Ask HN: A product you would like to see built?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343294

by ideahacker • 16 years ago

18 27 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi,

I have been doing a consumer Internet startup for last 3 years and have reached a point where I wanna try out something else. The startup is Ramen profitable so I can work on another idea without worrying about money.

My strengths are coding, usability and interaction design (for consumer facing sites). I don't know much about enterprise software etc. I wanted to ask the community what product they wish existed. Since I am a bootstrapper, monetizability is important. Ideally I should be able to charge people a subscription fees (monthly/yearly).

jasonlbaptiste• 16 years ago

im drawing a blank (its late), but don't worry about us. What would you like to see built?

ideahacker2• 16 years ago

I always find it hard to organize my reading (for most part technical reading). Do you think a service can help there? Like I can keep a track of books and papers I want to read and also get ideas from other people based on what I am currently reading/learning.

bhousel• 16 years ago

amazon.com, shelfari.com, anobii.com?

aymeric• 16 years ago

As Jason suggests, you should try to find the answer to your questions in your own frustrations. Where there is frustration, there is a market (usually).

I went through the exercise myself and blogged the results: http://aymeric.gaurat.net/index.php/2010/my-frustrations/

I would love to hear people's frustrations too.

grease• 16 years ago

Agree with Jason .. scratch an itch .. that way, even if nothing worked out, you would still have one loyal user -> You

In good probability, there'll be others who share the same itch.

http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html

rampr• 16 years ago

or try contributing to an opensource project that interests you

Flemlord• 16 years ago

My wife would like an iPad/iPhone app for tracking baby milestones. When is the first time she rolls over, smiles, holds her head up, makes eye contact, etc. Keep a centralized (anonymous) database so we can compare to the average stats of the other users.

She's downloaded several apps so far, paid $4 for one, $6 for another. They were all unusably bad. I wish there was a return policy for apps.

chubs• 16 years ago

What were the apps she already downloaded? Is there a market for baby-related iphone apps? This could be interesting, in that i've recently started dabbling in making iApps, and i've recently started being a dad.

mahipal• 16 years ago

I would love to hear more too. I'm not in the target market, but I think there's a large market for baby-related apps (and, equally good, apps for young kids). I had some thoughts about how a "baby milestone" app might work, but the lack of a camera on the iPad is a big obstacle.

Zev• 16 years ago

They were all unusably bad. I wish there was a return policy for apps.

Not really a "policy", but, in iTunes, if you:

  1. Go to Purchase History
  2. Report a problem
  3. Fill out the form with the for your refund request

You can probably get a refund. AFAIK, thats the process that people who i know that have gotten refunds before have had to do.

dumb_account_• 16 years ago

Do you have a resume / credentials? I'd like to make sure my idea reaches a capable person.

tjmc2• 16 years ago

High bandwidth proxy service. I can't watch Hulu in Australia and free proxies are too slow. I'd pay to use a proxy service along the backbone somewhere.

baskinghobo2• 16 years ago

Use FreeVPN.

tjmc2• 16 years ago

Is it fast enough?

nzmsv2• 16 years ago

You could run a proxy on a VPS. A basic Linode has 200GB bandwidth (which is the same as the monthly cap on my home connection). Tinyproxy is easy to set up.

But this is an interesting idea for a service.

maushu• 16 years ago

Wouldn't it be illegal to serve hulu content to the outside of US?

schindyguy• 16 years ago

Nzmsv, let's talk Bryan at schindyguy dot com

herrherr• 16 years ago

- Get a cheap development box (Linode, Slicehost, etc.)

- Set Firefox to use Socks Host 127.0.0.1:8080

- Open up your terminal and enter this: ssh -C2qTnN -D 8080 your-user@example.com

Et voilà, you're tunneling all your browser traffic through the development box.

Note: I'm on a Mac, so things might differ under Windows.

jay_kyburz• 16 years ago

I want to know what is going on in the world, but don't want editorial spin on my news. I want to have a better perspective about what is important.

Perhaps it's that I want to make up my own mind about what's important rather than trusting it to the current news organisations.

How about some kind of fact based news service where stories bubble to the top based on the "severity" or impact on the world or my community.

So for example, on the front page of the international section, global events of the last 7 days are sorted in order of "severity".

We may have to make some assumptions about what severity means, perhaps lives lost, financial loss, environmental impact. Perhaps a user can sort by a preference. Users could also filter by Global, County, State, City ect.

Clicking on one of these news events could present a nice collection of links to standard editorial content on the net, or relevant Wikipedia pages.

I guess the content would be community driven, and you would add some game mechanics to encourage adoption. (Karma ect)

I'd like to do this myself for fun, perhaps as a side project one day.

adrianwaj• 16 years ago

Build a Sin Bin for articles with bad or mis-titled headlines. I've posted something along these lines already: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283954

rms• 16 years ago

$5000 a year for a virtual personal assistant that only helps you deal with email overload.

SudarshanP• 16 years ago

http://sudarshan.posterous.com/proxypc

ochekurishvili• 16 years ago

If not relate to the internet then it's a time machine...

petervandijck• 16 years ago

OS forum software (simple, think vanilla forums, not phpbb) that I can easily run on google appengine so it's basically free to host.

Ask HN: A product you would like to see built?

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