Ask HN: How would you create a startup in an unfamiliar industry? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How would you create a startup in an unfamiliar industry?

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I have a friend who is a Physical Therapist and she showed me a few of the online tools that she uses. A lot of these tools, even the ones that are very successful, have out dated UIs, are difficult to use, and are not really liked by the majority of other therapists (from what I am told).

I see this as an opportunity to come in and make something better, but coming from a background in Software Engineering, it isn't very straight forward. My friend isn't interested in getting involved in any kind of project.

I was just wondering if any of you have had an experience like this? How would you approach something like this?

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Do you have experience writing web apps? If you remember the URLs for these tools, just sign up for trial accounts or something and try to reverse engineer how they work. I find flowcharts useful in nailing down the exact user flow, and then just use your CS/SWE knowledge to build a suitable backend that satisfies the constraints. You don't want to turn away your friend by bombarding her with endless questions, but you definitely have a place to start with what you've already described

There's a lot of stuff in the software that you can't see from the UI. For example, if the app is going to deal with patient information, it has to be HIPAA compliant and possibly conform to state laws governing healthcare providers. It may also need to interface with systems from dozens of insurers.

I think that the odds of someone unfamiliar with the industry creating a usable application (let alone one that's better than the widely used one) are very small. The best bet might be to find a co-founder who has had significant experience in this industry.

Building the app that I am interested in improving is actually trivial. The problem is that the information on the site is created by other users. So to get started I would need to create my own content which I am obviously not qualified to do.

The ones with outdated UIs have a captive market because the market is so small that no one bothers to compete. There are only 200,000 physical therapists in the US.

A market of thousands of customers who pay yearly for licenses and maintenance could be a great business for a small company to get into. It just doesn't have the growth potential to be a unicorn company that a VC would be interested in (which means you don't have to worry about competition from VC funded companies).

But even getting a quarter of those therapists to all pay $50 a year would be a pretty good businesses imo.

Is it realistic to expect to get 25% of a market you are newly-entering? I would say 1% or 2% would be more realistic, especially given the incumbents.

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