Comment by kmfrk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kmfrk | Hacker News Reader

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* Digital concierge health care. No crap booking an appointment with a GP two weeks from now to ask him about something that could be nothing.

* A full-program fitness regimen with tailored diet/nutrition/recipes and work-out regimens. I keep keep them up-to-date on the progress using my wirelessly synching Withings weight.

* Great, fresh fruit and vegetables sent to me every one or two weeks.

* Maybe a service where I can text legal questions (with a quota) to someone who can answer them - or find someone who does - for me.

* A decent internet connection where I can talk to support staff who can actually tell their ass from their elbow.

* Not for me, but I think there is a great business plan lying around for the person who has a big backlog of recipes. Recipes As a Service could be pretty interesting where all recipes and information are in the cloud.

* A gym that actually cares about my activity and commitment. Normally, the ideal customer to gyms is the January guy whose new year's resolution is never going to happen. A gym that actually nudges you and cares about your activity would be interesting. They can send me a poke, if I haven't visited the gym in a while, or if my weight hasn't changed for the better. Since a lot of this can be automated, it might not even take that much effort.

There's a gym like what you described near my house. You have a membership card you swipe to get in, and also swipe on a machine when you begin to use it. When you start out, you're given a health assessment and some exercises to determine your base level, then screens on the machines tell you what to do for your fitness goal. You get personal notes from your trainer. The machines tell you how many reps/how long to work, as well as pacing. Go too fast, and it yells at you. It tracks your progress on their machines, showing your progress to keep you motivated.

While I don't go to that gym anymore (it's expensive, more than double $50/mo), it really was a great service for what is an otherwise average experience (going to the gym).

> A decent internet connection where I can talk to support staff who can actually tell their ass from their elbow

I've occasionally wished for some kind of certification program that works as follows:

1. I take a test that proves I'm not an idiot on the subject of consumer product category X, and that I know how to do basic troubleshooting on problems in category X. I've given a certification in this.

2. When I call support for a problem in category X, I can tell them I'm a certified X consumer, give then my certification #, and they can verify it.

3. They then skip past all the "is the device plugged in?" and "have you tried rebooting?" and so on crap, and forward the call to a higher level tech who knows how to work with customers who know what they are doing.

You can get this from most places now:

'Hi, I was just running through the troubleshooting steps with one of your colleagues and I got cut off. He said he was just going to put me on hold to [order new router|arrange engineer|whatever you think is needed after your own troubleshooting]'

This works for me 95% of the time.

Slightly sleazier version: use a similar trick to get a discount when ordering new service, e.g. "I heard I could get a discount/fee waiver for plan X."

I don't consider this particularly sleazy because you can usually get the discount anyway if you haggle, but it saves a lot of time.

This works even better if you know what the deals are ahead of time, either from searching online or by knowing someone that works there.

> Digital concierge health care.

Check out ConsultingMD, consultingmd.com. It's a great perk startups can provide their employees.

I don't live in the US but Europe. Which, depending on how you look at it, can be a good thing or a bad one.

> * Great, fresh fruit and vegetables sent to me every one or two weeks.

Like a CSA?

Not necessarily. These were the guys I was thinking about:

http://www.organic-market.info/web/Europe/Denmark/Denmark/22...

http://future-farmers.net/from-the-field/denmark/aarstiderne...

Go join a crossfit gym near you. You'll get this.

http://map.crossfit.com/

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