4 ms·

This thread seems to suggest that there are heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the world and accessible to any software engineer. That they are not being picked

This thread seems to suggest that there are heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the world and accessible to any software engineer. That they are not being picked up suggests that there's some other constraint. Either extracting this value is not really worth one's time, or the bottleneck is not the ability to automate things but some other rare skill.

juped 6y ago
It's sales and marketing.
- Kinrany 6y ago
  There seems to be more people doing sales/marketing than software engineers (though I don't have any numbers). Why aren't they picking up the bills?
  - logicslave 6y ago
    These bills dont exist, they are an oasis. I dont believe in the idea that easy millions is just laying around
    - beckingz 6y ago
      There are millions laying around. But it takes a long long time to pick them up. "overnight successes" can take years.
  - hnick 6y ago
    Because once they get involved they're often not worth picking up. I think there's a lot of stuff out there that would provide value to both parties if they could simply connect. Something like Gumtree or Craigslist is an attempt to capitalise on this. e.g. I have a broken machine. It'll be useful to someone for spare parts, to fix and resell (or for fun), as a placeholder (since it sort of works) until they get something better. I'd probably give it away. But dealing with all the time wasters on such platforms makes me want to just toss it. It's similar for some ideas where there is definitely profit to be had, but simply connecting with the customer, convincing them that it will help them, convincing them you're actually honest, etc etc, all costs more than it's worth.
  - juped 6y ago
    There's few, if any, people who can sell these things to a new audience, and they're all picking up their own trillion dollar bills.
  - pembrook 6y ago
    Two things: 1) Being a non-technical founder is expensive 2) Being savvy at online marketing means you probably were able to figure out that the cost of customer acquisition was higher than the price people would be willing to pay for the product The reason businesses do inefficient things is because humans are stupid habit-driven animals. To break them out of their habits, you have to assault them with expensive messaging and literally shake them until they realize you have built a better way.
Yhippa 6y ago
The ones I've seen are a right-place-right-time kind of things. One company I saw scanned and collected auto parts instructions to be searchable via a web UI. I'm not going to come up with that out of the blue. These people are close to a problem and figured out an automation step that adds a lot of value.
RickS 6y ago
For software people, the missing link is knowledge of a domain. Not domain expertise, the rare part is merely knowing that domains even exist to be searched for $20 bills. The article mentions actuarial software for funeral homes. In retrospect, of course that's a thing, but asked to name low-hanging domains for lifestyle software businesses, few of us would ever arrive at that answer, let alone in the first 500 guesses. And is it sexy enough that we'd stake our livelihood on it? I'm reminded of this XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/ People in these small niches can't easily tell the difference between things that are too hard to be worth the money vs things that are solved by a for loop in an afternoon, and they don't talk about their work in a way that makes it obvious that there's gold in the hills. This is one reason that user research is an entire field that gets paid almost like engineering: framing the problem can be just as hard as the problem itself.
- czechdeveloper 6y ago
  It's also funny how nowadays such bird detection would possibly be just another few hours.
- ProZsolt 6y ago
  I really like that XKCD strip. A problem that was once hard now can be solved by a teenager with Tensorflow and a bunch of pictures.
kondro 6y ago
A lot of it is developers not understanding, being aware of (or simply being uninterested in) the problems other businesses face. And businesses not knowing what _can_ be done with software to commission developers to solve it for them (or if they do, the lack of empathy from the developer ends up with them building a half-assed solution).
austinl 6y ago
Engineers are unaware of the needs of these businesses, and often, the businesses are unaware that it's possible to solve some of their problems with software. That's why successful engineer-founders often have prior industry experience, or a co-founder who is an expert in the given industry. I remember working on a construction survey crew in high school, where all survey measurements were recorded by hand in notebooks, and then manually transferred to Excel to perform some trivial operations. The office had hundreds of notebooks lying around. The leadership had no idea it was possible to have an application built to solve something like this. Perhaps they're using something now — I sure hope so.
improv32 6y ago
There is a huge amount of these $20 bills lying around in fact. The thing is they're not that easy to pick up. These ERP systems are often fairly bespoke, designed for the workflow and needs of specific industries, or even specific niches in industries. I work for one of these bespoke ERP companies, our niche is CNC machine shops (huge industy you don't hear much about). Our software was grown organically out of tools we made to manage our own CNC shop, spun out into its own company. That deep domain knowledge is what allows us to make a competitive product. If this kind of stuff interests you we're hiring: https://www.proshoperp.com/company/careers/ https://www.proshoperp.com/company/careers/
- liotier 6y ago
  > These ERP systems are often fairly bespoke That is the paradox with ERP: they are sold as off-the-shelf solutions but customization costs twice the licenses and always ends up producing a bespoke monster.
  - AstralStorm 6y ago
    I'd liken them to LEGOs. SAP sells modules (bricks) and integration (services to make the bricks do what you need). They also sell some easy systems, like a LEGO car, but usually it's better to strip them down and reuse the parts of what you need is a house.
    - osrec 6y ago
      But the end result always requires you to cut/reshape the darn Lego bricks themselves, because the modules never quite fit the use case perfectly, so consultants are brought in to hack it all into some sort of workable shape.
thdrdt 6y ago
Maybe it's also because some software sounds dull and old fashioned so people don't talk much about it. I am into ERP, WMS, TMS and BI software. You don't hear much about this on HN but worldwide it's huge because it is what logistics run on. Most of the time it's also old software and I believe there is a lot of money to be made. For example machine learning can be used to estimate goods that have to be purchased to keep optimal stock.
pascalxus 6y ago
>> "heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the place" This isn't the case from my experience. I've networked with and interviewed dozens of people. It's incredibly difficult to find worthwhile problems that can be automated and aren't already automated. And, even here in the bay area, people tend to react pretty negatively the moment you even mention "repetitive processes". No one likes automation: they associate it with getting fired. So, if you ask people about this, they tend to clam up and stop talking pretty quickly. And when you get right down to it, and start having the type of deep dive talks need to have with potential customers, you'll quickly discover there's already solutions to almost every conceivable problem out there, even in the some of the most esoteric fields you can imagine.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  The Bay Area would have far fewer easy problems as every 2nd person is a developer. It is fished out. > people tend to react pretty negatively the moment you even mention "repetitive processes". No one likes automation: they associate it with getting fired. Those aren't the people you should be talking to. > you'll quickly discover there's already solutions to almost every conceivable problem out there, even in the some of the most esoteric fields you can imagine. That is irrelevant for most as you sell them the implementation of that solution then. It is a $20 bill, not a Y-Combinator worthy idea.
- spitfire 6y ago
  Did you know there's software to tell you how to unspool fiberoptic cable when laying underwater lines? It's one massive long integral math equation. It rents (yes, rents) out for $20K a week. There's also coffee logistics software. There's software for private club management(tennis, polo, etc), moving and storage, even software just for spa's. There is so much opportunity out there, the trick is finding it, and finding a working sales method.
MattGaiser 6y ago
> This thread seems to suggest that there are heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the world and accessible to any software engineer. I argue that they are. It is just that the dollar bills are stuck in the mud or hidden under a leaf or just down paths you rarely take. The bottleneck is knowing about them. You need to be the kind of person who thinks everything is done poorly and then thinks of ways to do it better. The other bottleneck is that extracting them frequently requires annoying human interaction, but if you are willing to do it endlessly, there is plenty to do. I'm not and I lose out on a lot of projects as I don't want to do that. But I know some absolutely terrible software developers (i.e. expect to see your password in the source code kind of developer) who outearn most devs I know simply by selling vast amounts of solutions to the thousands of people they meet every year. Spend the day talking to random shop owners. Spend the night hacking together a fix for them. Collect an ongoing fee.
- goatherders 6y ago
  This. I think one of the places where young entrepreneurs get stuck is in wanting to build something that gets noticed as much (or more) than building something that makes them financially successful. There are thousands of problems that need to be solved and can be solved by software. And almost all of them are super boring and niche specific.
rorykoehler 6y ago
Personally the biggest difficulty I have had is getting ops people to change their habits. Software is only useful if people use it and retrofitting software onto existing processes is infinitely more challenging than building a software driven company from the ground up.
zelos 6y ago
To me it seems that large parts of 'average' office jobs are things that a software developer would automate so they took a tenth of the time. Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V and undo are advanced computing to many people. But of course, the people doing those jobs aren't going to go out of their way to make 90% of their job redundant.
onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
There are tons of things that are worth the time to automate but aren't because they aren't worth the additional cost to sell the automation. Just because something can be done automatically doesn't mean companies can magically discover it and pay for it. You still have to sell it to them.
ska 6y ago
Software engineering skills alone are definitely not enough. There are a ton of these heaps of bills, sure, but they aren't lying around on the floor so much as on hilltops and mountains, to abuse an analogy. It may help to think of these opportunities as a form of technology arbitrage. In order to take advantage, one or more people have to a) understand the technology, b) understand the problem domain c) understand the workflows and d) identify and communicate effectively to the people who can actually make the decisions. How many people do you know who are both competent and interested in all of these aspects? It's not that any of these skills are particularly rare, but they are rare in the same person and there aren't natural communities, for the most part, of people who can do all aspects. Another issue is sometimes (often, really) the technology aspect is the smallest and least interesting part of the problem.

juped 6y ago

It's sales and marketing.

Kinrany 6y ago
There seems to be more people doing sales/marketing than software engineers (though I don't have any numbers). Why aren't they picking up the bills?
- logicslave 6y ago
  These bills dont exist, they are an oasis. I dont believe in the idea that easy millions is just laying around
  - beckingz 6y ago
    There are millions laying around. But it takes a long long time to pick them up. "overnight successes" can take years.
- hnick 6y ago
  Because once they get involved they're often not worth picking up. I think there's a lot of stuff out there that would provide value to both parties if they could simply connect. Something like Gumtree or Craigslist is an attempt to capitalise on this. e.g. I have a broken machine. It'll be useful to someone for spare parts, to fix and resell (or for fun), as a placeholder (since it sort of works) until they get something better. I'd probably give it away. But dealing with all the time wasters on such platforms makes me want to just toss it. It's similar for some ideas where there is definitely profit to be had, but simply connecting with the customer, convincing them that it will help them, convincing them you're actually honest, etc etc, all costs more than it's worth.
- juped 6y ago
  There's few, if any, people who can sell these things to a new audience, and they're all picking up their own trillion dollar bills.
- pembrook 6y ago
  Two things: 1) Being a non-technical founder is expensive 2) Being savvy at online marketing means you probably were able to figure out that the cost of customer acquisition was higher than the price people would be willing to pay for the product The reason businesses do inefficient things is because humans are stupid habit-driven animals. To break them out of their habits, you have to assault them with expensive messaging and literally shake them until they realize you have built a better way.

Yhippa 6y ago

The ones I've seen are a right-place-right-time kind of things. One company I saw scanned and collected auto parts instructions to be searchable via a web UI. I'm not going to come up with that out of the blue. These people are close to a problem and figured out an automation step that adds a lot of value.

RickS 6y ago

For software people, the missing link is knowledge of a domain. Not domain expertise, the rare part is merely knowing that domains even exist to be searched for $20 bills. The article mentions actuarial software for funeral homes. In retrospect, of course that's a thing, but asked to name low-hanging domains for lifestyle software businesses, few of us would ever arrive at that answer, let alone in the first 500 guesses. And is it sexy enough that we'd stake our livelihood on it? I'm reminded of this XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/ People in these small niches can't easily tell the difference between things that are too hard to be worth the money vs things that are solved by a for loop in an afternoon, and they don't talk about their work in a way that makes it obvious that there's gold in the hills. This is one reason that user research is an entire field that gets paid almost like engineering: framing the problem can be just as hard as the problem itself.

czechdeveloper 6y ago
It's also funny how nowadays such bird detection would possibly be just another few hours.
ProZsolt 6y ago
I really like that XKCD strip. A problem that was once hard now can be solved by a teenager with Tensorflow and a bunch of pictures.

kondro 6y ago

A lot of it is developers not understanding, being aware of (or simply being uninterested in) the problems other businesses face. And businesses not knowing what _can_ be done with software to commission developers to solve it for them (or if they do, the lack of empathy from the developer ends up with them building a half-assed solution).

austinl 6y ago

Engineers are unaware of the needs of these businesses, and often, the businesses are unaware that it's possible to solve some of their problems with software. That's why successful engineer-founders often have prior industry experience, or a co-founder who is an expert in the given industry. I remember working on a construction survey crew in high school, where all survey measurements were recorded by hand in notebooks, and then manually transferred to Excel to perform some trivial operations. The office had hundreds of notebooks lying around. The leadership had no idea it was possible to have an application built to solve something like this. Perhaps they're using something now — I sure hope so.

improv32 6y ago

There is a huge amount of these $20 bills lying around in fact. The thing is they're not that easy to pick up. These ERP systems are often fairly bespoke, designed for the workflow and needs of specific industries, or even specific niches in industries. I work for one of these bespoke ERP companies, our niche is CNC machine shops (huge industy you don't hear much about). Our software was grown organically out of tools we made to manage our own CNC shop, spun out into its own company. That deep domain knowledge is what allows us to make a competitive product. If this kind of stuff interests you we're hiring: https://www.proshoperp.com/company/careers/ https://www.proshoperp.com/company/careers/

liotier 6y ago
> These ERP systems are often fairly bespoke That is the paradox with ERP: they are sold as off-the-shelf solutions but customization costs twice the licenses and always ends up producing a bespoke monster.
- AstralStorm 6y ago
  I'd liken them to LEGOs. SAP sells modules (bricks) and integration (services to make the bricks do what you need). They also sell some easy systems, like a LEGO car, but usually it's better to strip them down and reuse the parts of what you need is a house.
  - osrec 6y ago
    But the end result always requires you to cut/reshape the darn Lego bricks themselves, because the modules never quite fit the use case perfectly, so consultants are brought in to hack it all into some sort of workable shape.

thdrdt 6y ago

Maybe it's also because some software sounds dull and old fashioned so people don't talk much about it. I am into ERP, WMS, TMS and BI software. You don't hear much about this on HN but worldwide it's huge because it is what logistics run on. Most of the time it's also old software and I believe there is a lot of money to be made. For example machine learning can be used to estimate goods that have to be purchased to keep optimal stock.

pascalxus 6y ago

>> "heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the place" This isn't the case from my experience. I've networked with and interviewed dozens of people. It's incredibly difficult to find worthwhile problems that can be automated and aren't already automated. And, even here in the bay area, people tend to react pretty negatively the moment you even mention "repetitive processes". No one likes automation: they associate it with getting fired. So, if you ask people about this, they tend to clam up and stop talking pretty quickly. And when you get right down to it, and start having the type of deep dive talks need to have with potential customers, you'll quickly discover there's already solutions to almost every conceivable problem out there, even in the some of the most esoteric fields you can imagine.

MattGaiser 6y ago
The Bay Area would have far fewer easy problems as every 2nd person is a developer. It is fished out. > people tend to react pretty negatively the moment you even mention "repetitive processes". No one likes automation: they associate it with getting fired. Those aren't the people you should be talking to. > you'll quickly discover there's already solutions to almost every conceivable problem out there, even in the some of the most esoteric fields you can imagine. That is irrelevant for most as you sell them the implementation of that solution then. It is a $20 bill, not a Y-Combinator worthy idea.
spitfire 6y ago
Did you know there's software to tell you how to unspool fiberoptic cable when laying underwater lines? It's one massive long integral math equation. It rents (yes, rents) out for $20K a week. There's also coffee logistics software. There's software for private club management(tennis, polo, etc), moving and storage, even software just for spa's. There is so much opportunity out there, the trick is finding it, and finding a working sales method.

MattGaiser 6y ago

> This thread seems to suggest that there are heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the world and accessible to any software engineer. I argue that they are. It is just that the dollar bills are stuck in the mud or hidden under a leaf or just down paths you rarely take. The bottleneck is knowing about them. You need to be the kind of person who thinks everything is done poorly and then thinks of ways to do it better. The other bottleneck is that extracting them frequently requires annoying human interaction, but if you are willing to do it endlessly, there is plenty to do. I'm not and I lose out on a lot of projects as I don't want to do that. But I know some absolutely terrible software developers (i.e. expect to see your password in the source code kind of developer) who outearn most devs I know simply by selling vast amounts of solutions to the thousands of people they meet every year. Spend the day talking to random shop owners. Spend the night hacking together a fix for them. Collect an ongoing fee.

goatherders 6y ago
This. I think one of the places where young entrepreneurs get stuck is in wanting to build something that gets noticed as much (or more) than building something that makes them financially successful. There are thousands of problems that need to be solved and can be solved by software. And almost all of them are super boring and niche specific.

rorykoehler 6y ago

Personally the biggest difficulty I have had is getting ops people to change their habits. Software is only useful if people use it and retrofitting software onto existing processes is infinitely more challenging than building a software driven company from the ground up.

zelos 6y ago

To me it seems that large parts of 'average' office jobs are things that a software developer would automate so they took a tenth of the time. Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V and undo are advanced computing to many people. But of course, the people doing those jobs aren't going to go out of their way to make 90% of their job redundant.

onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago

There are tons of things that are worth the time to automate but aren't because they aren't worth the additional cost to sell the automation. Just because something can be done automatically doesn't mean companies can magically discover it and pay for it. You still have to sell it to them.

ska 6y ago

Software engineering skills alone are definitely not enough. There are a ton of these heaps of bills, sure, but they aren't lying around on the floor so much as on hilltops and mountains, to abuse an analogy. It may help to think of these opportunities as a form of technology arbitrage. In order to take advantage, one or more people have to a) understand the technology, b) understand the problem domain c) understand the workflows and d) identify and communicate effectively to the people who can actually make the decisions. How many people do you know who are both competent and interested in all of these aspects? It's not that any of these skills are particularly rare, but they are rare in the same person and there aren't natural communities, for the most part, of people who can do all aspects. Another issue is sometimes (often, really) the technology aspect is the smallest and least interesting part of the problem.