7 ms·

Ask HN: What do you need that you'd pay a lot for?

55 points by joncalhoun 12y ago

PG mentioned this question in his most recent essay, so I am redirecting it to everyone on HN. What does your company (or you individually) need that you would play a lot of money for?

cyberjunkie 12y ago
Peace of mind. Take care of all my trivial stuff for me. Bills, taxes, money management, politics, corruption and other stupid distractions that stop me from focusing on people that matter. How much do you want?
- bulte-rs 12y ago
  This. I know the big-four of accounting/consultancy firms offer these services for e.g. expatriates but they don't take on single "puppets" for logistical reasons. Small firms mostly lack the wide scale of knowledge required to do said things. For prices: I know a certain B4-firm asks around EUR 450 (USD 550?) for a single tax return. Extrapolate from there ;-)
- jaggederest 12y ago
  It'd be interesting to look at a meta service to acquire and manage all of those things for you.
- rjtavares 12y ago
  You want a personal CFO. This honestly could work, but I don't know how the trust needed to make this work would scale well..
- bash-j 12y ago
  There's a company where I live that does some of these things regarding your bills and saving money. You go in for an interview and you show them all your expenses, incomes, etc. They will work out a budget for you, pay your bills, save money for your goals, send you a bit of spending money for groceries, etc. negotiate with your credit card companies, banks and what not if things are really bad. They set up a bank account which your income goes into, but you can't immediately access it to withdraw funds. Instead you have to call/email them and ask for it, which is good for preventing impulse purchases. Fees are a few hundred dollars for setting up, which is worked into your budget so you don't have to pay upfront, then around $25 a week ongoing.
  - annnnd 12y ago
    They can even assign you a person who does all this for you and more. Usually she is called "wife" (or "husband", if it's a "he"). It is rumored that the costs are usually way higher in that case though (especially if you decide on a "wife" instead of "husband"). Sorry, couldn't resist. ;) More seriously though: do you have a link? I find this concept seriously intriguing / weird / ... on many levels.
    - bash-j 12y ago
      mybudget.com.au
- proveanegative 12y ago
  What kind taking care of politics do you have in mind? The answer depends on whether you mean "vote like I would have for me by still have election days and campaigners and whatnot" or "abolish voting and make everything just work"? The only way to live without politics or corruption and have fully automated taxation is probably to establish a nation run by a Friendly AI. No such nation exists today but you may increase the likelihood of one existing in the future by supporting Friendly AI research.
Cressi 12y ago
Personally, I'd pay lots for a set of hardware-integrated network infrastructure monitor tools of a more advanced sort.
- aneesh 12y ago
  What tools do you use today, and what don't they do well enough?
allendoerfer 12y ago
People pay premium prices for stuff, that they want to do very much or that they do not want to do at all, but have to. Cyberjunkie described the second category as stuff that brings piece of mind. For the first category you get bonus points if you find something, that is highly visible to others (status symbols). First category: Golf equipment, expensive knifes, barbecue stuff, wine, shoes etc. Second category: Taxes, cleaning, medicine, everything which lets one appear to be a better parent (does not matter if it actually does) etc.
jrkelly 12y ago
Photo storage /viewing that doesn't try to sync my photos to a computer (making me scared of losing them in a sync mishap) or share them. Electronic equivalent of a shoebox. Snapjoy did this but Dropbox bought them and shut it down. I haven't seen an alternative - maybe the new Amazon photos does this?
- sjm 12y ago
  I had an idea a while back for this kind of thing, but never stuck with it. I wanted to make something with Amazon Glacier that would be for long-term storage of RAWs for all those people who don't want to ever really delete a RAW file, with small jpeg previews of your library. Maybe I should dig up my old notes and give it another go.
  - btgeekboy 12y ago
    I've mentioned something along these lines before as well. I want it to be seamlessly integrated with Aperture (and likely Lightroom, given how things are going in Aperture-land) such that I can browse all of my photos at any time. The RAWs are securely backed up in some datacenter, and if I want to edit the photo, the RAW is cached locally so that it can be edited. If the photo hasn't been edited in some time now, it's evicted from the cache, and I still have the preview available for perusal.
    - aaronbrethorst 12y ago
      Aperture is very much officially dead. http://www.cultofmac.com/285357/apple-kills-development-aperture-iphoto-os-x/ http://www.cultofmac.com/285357/apple-kills-development-aper...
  - aaronbrethorst 12y ago
    I'd pay $10-$20/month for this. But I also currently have about 400GB of photos on my hard drive. Still, I think that with annual contracts, you should be able to achieve a 50% margin on my usage, and I think I'm something of an outlier(?) in terms of usage.
SeoxyS 12y ago
Automating the US immigration system. Obsoleting attorneys.
- joncalhoun 12y ago
  https://teleborder.com/ https://teleborder.com/ is working on this in some ways.
- chrismcb 12y ago
  I used an attorney, because I wanted to make sure we did everything we needed. But you don't need an attorney, you can do all the paperwork yourself. There are instructions on the government website on how to fill the firms out.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mrwnmonm 12y ago
knowledge, i want a website that i tell that i want to have the knowledge of someone about certain domain. then the site give me a path(books, articles, exercises) that lead me to this. this could be simply done by letting people write about their knowledge and give the path by themselves
- kirillzubovsky 12y ago
  just as fyi, I had this in mind while doing ramenapp.net, but then it quickly turned out that people don't like to share very much. those who do, they already share, but the majority is happy otherwise. imo
aaronbrethorst 12y ago
More time.
sir_akshay 12y ago
A good music recommendation service.
sir_akshay 12y ago
A more approachable match making service.
- chetangole 12y ago
  Indian :D
joshfraser 12y ago
Tax evasion as a service. Target the same legal loopholes that big corporations use to avoid paying taxes like "transfer pricing". You set up the offices and shell corporations in Ireland and the Netherlands for a Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich. You then share those resources (offices, staff, lawyers, accountants, etc) between your clients & charge a percentage of the tax savings as your fee.
- lubos 12y ago
  This won't work. Tax authority will simply not accept tax deductible expenses which allow you to transfer profits to Ireland and will issue you new tax bill. Why big corporations can get away with this? It comes down to people. Little guy working at tax office doesn't have enough confidence to oppose Apple or Google but will have world of confidence to scrutinize unknown small businesses. I see companies like this popping up all the time offering services that allow profits to be concealed under some bullshit scheme. It might take a few years before tax authority will catch up but they will eventually find every single client of such company, they will conduct detailed audits and will issue new tax bills with penalties to all involved.
  - praxulus 12y ago
    Do you have a specific example of something Apple does that is illegal, but for which the IRS isn't pursuing them?
    - lubos 12y ago
      I didn't say anything about illegal. I specifically said, tax authority won't accept tax deductions they don't like. They will simply issue you new tax bill and couldn't care less whether what you are doing is legal or not. It's up to you to challenge their interpretation of law through legal system if you think what you are doing is legal. By the way, EU’s executive Commission is currently looking into Ireland and says what Apple is doing could be illegal under EU law. If confirmed, Apple will get a huge repayment bill. source: http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/is-the-apple-tax-dodge-about-to-end/story-fn5lic6c-1227076637565 http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/is-the-apple-tax-dod...
javajosh 12y ago
Irrevocable access to a channel that reaches every human on the planet.
karmacondon 12y ago
Please make my brain work better. I need a way to organize information that I come across online, get control of my schedule and find a way to manage my general learning process. Maybe a mix of bookmarking, google calendar and anki, with some event discovery thrown in. Then add some Tinder style social functionality so I can get a date or meet new friends. I wouldn't be able to throw money at you fast enough.
- MrDom 12y ago
  What is it about the current solutions that leave you cold? It sounds like google calendar, anki, evernote and Tinder could all work together to do exactly what you suggest. I'm curious what you think is missing, the X factor that another solution would be able to address?
  - karmacondon 12y ago
    None of those things are integrated, they don't fit into my daily routine and they're overkill for my versions of the problems that they solve. I want a toothbrush solution, something I check 3 or 4 times a day and benefit from using. I don't need four toothbrushes, and I don't want to have to learn to use four different products. I just threw those examples together in order to illustrate the idea that I have too much information for my puny brain to keep track of. I'm sure that there are apps to solve every information management problem that a person could have, but using all of them would create the new problem of learning to use and maintain N different apps.
- sideproject 12y ago
  In regards to "bookmarks", I know guys working on a new tool called "Marvelogs" http://marvelogs.com http://marvelogs.com - They're keeping all your likes, favorites, follows etc from various web services (e.g. YouTube, Instagram, GitHub, BitBucket etc) and putting them in a single place. Really like the concept.
  - stevekemp 12y ago
    You sound like you're not involved, but previously you've implied you are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8703270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8703270
joshfraser 12y ago
Tool to constantly monitor domains I'm interested in keeping an eye on (competitors, etc). Crawl their site every day and email me smart diffs (ignore timestamps, randomized content, etc) of every page that changed.
- ajankovic 12y ago
  There are existing services that provide services similar to what you request. Just Google for "track your competitors". Is there anything specific that you need that current services don't provide?
hoodoof 12y ago
Someone to sell my latest software product.
- sideproject 12y ago
  http://sideprojectors.com http://sideprojectors.com? (can we help? - I run the site) :) just throwing it out there.
joshfraser 12y ago
Data as a service. Collect, normalize and index public (but often hard to find/use) data sets and re-syndicate them in a data-as-a-service model.
- nichtich 12y ago
  I like this one. Normalized data, with all changes timestamped, realtime pushed directly to my own server where I can use along with my own internal datasets. It'll be very labor intensive though.
sraquo 12y ago
I have three windsport-related ideas for you. 1) weather analysis I'm a hang glider pilot, but this applies to all wind sports – windsurfing, kiteboarding, paragliding, sailplanes, possibly even surfing and skydiving. These sports require weather analysis. Is the wind blowing from the right direction? Is the cloudbase high enough? Some weather analysis tools exist like http://www.xcskies.com/ http://www.xcskies.com/ for hang gliding and paragliding, but they're not perfect to say the least. I still spend too much time looking at various charts and forecasts in the summer, and then waiting on site once I arrive and the weather conditions aren't right. If you can make me wait less on my precious weekend time, you have my money. Participants of these sports pretty much accept the current level of technology to be as good as it gets, because there are very few meteorologists who could create new, better weather models, and at the same time be either interested in doing that for free or have the technical and business acumen to make it a business. So pretty much everyone uses the RASP model and weather data off many disparate websites. --- 2) flight instruments Hang gliders, paragliders and sailpane pilots use special devices that combine a variometer with GPS and some stored map data to record flight paths, show airspeed, descent rate, etc. These are small, like a fat iPhone 6+ with a calculator-style screen. The company producing the most popular ones is Flytec. I'm not sure how they get away with selling a simple device that runs on two AA batteries for $400-$1000. Maybe they have some key patents... though they are not a monopolist, there's FlyMaster for example. Flytec's devices are pretty much the same as those they were selling 10 years ago, they are cheap to make and should not cost that much. There's room in the market for a significantly cheaper and/or more magical device. By magical I mean stuff like "go this way to get into the lifting air you've just lost", or "fly faster/slower to maximize glide ratio". --- 3) weather mapping drone When the wind hits the mountain / ridge at a certain angle, hang gliders, paragliders and sailplanes can easily soar next to that mountain. The wind also needs to be in a certain speed range etc. Sometime we pilots want to check if that mountain over there could be flyable. It looks like it might be soarable, but to verify this, we need to drive up the mountain and launch a live person in a glider from there. That's a huge waste of time, and because often such roads are privately owned, there's a lot of hassle in getting permission to do that. Landowners are afraid of the liability (which we legally waive but it takes time to explain and verify), and we don't even know if the mountain is soarable at all, we can only guess. It would be nice if we could just launch a drone which would fly around and record wind direction and speeds at various locations and altitudes. The same technique could also be used to better understand existing flying sites, OR to find thermals (invisible pockets of uprising air which gliders need to stay up in the air for long period of time). And this is #1 thing we want – more found thermals, more airtime. So maybe it can be a sort of follow-drone that flies in your general area, telling you where the thermals are. You can tell you're in a thermal once you actually fly into it, but you're descending at 3 ft per second, so the amount of time you can fly searching for thermals is limited. Because you're flying a glider, the follow-drone can be a glider too with just a small auxiliary engine, you don't need too much battery power. --- So there you have it. Wind sports are technologically underserved because the market size isn't very big, but the pain is real, and it's #1 reason preventing more people from participating. Maybe some of the weather / hardware solutions you develop might also be applicable in other fields. Maybe you already have a solution that is fairly easily adjustable to wind sports (esp. drones).
jcr 12y ago
Health. When you make a list of what people will (gladly) pay a lot of money for, health will always be at the top of the list, since without good health, you suffer from a constant impediment. Unfortunately, providing solutions to health problems is probably well beyond scope for already struggling startups. PG asked, "What do you need that you'd pay a lot for?" in relation to changing sales discussions with the hope of bringing in some revenue for struggling startups. The problem with taking this a bit too literally is it's essentially the same thing as asking a customer what they want. The classic statement from Henry Ford is, "If I asked my customers what they wanted, they'd tell me a faster horse." Often, the customer may not know what they want. Instead of asking "What you'd pay a lot for?" you could ask "Where are you spending lots?" or "What costs you a lot?" One of my favorites is, "What regular task in your job annoys the ever living snot out of you? Yeah, what's that thing you absolutely dead doing?" What annoys you? What do you dread doing? What infuriates you? What upsets you? ... The funny thing about human beings is, if you ask people where it hurts, they'll often tell you. If you take the time to learn where they hurt, you might be able to help.
- joncalhoun 12y ago
  You are correct that phrasing the question different ways can often get better results, but I just wanted to hear from HN users and it seemed simpler to just ask the question verbatim.
rsaarelm 12y ago
Anti-aging life extension. Intelligence augmentation.
kokonotu 12y ago
my health...
alizaki 12y ago
A work/travel-program for knowledge professionals to travel the world and work a set number of hours a week on projects to pay their way. Air tickets, budget, airbnbs/apartments all paid for. Then you resell services to clients. You could probably keep a high enough margin by saving through smart purchasing/renting of travel along and picking lower cost/highly desired destinations (south east asia comes to mind, for example). a business of lifestyle, if you will.
thewarrior 12y ago
A way to boost my cognitive capacities.
- bootstrapnyc 12y ago
  aderol works pretty well
hoodoof 12y ago
Time.
pgcosta 12y ago
Starbucks said coffee :D
andrewstuart 12y ago
I make money to pay my bills when I get someone a job. Help me do that better. It's much harder than it sounds. None of the software products I have heard of help.
expose 12y ago
Affection and/or love.
csallen 12y ago
Easy access to well-funded companies looking to hire highly skilled full-stack developers for contract work. Word of mouth works great, but it'd be good to have something reliable to fall back on if my network falls through. I imagine I'd be willing some small % of my hourly/project fee (less than recruiters would take), or a somewhat high yearly rate for access if it was good. Wouldn't pay "a lot" for it, maybe $10-20/month, but I'd like some sort of "learning framework" software. I imagine it would be a clever combination of Anki/Mnemosyne (but modern and web-based), note-taking software like Evernote, bookmarking similar to Pocket, and maybe some basic reminders/tasks that I can schedule. Disclaimer: I've put no more than ~5 minutes of thought into this total. Someone said [legal] "tax evasion" as a service. I'd pay for that. As a contractor I've set up an LLC for myself, and I'm sure I'm missing out on lots of elementary tricks that could save me money. I actually have a meeting set up with a tax guy later this week, but my intuition is that if a company figured out how to scale this, it could be cheaper and more effective. I'd be willing to pay a % of the money saved if it's substantially more than what I've been able to do on my own. Office hours with experts. I'd pay upwards of $200/hr to be able to schedule time to speak with certain experts. I doubt I'd use it more than a few times a year, but that's still a lot of money. Some sort of automated personal assistant that coaxes me to do the things I need to do without a lot of manual input on my part. It's been tried many times and it's tough to do, but if someone gets it right, I'd pay a lot.
- joncalhoun 12y ago
  Office hours with experts sounds like Helpouts[1], AirPair[2], and I think there are 2-3 others out there that I am forgetting. Some are targeting specific markets (eg programmers) but the end goal would seem similar for them all. [1] https://helpouts.google.com/ https://helpouts.google.com/ [2] https://www.airpair.com/ https://www.airpair.com/
SiVal 12y ago
This question is interesting enough that I'd like to see it as a partner to the monthly "Who is Hiring" posting. This "What Would You Be Paying For (If Only It Existed)" is a question worth asking again and again....
MrDom 12y ago
Here's something my mother badly needs: an alternative to meditech that is easy to program and use, but cheap enough for small hospitals to afford. Just to put this in perspective, Meditech allows users (ie: non-technical medical personnel) to write their own "programs" for retrieving and organizing information in something called "Meditech Magic." Here's a clip: BEERv1.1, 100^b,T("")^#,DO{b'<1 NN(b,"bottle"_IF{b=1 " ";"s "}_"of beer on the wall")^#, N(b,"bottle"_IF{b=1 " ";"s "}_"of beer!")^#, N("You take one down, pass it around,")^#,b-1^b, N(b,"bottle"_IF{b=1 " ";"s "}_"of beer on the wall!")^#}, END;
- mappu 12y ago
  Interesting, tell us more. Do you need something that's a drop-in replacement with compatible syntax, or is it more about built-in libraries / integrations that could be solved as an extension to another language?
  - MrDom 12y ago
    I was thinking a complete replacement of the entire platform, but thinking about it more made me realize that's not practical for anybody. For better or worse, a lot of applications are already written for this platform. A drop in "replacement" that creates a web-based UI for easy creation and retrieval of Meditech data would be very useful. It could communicate with the system and translate javascript into MMagic. Bonus points if it could translate already existing applications automatically. Time to see if Meditech has an API I can access from javascript. OT: I took a look at your projects page and I have to say I like the cut of your jib, sir.
gyre007 12y ago
LONGER LASTING PHONE BATTERY. Simples..
smileysteve 12y ago
> Nice, show me something cool when you've got your first PHP app running! Just show me what you have. It doesn't have to be an app. > Once you're more comfortable with basic web programming Don't use the word BASIC! Simple, Basic, Easy, Quick are all still denigrating their effort and experience.
mw67 12y ago
I'd pay a lot for a desktop version of whatsapp. I live in Asia (Hong Kong) and 90% of my communications with clients, staff, partners go through whatsapp because its instant, free and everyone has it. But I'm really tired of having to pull my phone to reply to people when I'm on my computer. It's a $19bn company, someone should work on this, ideally something multi-platform a la Slack would be fantastic.
- lzy 12y ago
  A quick Google search brought up the following 2 solutions, never tried them but just might be what you need? https://whatsremote.com/ https://whatsremote.com/ https://whatsappformypc.com/ https://whatsappformypc.com/
  - mw67 12y ago
    Thanks, tried those but only work if you have an android phone (for your first link); and for your second like it works either on desktop (through the android emulator), or on mobile, but not on both. :(
joannerr 12y ago
Make things organized. Take care of all the messy details of my life. Bills, big events (like a wedding), group traveling. Would pay compared with a 3rd party's service fee.
gesman 12y ago
Regex-aware vertical search engine
cdvonstinkpot 12y ago
Self-powered subdermal GPS tracking for my pets.
chozero 12y ago
Teleportation.
- lyricalpolymath 12y ago
  stay tuned on http://www.eyevel.com http://www.eyevel.com ;)

55 points by joncalhoun 12y ago

PG mentioned this question in his most recent essay, so I am redirecting it to everyone on HN. What does your company (or you individually) need that you would play a lot of money for?

cyberjunkie 12y ago

Peace of mind. Take care of all my trivial stuff for me. Bills, taxes, money management, politics, corruption and other stupid distractions that stop me from focusing on people that matter. How much do you want?

bulte-rs 12y ago
This. I know the big-four of accounting/consultancy firms offer these services for e.g. expatriates but they don't take on single "puppets" for logistical reasons. Small firms mostly lack the wide scale of knowledge required to do said things. For prices: I know a certain B4-firm asks around EUR 450 (USD 550?) for a single tax return. Extrapolate from there ;-)
jaggederest 12y ago
It'd be interesting to look at a meta service to acquire and manage all of those things for you.
rjtavares 12y ago
You want a personal CFO. This honestly could work, but I don't know how the trust needed to make this work would scale well..
bash-j 12y ago
There's a company where I live that does some of these things regarding your bills and saving money. You go in for an interview and you show them all your expenses, incomes, etc. They will work out a budget for you, pay your bills, save money for your goals, send you a bit of spending money for groceries, etc. negotiate with your credit card companies, banks and what not if things are really bad. They set up a bank account which your income goes into, but you can't immediately access it to withdraw funds. Instead you have to call/email them and ask for it, which is good for preventing impulse purchases. Fees are a few hundred dollars for setting up, which is worked into your budget so you don't have to pay upfront, then around $25 a week ongoing.
- annnnd 12y ago
  They can even assign you a person who does all this for you and more. Usually she is called "wife" (or "husband", if it's a "he"). It is rumored that the costs are usually way higher in that case though (especially if you decide on a "wife" instead of "husband"). Sorry, couldn't resist. ;) More seriously though: do you have a link? I find this concept seriously intriguing / weird / ... on many levels.
  - bash-j 12y ago
    mybudget.com.au
proveanegative 12y ago
What kind taking care of politics do you have in mind? The answer depends on whether you mean "vote like I would have for me by still have election days and campaigners and whatnot" or "abolish voting and make everything just work"? The only way to live without politics or corruption and have fully automated taxation is probably to establish a nation run by a Friendly AI. No such nation exists today but you may increase the likelihood of one existing in the future by supporting Friendly AI research.

Cressi 12y ago

Personally, I'd pay lots for a set of hardware-integrated network infrastructure monitor tools of a more advanced sort.

aneesh 12y ago
What tools do you use today, and what don't they do well enough?

allendoerfer 12y ago

People pay premium prices for stuff, that they want to do very much or that they do not want to do at all, but have to. Cyberjunkie described the second category as stuff that brings piece of mind. For the first category you get bonus points if you find something, that is highly visible to others (status symbols). First category: Golf equipment, expensive knifes, barbecue stuff, wine, shoes etc. Second category: Taxes, cleaning, medicine, everything which lets one appear to be a better parent (does not matter if it actually does) etc.

jrkelly 12y ago

Photo storage /viewing that doesn't try to sync my photos to a computer (making me scared of losing them in a sync mishap) or share them. Electronic equivalent of a shoebox. Snapjoy did this but Dropbox bought them and shut it down. I haven't seen an alternative - maybe the new Amazon photos does this?

sjm 12y ago
I had an idea a while back for this kind of thing, but never stuck with it. I wanted to make something with Amazon Glacier that would be for long-term storage of RAWs for all those people who don't want to ever really delete a RAW file, with small jpeg previews of your library. Maybe I should dig up my old notes and give it another go.
- btgeekboy 12y ago
  I've mentioned something along these lines before as well. I want it to be seamlessly integrated with Aperture (and likely Lightroom, given how things are going in Aperture-land) such that I can browse all of my photos at any time. The RAWs are securely backed up in some datacenter, and if I want to edit the photo, the RAW is cached locally so that it can be edited. If the photo hasn't been edited in some time now, it's evicted from the cache, and I still have the preview available for perusal.
  - aaronbrethorst 12y ago
    Aperture is very much officially dead. http://www.cultofmac.com/285357/apple-kills-development-aperture-iphoto-os-x/ http://www.cultofmac.com/285357/apple-kills-development-aper...
- aaronbrethorst 12y ago
  I'd pay $10-$20/month for this. But I also currently have about 400GB of photos on my hard drive. Still, I think that with annual contracts, you should be able to achieve a 50% margin on my usage, and I think I'm something of an outlier(?) in terms of usage.

SeoxyS 12y ago

Automating the US immigration system. Obsoleting attorneys.

joncalhoun 12y ago
https://teleborder.com/ https://teleborder.com/ is working on this in some ways.
chrismcb 12y ago
I used an attorney, because I wanted to make sure we did everything we needed. But you don't need an attorney, you can do all the paperwork yourself. There are instructions on the government website on how to fill the firms out.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

mrwnmonm 12y ago

knowledge, i want a website that i tell that i want to have the knowledge of someone about certain domain. then the site give me a path(books, articles, exercises) that lead me to this. this could be simply done by letting people write about their knowledge and give the path by themselves

kirillzubovsky 12y ago
just as fyi, I had this in mind while doing ramenapp.net, but then it quickly turned out that people don't like to share very much. those who do, they already share, but the majority is happy otherwise. imo

aaronbrethorst 12y ago

More time.

sir_akshay 12y ago

A good music recommendation service.

sir_akshay 12y ago

A more approachable match making service.

chetangole 12y ago
Indian :D

joshfraser 12y ago

Tax evasion as a service. Target the same legal loopholes that big corporations use to avoid paying taxes like "transfer pricing". You set up the offices and shell corporations in Ireland and the Netherlands for a Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich. You then share those resources (offices, staff, lawyers, accountants, etc) between your clients & charge a percentage of the tax savings as your fee.

lubos 12y ago
This won't work. Tax authority will simply not accept tax deductible expenses which allow you to transfer profits to Ireland and will issue you new tax bill. Why big corporations can get away with this? It comes down to people. Little guy working at tax office doesn't have enough confidence to oppose Apple or Google but will have world of confidence to scrutinize unknown small businesses. I see companies like this popping up all the time offering services that allow profits to be concealed under some bullshit scheme. It might take a few years before tax authority will catch up but they will eventually find every single client of such company, they will conduct detailed audits and will issue new tax bills with penalties to all involved.
- praxulus 12y ago
  Do you have a specific example of something Apple does that is illegal, but for which the IRS isn't pursuing them?
  - lubos 12y ago
    I didn't say anything about illegal. I specifically said, tax authority won't accept tax deductions they don't like. They will simply issue you new tax bill and couldn't care less whether what you are doing is legal or not. It's up to you to challenge their interpretation of law through legal system if you think what you are doing is legal. By the way, EU’s executive Commission is currently looking into Ireland and says what Apple is doing could be illegal under EU law. If confirmed, Apple will get a huge repayment bill. source: http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/is-the-apple-tax-dodge-about-to-end/story-fn5lic6c-1227076637565 http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/is-the-apple-tax-dod...

javajosh 12y ago

Irrevocable access to a channel that reaches every human on the planet.

karmacondon 12y ago

Please make my brain work better. I need a way to organize information that I come across online, get control of my schedule and find a way to manage my general learning process. Maybe a mix of bookmarking, google calendar and anki, with some event discovery thrown in. Then add some Tinder style social functionality so I can get a date or meet new friends. I wouldn't be able to throw money at you fast enough.

MrDom 12y ago
What is it about the current solutions that leave you cold? It sounds like google calendar, anki, evernote and Tinder could all work together to do exactly what you suggest. I'm curious what you think is missing, the X factor that another solution would be able to address?
- karmacondon 12y ago
  None of those things are integrated, they don't fit into my daily routine and they're overkill for my versions of the problems that they solve. I want a toothbrush solution, something I check 3 or 4 times a day and benefit from using. I don't need four toothbrushes, and I don't want to have to learn to use four different products. I just threw those examples together in order to illustrate the idea that I have too much information for my puny brain to keep track of. I'm sure that there are apps to solve every information management problem that a person could have, but using all of them would create the new problem of learning to use and maintain N different apps.
sideproject 12y ago
In regards to "bookmarks", I know guys working on a new tool called "Marvelogs" http://marvelogs.com http://marvelogs.com - They're keeping all your likes, favorites, follows etc from various web services (e.g. YouTube, Instagram, GitHub, BitBucket etc) and putting them in a single place. Really like the concept.
- stevekemp 12y ago
  You sound like you're not involved, but previously you've implied you are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8703270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8703270

joshfraser 12y ago

Tool to constantly monitor domains I'm interested in keeping an eye on (competitors, etc). Crawl their site every day and email me smart diffs (ignore timestamps, randomized content, etc) of every page that changed.

ajankovic 12y ago
There are existing services that provide services similar to what you request. Just Google for "track your competitors". Is there anything specific that you need that current services don't provide?

hoodoof 12y ago

Someone to sell my latest software product.

sideproject 12y ago
http://sideprojectors.com http://sideprojectors.com? (can we help? - I run the site) :) just throwing it out there.

joshfraser 12y ago

Data as a service. Collect, normalize and index public (but often hard to find/use) data sets and re-syndicate them in a data-as-a-service model.

nichtich 12y ago
I like this one. Normalized data, with all changes timestamped, realtime pushed directly to my own server where I can use along with my own internal datasets. It'll be very labor intensive though.

sraquo 12y ago

I have three windsport-related ideas for you. 1) weather analysis I'm a hang glider pilot, but this applies to all wind sports – windsurfing, kiteboarding, paragliding, sailplanes, possibly even surfing and skydiving. These sports require weather analysis. Is the wind blowing from the right direction? Is the cloudbase high enough? Some weather analysis tools exist like http://www.xcskies.com/ http://www.xcskies.com/ for hang gliding and paragliding, but they're not perfect to say the least. I still spend too much time looking at various charts and forecasts in the summer, and then waiting on site once I arrive and the weather conditions aren't right. If you can make me wait less on my precious weekend time, you have my money. Participants of these sports pretty much accept the current level of technology to be as good as it gets, because there are very few meteorologists who could create new, better weather models, and at the same time be either interested in doing that for free or have the technical and business acumen to make it a business. So pretty much everyone uses the RASP model and weather data off many disparate websites. --- 2) flight instruments Hang gliders, paragliders and sailpane pilots use special devices that combine a variometer with GPS and some stored map data to record flight paths, show airspeed, descent rate, etc. These are small, like a fat iPhone 6+ with a calculator-style screen. The company producing the most popular ones is Flytec. I'm not sure how they get away with selling a simple device that runs on two AA batteries for $400-$1000. Maybe they have some key patents... though they are not a monopolist, there's FlyMaster for example. Flytec's devices are pretty much the same as those they were selling 10 years ago, they are cheap to make and should not cost that much. There's room in the market for a significantly cheaper and/or more magical device. By magical I mean stuff like "go this way to get into the lifting air you've just lost", or "fly faster/slower to maximize glide ratio". --- 3) weather mapping drone When the wind hits the mountain / ridge at a certain angle, hang gliders, paragliders and sailplanes can easily soar next to that mountain. The wind also needs to be in a certain speed range etc. Sometime we pilots want to check if that mountain over there could be flyable. It looks like it might be soarable, but to verify this, we need to drive up the mountain and launch a live person in a glider from there. That's a huge waste of time, and because often such roads are privately owned, there's a lot of hassle in getting permission to do that. Landowners are afraid of the liability (which we legally waive but it takes time to explain and verify), and we don't even know if the mountain is soarable at all, we can only guess. It would be nice if we could just launch a drone which would fly around and record wind direction and speeds at various locations and altitudes. The same technique could also be used to better understand existing flying sites, OR to find thermals (invisible pockets of uprising air which gliders need to stay up in the air for long period of time). And this is #1 thing we want – more found thermals, more airtime. So maybe it can be a sort of follow-drone that flies in your general area, telling you where the thermals are. You can tell you're in a thermal once you actually fly into it, but you're descending at 3 ft per second, so the amount of time you can fly searching for thermals is limited. Because you're flying a glider, the follow-drone can be a glider too with just a small auxiliary engine, you don't need too much battery power. --- So there you have it. Wind sports are technologically underserved because the market size isn't very big, but the pain is real, and it's #1 reason preventing more people from participating. Maybe some of the weather / hardware solutions you develop might also be applicable in other fields. Maybe you already have a solution that is fairly easily adjustable to wind sports (esp. drones).

jcr 12y ago

Health. When you make a list of what people will (gladly) pay a lot of money for, health will always be at the top of the list, since without good health, you suffer from a constant impediment. Unfortunately, providing solutions to health problems is probably well beyond scope for already struggling startups. PG asked, "What do you need that you'd pay a lot for?" in relation to changing sales discussions with the hope of bringing in some revenue for struggling startups. The problem with taking this a bit too literally is it's essentially the same thing as asking a customer what they want. The classic statement from Henry Ford is, "If I asked my customers what they wanted, they'd tell me a faster horse." Often, the customer may not know what they want. Instead of asking "What you'd pay a lot for?" you could ask "Where are you spending lots?" or "What costs you a lot?" One of my favorites is, "What regular task in your job annoys the ever living snot out of you? Yeah, what's that thing you absolutely dead doing?" What annoys you? What do you dread doing? What infuriates you? What upsets you? ... The funny thing about human beings is, if you ask people where it hurts, they'll often tell you. If you take the time to learn where they hurt, you might be able to help.

joncalhoun 12y ago
You are correct that phrasing the question different ways can often get better results, but I just wanted to hear from HN users and it seemed simpler to just ask the question verbatim.

rsaarelm 12y ago

Anti-aging life extension. Intelligence augmentation.

kokonotu 12y ago

my health...

alizaki 12y ago

A work/travel-program for knowledge professionals to travel the world and work a set number of hours a week on projects to pay their way. Air tickets, budget, airbnbs/apartments all paid for. Then you resell services to clients. You could probably keep a high enough margin by saving through smart purchasing/renting of travel along and picking lower cost/highly desired destinations (south east asia comes to mind, for example). a business of lifestyle, if you will.

thewarrior 12y ago

A way to boost my cognitive capacities.

bootstrapnyc 12y ago
aderol works pretty well

hoodoof 12y ago

Time.

pgcosta 12y ago

Starbucks said coffee :D

andrewstuart 12y ago

I make money to pay my bills when I get someone a job. Help me do that better. It's much harder than it sounds. None of the software products I have heard of help.

expose 12y ago

Affection and/or love.

csallen 12y ago

Easy access to well-funded companies looking to hire highly skilled full-stack developers for contract work. Word of mouth works great, but it'd be good to have something reliable to fall back on if my network falls through. I imagine I'd be willing some small % of my hourly/project fee (less than recruiters would take), or a somewhat high yearly rate for access if it was good. Wouldn't pay "a lot" for it, maybe $10-20/month, but I'd like some sort of "learning framework" software. I imagine it would be a clever combination of Anki/Mnemosyne (but modern and web-based), note-taking software like Evernote, bookmarking similar to Pocket, and maybe some basic reminders/tasks that I can schedule. Disclaimer: I've put no more than ~5 minutes of thought into this total. Someone said [legal] "tax evasion" as a service. I'd pay for that. As a contractor I've set up an LLC for myself, and I'm sure I'm missing out on lots of elementary tricks that could save me money. I actually have a meeting set up with a tax guy later this week, but my intuition is that if a company figured out how to scale this, it could be cheaper and more effective. I'd be willing to pay a % of the money saved if it's substantially more than what I've been able to do on my own. Office hours with experts. I'd pay upwards of $200/hr to be able to schedule time to speak with certain experts. I doubt I'd use it more than a few times a year, but that's still a lot of money. Some sort of automated personal assistant that coaxes me to do the things I need to do without a lot of manual input on my part. It's been tried many times and it's tough to do, but if someone gets it right, I'd pay a lot.

joncalhoun 12y ago
Office hours with experts sounds like Helpouts[1], AirPair[2], and I think there are 2-3 others out there that I am forgetting. Some are targeting specific markets (eg programmers) but the end goal would seem similar for them all. [1] https://helpouts.google.com/ https://helpouts.google.com/ [2] https://www.airpair.com/ https://www.airpair.com/

SiVal 12y ago

This question is interesting enough that I'd like to see it as a partner to the monthly "Who is Hiring" posting. This "What Would You Be Paying For (If Only It Existed)" is a question worth asking again and again....

MrDom 12y ago

Here's something my mother badly needs: an alternative to meditech that is easy to program and use, but cheap enough for small hospitals to afford. Just to put this in perspective, Meditech allows users (ie: non-technical medical personnel) to write their own "programs" for retrieving and organizing information in something called "Meditech Magic." Here's a clip: BEERv1.1, 100^b,T("")^#,DO{b'<1 NN(b,"bottle"_IF{b=1 " ";"s "}_"of beer on the wall")^#, N(b,"bottle"_IF{b=1 " ";"s "}_"of beer!")^#, N("You take one down, pass it around,")^#,b-1^b, N(b,"bottle"_IF{b=1 " ";"s "}_"of beer on the wall!")^#}, END;

mappu 12y ago
Interesting, tell us more. Do you need something that's a drop-in replacement with compatible syntax, or is it more about built-in libraries / integrations that could be solved as an extension to another language?
- MrDom 12y ago
  I was thinking a complete replacement of the entire platform, but thinking about it more made me realize that's not practical for anybody. For better or worse, a lot of applications are already written for this platform. A drop in "replacement" that creates a web-based UI for easy creation and retrieval of Meditech data would be very useful. It could communicate with the system and translate javascript into MMagic. Bonus points if it could translate already existing applications automatically. Time to see if Meditech has an API I can access from javascript. OT: I took a look at your projects page and I have to say I like the cut of your jib, sir.

gyre007 12y ago

LONGER LASTING PHONE BATTERY. Simples..

smileysteve 12y ago

> Nice, show me something cool when you've got your first PHP app running! Just show me what you have. It doesn't have to be an app. > Once you're more comfortable with basic web programming Don't use the word BASIC! Simple, Basic, Easy, Quick are all still denigrating their effort and experience.

mw67 12y ago

I'd pay a lot for a desktop version of whatsapp. I live in Asia (Hong Kong) and 90% of my communications with clients, staff, partners go through whatsapp because its instant, free and everyone has it. But I'm really tired of having to pull my phone to reply to people when I'm on my computer. It's a $19bn company, someone should work on this, ideally something multi-platform a la Slack would be fantastic.

lzy 12y ago
A quick Google search brought up the following 2 solutions, never tried them but just might be what you need? https://whatsremote.com/ https://whatsremote.com/ https://whatsappformypc.com/ https://whatsappformypc.com/
- mw67 12y ago
  Thanks, tried those but only work if you have an android phone (for your first link); and for your second like it works either on desktop (through the android emulator), or on mobile, but not on both. :(

joannerr 12y ago

Make things organized. Take care of all the messy details of my life. Bills, big events (like a wedding), group traveling. Would pay compared with a 3rd party's service fee.

gesman 12y ago

Regex-aware vertical search engine

cdvonstinkpot 12y ago

Self-powered subdermal GPS tracking for my pets.

chozero 12y ago

Teleportation.

lyricalpolymath 12y ago
stay tuned on http://www.eyevel.com http://www.eyevel.com ;)