30 ms·

Show HN: Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis

78 points by andrewbr 4mo ago

I know, it's kind of weird. What is a veterinarian doing creating an analysis tool for lawn problems? Frankly, the idea was born of my own lawn care struggles. Endless lawn care company fees without any actual improvement. Googling problems and finding generic solutions without regional considerations. One time I overseeded my grass not realizing I had to actually put soil down too. One day, I decided to run lawn pictures through AI and found some pretty helpful information. So I decided with my clinical background (the idea of treating the cause, not just the symptoms), as well as tech savvy, I would create an AI tool where homeowners can upload pictures of their lawn, enter their ZIP code, and get a diagnosis tailored to their location with actionable next steps in just 15 seconds. Completely free. The platform is monetized with affiliate sales (if a user elects to purchase through one of our Amazon or other links) and by selling exclusive rights to individual ZIP codes to lawn care companies seeking warm leads. Users can pursue their own DIY plan, purchase a lawn care subscription service, or contact a local lawn care system. I'd love if you'd test it out, toy with it, try to break it, and give me your feedback. Any feature requests would be super helpful. Thanks! Excited to hear your thoughts. Andrew

truetraveller 4mo ago
Love the monetization idea. Something like this might actually be the future.
- andrewbr 4mo ago
  Appreciate the positive words! Lots of work to be done but I'm hopeful.
goda90 4mo ago
> Your lawn is trying to tell you something. It's saying "I'm an unnatural, non-native monoculture that does little to support biodiversity but will gladly suck up your time and money." Sorry to speak negatively of the thing you're working on Andrew, but the subject matter is one I feel strongly about. Having a short cut lawn area has many recreational uses, but most people don't do anything except maintain most of their lawn. On top of that, many people become focused on a particular aesthetic that usually requires non-native grasses and harmful pesticides. In some places, scarse water supplies are used just to maintain a certain color. I encourage everyone to look into replacing grass lawns with native plant landscapes, and where you do want it short cut, look into a mix of plants like clover that require far less work to keep alive than most grass monocultures.
- jna_sh 4mo ago
  Kill your lawn!
- andrewbr 4mo ago
  I appreciate the sentiment, perhaps it would be wise to include some lawn alternatives or eco-friendly lawn techniques, or even drought tolerant landscaping. Though my site is not likely to change peoples' behavior around traditional lawns, perhaps we can eliminate needless application of pesticides and fertilizers by focusing on the right applications at the right time, rather than via guesswork. I also appreciate the irony of a lawn site using AI which itself uses a lot of water. Seriously though, this is helpful in that I can also be considering ways of encouraging users to seek alternatives. Maybe they don't even want the pressure of trying to keep a short cut, green lawn.
  - customguy 4mo ago
    > Maybe they don't even want the pressure of trying to keep a short cut, green lawn. I think offering a range of options and leaving it up to people could go a long way. Especially since people could just try out all options to see what it would involved, how they might imagine (and like) the results, before committing to anything. As in, here's the lawn, I want it to a.) keep it trim and green, b.) keep it decent looking and still human friendly, but also make it low maintenance and better for biodiversity c.) turn it into a jungle of flowers.
  - 1shooner 4mo ago
    If you were able to translate chronic problems like drainage/poor soil/etc into broader alternatives like landscaping or LA/engineering, that could increase your market on the service provider side.
    - andrewbr 4mo ago
      Great insight. Never would have thought of it. Thank you
- Carrok 4mo ago
daviding 4mo ago
A nice idea and good luck! My lawn is dead as our local data center took all the water (I'm kidding!). We do home property and inventory services using AI on photos as well and the key thing we've found so far is that the biggest rival to those features is just people dragging photos into chatgpt and asking away. So the key here is differentiating from that and making something better and more accurate. What we did was to basically build a better and deeper prompt and history, e.g. context is king in a vertical. So that means the other info the user has put about the property, the memory of previous things asked or seen, combining with publicly available property info we already gather - this would make the information more valuable than straight gpt usage. So what more can you bring to the bare prompt on the photos to help? What can you build in terms of info about the zip, so you do more 'vertical stuff' before the api call.
- andrewbr 4mo ago
  Great callout, I saw something similar on another site. Essentially instead of just entering your ZIP, you can also enter your estimated lawn size as well as various other parameters to generate a better prompt. I think that would be helpful to build in the next iteration, both to strengthen the results and also differentiate ourselves from GPT. Another thought I had was to potentially build a database of specific, authoritative lawn care information, such as industry journals, textbooks, university extensions, etc from which the GPT must draw upon and reference, rather than using context clues from the internet to try and invent some kind of analysis or treatment.
haaz 4mo ago
Great idea, and really good job on the website. Can't use it myself as I'm not in America but I'm sure it's great. Please ignore most of the people on hacker ews, most of them are losers who complain about everything.
- andrewbr 4mo ago
  Hah! Thanks. We plan to roll out in other markets. Stay tuned! I appreciate the compliment on the website.
jensenbox 4mo ago
Any chance you will support Canada?
- andrewbr 4mo ago
  Support for Canada is in the works!
  - contingencies 4mo ago
    icelawn.com is registered
pryelluw 4mo ago
Besides lead gen, how about having ready to go packages for the diy people? You can probably have it drop shipped by other online providers. Lead gen is fine and all but I already get postered by a ton of lawn care sales people who basically provide the same service.
- andrewbr 4mo ago
  A lot of the lawn care lead websites don't offer ZIP code exclusivity, which we do. And the leads are already warm, because they are actively seeking a solution to a definite problem. This all hinges on a large amount of traffic, but when the leads do come, their conversion rate should be pretty high. We also rely on affiliate income to monetize. Ready-to-go packages could be offered in the future, not a bad idea.
swatcoder 4mo ago
What are you actually providing here? What makes this more useful for someone than just uploading a their lawn images directly to their favorite frontier chatbot? Did you craft a rich prompt template that's untuitively helpful? If so, what did you see go wrong before you had that figured out? How did you determine it was a positive improvement? How will you make sure that your prompt's benefits hold up as your original model is retired and it needs to be run against whatever new model you're left to use instead? Or is it just that your website acts like a kind of inspiration a la "Hey, did you ever think to ask AI about your lawn problems?"? If so, how do expect people to find this inspiration when link-delivering search is being agressively retired in favor of synthesized chatbot responses already?
- andrewbr 4mo ago
  Our differentiator is that we provide a richer results experience than the typical text-only chatbot response. Rather than a few bulleted sections, we provide a visual guide, a grass health score, 2-3 specific diagnoses with information about each, and three distinct treatment pathways to choose from. A lot of chatbot responses are somewhat wordy or generic and may be based on general internet slop rather than favoring reputable sources. But it's also true that many people never even think to ask a chatbot about their lawn. So to some degree yes, the website also exists to remind people that they in fact can use AI for this purpose. Of course we are targeting Google search for traffic, but to your point that will continue to decline. We plan to use content to drive traffic where possible, as well as good old-fashioned local marketing and direct outreach to service professionals (realtors, hardware stores, etc.).
ktrnka 4mo ago
I don't have a lawn, but I could use some more software around native habitat restoration for Green Seattle work parties. I end up using Claude or ChatGPT for plant identification because iNaturalist isn't as good, then getting the background on each plant - native? non-native? invasive? When I'm planting, site selection is important but I'm really slow at it, even when using AI. I also use AI for some plant diagnosis but that hasn't led to any meaningful action, except that I'll be more thoughtful about site selection for some plants in the future. Most of this could just be a collection of documents in a Claude project, but hey if more people are working on it I'm all for that even if there are competing tools.
codingdave 4mo ago
I've been slowly working for years on letting clover take over my lawn. I have amazing flows of white flowers in the spring, with the red clover now starting to come in as well. I mow it once the flowers pop up to force the growth back down into the root systems, and I've converted more than half of my 5 acres into clover at this point. It also is speeding up, and will probably be fully clover within a year or two. My point being - your UX doesn't ask what people's goals are. Not everyone wants a "perfect lawn". Even people who do want grass may have different priorities for their grass - low maintenance vs. low water usage vs. really green, etc. If you want your product to be different than what the lawn care guys will say, then you need to actually let people do different things in the app. Or, if you are dead set on making this into lead gen for lawn care guys, well... I personally find that somewhat disheartening, but clearly I'm not your audience.
- andrewbr 4mo ago
  The real proposition here is diagnosing the specific problem and offering specific fixes for said problem. I think the platform provides a good opportunity to present alternatives to the user other than "just fix the problem" and says "have you thought about this instead?" But since the primary user is trying to fix the issue, I don't want to necessarily try to force alternatives my audience isn't looking for. That being said, one option would be to give an option in filling out the form to ask what their goals are, such as "I just want to fix the problem" or "I'm open to exploring new ideas for my lawn." It's not "just" for lead gen. I'm actually trying to help people and solve a problem. I want the tool itself to be free. It monetizes by means other than making it a paid tool.
jmathai 4mo ago
I’ll definitely try this out. I have a Claude project for our home and many chat conversations about my lawn. What I don’t know yet is if the DIY I’m doing with the help of Claude is going to materialize into a lush lawn. It has me doing pre-emergent spray, broad leaf weed killers, and moss killer. It’s a lot of work and I’m sure there is a much better UX than saved chats.
- andrewbr 4mo ago
  Yes, please try it and let me know! I think you'll find the output a little nicer than a chat, which is exactly why I made this. If it sucks, let me know why so I can improve it. Thank you!
throwaway2037 4mo ago
I recommend to change the title of this submission to: > Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis When I first saw "vet", I assumed that an American was trying to virtue signal using their armed forces veteran status.
- andrewbr 4mo ago
  Thank you for the suggestion, however it appears I am outside of the allowed editing window
- dang 4mo ago
  Ok, we've erinarianed the title above.
joshellington 4mo ago
I know you probably worked a bunch on the website, but the amount of AI slop and obvious AI design is an immediate turn off for myself. And I’d theorize more “normies” are getting “spidey senses” on these types of generic Claude-designed products. I’m seeing them pop up weekly on my small town subreddit. I’d highly recommend telling Claude something like (untested myself): redesign the website, remove all emojis and all letter-spacing CSS, use non conventional typefaces, no italic serifs, limited cream/beige colors Something along those lines. Fun idea, good luck!
- andrewbr 4mo ago
  This is really sound advice, thank you.
  - joeyguierra 4mo ago
    [dead]
ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago
If you build it on LLMs you have no business...
- andrewbr 4mo ago
  Helpful
  - ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago
    It was argued at length by people brighter than me so not sure it's worth repeating.
    - andrewbr 4mo ago
      I'll have to look it up. Black and white statements like that don't usually prove out.
      - ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago
        One of them was just on HN like yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48529101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48529101 You do you, just letting you know.
ungreased0675 4mo ago
How do you know the diagnosis is correct?
- Lionga 4mo ago
  added make no mistakes to the prompt so it can not be wrong, ez.
supertroop 4mo ago
Let’s waste more water so we can waste more water. Lawns. Yay. Yawn.
- teekert 4mo ago
  I had the same anti-reaction. Yay, lets all try to tightly control a piece of land and spend an inordinate amount of effort making sure nature will not get a grip on it. Oh piece of land, you shall behave according to my rules! Noise, genetic engineering, pesticides, herbicides: Take that you bad piece of land, Oh my dear 50 m2, you shall remain out of balance and no insect shall ever be happy here! For as long as I live here! Hahaha! There are many people that do really get happy with a nice lawn, like most of my neighbors. They are even putting up with all of their gasoline leaf blowers that sounds like a motocross is taking place right in our rural street. What is a nice development though is automatic electric lawn mowers, some (some not!) are completely silent and keep that lawn as far from equilibrium as one can with little effort (as in: Some would say it looks "nice", at least it looks "homogeneous".) So for many people this website is a nice idea! And I do appreciate the effort, for free even! Nice work! If I'd make this I'd add silent and non-toxic methods as the first options. Maybe stimulate some planting some patches of wild flowers for our bug friends that are going through a rough patch atm ;)
SyneRyder 4mo ago
Off topic question and probably a far too ambitious idea... but as a veterinarian, have you thought about working on improvements to the software that vets use? About six months ago I was spending time with a vet friend, and was hearing stories about terrible user interface and ways the software was getting in the way. The story I most remember was a 60 second timeout requirement to enter patient data before the workstation locked and required logging in again, and that a logout while still typing would cause the current notes in progress to be deleted. I have no idea if those problems are caused by regulation (a kind of kitty HIPPA compliance) or just terrible UX. I worry that vet software is probably a terrible market as well, with regulation and established providers, maybe it's a lower margin business (certainly not a profit center) and maybe edge cases for each vet practice in the US. As someone with domain knowledge, perhaps that's a challenge you might consider, now that AI makes coding so accessible across domains now? Since I have zero domain knowledge, it seemed like something I could never help solve.
- jeanlucas 4mo ago
  I am committed to some projects now, but I did a full analysis of projects to invest, used AI to validate ideas and so on. My main goal was "solo founder projects as programmer" and one of them was software for veterinarians (second one was for golf tracks). It is an interesting niche!
herbst 4mo ago
How comes there is this one very specific style the AI makes websites look like with little to no variance?
slopinthebag 4mo ago
Um, are your testimonials AI generated or are they real people who really said these things?
- Lionga 4mo ago
  [flagged]
MagicMoonlight 4mo ago
[dead]
merveceylan 4mo ago
[dead]
ConsultantCam 4mo ago
To be fair a lot of good product ideas come from personal experiences like yours, not weird. Seems like a solid idea, when you say tailored to location does that account for the different types of grass across geographies? If you're interested in a market snapshot to look at competitors I built a one-time competitive intelligence report tool at stratica.ca covering competitor positioning, market gaps, SWOT, growth action items and more. Could be useful if you want to make it real. Cheers!
westurner 4mo ago
Soil science! Soil Food Web! Can topdressing fix lawn problems? Can mulching clippings instead of bagging fix lawn problems? How to avoid worsening nitrogen runoff algae blooms with liquid fertilizer? Granulated fertilizer if you must. White Dutch Clover is a nitrogen fixer that fertilizes soil and feeds the bees. All broad-leaf herbicides kill clover and dandelions, which bees prefer. Feature ideas: - refer for local free soil testing; ?q=soil+testing+{zip code} - follow-up reminders --- Thanks for helping lawns and thereby animals. From "Show HN: Dog Rescue Transport Coordination Website" http://puptransfur.org/ http://puptransfur.org/ .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45154345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45154345 : > Notes re: "Veterinary Animal EHR FHIR" and SPDA: Shelter Pet Data Alliance: https://shelterpetdata.org/ https://shelterpetdata.org/ and Petco Love Lost, and a list of shelter and sanctuary softwares that don't yet support FHIR: https://github.com/jupyterhealth/jupyter-health-software/issues/20#issuecomment-3169701609 https://github.com/jupyterhealth/jupyter-health-software/iss... How do you get dogs to drink more water?
- westurner 4mo ago
  Golf courses fill with sand and seed and mix. You can buy divot fixer bottles and a holder for a golf cart, because of soccer in the backyard
turtlebits 4mo ago
"Googling problems and finding generic solutions" Your product links are just generic search terms in amazon and local lawn care providers just goes to the angi.com home page. This feels like an AI play without any real effort.
hasudon7171 4mo ago
That’s a great point! However, I think it would be better if your service better reflected the fact that you’re a veterinarian. For example, determining the appropriate grass or turf for grazing horses, or checking whether they’re being cared for in a way that prevents injuries.
stAInley 4mo ago
[dead]
Nicolau_Amorim 4mo ago
[flagged]

78 points by andrewbr 4mo ago

truetraveller 4mo ago

Love the monetization idea. Something like this might actually be the future.

andrewbr 4mo ago
Appreciate the positive words! Lots of work to be done but I'm hopeful.

goda90 4mo ago

> Your lawn is trying to tell you something. It's saying "I'm an unnatural, non-native monoculture that does little to support biodiversity but will gladly suck up your time and money." Sorry to speak negatively of the thing you're working on Andrew, but the subject matter is one I feel strongly about. Having a short cut lawn area has many recreational uses, but most people don't do anything except maintain most of their lawn. On top of that, many people become focused on a particular aesthetic that usually requires non-native grasses and harmful pesticides. In some places, scarse water supplies are used just to maintain a certain color. I encourage everyone to look into replacing grass lawns with native plant landscapes, and where you do want it short cut, look into a mix of plants like clover that require far less work to keep alive than most grass monocultures.

jna_sh 4mo ago
Kill your lawn!
andrewbr 4mo ago
I appreciate the sentiment, perhaps it would be wise to include some lawn alternatives or eco-friendly lawn techniques, or even drought tolerant landscaping. Though my site is not likely to change peoples' behavior around traditional lawns, perhaps we can eliminate needless application of pesticides and fertilizers by focusing on the right applications at the right time, rather than via guesswork. I also appreciate the irony of a lawn site using AI which itself uses a lot of water. Seriously though, this is helpful in that I can also be considering ways of encouraging users to seek alternatives. Maybe they don't even want the pressure of trying to keep a short cut, green lawn.
- customguy 4mo ago
  > Maybe they don't even want the pressure of trying to keep a short cut, green lawn. I think offering a range of options and leaving it up to people could go a long way. Especially since people could just try out all options to see what it would involved, how they might imagine (and like) the results, before committing to anything. As in, here's the lawn, I want it to a.) keep it trim and green, b.) keep it decent looking and still human friendly, but also make it low maintenance and better for biodiversity c.) turn it into a jungle of flowers.
- 1shooner 4mo ago
  If you were able to translate chronic problems like drainage/poor soil/etc into broader alternatives like landscaping or LA/engineering, that could increase your market on the service provider side.
  - andrewbr 4mo ago
    Great insight. Never would have thought of it. Thank you
Carrok 4mo ago

daviding 4mo ago

A nice idea and good luck! My lawn is dead as our local data center took all the water (I'm kidding!). We do home property and inventory services using AI on photos as well and the key thing we've found so far is that the biggest rival to those features is just people dragging photos into chatgpt and asking away. So the key here is differentiating from that and making something better and more accurate. What we did was to basically build a better and deeper prompt and history, e.g. context is king in a vertical. So that means the other info the user has put about the property, the memory of previous things asked or seen, combining with publicly available property info we already gather - this would make the information more valuable than straight gpt usage. So what more can you bring to the bare prompt on the photos to help? What can you build in terms of info about the zip, so you do more 'vertical stuff' before the api call.

andrewbr 4mo ago
Great callout, I saw something similar on another site. Essentially instead of just entering your ZIP, you can also enter your estimated lawn size as well as various other parameters to generate a better prompt. I think that would be helpful to build in the next iteration, both to strengthen the results and also differentiate ourselves from GPT. Another thought I had was to potentially build a database of specific, authoritative lawn care information, such as industry journals, textbooks, university extensions, etc from which the GPT must draw upon and reference, rather than using context clues from the internet to try and invent some kind of analysis or treatment.

haaz 4mo ago

Great idea, and really good job on the website. Can't use it myself as I'm not in America but I'm sure it's great. Please ignore most of the people on hacker ews, most of them are losers who complain about everything.

andrewbr 4mo ago
Hah! Thanks. We plan to roll out in other markets. Stay tuned! I appreciate the compliment on the website.

jensenbox 4mo ago

Any chance you will support Canada?

andrewbr 4mo ago
Support for Canada is in the works!
- contingencies 4mo ago
  icelawn.com is registered

pryelluw 4mo ago

Besides lead gen, how about having ready to go packages for the diy people? You can probably have it drop shipped by other online providers. Lead gen is fine and all but I already get postered by a ton of lawn care sales people who basically provide the same service.

andrewbr 4mo ago
A lot of the lawn care lead websites don't offer ZIP code exclusivity, which we do. And the leads are already warm, because they are actively seeking a solution to a definite problem. This all hinges on a large amount of traffic, but when the leads do come, their conversion rate should be pretty high. We also rely on affiliate income to monetize. Ready-to-go packages could be offered in the future, not a bad idea.

swatcoder 4mo ago

What are you actually providing here? What makes this more useful for someone than just uploading a their lawn images directly to their favorite frontier chatbot? Did you craft a rich prompt template that's untuitively helpful? If so, what did you see go wrong before you had that figured out? How did you determine it was a positive improvement? How will you make sure that your prompt's benefits hold up as your original model is retired and it needs to be run against whatever new model you're left to use instead? Or is it just that your website acts like a kind of inspiration a la "Hey, did you ever think to ask AI about your lawn problems?"? If so, how do expect people to find this inspiration when link-delivering search is being agressively retired in favor of synthesized chatbot responses already?

andrewbr 4mo ago
Our differentiator is that we provide a richer results experience than the typical text-only chatbot response. Rather than a few bulleted sections, we provide a visual guide, a grass health score, 2-3 specific diagnoses with information about each, and three distinct treatment pathways to choose from. A lot of chatbot responses are somewhat wordy or generic and may be based on general internet slop rather than favoring reputable sources. But it's also true that many people never even think to ask a chatbot about their lawn. So to some degree yes, the website also exists to remind people that they in fact can use AI for this purpose. Of course we are targeting Google search for traffic, but to your point that will continue to decline. We plan to use content to drive traffic where possible, as well as good old-fashioned local marketing and direct outreach to service professionals (realtors, hardware stores, etc.).

ktrnka 4mo ago

I don't have a lawn, but I could use some more software around native habitat restoration for Green Seattle work parties. I end up using Claude or ChatGPT for plant identification because iNaturalist isn't as good, then getting the background on each plant - native? non-native? invasive? When I'm planting, site selection is important but I'm really slow at it, even when using AI. I also use AI for some plant diagnosis but that hasn't led to any meaningful action, except that I'll be more thoughtful about site selection for some plants in the future. Most of this could just be a collection of documents in a Claude project, but hey if more people are working on it I'm all for that even if there are competing tools.

codingdave 4mo ago

I've been slowly working for years on letting clover take over my lawn. I have amazing flows of white flowers in the spring, with the red clover now starting to come in as well. I mow it once the flowers pop up to force the growth back down into the root systems, and I've converted more than half of my 5 acres into clover at this point. It also is speeding up, and will probably be fully clover within a year or two. My point being - your UX doesn't ask what people's goals are. Not everyone wants a "perfect lawn". Even people who do want grass may have different priorities for their grass - low maintenance vs. low water usage vs. really green, etc. If you want your product to be different than what the lawn care guys will say, then you need to actually let people do different things in the app. Or, if you are dead set on making this into lead gen for lawn care guys, well... I personally find that somewhat disheartening, but clearly I'm not your audience.

andrewbr 4mo ago
The real proposition here is diagnosing the specific problem and offering specific fixes for said problem. I think the platform provides a good opportunity to present alternatives to the user other than "just fix the problem" and says "have you thought about this instead?" But since the primary user is trying to fix the issue, I don't want to necessarily try to force alternatives my audience isn't looking for. That being said, one option would be to give an option in filling out the form to ask what their goals are, such as "I just want to fix the problem" or "I'm open to exploring new ideas for my lawn." It's not "just" for lead gen. I'm actually trying to help people and solve a problem. I want the tool itself to be free. It monetizes by means other than making it a paid tool.

jmathai 4mo ago

I’ll definitely try this out. I have a Claude project for our home and many chat conversations about my lawn. What I don’t know yet is if the DIY I’m doing with the help of Claude is going to materialize into a lush lawn. It has me doing pre-emergent spray, broad leaf weed killers, and moss killer. It’s a lot of work and I’m sure there is a much better UX than saved chats.

andrewbr 4mo ago
Yes, please try it and let me know! I think you'll find the output a little nicer than a chat, which is exactly why I made this. If it sucks, let me know why so I can improve it. Thank you!

throwaway2037 4mo ago

I recommend to change the title of this submission to: > Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis When I first saw "vet", I assumed that an American was trying to virtue signal using their armed forces veteran status.

andrewbr 4mo ago
Thank you for the suggestion, however it appears I am outside of the allowed editing window
dang 4mo ago
Ok, we've erinarianed the title above.

joshellington 4mo ago

I know you probably worked a bunch on the website, but the amount of AI slop and obvious AI design is an immediate turn off for myself. And I’d theorize more “normies” are getting “spidey senses” on these types of generic Claude-designed products. I’m seeing them pop up weekly on my small town subreddit. I’d highly recommend telling Claude something like (untested myself): redesign the website, remove all emojis and all letter-spacing CSS, use non conventional typefaces, no italic serifs, limited cream/beige colors Something along those lines. Fun idea, good luck!

andrewbr 4mo ago
This is really sound advice, thank you.
- joeyguierra 4mo ago
  [dead]

ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago

If you build it on LLMs you have no business...

andrewbr 4mo ago
Helpful
- ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago
  It was argued at length by people brighter than me so not sure it's worth repeating.
  - andrewbr 4mo ago
    I'll have to look it up. Black and white statements like that don't usually prove out.
    - ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago
      One of them was just on HN like yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48529101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48529101 You do you, just letting you know.

ungreased0675 4mo ago

How do you know the diagnosis is correct?

Lionga 4mo ago
added make no mistakes to the prompt so it can not be wrong, ez.

supertroop 4mo ago

Let’s waste more water so we can waste more water. Lawns. Yay. Yawn.

teekert 4mo ago
I had the same anti-reaction. Yay, lets all try to tightly control a piece of land and spend an inordinate amount of effort making sure nature will not get a grip on it. Oh piece of land, you shall behave according to my rules! Noise, genetic engineering, pesticides, herbicides: Take that you bad piece of land, Oh my dear 50 m2, you shall remain out of balance and no insect shall ever be happy here! For as long as I live here! Hahaha! There are many people that do really get happy with a nice lawn, like most of my neighbors. They are even putting up with all of their gasoline leaf blowers that sounds like a motocross is taking place right in our rural street. What is a nice development though is automatic electric lawn mowers, some (some not!) are completely silent and keep that lawn as far from equilibrium as one can with little effort (as in: Some would say it looks "nice", at least it looks "homogeneous".) So for many people this website is a nice idea! And I do appreciate the effort, for free even! Nice work! If I'd make this I'd add silent and non-toxic methods as the first options. Maybe stimulate some planting some patches of wild flowers for our bug friends that are going through a rough patch atm ;)

SyneRyder 4mo ago

Off topic question and probably a far too ambitious idea... but as a veterinarian, have you thought about working on improvements to the software that vets use? About six months ago I was spending time with a vet friend, and was hearing stories about terrible user interface and ways the software was getting in the way. The story I most remember was a 60 second timeout requirement to enter patient data before the workstation locked and required logging in again, and that a logout while still typing would cause the current notes in progress to be deleted. I have no idea if those problems are caused by regulation (a kind of kitty HIPPA compliance) or just terrible UX. I worry that vet software is probably a terrible market as well, with regulation and established providers, maybe it's a lower margin business (certainly not a profit center) and maybe edge cases for each vet practice in the US. As someone with domain knowledge, perhaps that's a challenge you might consider, now that AI makes coding so accessible across domains now? Since I have zero domain knowledge, it seemed like something I could never help solve.

jeanlucas 4mo ago
I am committed to some projects now, but I did a full analysis of projects to invest, used AI to validate ideas and so on. My main goal was "solo founder projects as programmer" and one of them was software for veterinarians (second one was for golf tracks). It is an interesting niche!

herbst 4mo ago

How comes there is this one very specific style the AI makes websites look like with little to no variance?

slopinthebag 4mo ago

Um, are your testimonials AI generated or are they real people who really said these things?

Lionga 4mo ago
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MagicMoonlight 4mo ago

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merveceylan 4mo ago

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ConsultantCam 4mo ago

To be fair a lot of good product ideas come from personal experiences like yours, not weird. Seems like a solid idea, when you say tailored to location does that account for the different types of grass across geographies? If you're interested in a market snapshot to look at competitors I built a one-time competitive intelligence report tool at stratica.ca covering competitor positioning, market gaps, SWOT, growth action items and more. Could be useful if you want to make it real. Cheers!

westurner 4mo ago

Soil science! Soil Food Web! Can topdressing fix lawn problems? Can mulching clippings instead of bagging fix lawn problems? How to avoid worsening nitrogen runoff algae blooms with liquid fertilizer? Granulated fertilizer if you must. White Dutch Clover is a nitrogen fixer that fertilizes soil and feeds the bees. All broad-leaf herbicides kill clover and dandelions, which bees prefer. Feature ideas: - refer for local free soil testing; ?q=soil+testing+{zip code} - follow-up reminders --- Thanks for helping lawns and thereby animals. From "Show HN: Dog Rescue Transport Coordination Website" http://puptransfur.org/ http://puptransfur.org/ .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45154345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45154345 : > Notes re: "Veterinary Animal EHR FHIR" and SPDA: Shelter Pet Data Alliance: https://shelterpetdata.org/ https://shelterpetdata.org/ and Petco Love Lost, and a list of shelter and sanctuary softwares that don't yet support FHIR: https://github.com/jupyterhealth/jupyter-health-software/issues/20#issuecomment-3169701609 https://github.com/jupyterhealth/jupyter-health-software/iss... How do you get dogs to drink more water?

westurner 4mo ago
Golf courses fill with sand and seed and mix. You can buy divot fixer bottles and a holder for a golf cart, because of soccer in the backyard

turtlebits 4mo ago

"Googling problems and finding generic solutions" Your product links are just generic search terms in amazon and local lawn care providers just goes to the angi.com home page. This feels like an AI play without any real effort.

hasudon7171 4mo ago

That’s a great point! However, I think it would be better if your service better reflected the fact that you’re a veterinarian. For example, determining the appropriate grass or turf for grazing horses, or checking whether they’re being cared for in a way that prevents injuries.

stAInley 4mo ago

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Nicolau_Amorim 4mo ago

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