Ask HN: What software would you pay for right now?
Looking for some ideas on what to build for small-medium sized businesses/startups.
2. Customer journey automation tools. Autopilot is really good but its good to see competition in this area
3. Something that makes the burden of making data more accurate at the logging end better to report to business intelligence tools
4. Something that allows me to leverage my knowledge expertise as a consultant and better helps me deploy group coaching and accountability. Again there's some software out there for this already but nothing I like
6. Most important. A really good CRM. I've tried soooooooo many. Not a single silver bullet solution. Can't believe it given its 2016.
For 6, what's the biggest problem will all the CRMs out there these days? What makes you cringe?
2. is something that I did think about but am unsure about the market for the tool. I'd also like to learn more about 1. and 4. in greater detail.
3. I know how you feel - I've been in BI and logging data accuracy is just a pain. You'll also have to balance to make sure that the UX is not affected by having all these logging events.
For 6, all the tools despite promising minimal data entry don't actually deliver on their promise (at least not in my experience) and don't play as nice with other tools as they could. Customer journey automation is a growing market and CRM systems are not paying that area enough attention. It's not that they need to build something that can address automation itself -- they just need to play nice , very nice, with other tools.
For number 1 check out Stealth Seminar and EverWebinar. They're the two best in the business which says a lot.
For 4. What else would you like to know? What kind of detail would you like me to share?
Would love to know what's out there for 4.
I'm on twitter @khurammalik
For what it is worth, sometimes my search string is as follows (India related). As you can see, I am searching for narendra modi minus major news sites. narendra modi -timesofindia -ndtv -ibnlive -thehindu -Firstpost -facebook -indianexpress -hindustantimes -news -indiatimes
Because a lot of them have nowhere to list. The process is not fair, and in developing countries, people exploit this. Usually one person has the power to recommend and significantly affect the decision. That one person tends to get a lot of free lunches and free phones.
The lack of competition also leads to overinflated prices on the buyer's end and over promising on the seller's end. If the average applicant offered to Project A for $1,000,000 in 4 months, and suddenly company 13 offers to do it for $400,000 in 1 month, something sticks out.
If there were only 1-4 applicants, as usually happens for this situation, the shady inexperienced one will not stick out so much. As a result, a lot of these companies take these jobs and get burned, which damages the industry as a whole.
However, in Canada, we do have a system like that for government projects so it could definitely be a step in the right direction. Especially for developing countries.
One app which I can use to sell things, buy things, send messages, review things, control things, get notifications, track my health, learn things, etc.
This doesn't seem like something that would be too hard to do, considering that all apps pretty much do the same things. But that would make people's life so much better.
One way to solve this is to create a modular super-app for which developers can write components. This is much more than just the idea of plug-ins or extensions, because the super-app will be built from the ground up, and at various layers, to be highly modular, which almost every aspect being replaceable with user-chosen components. Also, the basic structure of the app and the its extension points cannot be changed unless by majority vote of registered users.
For example, imagine a task super-app. The user should be able to choose from various competing workflows, UIs, or 3rd-party integrations. These components could be purchased outright from a gallery, subscribed to, or paid per use. So if I have a little idea about how to improve todo lists, I don't have to build an entire app from scratch to do it, I can just define a UI flow.
I am pretty sure they call this an operating system. Moreover, most operating systems do provide built-in or pre-installed functionality, such as for scheduling, messenging, and note-taking.
In any case, if I were to write an app for any OS, I still have to think about authentication, UI, storage, etc. There is no tight environment where I can just submit a more performant file sorting algorithm, for example, and be paid by users who choose to use that in the OS. That is the idea.
Just write a Slack plugin for all those things, if they don't already exist (they totally do tho).
/s
In all seriousness. Communication IS the baseline requirement for the super-app you speak of. The next requirement is making the platform talk to any data source. Slack does both of these things surprisingly well.
Check this out:
Not meant to be sarcastic, honestly. I just can't imagine what your dream app would actually do that isn't done by a web browser or a virtual assistant.
What are your thoughts on bandcamp?
Also, soundcloud is just unreliable in general. Even on my laptop with fiber internet I find myself running into ajax calls that timeout. I always have to refresh the page and whatnot to get songs to play.
I could honestly write a small book about all the things I hate about soundcloud. Now that they have ads I really hope that a small competitor steals their pie. If I didn't have to work a silly enterprise job 9-5 I would just write a new platform myself....
A stripped down version of soundcloud would include:
no stupid animations when I click any buttons.
no 100 ajax calls every time I load a page.
a mobile interface that didnt suck - and had an easy button for getting to "my tracks".
A page that showed a history of every song I have ever played in chronological order so I could go back and find things I missed.
Smaller album art for each song (ie. more songs displayed per screen space unit).
No ads.
No fullscreen play/next buttons on mobile - screws me up all the time while biking/running/driving. The buttons are too big.
As for bandcamp - I don't use it. The few times I have used it have been fine though.
TLDR: I think soundcloud is the best source for finding new artists and music, but the platform from a UX and technical standpoint is shitty.
* works as well as Windows or OSX _out of the box_
* is beautiful and usable
It just doesn't exist at the moment unfortunately, but I'm confident PapyrOS, Pantheon or Cinnamon will come to solve this soon.
In fact, I've started a project to make that a reality.
It wouldn't require a monumental effort to create something similar that uses a file watcher to only sync specific directories that have changed.