Solve the Problems Your Parents Have
daniellemorrill.com
daniellemorrill.com
As mentioned in the second reply comment here, the "your parents have money" comment is mistaken relative to many of the hackers reading this site. A lot of young hackers, it appears to me, are leveraging their parents' investment in their own education to move into occupations with high economic returns, after the parents didn't have the same opportunity in their generation.
On the other hand, "someday you will be like your parents" is a probable future that most people forget too readily, so the point is well taken that if you want to build a better world for yourself in the future, you might get a reality check on your plans by building a better world for your parents today.
I can't speak to the issue of what single parents need. I know I would dread having to use any current kind of dating site if (God forbid) my wife predeceased me. Health information is always popular here on Hacker News, even among the young participants, so it stands to reason that anything that can help people a generation older than you are keep good health must have wide appeal. Even in an era of steadily increasing life expectancy at all ages,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2810516/
people still like to be healthier rather than sicker, and to live longer rather than die sooner.
Huh, I know some wonderful success stories for this use case.
Actually, the biggest problem among my parents is that they don't. My dad makes less than half what I do and he's incredibly knowledgeable, skilled, and hard working (a lot more than I am). If there's one thing I could do for him it'd be finding him a better paying job. But I don't know if there's any app that can fix being in a dying, underpaid industry. Sometimes I daydream about writing him a portfolio site or something, but I have no idea if that would help.
Even if your dad's skills are in a specific dying industry, he probably has some transferable skills which others want to learn.
Here's an example: http://www.designdimension.com/projects/cranium-connection-h...
Is that something somebody would pay to learn? I don't know. Maybe.
I would be very very surprised if there's no one who would pay good money to learn that.
I do think you should make him a portfolio, though. If he's in the top 1% and willing to travel, he can avoid being a commodity and start doing one-offs for more affluent clients. Those people are few, and they likely aren't where he is, so communication is key.
If his dad knows to carve beautiful things out of blocks of wood, he can probably pick up CAD software quite easily.
[1] http://www.judegomila.com/2012/12/manufacturing-renaissance-...
But, darn, all CAD software seems incredibly tedious to me -- even that which people say is "easy" to learn. It kind of reminds me a lot of every time I try to use IDEs for developing software (I'm the sort of person who likes a good text editor and the unix shell for software development.)
I'm wondering if this represents a valuable insight into what is lacking in existing CAD software, or if it's an just a necessary learning curve I haven't climbed that's inherent to the problem space.
I'm under the impression that CAD users learn the scripting language that goes with the software to automate a lot of the tedium. They're also the people who buy those crazy mice with the eight macro buttons and extension ports.
- There's always a faster way to do what you want, but you have to know about it. It seems like every photoshop tutorial I see introduces a new, difficult brush or technique. I guess the only way to be acquainted with these is to spend a ton of time in the software, messing with everything. Essentially, you need to make a career - or life-consuming hobby of it. Otherwise you have a very small set of tools which can do everything, but excruciatingly slowly.
- Artists spend hours doing even simple things, because it's a craft and they want it to be perfect. Programmers are used to knocking out quick iterations and seeing immediate results. I'm not sure if this takes a different sort of mindset, longer attention span, or just a real dedication to what you do. I suspect OP's dad has this mindset, because fine woodworking would be similar in this respect.
I've just accepted that I'm not cut out for art; I take photos, but I don't even have the patience to do post. It's a very foreign mindset to me - it seems tedious, but every choice really does require human interaction, and skilled interaction at that.
You're making incredible stuff that will likely last forever, but fundamentally performs the same tasks as something that costs 1/10 as much.
While you can find people who are willing to pay 10x Ikea for your wares, they're few and far between, and aren't likely to be repeat customers if the products are sturdy enough.
I feel for your dad. Unfortunately, skilled artisan labor in the face of mass produced items that work similarly and undercut cost greatly is not the greatest place to be.
There's no doubt that cheaper mass produced goods will replace more expensive manually produced ones. But as techies, we often overestimate the speed at which this change actually happens in the world.
I bet there are thousands of people who really value high quality handmade wooden goods. The internet and mobile tech now makes it easier than ever before to find these people. So, there's probably enough money to be made in selling to these people. There'll also be less competition.
If your furniture is not older than 20 years, I doubt that you have manually produced furniture. Ikea was the pioneer and the rest somehow followed.
Probably almost nothing that you own is hand-made.
It really depends on where you live; some places, people buy things that are more expensive but last forever.
Yes, fundamentally for the first one year. Maybe I am the only one who gets weird feelings when furniture starts to degenerate each time it is in use. Ikea is cheap and good looking, at least for a short amount of time.
If you don't like that, you can buy luxury furniture - or buy the high-priced Ikea stuff that somehow has reasonable prices.
I think hand made stuff is in high demand, as long as it is affordable. AFAIK it's not... for me. :)
You just have to know where to sell it and how to get work commissioned.
You need to understand that volume is not important but demand is.
While you can find people who are willing to pay 10x Ikea for your wares, they're few and far between, and aren't likely to be repeat customers if the products are sturdy enough.
Again, that falls into the "not even wrong" category. First of all, you sell at 20x-50x Ikea, not 10x. People at that end of the market are socially gregarious, wealthy, often into conspicuous consumption... and they always have friends just like them.
There are probably highly paid jobs for doing unique things with wood, but the problem is finding and getting them. The general way is networking. Having a blog would help with getting known.
Maybe an online blog is not the right thing in his world, which is probably "lower-tech". Maybe an email newsletter?
He's huge with the DIY and home projects crowd :)
His (and probably your dad's) problem is that he was still grasping at straws and willing to have the old world order back. He was longing to build custom kitchens that serve more to demonstrate his woodworking skills rather than to appeal to modern taste. He was also (erroneously) considering middle class to be his ideal clientele.
The solution is right there on the surface. You can't compete with IKEA, so don't. You've got unique skill and it can be applied to make unique pieces. For those who do not shop at IKEA and find the quality of "affordable Swedish crap" simply appalling. For people who don't really mind paying 2-5-10x the IKEA prices to get exactly what they want and in quality they want. It's the top of the market, but that's exactly where the demand for high-quality custom work is prevalent.
Also, the focus should really be not on the intricacy of the work, but on quality. The reason being is that the taste of carpenter is not likely to be aligned with the taste of someone needing a piece for his minimalist penthouse loft. The fancier the design, the more it detracts for the quality angle. So if you are to build your dad a portfolio site, make sure to feature either simple, but casual things or something that is clearly there to demonstrate the skill and not the design.
... it may sound like I ramble, which I am, but it was painful to talk to our carpenter and see how helpless and lost he essentially was in modern reality. You are in a position to help your dad, if not with anything else but your understanding how the Internet works and how it can be used for self-promotion. Do it, dude. Stop day-dreaming and build him a simple tasteful site (e.g. square space). Go from there.
And may I say the 5-10x increase in prices is too low - ikea will sell me a compete kitchen for 2000 ukp. If you sell a hand made kitchen for less than 50,000 ukp you are in the wrong place. (Incl labour and the cut to the architect)
Yes. I've suggested the possibility of a business before and I think he believe it's too risky or not lucrative enough. In fact, I've ran into this mindset very often with my family. For instance, I've been trying to convince my wife to sell things online for quite a while. She's convinced now, but for a long time she thought it was total pipe dream.
http://www.herriottgrace.com/ and http://shop.herriottgrace.com/
HG is product based and what you describe sounds more about creating exhibits and environments. However, there might be similar intentions toward craftsmanship and construction. It does take time and work to set up a shop like HG (site is on Big Cartel), but with the right amount of SEO / Social referrals it is possible to find an audience that cares. Good luck!
The ingenuity, lateral thinking, and sincere desire to help someone you guys have never even met on display today are just mindblowing.
My dad is in a similar predicament being, well, a shady dealer in a troubled part of the world. Unfortunately for both him and myself, he doesn't want to leave his "industry" despite the diminishing returns and the risk or prison (he has never been in prison). Even if he wanted to his industry probably wouldn't let him leave.
Posing this from a throwaway account for obvious reasons.
Here's a recap of the market from Consumer Reports:
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/2012/12/hear-well-in-a-no...
At least they could if his insurance covered the expense. Instead, he wears tech that's a few years outdated.
Not terribly cool now, but hearing aids are becoming cyborg tech. Better hearing than your peers with broad device interoperability - it might be enough to make folks with decent hearing to consider buying aids, like athletes and lasik / performance contact lenses. We're not far from slightly-outdated hearing aids being pretty cool.
And no, I'm not making light of his deafness - I'm just echoing his own excitement.
Hearing aids are limited in what they can do and will be limited in the near future. Hearing aids never restore full hearing let alone actually improve your hearing.
Hearing aids operate only on the outer ear and are basically just amplifiers with some smartness built in (trying to cut out background noise, amplify foreground etc). So they're really limited in what they can achieve.
The two greatest hopes for the hard of hearing are 1. Cochlear Implants 2. Flawless speech to text translation. You want to be working on either of those two.
Another friend just bought a hearing aid. The (other) comment about product + service is absolutely true. This friend marvels at the sophisticated DSP stuff going on. This friend is also grumpy that the internals are proprietary, so there's no way hack it, or even do adjustments. It's probably better for most people to have the expert do it, hearing is complicated stuff, but the principle stands.
With the costs of R&D, manufacturing, sales/service/support, and especially regulation/approval, it's not clear to me how the markets for low volume products are going to be disrupted.
There's probably a business there in the connecting people (possibly over Skype, etc.) and handling all the billing and tax-related issues for mostly-retired people who are collecting social security and are computer-friendly but not heavily computer-savvy. I'm sure my dad would use it... from a nice part of the country where there are a ton of golf courses.
My dad lost his job in the Hostess bankruptcy (save yr Twinkies jokes) and seeing the difficulty of navigating the labyrinthian, poorly-designed interfaces set up by the kind of companies hiring stationary and facilities engineers was shocking. And a lot of it isn't just bad, it's literally broken, like, full of bugs that would preclude you from actually submitting a resume if you didn't have your kid around to think of a clever workaround.
I think this is partly due to the fact that professions like my dad's are basically invisible to hackers, so even if you are making killer HR and hiring software, your sales department probably isn't even aware of some of these companies.
He kept saying, over and over, "hey, you should start a company to fix this mess", but I can't fathom the idea of spending even 5 years doing something that boring (even though it would be incredibly lucrative). Any takers out there?
It really is terrible. I got the job, at least.
He said a big part of the frustration is the resume formatting requirement — some systems will only take resumes in either PDF or Word, and sometimes Word 97 or lower, and sometimes these requirements aren't explicit, or the application system will take a file format the HR department won't actually accept.
He said another problem is the lack of an automatic "receipt", or some kind of response letting you know a resume has been received or when it's been rejected.
He also said that in general, he feels like the automatic screening performed by some of these tracking systems (for instance, looking for key words from the job description) weeds out qualified applicants and selects for people that are best at gaming the software.
The standardized formats are so the ATS can do keyword matching and place a score on the candidate. Qualified candidates are often screened out for not choosing the right words, while others jump to the top for keyword stuffing.
IMO, the quickest way towards a job is typically to circumvent HR and reach out directly to the hiring manager, department head, or get referred in if you have a connection there. In this economy, HR departments are simply dealing with such a high volume of unqualified candidates applying for anything and everything, that its hard to filter through to find the qualified ones without the help of an automated system.
So any web-design help or interest from a potential customer would be really helpful.
- For many companies, the main buying criteria for an ATS is EEOC compliance and the ability to report on their % diversity, veteran, etc hires.
- The buyer in an ATS sale in many cases is the CFO, not the HR dept. HR is often not seen as a strategic part of the organization, so even if they understand the value of a streamlined applicant process, they don't always have the policitcal capital to lobby for a better system.
- Often an ATS is purchased as part of a suite of other software (payroll, onboarding, etc.) and a software vendor basically just needs to check the ATS box.
- The switching cost for replacing an existing ATS is high, so even if there are better alternatives, many companies will avoid changing unless they have to.
- Application processes are sometimes designed to be more cumbersome than they need to be to screen out more candidates upfront. This is common especially in lower level positions.
- Certain more user friendly application workflows are patented.
It's an extremely crowded market with long buying cycles that requires an enterprise sales force and also requires you to keep up with employment law in 50 states. Your best bet is to specialize on a niche with unique demands.
Meanwhile, my mom had a stroke 6 months ago and lost some communication skills, so she needs to keep writing / talking to people to recover. She's semi-tech savvy, but not professionally, so we brought her on to develop our user manuals. Aside from start-up user development skills, by the time she's done here she'll also be adept at Wordpress & UserVoice.
Point is, 50s and 60s is not too young to learn new skills, including tech skills. Arguably you have better perspective on which tech skills actually matter because of better life skills.
I learned everything I know about analog electronics from a retired electrical engineer -- and I am vastly better at it from an intuitive side than anyone in my age group I've talked to. And I'm not even an EE; I only ever took two courses in the field (introduction, and microcontroller lab). Meanwhile, he's building state-of-the-art electron microscope accelerators and x-ray detectors in his garage.
At the same time, he is not a fan of programming, and happily finds 20 somethings to deal with that stuff for him.
Moral of that story -- do what you've spent your life developing the skills to do, and extend from there instead of trying to start from scratch. It's hard to start over at 60 or 70. It's not nearly as hard to push forward from where you are.
Good luck, and may huge amounts of venture capital be with you!
Word of mouth is my savior :-)
Maybe you miss some opportunities but I've the highest motivation if I solve a personal problems since I am not thinking about how big is the market, how to target which demographics. No, I just want to build a nice product for myself and I am happy even if it's just me who will use it.
Usually, these products get perfect and extremely well designed because you are the user yourself and care about every detail and at the same time you deploy and use a MVP very early since you don't care about anyone looking at your product. Worked for me and market is success is usually one step away. I couldn't work one second for a product where I won't be the user, I did it few times and it's awful.
It could also be a psychological phenomena since when you do something just for yourself you don't put too much pressure on yourself and the product, you don't force success like becoming the market leader or getting venture capital -- you are relaxed and in the zone which are the best premises to build an awesome product (compare to 'The Inner Game of Tennis').
While predictable, this is a great loss to the younger people, and perhaps a frustration for your parents. A mentoring network, content or career service that helps older people communicate with younger people may be useful.
If you want to rehash existing ideas (e.g. an affiliate network thats easy to use) then this idea/model works fine.
Helping people figure out how to live well and spend their time and money in a way that leaves them satisfied is a universal problem, and certainly one my parents have.
By this metric it's not actually a requirement that I do anything new.[0]
[0]: Or even that it's anything different from a traditional small business.
So, IMO it would be very hard to bring disruptive technology to a segment of the population that is very reluctant to change.
Obviously this won't be the case for our generation.
It won't? I often wonder what new technology my kids will get into in 30 years that I won't understand or care about. Obviously, it is different for geeks as we tend to keep up with technology better than the average person, but it seems naive to think that our generation as a whole is resistant to losing touch with the bleeding edge.
Another idea is to help the elderly tell their stories. It's a shame so many are passing away in silence. What about some way of helping retirement communities get their populations to write, perhaps by blogging? The customer here might be the retirement home, which would pay you to set up a community of blogs. It would be a way for members to write, and also give the retirement home something to show off.
The wisdom gained over a lifetime in the craft is like pure gold, but only if it is shared. Technology gives the custodians of these skills the opportunity to teach a large number of paying apprentices at once.
Google Rob Cosman or Paul Sellers and you begin to get an idea of the potential. True craftsmanship has been prized for thousands of years, it's not about to dry up and blow away just because someone invented computers or flat pack furniture.
Facetime usually doesn't work.
I love all that technology has to offer, but at the same time I hate the perceived limitation that we've made leaps and bounds when things like the above still are an issue.
*note: I'm speaking only about the benefit of consumer tech to parents/baby boomers, and not about things such as advancements in the medical field, automobiles, etc.
My grandma can't see my stuff on G+, due to its awful usability, but if they opened up a nice API, someone could build a client app suited to audiences like the 80+ set.
Who is really trying to tie the death of their parents into a technical blog?