilots could use some competition. The one widely used is from 1998. Total market size is about 50 people, though :)

__initbrian__ 7y ago
Sounds like market research would be a blast
travisjungroth 7y ago
What do they need that a modern handheld aircraft GPS doesn’t provide?

patel011393 7y ago

Scientific software for doing research is awful in many ways. There is a great deal of need at all levels to upgrade how scientists read, recruit participants, analyze data, and more. However, inside knowledge is needed to be successful. The research field has many unique practices that are important to work around.

atari800 7y ago

There's almost nothing in the manufactured housing (AKA "mobile home", AKA "trailer" AKA "HUD-code home") industry. The industry experienced a severe contraction even before the Great Recession, declining in the 2000's from its most recent boom years of the 90's. In that earlier era, there were several vertical software companies selling Windows and DOS dealership management systems to the many independent (mom-and-pop) dealerships of manufactured homes By the time the industry started to recover in the last several years, they had all gone out of business. Because of the timing of the near-death of the MH industry, none of those companies even tried to move to web-based SaaS products. As far as I know, the only new dealership management (line of business) system for the industry is my own SaaS product, which I started selling a year ago. I'm a software developer, but my family owned a dealership for decades, so I know the business well. The industry is weird, and different enough from automobiles and motor homes that software for those (seemingly related) industries isn't really a good fit. I've had some success bootstrapping my business. The industry is big enough at this point that I can make pretty good money as a small player, but it's still small enough that it's unlikely to attract any big operators. The market is too small for them, I'm pretty sure. I think it would be difficult for someone who doesn't know the way things are done in the industry to create software for it. It's certainly possible, but for sure you'd have to partner with someone who has expertise already. But I guess that's true of almost any niche industry.

copperfitting1 7y ago

Imagine how many people never used a chat app in a business context before. Maybe this is hard, as you can’t imagine who they could be — or you don’t remember a time _before_ the ubiquity of chat apps in the workplace. But trust me those people are a majority of the workforce.

bjourne 7y ago

There's a lot of software you could build to help grassroots mobilization efforts. However, there's not a lot of money in that business.