Show HN: Place to support and validate early startup ideas

Nice work on a cool side project! Just my 2c, but I would find this more useful as a place to validate and support early pain-points, as opposed to solutions. Validating that a genuine burning pain exists for a small group of people - with access to early adopters - would be really helpful, and I think would provide a nice play to do discovery. Going solution-first puts the cart before the horse imo.

Ok. Wow. That's interesting. I never thought about it from this angle. Can you give an example? I mean a pain point that you would like to validate, or would have liked to in the past, if such a tool had existed?

I think many compelling companies come from rigorously testing lots of possible solutions for a problem that the founders understand deeply.

You might experiment and fail with 10 different ways to solve that problem, before one of them sticks. But the important thing for building the right solution is understanding the context, situation, nature of the pain-point, implications of it, and why the world would be better served if it was solved. The benefit of solving your own painpoint is that you often understand these things instinctively, but it's helpful to talk to other people to understand how it is different for them. From there, the first solutions should be to validate this -- maybe the first version is a Google form or a manual inbox (i.e. "What can we test in 1 week vs. 1 year?").

For an example from me, I previously had a start-up where we provided version control for PowerPoint documents. Our first iteration was way too complicated and we went in solution-first. We built all kinds of shit people didn't need, like slide-by-slide version control, git integration, etc. On your current site, I could ask people if they want a plugin into PowerPoint which gives slide-by-slide version control using git, and get a bunch of feedback on that specific solution. Instead, it would be more helpful to step back and try and validate that sharing PowerPoint documents over email leads to versioning problems. From there, maybe I could dig deeper into specific use-cases, verticals, and understand a wider problem space, before talking about how people need the problem to be solved. I think the learnings would be 100x more useful than getting some specific feedback on my myopic solution.

Similarly, I have found that users often love talking about their problems more than they love giving feedback on individual solutions.

You are right. It makes sense to first validate that you're targeting the correct destination, versus validating a particular route to a destination.

It would be great to have something like an atlas of problems. And you, both as user and as provider, can zoom in on the topics that are important to you.

Because just having one long list of disconnected problems mixed together from various domains, from photography over machine learning to marketing will just fry your brain.

I like your idea. And I agree that it would be great if something like that existed. Like a Hacker News for problems.

Have you seen any site/app that comes close to this? Perhaps even just localized to one domain?

I made what you describe a few years ago on a coding stream during a weekend. https://makeithappen.dev/ was the place, everything about the site is horrible but I liked the idea, maybe it's a thing I could revisit someday.

Yea man I’ve thought about this too. For it to work you almost need to make it a marketplace to entice people to come forward with their problems.

Kind of like “I’ve got this problem can someone help me?” And then you have a whole bunch of entrepreneurs looking at all the problems picking them up as needed.

Hey! This looks a lot like my old project https://oppslist.com - open them side by side ;)

(which I no longer maintain, and yes I know it throws a warning when you open it)

Best of luck with the platform! It's an interesting space, but a challenging one.

Oh wow. Even the same color! This is hilarious! :)

Boy. You got lots of ideas on there. And you've got a slightly different angle, if I see it correctly. It's actually business owners who are posting things they'd like to get done.

I imagine that it's hard to get businesses to tell you what they need. I imagine that they often not only understand the problem they have, or even the fact that they have one. Much less how it could be solved.

Was that the challenge that you faced, and which caused you to give up on the project?

It looks really well done. You must have spent many weeks on this!

I'm trying to sign up for an account, but when I click "create account" it just tells me "This field is required" next to each field, even though I filled in all 3 fields.

EDIT: It's worked now. I think it didn't like "jstanley" as a username, but has accepted "James Stanley". Maybe it requires a space in the username field??? That's an... unusual choice.

A few more things:

Once I'd submitted an idea I got a page saying "Thank you for your submission", and it gave me a URL to copy to share with others, but the URL was "http://127.0.0.1:5500/item?id=25" - this probably wants fixing on the public version.

Also it says my idea was submitted "2 days ago" even though it was only in the last few minutes (maybe the server's clock is wrong?)

The "following" page leads to "Internal Server Error".

This site is a really interesting idea, nice work. I like that the ideas are shown anonymously.

I clicked to provide contact details to my own idea, but I can't find anywhere that I actually access the contact details that have been provided to the idea. Does this exist yet?

> Maybe it requires a space in the username field

I was curious and thought it may be more likely that the requirement is the first letter must be a capital letter.

Tried out some combinations and that is the case (pun intended :-)

Not sure how I spotted this as being the likely thing, just intuition I guess from doing this kind of thing for long enough. For the OP, my guess at the cause would be a bad regex on username, if it's not intended.

Also for the OP, I signed up with a couple of usernames starting dw with matching emails, if you want to delete those accounts :-).

Thank you for the detective work! I'll look into this. This is not intended behavior at all. In fact, my own username on the platform is leobg - so, no space, no caps. Whatever it is, I'll fix it!

Also, thanks for adding a marker to your test domains. That was really thoughtful of you.

Fixed the username issue.

Thank you, James, for the nice words.

I'll look into that names thing. It's not at all expected behavior, and "jstanley" should have been working fine. Something is off there. I'll fix it when I get to it tomorrow.

I'll also fix the sharing link, the "2 days ago" thing, and the server error. I'm a bit embarrassed about those issues. Should have caught them before posting here. Thank you for pointing them out!

Regarding the contact info thing: Exactly. I haven't actually implemented that feature yet. I had done a few Show HNs before, and they went nowhere. So I tried to stick to making the bare essentials work, and fixing the rest "in post", as they say... .

What's missing is only the display. The actual sharing is already recorded in the database. So far, you can see under "ideas" a table of all of your ideas, along with the counts for upvotes, subscriptions, shared email addresses, and questionaires. What I need to add is a way for you to click on these numbers, to actually be able to open the questionaires, see the contact info, or send out the update. I'm going to add this tomorrow.

In your case, it might not actually appear, because you clicked on your own idea. And I think I may filter or block upvotes etc. on one's own ideas. (Then again, I can see that one wants to see that it really works. So perhaps I'll leave it and add an option to hide or show your own test interactions.)

Fixed the "2 days ago" thing. Seems like it used the date when the database was last initiated, rather than the date of the new entry. Now it works properly.

This looks really great but eventually there is one place to validate your startup which is The Market.

No encouraging words from strangers will replace a candid critical feedback from someone who is in position to consider buying your product.

My 2c: Stop sharing, start selling.

Having built a successful web service I know two things: One, there is a long journey from idea to having something ready to test in the marketplace. This sort of site is great for that phase.

Second: Those of us who have been through the roller coaster of entrepreneurship know how "encouraging words from strangers" are often just the tonic you need psychologically to keep going because in the real world the "candid feedback" can often sap your morale.

Love the thing. I'll use it for real.

Thanks for the kind words! Hadn't expected this at all on HN.

I generally also agree that the real test is the marketplace, i.e. real customers voting with their wallets. But of course you're right: Seeing that someone actually cares is sometimes worth more. Or rather, is what's needed to get to the stage where you actually dare to launch something on the actual marketplace.

My own use case is that I have a list of 100+ ideas. There are a few I have some degree of conviction in. Enough at least to put together an MVP that I can put to the test. But all the others? I'll never find out. For all I know, there could be one idea among them that wants to grow big, and that has a huge marketplace. But I cannot see that. And on my list, it would simply fade away from me. So the idea of having a space where I can just dump such ideas and have a chance of someone reaching out is attractive to me. That's what I'm hoping to do with this site.

It also isn't about giving creators false hope. Upvotes exist on the site because they're easy and non-committal for the consumer. But they count very little. On the other side of the spectrum, a consumer can fill out a questionaire and tell you exactly why they think they need your thing, what problems they are hoping to solve with it, how they are currently dealing with that problem, etc.. While it is encouraging if someone takes the time to write all of this down for you, it's also valuable information if you're making that thing.

I would have also loved to implement a thing where consumers can buy shares in your idea right now (or rather, in you implementing it). Something like, they pay you $10 now, and will be eligible as beta testers once you build it. But there seems to be no off-the-shelf solution for user-to-user payments. So for now, there's just an option to send money to the owner of an idea via an Amazon gift card.

The big challenge, of course, is going to be attracting enough "consumers" to the site - meaning people who go there to shop for potential solutions to problems they might have, or for ideas they want to see become real.

That's brilliant! Can't agree more!

This was executed nicely. The ability to include screenshots, a video or link is especially helpful to communicate a concept.

One idea that could be cool would be some kind of forced ranking of features/functionality that idea posters could include so that interested users could indicate what would be most important to them. That would take it beyond high-level elevator pitch and into feature-product fit insights.

Thanks for the kind words.

Let me see if I understand your suggestion correctly. You want users to be able to not only support the idea as it is, but to also be able so suggestion additional features, or to indicate what parts of the idea are most important to them.

Right now, a user who wants to suggest specific features would select "share my contact info with the owner", or they'd fill out the "use case questionaire". In both cases, you as the owner of the idea would be able to reach out to them (an d they'd have indicated that they'd actually want you to do so). Though, as it is now, you'd be doing that outside of the platform then (say, through email, Zoom, or a Telegram group perhaps).

Great Job, I ran a somewhat related site https://makeithappen.dev/ (no longer maintained, this was a hack weekend project build on stream a few years ago) but there's some cross functionality in there. Really like your solution, this is rekindling that old makeithappen flame ahah.

Best of luck and keep going! Cheers

I like your project. And your domain name. Very similar, indeed.

Are these real suggestions that are posted on the site? Like from the photographer wanting a solution to quickly share photos right from his DSLR? Because that's great stuff. Actual users describing problems they need solved.

I would imagine that, most of the time, people don't even realize that there is a better way. Hence they're often not actively hunting for a solution, or able to even just describe how a potential solution could look like.

If you, during a weekend, got several strangers to post such detailed requirements, I'd love to hear how you did it.

I posted a few of them to show the flow and not be an empty website and then it was people on the stream going in with their ideas. I was looking into parsing reddit like r/SomebodyMakeThis, twitter and keep on doing some streams picking stuff from the ideas in there to promote its use but you know life happened and it got put on the side lines. The hardest criticism I received is "why would I give my idea to someone else, they may make millions out of it" which is not a big problem in my book, as I have way more ideas and problems than time to build solutions for them, but this might be the biggest pushback I received.

The plan was to let ideas float around, let people discuss and gather around, maybe mark that they would be willing to pay for a solution. When an entrepreneur or company comes along and want to tackle the problem, we can link people with the problem with the people building the solution, which in my experience was the hardest part of starting a project.

Nice site. I like the design. The speed of page loads is particularly noticeable to me; what does the stack look like?

There's no visible border on the username/password fields on the login page for me, you might want to fix that.

Yeah, I'll fix those borders.

Thanks for the compliments. Pretty much my first time making a proper app, actually. I stuck close the the Hacker News design.

I used Flask and HTMX.

Fixed the borders

I miss features for commenting and downvoting. There are a lot of ideas on there currently which already exist.

Like Companies data API, Daisy Disk for personal finance and Email parser with categorization and actions

ya, a way to submit feedback/comments might be a good idea. I just submitted an idea, and immediately was wondering how I would be able to engage with the people who voted (or didnt)

First, thank you for trying it out and for submitting an idea. That's super cool.

With regards to engaging with users:

In the current design, the first two levels of interest that a user may show on your idea do not include sharing any contact information. Namely upvoting an idea, and signing up for updates. A user has to support your idea on level 3 ("share contact info with the project owner") or level 4 ("share your use case") in order for you to actually get their contact info.

For now, if you go to your "ideas" section, you'll already see the count of each level of support your idea got (upvoted, subscribed to updates, shared contact info, filled out questionaire).

The ability to actually send out an update to the users that requested it is actually still missing. Same goes for accessing the contact info of the users who shared it with you, and for accessing the info they shared with you when they filled out the questionaire. I didn't know if this Show HN was going to go anywhere. But I'm going to add these features. These contacts are yours. And they have entrusted me with forwarding their request to you.

I was thinking more along the lines of a public dialog, where a user could post a comment like "This is a great idea! However, if you could make it do X and Y, it would be even better!"

Getting access to people's contact information would be useful at a later point in the process, but early on I think immediate feedback would be the most beneficial. Even something along the lines of a HN thread like this one would be enough engagement at first. In fact, perhaps that is even sufficient :)

Right. This should be possible without necessarily giving up one's privacy.

I wouldn't want a public dialogue. Because that would signal public interest in the idea to outsiders. This is something that I imagine people posting an idea want to avoid, because they don't want to attract competition if the idea turns out to be a good one.

But it would be easy to have a two-way-conversation with the creator. So user john can post a message to idea owner thomas. Thomas can even reply, and they can write back and forth. But john will ever only see his own conversation with thomas, and never those that thomas might have with others, such as ben or lucy.

This is actually one of the major reasons I made the site, even though there's Hacker News. If my idea got traction on HN, it would attract more and more attention, and I'd have no way of pulling it from the site. Public interest in the idea would be documented for everyone to see, forever.

You are right. There should be a feature to quickly let the owner of an idea that there already exists a solution for this. Also, if you don't like an idea, there should be a way to remove it from your view. I'll implement this. Thanks.

I'm thinking of a button that says something like, "Not a good idea? Tell the owner why". And when you click, you'll be asked to tell the owner why. That feedback won't be visible publicly. But it'll be shared with the owner of the idea. And also, if you used that button on an idea, it'll by default be hidden from your view in the future.

If you have other suggestion on how to implement this, let me know!

I suspect it's not supposed to look like this - https://i.imgur.com/L4RJ5Ag.png

This is in Firefox on Windows.

You're right. Looks like the header is missing. And the "thumbs up" icon is way too big. I'll look into it tomorrow. Thanks for sharing this bug, really appreciated!

Layout is fixed now. Thanks!

Interesting but doesn't work - always throws Internal Server Error.

I tried submitting an idea. The permalink is being set to 127.0.0.1

Yeah that’s a bug. I’ll fix it when I get to my computer. For now, you can replace the 127.0.01:5500 part with ideas.dynamate.io.

Thanks for using it and posting an idea!

Fixed

Is this the right interface for this idea?

Not useful to post ideas where your customers aren’t tbh

While it is nice to have a platform to explore ideas and talk about them, your point is very accurate.

I agree.

However, when you post your idea, you also get a link that you can share elsewhere. In this case, you're essentially using the site as a quick and easy hosting service for your idea. And you get to piggyback on the built-in options for visitors to leave feedback (both anonymous and personal).

If you have several ideas, and one of them is getting significantly better results, you'll have a lot more motivation to invest the time, energy and money to set up a more in-depth test for that idea.

Hello! I have been working on something similar, in RoR, I have already implemented social logins, comments, gallery, rating and other things to help inventors reach people to help them.

Greetings!