Comment by t0astbread | Hacker News Reader

Comment by t0astbread | Hacker News Reader

Coincidentally, I've been thinking about this as well recently. Especially your second major question:

> If you completely don't have an idea, but want to work on one, how do you look for ideas?

(But also the one before.)

My line of thinking was there oughta be a community online where people can pitch their ideas and get opinions on it or look for collaborators, also cross-discipline. Like "hey I have this cool idea for an, idk, gardening app but I don't know how to code, wanna help?" or "I'm working on this thing, any ideas to make it better", etc.

From what I've seen, there are some forums like that on Reddit but they look more focused on momentary thoughts and whacky ideas rather than projects people are actually attempting. And it doesn't help that Reddit is mostly focused on recent posts (like HN or Twitter), so your post would only really be "active" for a few days.

GitHub could work like that in theory. You can push an empty repository with your idea in a README and people can use discussions to, well, discuss it. Tags could help others discover ideas to work on. But I haven't really seen anyone use GitHub like that, especially not people who aren't involved with IT in any way.

I guess what I would like to have is some kind of "Product Hunt but there is no product yet" (and with more useful discussions). Is anyone aware of anything like that? Or is this perhaps a niche that's not filled yet?

I’m a big fan of this concept. I’m always coming up with ideas, or more importantly problems I think tech could solve (or solve better). Some of them I might work on myself but most of them I know I’ll never touch them for a multitude reasons like lacking the technical expertise or not knowing the right people to talk to. I’d happily put these online for someone else to solve. In the end it would still be solving my initial problem.

As far as I can tell, nothing like this really exists. A quick search gives r/startup_ideas and a few other low traffic forums.

I think structuring it around the fundamental problem, rather than the solution would provide a nice space for lots of solutions to flourish.

Users could easily like problems that they also have, giving a nice ranking of the ‘most important’ problems, and which would provide a ready list of people to present an MVP to, get feedback from, and you may even find a cofounder amongst them.

Agreed, the focus should definitely be on exploration rather than promotion. Although I feel like allowing some level of promotion while still shaping the thing being built would attract more ambitious projects which might help give the platform a better reputation for collaboration-seeking.

Maybe allow a mix of both? Like, people can open a thread starting from a pure problem and throw in some ideas for solutions. Or start with an idea and, as part of it, describe the problem. Let people filter if they only wanna see one type. And of course people can always link threads.

There are some sub-reddits that are sorta like that.

/r/SomebodyMakeThis

/r/somebodybuildthis

/r/stealmyidea

/r/startupideas

etc. come to mind.

r/programmingbuddies

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