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Comment by ahussain | Hacker News Reader

I honestly cannot tell if some of these ideas are real or just parodies of silicon valley, "avocado toast" tech culture: - AI for Communicating with Dogs - Baby Bidet - AR Debt Collector - Buyer’s Remorse Insurance

Are these really the most pressing problems start-ups could be solving right now? What about issues like cost of housing in cities, urban transport, infrastructure in the developing world, fixing 'fake news', new (non-ads) business models for the web, modern banking, helping refugees and displaced persons, more energy efficient air-conditioning, voice-to-voice language translation, collective decision making tools, reducing air pollution...

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I don't like any of these ideas but dismissing only the most pressing problems is a silly way to judge ideas.

It is easy to pick apart ideas, look:

- cost of housing in cities: Convince home owners to vote against their own self interest. Not a great business idea - urban transport: Everyone else is trying to do this. Self driving cars might solve this - Infrastucture in the developing world: Hard for outsiders to actually know where the infrastucture should be. Also, who pays? - fixing 'fake news': The issue isn't fake news, it is filter bubbles. Just fix human nature. - new (non-ads) business models for the web: There are other business models but ads are a pretty great option for the rest of the planet. This a non problem that only for hacker news posters care about. This is one of the most pressing issues on the planet?

> dismissing only the most pressing problems is a silly way to judge ideas

You are correct, but if you don't judge ideas on this metric then you risk becoming irrelevant to the vast majority of people, and you are not taken seriously when you say things like "we are going to revolutionize the world"

And yes, it is easy to pick apart those ideas, but that's exactly why more people (especially those who consider themselves talented, fortunate and ambitious) should be tackling them head on - because all the simple, naive approaches don't work.

> but if you don't judge ideas on this metric then you risk becoming irrelevant to the vast majority of people,

Not really. What "pressing problem" was Zuck addressing? Or Dorsey? Taxis have existed for a century, and still Uber sprang up.

Sometimes it's equally valuable to create something that people can't live without, even though the need may not exist at the time

Whatever you think about Facebook, it is not irrelevant to the vast majority of people. What was the pressing issue it was solving? Even the personal computer was not solving a pressing issue at the time. New products create the demand for it and the influence of it only makes sense in retrospect. There are not many solutions that are both achievable and solve obviously huge problems. If there were clear ways to solve these problems, tons of people will have already done it. We solve huge problems by first solving small ones and laddering up.

> AR Debt Collector

Have you ever tried to get an invoice paid by an a*hole customer?

It's not exactly that. The post names it "Accounts Receivables as a Service". The idea is to make sure the invoice does not become a bad debt.

The willingness to pay small vendors and contractors varies across countries, industries, and cultures. Often, it involves a ridiculous amount of haggling and bickering.

For a small business, it is a lot of pain and loss of productivity (let alone actual revenue in some cases).

It's not technically ambitious but definitely a real problem to be solved.

I suspect the parent thought "AR" was Augmented Reality whereas it actually means "Accounts Receivables".

I am wondering however about using AR to simulate the discovery of that horse's head in the bed...might work quite well to get quick payment.

and add to it simulated knee breaking... might have a product idea here.

But... Is this not already a service offered by the financial industry for an extremely long time? What makes this a start-up?

You're probably referring to factoring, you're right... age-old product. The opportunity here is to bring sales & customer success automation to the unsexy accounting world.

Is reason to believe current services have poor customer service or sales?

Yes, just like there were taxis before Uber.

The existing options are horrible. They charge a lot, spend an effort of maybe 5 minutes per customer, and will not handle complicated cases. The debt collection is even worse.

As far as what a more resourceful and powerful startup can do: they can consolidate a database of uncooperative customers or maybe even the debts of different vendors which would make legal action more viable, handle cross-border issues, provide payment ratings (different from credit rating - pretty sure many AAA companies would think twice before delaying payments!), and generally will be taken more seriously than a small business.

Just a handful of ideas.

I think there are many more options that you are perhaps not aware of. You can hire contractors to work with your clients either for an hourly wage or for commission. At the other end of the spectrum is factoring, where you sell your AR outright in exchange for cash up front. This is common in industries like retail where there's a long wait between manufacturing goods and getting paid for them.

The idea that big companies would care about a payment rating misunderstands the relationship. When your startup has an opportunity to close a sale on a BigCo and you find they have a history of taking a few months to pay... what do you did with that information? Insist on custom contract terms? Walk away?

I don't doubt that it's possible to create a startup that does something like Factoring and just does it really well (perhaps especially with better marketing). But that's true of any industry. I don't see any analogy to the Taxi/Uber disruption. It would fundamentally be the same thing.

> The idea that big companies would care about a payment rating misunderstands the relationship. When your startup has an opportunity to close a sale on a BigCo and you find they have a history of taking a few months to pay... what do you did with that information? Insist on custom contract terms? Walk away?

Heh. Work less or hedge the bets.

I am saying it because I am familiar with the situation. A certain acronym company which may or may not be associated with the colour blue had a minor PoC gig and invited a bunch of contractors on loose terms. Many worked around the clock. Closer to the end of the project, it became apparent that there will be issues with the payment. Smarter guys bailed out.

Knowledge is power. There are always options. Kids in their twenties may be mesmerised by the power of known logos, then they learn that it's more about the figures.

I am surprised that you honestly can't tell. I find this sincere. There are a few such things on the list, like modern firefighting and renewable energy from engineering microbes. So if we aren't cherry-picking, it's a varied list.

Moreover, it isn't always as easy to say what is the biggest idea. If we truly learned to communicate with animals, I can see that having the potential to radically decrease suffering in the world for example.

Instead of complaining some people's ideas aren't good enough enough, see it as a challenge to publish some of your own, you got some good problems there.

I actually loved this list and article, and what I like the most about it was the unpretentiousness of actually proposing real ideas, versus saying something that would sound admirable, but actually not really be an idea.

Can't speak to AI for dogs and buyer's remorse insurance, but the AR collector really spoke to me - I would hand over 5-10% of invoices to have someone else deal with getting my enterprise clients to pay on time (and getting them to pay interest when they don't). It might not provide much social benefit, but I wish it existed anyway.

Pardon my asking, but this piqued my interest. Assuming that you get paid 90%, why do you care whether your client also pays interest - presumably to the collector?

It something seems too good to be true...

I'm curious why you think AR would be a good way to solve this problem. I feel like I'm missing a few links in the chain.

By "AR" he's talking about Accounts Receivables. I believe you're thinking of Augmented Reality :)

yup, sorry I was too far into the tech rabbit hole myself there

Hasn't this been around for ages? "Factoring Accounts Receivable". All the cool kids were doing it in the 80's.

Since at least Roman times.

A quick search turns up a number of companies to which you can outsource your AR. Not sure what the payment structure looks like.

It's bike-shedding, because the kind of problems you mentioned are really hard to solve so people work on something else instead.

Soft debt collector is a huge pronlem though. I don't think AR is the best fix, but if someone can do it just slightly better, I'd be willing to throw a lot of money at it.

AI communicator for dogs is hilarious though. It follows the (Buzzword) for Dogs pattern everyone jokes about.

Am I the only one that remembers Gary Larson's "canine decoder"? https://img.ifcdn.com/images/e7aa1c63573be10d2cb7b18edc55b0d...

"AR" is not "augmented reality" in the post, it is "Accounts Receivables".

ah, that explains a lot - thank you!

oh derp, I actually noticed that a couple of times but there's so many "AR for X" startups that I get them confused.

Those problems aren't sexy and can't get anyone rich quick.

You're right, a lot of those problems aren't sexy. Yet, they're all critical problems that must be solved.

That said, some of them are sexy. Voice-to-voice translation, for example, is already being worked on substantially.

Most of those problems, though, seem to me to be more political problems than technological ones. The cost of housing in cities, the failure to help refugees and displaced persons, tools for collective decision-making, and infrastructure in the developing world are not problems that can be solved by throwing technology at them. These are political problems. In technological senses, every single one of these items is known, understood, and holds few mysteries for execution. In every single one of these cases, there are real obstacles that generally cannot be removed by technology.

Maybe someone wants to launch a startup to convince cities to permit housing to be built? Of course, I'm pretty sure that would be a lobbying group or advocacy non-profit... things that already exist and work very differently.

People do very often just grab for the sexiest problem at hand. There are always other problems that could be solved. Yet, it's perhaps possible that the startup model isn't the right tool for every problem

I agree with you, but if we think that many of our most pressing problems are political/governmental at their core, then doesn't that mean tech is a little impotent? - maybe we ought to be more careful about using "change the world" narratives, and maybe we should be encouraging more of our brightest minds to go into politics and government, if that's where the really interesting problems are.

* I am being a little facetious here, but only because I don't think I don't think tech has nothing left to offer in these, more challenging, problems.

It's perhaps less than optimally correct to assume that intelligence is infinitely flexible. The same minds that are brilliant at technology may not always be equally brilliant at politics, policies, and campaigning. It's even perhaps possible that both fields, and many others, have genuinely interesting problems.
I don't think tech has nothing to offer. Just that a lack of tech is not what keeps the political problems unsolved. Be not guided by the beauty of your weapons, they are but tools fit to serve a purpose. That my stovetop cannot comfort the bereaved does not render it impotent - merely unsuitable for that purpose.

Counterpoint: some of those are sexy problems. The design of cities is a really interesting and deep challenge.
For example, check out @nkoren's startup, Podaris: https://podaris.com/
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Conversely, there's actually nothing "sexy" about a startup for buyer's remorse insurance for fine art. It's unimportant and extremely bourgeoisie. It's not even a particularly big market.
There are real problems to solve!
Pretty much all of us on HN are extremely lucky in a lot of different ways. Solve a problem for some of the seven billion people less lucky than you, and you can achieve a double win. You can (1) build a business with a ton of growth potential and (2) sleep well at night.
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I'm disappointed with YC's startup ideas list. It is potent evidence that the YC community has become too insular--that rich people are spending too much time hanging out with other rich people.

For a deep look on designing cities I recommend reading the book the power broker.
Aaron Swartz' review of the book:
"I cannot possibly say enough good things about this book. Go read it. Right now. Yes, I know it’s long, but trust me, you’ll wish it was longer. I think it may be simply the best nonfiction book."

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