[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What are the least competitive consumer and ...
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Ask HN: What are the least competitive consumer and enterprise
markets?
My experiment in working backwards from market to problems to
solutions: 1. Start with listing markets that have a low degree of
competition, but don't have a mega-monopoly owning them. These will
mostly be small markets. 2. Examine the problem space within each
and see if new technology (SW / HW) can deliver 10x improvements.
3. Determine whether these markets are a short enough hop away from
deeper ones. It's surprisingly hard to get a "map" of existing
markets, but am curious about those the community can readily
identify.
Author : trevett
Score : 63 points
Date : 2020-08-05 23:48 UTC (23 hours ago)
| ideals wrote:
| Services that sell to HOAs
|
| This is something I've been thinking about since my HOA sent me
| an email a month ago warning me that the sidewalk outside my
| property may be damaged and in need of repair because if someone
| tripped I'd be liable for this. Of course the email had a bunch
| of red and gold text.
|
| Luckily for me they already had a concrete cutting company come
| by and survey the area and provide estimates for each plot.
|
| My bill would be about $200 to fix the sidewalk. I looked outside
| and it was totally level and no edges exposed.
|
| In really small print at the bottom of the email was information
| telling me it was optional to do, but again I might be liable if
| anything happens.
|
| Today I saw this person outside doing the concrete repairs. It
| was a guy with a small trailer and grinding down the sidewalk
| with an angle grinder and a vacuum to suck up the dust.
|
| This basic concrete cutting job is pulling money in if he can go
| around and tell all the HOAs about the urgent need to fix
| sidewalks and HOAs pass that along to all the residents.
|
| How many people paid the $200 "to be on the safe side"?
|
| Now you repeat for all the other services you can think about for
| home maintenance and repair and contact HOAs with estimates they
| can pass along.
| tmaly wrote:
| I would love to get rid of my HOA to be honest. We have a
| property management company that interfaces with them. I put in
| a change request back in early June. I am still waiting for
| approval.
|
| My neighbor mentioned something about bylaws and the
| requirement for HOAs is only 20 years. That is up in December.
| However, I have to confirm that.
| brailsafe wrote:
| So, you wouldn't really be liable for this right?
| gruez wrote:
| >because if someone tripped I'd be liable for this
|
| isn't the sidewalk the city's responsibility? Also, wouldn't
| your homeowner's insurance cover it?
|
| >In really small print at the bottom of the email was
| information telling me it was optional to do, but again I might
| be liable if anything happens.
|
| Honestly the arrangement seems rent-seeking(ish) to me. At the
| very least it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They're not
| providing any _real_ value, just scaring people into paying
| with an (arguably) misleading letter.
| maxk42 wrote:
| Dog-walking. My roommate used to make six figures by setting up
| standing dog walking appointments for affluent clients. She only
| worked six hours a day. Note that this was before the days of
| Rover which probably dominates the market in large cities, but I
| suspect suburbs and rural areas still need help.
| adrr wrote:
| Anything relating to regulated banking. The challenger banks all
| have a chartered bank partner under the hood.
|
| Licensed Banking: a there hasn't been a new chartered banks in a
| decade
|
| Also Clearing Brokerage. Credit Bureaus. US Core banking
| software, KYC providers(Eg:lexis nexus), bill pay providers
| Keyframe wrote:
| Film cameras. Dominated by ARRI, a 100 year-old company whose
| worth is ~250m. There were disruptions (red, sony, etc.), but
| they regained dominance rather quickly (one semi-metric is oscar
| nominees which cameras are used, as well as top 500 grossing
| films over a year). Similar stuff in the same industry with
| services and lenses with Panavision (rental only) and dollies
| (Chapman Leonard, also rental only).
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Or even digital imaging, which is a new technology forced onto
| an otherwise very conservative industry.
|
| As an example, think of TSMC's upcoming 3nm process. It has a
| density of 300 million transistors per square millimetre. A
| Canon 5DS R has a 50 MPix resolution, which works out to about
| 60K photosites per square millimetre. That's a "budget" of
| 5,000 transistors per photosite!
|
| That's more than enough to do "digital sensing". That is:
| accumulating photons in a digital counter instead of using an
| analog capacitor, allowing unlimited dynamic range. There would
| be no such thing as sensor saturation, allowing unlimited
| "electronic ND filter" effects without the colors being
| distorted even in a long time-lapse. It would allow "steering"
| of the data to nearby accumulators through an on-chip network
| at megahertz rates, providing near-perfect digital shake
| reduction without having to physically move the chip. Shake
| reduction could track moving objects and avoid blur even for
| very long hand-held exposures with cars or people in the scene,
| the same as what the Google Pixel does, but at a far higher
| quality. The motion vectors could be fed into a video
| compression stage, improving picture quality to _above_ what
| the compressors can normally achieve by "guessing" the motion
| from 24fps still frames.
|
| Etc, etc...
| atarian wrote:
| Here's a list you might be interested in:
|
| - home services: lawn mowing, pest control, firewood delivery
|
| - vehicle services: mobile oil change, mobile tire sales,
| locksmith
|
| - event/seasonal services: catering, event management, tent
| rentals
|
| - entertainment: bike tours, party rentals, hunting guides
|
| - personal care: mobile haircuts, mobile makeup, mobile massages
|
| - training/coaching/consulting: pet training, college application
| consulting, credit repair consulting
|
| - trades/construction: electrical, plumbing, carpenting
|
| - business services: videography, bookkeeping, junk removal
|
| - real estate transactions: moving services, realtor, vacation
| rental management
|
| Source: https://sweatystartup.com/businesses-i-love/
| flaque wrote:
| My uninformed guess is legal "engineering", such as tariff
| engineering. Discovering the cheapest way to manufacture goods /
| run your business given the most up to date legal landscape. To
| some respects, privacy companies that help you navigate GDPR/CPA
| are in this category, but there's plenty of space here
| (immigration, copyright, zoning, etc).
| wombatpm wrote:
| This appears to be the IKEA practice, they less of a retailer
| and more of an global tax avoidance scheme
| bobosha wrote:
| Related: I highly recommend The Blue Ocean Strategy[1]. I suspect
| what you are looking for is the Blue Ocean market space, not
| necessarily the "least competitive". As others have pointed out,
| if a sector lacks multiple entrants, it is almost always with
| very good reason.
|
| [1] https://learn.blueoceanstrategy.com
| mamcx wrote:
| You can _safely_ bet than any below the highest tech-level
| industries (so anything not called Apple, MS, ....) are under-
| served.
|
| I work in the small-bussines and before in government. have done
| some stuff for some of the biggest companies in my country
| (Colombia).
|
| To say ALL of them are like 20-10 years behind is not say enough.
|
| Today, I'm integrating with cobol and other stuff that only have
| text-based files as interface.
|
| A problem is that not many investment are in this long tail, so
| when talking about solutions for this market is possible to NOT
| get excitement for it.
|
| I'm building on the side a relational language that eventually
| could be an Access+Excel tool, but everyone is interesting in the
| markets that reach billons :).
| kirillzubovsky wrote:
| When it comes to market selection, I often think back to how Ryan
| Petersen came up with the idea of Flexport. He put up landing
| pages and some ads, and only when he saw interest from the
| biggest players did he go all in. It's a pretty darn good way to
| find out, even if it sounds too simple, or cheap, but if you
| listen to the rest of the interview, Ryan had semi-failed enough
| times beforehand to realize that simplicity was key. Maybe throw
| a bunch of landing pages up and see what works?
|
| (original audio segment:
| https://smashnotes.com/p/y-combinator/e/92-ryan-petersen/s/h...)
| claudiulodro wrote:
| The least competitive markets are most likely local small-
| businesses with regional restrictions. By this I mean places that
| where you need to physically go (e.g. dry cleaner) or where
| someone needs to physically come to you (e.g. electrician).
| Because you're only competing with people in a specific region,
| these are going to be much less competitive than industries where
| you compete with the whole world (e.g. software).
|
| This doesn't necessarily help you come up with new software, but
| it is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about since I'm
| also trying to start a business.
| [deleted]
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| My experiment that I am thinking of recently is almost the
| opposite.
|
| 1. Start with markets with high competition. E.g. paid
| alternatives to Google forms.
|
| 2. Get a list of 50+ products competing in the space. If < 50 go
| back to step 1.
|
| 3. Google to find what people, who are on the paid tiers of those
| products, complain about. This is easy as I am now Googling brand
| names so should get laser targeted results (v.s. googling
| "problem I had creating a form" -> Stack Overflow user who'll
| never pay for a form!)
|
| 4. Interview them to dig in further. If you can't get any of
| these people to even spare 5 minutes to talk, then it might be an
| indicator that you wont get them to buy.
|
| 5. Based on this, derive a hypothesis for a MVP that would solve
| the problem, along with the market it serves and where to find
| these people.
|
| 6. Presell to people in #4. If they say no - dig in further as to
| why. If they say yes, aim for maybe $1000 monthly revenue
| presold, then build.
|
| The reason for this approach is it filters for the "are people
| motivated enough to spend money" which I think is the biggest
| risk for the ideas I come up with. Since they are (they already
| use the "competitor" product"), can I carve out a niche where I
| do something better for a specific group of people? Can I reach
| them easily without spending crazy money on ads? And am I solving
| their problem?
|
| Caveat is this is designed as an idea generator for an Indie
| Hacker style project, not a startup!
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| This active approach to engaging people nicely compliments
| advice you hear about on setting up passive channels like
| landing pages w/ Google Ad Words campaigns.
| disambiguation wrote:
| anecdotal, but my roommate is a first year lawyer. A lot of his
| job is taking old legal docs and updating them for new deals.
| This is a lot of tedious search and replace and formatting in
| hard-to-edit PDFs.
|
| A sample scenario is one of his senior colleagues takes a PDF and
| writes in some comments -- almost like a teacher grading an essay
| with a red pen, change this x to y, etc. This goes to my friend,
| who reviews, edits, and returns the draft by email. And there
| will be a lot of back and forth, plus other people making edits
| in real time.
|
| watching this i can't help but notice how remarkably similar it
| is to programming, minus all the convenience of programming
| tools.
|
| i don't know what the product or barriers are here, but these
| people could easily 10x if they knew about version control and
| markup languages.
| droidno9 wrote:
| If they're using PDFs, they're doing it wrong.
|
| Most law firms are fully integrated into the MS Office
| ecosystem. Even with emailing things back and forth, the Track
| Changes feature in Word does a decent enough job. (Although
| transactional lawyers will say it's the bane of their
| existence.) More advanced firms will use a document management
| system to save and back up documents to the cloud, and such a
| system usually also has built-in version control. So, the main
| technical problem with lawyers emailing back and forth has to
| do with the fact that no standard exists for the industry for
| document management, so these document management systems don't
| talk to each other. Even if the firms are using the same
| system, the functionality that would allow collaboration
| between opposing lawyers is terrible, at best.
|
| More importantly, the real barrier to innovations in the legal
| industry has to do with economics. Lawyers get paid by the
| hour, so there's almost no incentive to become more efficient.
| Large clients can demand efficiency in the form of slashing the
| final legal bill by up to 40-50% sometime.
|
| Finally, even the smallest changes introduce professional
| liability risks, so lawyers tend to stick to well known and
| understood processes that have withstood the test of time.
| Unless there's a concrete, nontrivial incentive for a lawyer to
| try something new, you're not going to find one voluntarily
| sticking his neck out in the name of innovation.
|
| If there's an industry that massive savings [to the client] can
| be had with technological innovations, the legal industry would
| undoubtedly be it. But for the reasons stated above, startups
| working in this space will run out of money long before they
| could introduce meaningful changes.
|
| Read up on Atrium if you want to understand more about the Tech
| x Legal space: https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/atrium-shuts-
| down/
| codingdave wrote:
| I work in this niche. I actually work a niche within this
| niche, and have implemented solutions. We do have a couple
| competitors. But most new players in this arena come in with
| exactly that statement - "oh, this is like programming, lets
| bring in markdown and git and solve all the things!" Then they
| realize that the level of detail and the expectations of legal
| document authors are far higher than they ever expected.
| Markdown doesn't cut it. HTML doesn't cut it. CKEditor and
| tinyMCE don't cut it. We spend a huge amount of effort re-
| writing plugins for those editors to meet the actual
| expectations, and defining new data formats for all the
| citations and interlinking of legal documents.
|
| Not that there isn't room for competition - there is. But the
| barriers are not what people expect. And the easy answers that
| coders tend to see aren't the real problems.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| A legal IDE. And diff-able doc formats.
| wombatpm wrote:
| That was the strength of WordPerfect in legal areas for many
| years. Formatting was special codes within a document and
| Wordperfect could generate Black lines in the margins to
| indicate changed lines.
| dhr wrote:
| A lot of firms still pay by the hour for such work, so there's
| little incentive for people to be more efficient at this.
|
| Plus for people in the first few years, there's pressure to
| meet a billable hour quota - work like this pads the numbers.
| travmatt wrote:
| Justin Kan created a legal business that attempted to be more
| efficient than a traditional law firm, but it seems that
| venture folded. I'd be interested in a post-morten and if he
| thinks there is any innovation on the current law firm
| business model.
|
| https://www.techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/atrium-shuts-down/amp/
| faangFar wrote:
| Medical care.
|
| You want medicine, you need to pay someone who's part of the
| Physician cartel, a pharmacy, a pharmacist, and whoever has the
| patent.
|
| With computers and science you often need 0 of these except the
| manufacturer of the drug.
| James_Henry wrote:
| Personalized medical research, n-of-one therapies that you can
| (with help) self-administer, and other types of, perhaps at
| this point, "gray-market" medical care could be profitable.
| Animats wrote:
| _It 's surprisingly hard to get a "map" of existing markets_
|
| No, it's not. It might take more than a Google search.
|
| You can extract what you want from US business census data. See
| "data.census.gov". Look for NAICS codes with a small number, but
| greater than 3, companies, and high dollar amounts for the
| category.
| trevett wrote:
| It seems there are 19 codes: https://www.naics.com/search-
| naics-codes-by-industry/. I'm interested in more granularity
| e.g. where "mobile video editing software" appears on the map,
| show me the market size, top companies, estimated sales, etc.
| Animats wrote:
| That's just the top level of NAICS codes. For example, 441320
| is tire dealers. 512191 is "Teleproduction and Other
| Postproduction Services"[1]
|
| "Mobile video editing software" is a product type, not a
| business type. If you want product categories, you need a
| different data source. Such as Amazon's, or Google's or
| Alibaba's product tree. Here's Google's product hierarchy.[2]
| Google category 4953 is "Software > Computer Software >
| Multimedia & Design Software > Video Editing Software".
|
| If you want such results handed to you without much work on
| your part, you may have to pay a company which collects such
| data. NAICS or D&B or some of the mailing list companies
| could make you a list.
|
| [1] https://www.naics.com/code-search/?naicstrms=video
|
| [2] https://www.google.com/basepages/producttype/taxonomy-
| with-i...
| trevett wrote:
| Thanks for that. I think the NAICS codes could be fleshed
| out a little to be more relevant and useful.
|
| Not to beat this example to death, but there is a market
| for mobile video editing applications and I have no idea of
| its size. Wikipedia only lists one iOS product. I feel
| there would be a lot of value in providing this kind of
| information easily to people. I personally don't want to
| engage with a market research firm during the exploratory
| phase.
| jkaptur wrote:
| So you're saying it's an area... without a lot of
| competition...
| tedmcory77 wrote:
| Are you familiar with Porters five forces? and the sixth, which
| is regulatory environment?
|
| If you're not, it's worth it's weight in gold when evaluating
| markets and looking at how do build your business model.
| this2shallPass wrote:
| Great strategy - you are saving yourself a lot of time with this
| approach.
|
| What's the value of a good "map" of an existing market? What are
| you willing to pay for one?
| joshuamarksmith wrote:
| I feel that maps of existing least competitive markets are low
| in competition.
| pieno wrote:
| I'm not sure whether the competitiveness of the market is very
| relevant for your success in finding a profitable innovation.
| Profitable innovation is hard, in any market.
|
| There may be an expectation that there are higher profit margins
| in non-competitive markets, so you may have an advantage there
| that any innovation will allow you to capture more excess profits
| as it will take longer for those excess products to be eaten by
| increased competition you triggered.
|
| On the other hand, there's an expectation that the incumbent(s)
| in a non-competitive market has a lot of funds at its disposal
| (due to years of capturing producers excess profits in a non-
| competitive market) to hamper innovation.
|
| To me, this illustrates that whether the market is competitive or
| not is not very relevant. The question is whether you are able to
| outcompete the market by reducing costs and/or improving your
| offering compared to your market, whether that's a single
| monopolist or 1,000 highly competitive companies.
| slantaclaus wrote:
| Take a look at Costar (Commercial Real Estate Data / GIS
| Demographics)
| thorwasdfasdf wrote:
| Beware: if there are markets that appear uncompetitive, there is
| a damn good reason for it. And it's never becaues no-one thought
| to look there. If you do find uncompetitive markets, it'll most
| likely be because someone has regulatory capture, or there is
| something preventing new entrants, high barriers to entry, or the
| cost of user acquisition is simply too high for new entrants.
| haolez wrote:
| What a wonderful meme: "regulatory capture". Words have power!
| I'll definitely use this.
| kube-system wrote:
| It's a pretty common political/economic term
| afarrell wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1053/ sometimes it is nice to bask in the
| glow of another person's TIL. There is a simple joy to it
| like the smell of freshly-cut grass.
|
| yes and -- informing someone that the term is more widely
| used than they might otherwise have known is indeed useful
| haolez wrote:
| It's not common in my native language.
| kube-system wrote:
| Makes sense, I wasn't calling you out, just trying to be
| helpful.
| travmatt wrote:
| It's an idea that is studied in political economy. If the
| idea resonates with you there are a lot of discussions
| around it: https://www.theregreview.org/2016/07/07/lupo-
| a-resource-list...
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Okay, this comment reminds me a bit of the economist joke with
| the $20 bill[1].
|
| But the essence of the comment is spot on, these apparently
| barren landscapes of competitors often have a cause, and so
| just finding such a market is only the start of analyzing WHY
| it seems to be so noncompetitive.
|
| [1] Two economists are walking down the street and one sees a
| $20 bill on the ground and picks it up. The other asks, "Why
| did you pick that up? It's clearly counterfeit, if it were a
| real $20 bill someone else would have already picked it up."
| xapata wrote:
| That's the efficient market hypothesis.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Or, some businesses are just not worth it.
|
| You can throw as much business intelligence and automation to,
| let's say, an Ice Cream truck. It will still be an Ice Cream
| truck. Nobody is becoming a millionaire with it.
| Animats wrote:
| You could have a gamified app which tells kids when the ice
| cream truck is getting close.
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| Pretty sure there are quite a few millionnaires who own ice
| cream trucks.
| cameron_b wrote:
| I think this is a good example of how sometimes we sit in the
| VC space where you go from $0 MRR to THE MOON or it really
| doesn't mater. There are a lot of avenues to really
| significant lifestyle businesses outside of 4 Hour Work Week
| SaaS Solo Ventures, It is important to remember that
| sometimes taking the risk back a notch, applying all the same
| principles, leveraging less, and working hard -- maybe even
| making a tangible product, like food, say -- can be just as
| rewarding.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| What if the end goal for the business owner isn't to be a
| millionaire? Maybe he's totally cool with just having a
| couple of ice cream trucks and clearing 150K in income every
| year?
|
| Would THAT be worth it then? Maybe not to you, but to the guy
| who came from a third world country and built his company
| from nothing and now he's living an upper middle class
| lifestyle? To that guy it's the essence of the American
| Dream.
| Jommi wrote:
| I think you should still include the temporal factor here.
|
| Yes there might _have_ been a reason for a the market to be
| competitive, but something might have changed in the past few
| years that has removed or minimized that reason.
|
| These are the marketing that are ripe for competition.
| kube-system wrote:
| Those are all good points -- I would also imagine that many of
| the least competitive markets are simply just niche markets.
| There could be a potential to easily make a 10x product in many
| of these markets, but the reward is likely not great enough to
| make that profitable. Although, some people do okay if they're
| able to make a one-man-shop out of it.
| trevett wrote:
| Could be nascent markets with a few seed-funded startups trying
| to serve them. The goal is not to find totally uncompetitive
| markets but those that are more niche, with a lighter degree of
| competition, where marketing efforts can be more efficient. The
| last requirement is that there is an overlap with a larger,
| adjacent market along a few dimensions.
| afarrell wrote:
| One class of markets that I suspect is a target-rich
| environment: disability-adaptation tech.
|
| 1. There is a decent chance that existing entrants are tied
| down by a focus on meeting the regulations rather than on
| delighting users.
|
| 2. You _might_ be able to significantly scale-up and thus
| improve the unit economics.
|
| While the market of people who can pass the means-testing to
| qualify for whatever government-subsidized benefit exists might
| be small, the nature of bureaucracy means there is often a MUCH
| wider pool of people who are "quasi-disabled", either
| permanently or temporarily.
|
| Note that there are a few disabilities which are _so_
| overwhelmingly common that the market is already saturated. The
| classic example is eyeglasses.
|
| 3. The specific disabled population is a ready-made population
| of early adopters _IF_ you identify that you can keep your
| focus on delighting users and just use the regulations to
| remind yourself of risks and edge-cases. (This really will
| depend quite heavily on the _quality_ of the regulations --
| notice the difference between Japanese zoning and SF-bay
| housing-approvals) Lots of legacy disability tech:
|
| * Has a pretty frustrating maintenance cycle, so you can win on
| a strong customer service brand _IF_ you can innovate on
| operations.
|
| * Can be pretty frustrating to use, so you can win big on
| design.
|
| A focus on _delighting_ users rather than ticking boxes is
| naturally going to produce a naturally better product. Here is
| the key tactic though: lean on the early-adopters for high-
| detail feedback. This problem occupies a _much_ larger
| proportion of their lives than the average user of a product.
|
| This higher-strength signal of user needs is known as the "Curb
| Cut Effect".
| https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/11/15/the-curb-cut-...
|
| This also seems to hint at a good trick to turn any regulatory
| box-ticking exercise into purpose-driven-design. After all, a
| focus on privacy-by-design is better than a focus on the letter
| of GDPR-compliance, right?
|
| ---------------------------------------------------------------
| -------------------------------------------
|
| Hilariously, I used to work for a YC company unwittingly
| building assistive tech for my particular disability. Their
| Curb Cut effect was so ridiculously strong, they've
| occasionally written ad copy with reference to a symptom I've
| experienced and I'm pretty sure they _still_ don 't even
| realize it. Looking back, I now really wish I had been self-
| confident enough to explicitly disclose -- especially when
| their CEO started using a wheelchair.
| rglovejoy wrote:
| The problem here is that the real customers are the health
| insurance companies, Medicare, and the VA. They don't care
| about being delighted, they want inexpensive and rugged
| devices.
|
| That's the problem Dean Kamen had with his iBOT wheelchair.
| They were very cool and their users loved them, but they went
| for something like $25,000 each and likely needed frequent
| maintenance.
| refurb wrote:
| Yup, if you've every watched network TV and seen the "Did
| you know Medicare will pay for X?" and wondered why, it's
| exactly this.
|
| If you want Medicare to pay for a product, you need a
| positive Coverage Determination. And if you get it, you
| just opened up a 50M person market (obviously a subset,
| since not everyone will need it) and all you need is the
| patient to say to their doctor "I want that" and it's paid
| for.
|
| It's a heavily front loaded business, but if can get
| reimbursement, it's basically paid for, you just need
| customers to ask for it (I'm obviously simplifying, since
| it varies by product type, but medical equipment is a great
| example).
| skmurphy wrote:
| The least competitive markets don't exist yet, the next least are
| tiny. These attract the smallest and least well funded
| competition.
| jrumbut wrote:
| Could be labor organizing. I've had a job for years and never
| even been solicited about it.
|
| The incumbent players are ignoring massive swaths of the
| addressable market at a time when, judging by my social media
| feed, there is renewed interest in labor issues.
|
| A big reason for this is their reliance on a high-touch, manual
| onboarding process and slow, high overhead contract negotiation
| techniques. Prime for marketing automation, SaaS tools, chatbots,
| etc.
|
| Additionally, for purely historical reasons, they have segmented
| the market by trade. There's no particular reason for you to
| follow this path, may as well help everyone get a better deal
| from their employer (and a cut for yourself!).
| trevett wrote:
| That's interesting. I never would have thought about this area.
| If you can shoot me an email (in my profile) I would love to
| ask a few more questions about this, if you have the time.
| tcmb wrote:
| Check out the translation industry. It's a fairly niche market,
| with its own quirks. There is a good book that gives an overview
| of how the industry works, but I can't remember the title atm. It
| has a yellow cover and some cartoon drawings inside... :) If
| you're interested I can dig a bit more and find it.
|
| There is software for translation management, which is
| essentially project management, but because of the intricacies of
| the business there is specialized software for it. There are
| maybe 2 or 3 main competitors, all of which do the job but are
| fairly awful to use. Then there are a handful of products which
| come from computer-assisted translation (CAT, which is different
| from machine translation), and try to capture the project
| management part as well. Because their focus is on CAT, they're
| also not excellent in the management aspect.
|
| If you want to capture the whole spectrum with all the edge
| cases, it's going to be a very complex product which will require
| a lot of user research and take a fairly long time to build. But
| there might be an opportunity to go to market earlier, with a
| subset of the functionality, and build from there.
| trevett wrote:
| At a previous job I built an internal translation system forked
| from pootle because the commercial options were so bad (mostly
| wrt UX). This was 8 years ago, so I would have to do a survey
| to learn what the state of things is today. It's possible the
| existing solutions are "good enough" and the switching /
| retraining costs aren't worth it for most organizations. Not to
| be too Thiely, but I wonder what a 10x improvement looks like
| in this space as well.
| tcmb wrote:
| Switching costs is a fair point. I think the biggest
| improvements can be made in UX and in having great APIs which
| enable integration and automation.
| nojs wrote:
| If you can remember the title of the book I'd love to read it.
| tcmb wrote:
| It's called 'The General Theory of the Translation Company'
| by R. Beninatto and T. Johnson.
| Axsuul wrote:
| I think they're talking about the ,,for Dummies" books
| jmchuster wrote:
| So usually what happens is that an individual is an expert in
| their under-served area, sees the opportunity, and then puts in
| the effort to build a business to serve that opportunity. The
| point being that you won't get people who know of lots of
| opportunities, but rather many individuals who each know of their
| own opportunity. And you most likely won't find such domain
| experts on HN.
|
| It might be worth looking for evidence of attempts at building
| such businesses, since often such domain expertise doesn't pair
| with business-building expertise. So if you're trying to build
| such a map, then maybe look at all the businesses (including all
| the failed ones) that served each market.
| keiferski wrote:
| It has been my (unfortunately frequent) experience that funeral
| homes are almost universally owned by individual families.
| listenallyall wrote:
| It's actually not true, but the real owner, Service Corp
| International, wants you to think so.
|
| > SCI then retains the funeral home's original name, often
| along with former owners who are kept on as management. A
| typical funeral home that is owned by SCI will not contain
| advertisements or logos for SCI
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Corporation_Internatio...
| keiferski wrote:
| Interesting to know. Thanks for the link.
|
| Edit: actually that doesn't seem to be correct.
|
| _Eighty-nine percent of funeral homes in the U.S. are owned
| by individuals, families, or closely held private
| corporations. The remaining 11 percent are owned by
| corporations whose stock is publicly traded._
|
| From Wikipedia:
|
| _In the 1960s, a push for large companies acquiring smaller
| funeral homes and cemeteries occurred.[18] Although there has
| been a consistent push for consolidation, the majority of the
| industry still consists of small, family-owned
| businesses.[18] Experts and analysts of the industry have
| estimated that the top six funeral operators control 25 to
| 30% of all funeral services in North America, with the top
| four owning between 15 and 20% of all funeral homes._
| kraig911 wrote:
| Commercial and military aviation lol. Trust me it's by design.
| And you don't want to get into this market.
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