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▲ belinder 4 days ago

Now where to get a list of such companies and products to decide what to build...

▲razakel 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

People constantly moan about their jobs, stupid processes, broken software and tools... listen to them and build something better.

▲bombcar 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The problem is that usually the moaners are not the loaners - they're not the ones making the purchase decisions.

That's why you either get in via very small business (where the owner is the buyer and user) or guerrilla (like Slack et al).

▲Zambyte 4 days ago | parent [-]

The people moaning are the ones building things that can be built better, not the ones that you should try to sell to.

▲pavel_lishin 4 days ago | parent [-]

I'm a moaner, but I'm not building anything.

The software my school uses to communicate with parents is fucking awful. Based on digging around their website & linkedin, I suspect they have a team of offshore developers - which is fine - but my money is that they don't actually have a team, they're paying a company that gives them supposedly-fungible engineer-hours instead of an actual cohesive team that works on the product and is proud of what they've made. They just eat requirements and shit something approximating software.

But what am I going to do? Say I build a competitor, solo, for cheap. (It can be done. The software doesn't do much. The hardest thing would be ensuring the emails actually get delivered.)

Now I get to play salesman. I have to sell it to my school. Now I have to maintain it. Our school isn't rich; a local school paid $130k for an unrelated hardware+software solution, so I'm at most going to get that, and now I'm on call 24/7, now I'm training the teachers & administrators to use it, now I'm fielding support emails, etc., etc.

Fuck it. I'll keep moaning.

▲bombcar 4 days ago | parent [-]

This is a perfect example. The school is suffering, but has nearly no budget. The users suffer, but have no say. Nothing changes, everyone cripples along.

▲dazh 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Is this true? I've tried for months to get people to talk to me about their problems and the most common answer I get is "everything's... fine?".

▲madmask 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A decent 3d CAD and multiphysics FEM (cheap comsol) would be a good start

▲ph4evers 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes but the industry is so rooted and vendor locked that it is extremely hard. People pay for Autodesk, Ansys, comsol etc. because it is proven and engineers are trained to use it. I would not be eager to use something new if I’m a constructor or car manufacturer.

▲nradov 4 days ago | parent [-]

Sure, a new startup will never get any market share in large, stable businesses like those. They would have to sell to other startups. New auto parts manufacturers pop up all the time.

▲qazxcvbnmlp 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yep, decent 3d CAD is expensive. Competition in this space would be fantastic

▲mickael-kerjean 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A dirty secret I recently learned about: look for public contracts in your area, to find some of those, google "contract register filetype:pdf".

Tons of crazy shit in there waiting to be disrupted. The tricky part is to get the right financials to bid on the interesting stuff, a good pathway there is to combine multiple companies together and make a shared bid, reach out to me if you're interested.

▲bagpuss 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

there's neoseed.io that sends out emails weekly with "ideas you can replicate"