Ask HN: What products or services do you wish existed for your startup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What products or services do you wish existed for your startup?

57 pointsmemn0nis47 comments

What products or services (software or not) do you wish existed for your startup?

I'm taking 6 months off and looking for projects to work on (most of my experience is in B2B software, so ideally would work on a project in that space). Any ideas like "I wish someone produced X or Y" would be helpful!

View on HN

Something to simplify FTP.

When you partner with a business in b2b most data is delivered through sftp channels.

Make a tool that vastly simplifies that. Be it onboarding, offboarding, alerting, emailing, the works.

How is this different than file sharing (e.g., Dropbox)?

Based on own experience, there are a lot of systems out there that will only injest certain kinds of data via an FTP drop off. They won’t change or update their systems, but everyone who wants better visibility to the data they’re dropping into the ftp system will have to write something to cover that.

So, you’d probably need to build both halves of the FTP chain, but each would still need to deliver the value add if only half of the new system was being used.

Interesting... would you mind giving me an example of the type of data you are referring to? Or perhaps an example use case / real world example?

Real world example: uploading product, inventory and pricing data to ChannelAdvisor for processing and then republishing out to multiple e-commerce platforms (Amazon, Jet, Rakuten, etc). CA is a big complex powerful system, and my team was uploading FTP files every few minutes. We had the same kind of issues that E2E email delivery and receipt testing would be important for. In our case, we needed to know more about how many of those files were being read, injested, etc. There were dependent processes that could only be triggered if the data had made it into the system. We relied on process scheduling intervals to get close, but knowing more about the state of the ftp pickup itself could’ve improved yields to what we were trying to do.

https://docs.pyfilesystem.org/en/latest/reference/ftpfs.html ?

What does it take for CA to modernise their intake? As a customer, you should really them to change, rather than settle for a band aid around their drawbacks.

Big public SaaS company... they're not going to change on anything but their own roadmap schedule. They have competitors, and we looked at them, but we had at least two requirements that the newer, smaller, fresher competitors couldn't provide, and we couldn't do without.

I'm not involved in this project anymore, so it's not a current conundrum for me, but we had this issue a few quarters ago.

Do you mean you needed to know the state of processing on the ChannelAdvisor side?

Or would you have been able to get this information from FTP access logs?

Or could you have done it simply by checking if files existed?

I am building something like this for data scientists (currently being used in finance) and wonder if it wouldn't also have served your team well.

Yep, been persistently about 3-5 down from the top of my idea list for a while

Some notes:

* facilitation of non technical ops people (sales, client success, etc)

* automates status reporting to stake holders (did we get the data yet?)

* as part of status reporting, ability to mark data as QA’d / next steps

* how to hand off data to internal team

* on prem in your cluster (think regulated industries)

* notification/dashboard of file arrivals (think did weekly file come from partner X?)

Probably some big enterprise tool out there that does all this. Always wished there was an open source “sidecar” to a sftp server that would help lighten the load of random communication overhead of moving csv’s or other flat files back and forth between clients and keeping non technical people updated.

A user gateway. I need a product that can help me process user registration, login, session and other user identity logic. Than I can add my own user experiences using programming languages. The present user processing tools are too complicated and makes non sense.

Check out AWS Cognito

yeah, I checked it. Thanks!

Like this? (Open source) https://www.keycloak.org/

seems great, but how to use it in other programming language? How to add my backend logic?

Keycloak is an identity/authentication provider. Your app would leverage it using OpenID Connect (OAuth 2). Keycloak would handle the heavy lifting related to identity management, registration, password changes, authentication, etc. Your app would handle everything else.

Azure AD B2C https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/active-directory-...

thanks, I will check.

Auth0 might be a good fit for you. Not affiliated, just a fan.

thanks, checked it before, still complicated somehow

https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/ ?

On GCP, maybe firebase auth: https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth

Definitely this.

Edit: let me expand on why. You get to take advantage of the power of all of google's security team, with a nice clean simple api, great client libraries and excellent documentation.

There is also some cool features like the ability to tie custom data to a user (claims) and integrate with the realtime datastore for immediate notifications about changes to the user.

There is some great examples on how to implement this in the docs. I implemented this in my own app so that when I enable a 'role' for a user, the app literally updates (in both a Flutter mobile and React webapp) without even a refresh of the window. Pretty epic UX and super painless to implement.

Oh and it is effectively free.

Non-starter. You're giving all your user information to Google. If you're OK with that, go for it. A lot of people are not.

I hear you. It really depends on your requirements. That said, any site that is currently enabling 'google login' or 'xyz login' other than just a standard email login is already doing this. Never mind the fact that significant numbers of users are already on gmail or google apps.

The trade-off being that you can run the risk of a security hole in your authentication flow.

I still miss Mozilla Persona.

I also looked up the terms... this is the only thing I noticed that was relevant... 'except as necessary' is pretty vague, but I'd take that to mean that they should probably inform you first.

https://cloud.google.com/terms/

5.2 Use of Customer Data. Google will not access or use Customer Data, except as necessary to provide the Services and TSS to Customer.

why not using WebAuthn? https://webauthn.io/

I use Auth0, its been amazing though sometimes the docs are a little difficult.

Horizontizally scalable RDBMS that can grow by adding commodity hardware and storage and can be queries with ANSI SQL. And MIT/BSD licensed.

(Not a Six month project, I know....)

Thank you for the suggestion. I like the idea, but unfortunately I think it is out of scope for me!

cockroachdb

I would absolutely second CockroachDB here, though it’s not BSD or MIT licensed. I’m not sure why that is a reasonable thing to want, though.

Isn’t that Google Cloud Spanner?

TiDB is Apache 2.0 licensed, but it is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability. https://github.com/pingcap/tidb

I think one of the main issues in startups is building cross-platform products as quickly as possible, so I think this is why some companies like Google work on some new technologies/methodologies like Kotlin

But there's a big issue, most of the times founders are not programmers and looking for some codeless solutions

And I think there're not any countable solutions in the market. The somewhat countable solution that exists is Bubble.io but even Bubble has some limitations and even issues but has a very good UI interface and logic behind

I decided when our startup officially launched for our next startups and projects we build an invaluable solution and I think I have the answer in mind

Mentorship after a successful Kickstarter.

I think there's plenty needed to get to a fully funded Kickstarter too

A service that hooks into Stripe or whatever and sends a nice "welcome / swag" package to the address of whoever just signed up.

It should take care of ordering and stocking t-shirts, mugs etc. with my design and then shipping it.

A better Scrum Board and Issuer tracker than Jira

To be fair, as far as I can tell Jira's Scrum Board is pretty good (I only test drove it, though). It gets a lot of stuff right. It's main problem is that it's connected to Jira. There appears to be a lot of baggage there. If I were to do this (and I've been tempted), I would make the UI pretty similar to Jira's and remove most of the complexity underneath. Of course the downside to this is that the complexity underneath is there for a reason: People who are not programmers want a whole bunch of weird stuff. However, I think there may be a small market for a programmer focused Scrum board that has basic reporting capabilities (which Trello, unfortunately lacks: Screenfull is quite good, but necessarily fiddly). Probably would fit into a 6 month project.

There is a myriad of excellent alternative products to Jira in this space and it list keeps growing. The problem is that once a company has something like Jira ingrained in the culture, it is near impossible to switch.

A product that finds me the best deal for my customized services, for example servers, emails, hardwares, etc.

Have you checked out Vendr for software?

This takes up so much of my time as a founder... trying to determine where I should be hosting, what technologies (VPS, Serverless, SQL vs NoSQL, Azure vs AWS, etc) I should be using, etc. If I’m paying $20/mo to DigitalOcean would the bill be cheaper at Amazon? Would their extra technologies make me more effective? Does it even matter? Why don’t vendors have a list saying “if you need this, use that” for all their horribly named services that all overlap themselves?

Don’t get me started on email hosting. I don’t even know what’s possible in the email world so I’m 100% sure I’m overpaying but I don’t have the time to figure it out.

A financial modelling tool that also has API access for booking revenue.

Running an e-commerce store, would definitely pay for something that could help me track margins on my products, when I break even, etc.

"Virtual" scrum master

Could you expand on this?

I recently took over scrum master role and I've built my own JIRA visualisation to help me (and the team) during standups that basically highlights progress-over-time (rather than JIRA's 'just now'). It basically helps us to compare each day against yesterday to see trends.

It also does some status magic by looking at story point progression, time logged and so on to highlight tickets that "should" have progress but doesn't (so that we can converse about it).

It also helps me specifically by calculating story points per day / per person etc for the next sprints, how much to add etc.

I figured I could even add some slack bot to send messages automatically about e.g. "tickets in trouble" to further remove some manual work.

Rambling on here but, does it sound anything at all to what you're looking for?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com