We also know that ideas are easy to come by, but solvable problems are harder.
So, what is your problem that needs solving? Either you'll get a response to something you didn't know existed that solves your problem, or someone might start working on a solution for it.
My dream would be a product offering that offered pass-through payment processing, so my vendors have an account and give my store a key. Payments go directly to the vendor, and a pre-negotiated amount or percentage is automatically collected and sent to me. Both me and the vendor pay the same processing rate.
I have several concepts I'd love to build and launch, but all of them fall down because I can't easily justify a 2x2.9% transaction fee.
That said, I had no idea this existed and it's definitely on my radar now. Thank you again.
Assign a local agent, with physical/ mailing address, and open a US business banking account is pretty much all there is to it (not all). I've actually considered offering this as a service, but convincing myself there is an actual need has been difficult.
[1]: https://stripe.com/docs/connect [2]: https://stripe.com/docs/connect/collecting-fees
I have a personal policy: I will never build a business that relies on a PayPal product. I've read too many horror stories about frozen accounts where people were punished for being successful to risk my client's money with them.
Key point: I need to trust that your decisions are correct. What I want to pay for is not thinking about this and knowing that it's handled.
As for shops that tend to have good looking clothes, those already exist. Unfortunately full packages must be built manually from modular components, and little progress has been made on systemic solutions to this problem.
They do a brief interview with you over the phone, get your measurements, and send you a trunk of clothes every month. You only pay for what you keep. My friends have been very satisfied with that they've gotten.
For example, I'm a big fan of Put This On:
The blog is great, and the web series is really great.
http://putthison.com/post/10287901291/put-this-on-season-one
This could exist by the way, I don't know of any off the top of my head though. Bonobos.com is the only thing that comes to mind. They're not specifically doing the above, but I think they offer a variety of fits/sizes. I've had a good experience with them in the past.
I'm up late all the time working. True nightowl you could say. The earliest I'd go to bed is 6am. I sleep during the day and wake up around noon at the latest. I don't lack sleep, this schedule works for me. Point is, I'm up late and I'm sure there are others like me.
I get hungry often. I don't cook. Few places if any are open. Those that do are unknown (what little and inccurately Yelp tries to cover with hours filtering) and certainly don't deliver.
Broken solution, I'd like a list of all places open late, what they serve, and a way to get it delivered. I'd pay premium for it. I would task rabbit it or something but I don't know many rabbits working that late and certainly not a good enough resource to figure out what places are open. Not changing my sleep schedule either, f that.
To me that sounds like the real problem to solve.
Out of curiosity, where do you live? AFAIK, Yelp's hours are user-submitted, so you might just be in a place with low yelp usage.
I reside in their home city (SF), and I've rarely ever had issues with faulty hours. In your case, you might just need to hire someone to collect the data, since individually no one has enough incentive to do so.
Facebook does not fix a problem. It built something that was missing (a good social network). Google did not fix the search problem. Is built something that was missing (a better way to search back then). AirBnB does not fix a problem. It built something that was missing (a platform for temporary private housing rentals). Twitter did not fix the blogging problem. It built something that was missing (a way for people to communicate quickly without much friction).
Look around. What is missing? Go build it.
e.g. It's really hard to keep up with what's going on in all my friends' lives It's hard to find stuff on the Internet if I don't know who hosts that information Hotels are too expensive for medium-length stays
My main challenge is being overwhelmed with information and I can't seem to find a good place to get started on any project.
Not to sound trite, but I don't think the reasons you enumerated for contributing to a project would give most people enough incentive to spend the energy figuring out how to contribute to most projects. Find the project that makes you go "yeah!" and you'll find it much easier to get acclimated to whatever it is, because you'll really want to understand how it works.
- GitHub, Google Code, Bitbucket, SourceForge, CodePlex, ...
- Google Summer of Code, Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects, OpenHatch, ...
Getting involved in open source is easy, there's way too many projects that die or go unmaintained because there's no one to help. I have a few projects that could use contributors, but I assume you want to get involved in an active, serious, and popular open source project. Whatever project you're interested in, subscribe to their mailing list (won't hurt to introduce yourself), join their IRC channel, look at their open issues, grep the source for TODOs, look for something to improve, and submit your patch.
The inspiration was the quote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", which jives with the observation that how one spent their time last month is a better predictor of their future than how they wish they would spend this month. People have a lot of inertia, but tend not to notice.
I'd be especially interested in any tips about research on past-time perception.
I want to bet against myself; to put down money that I will complete a task, so that the only way to get my money back is to finish what I start.
For example, I want to teach myself machine learning but find it hard to concentrate and stick through an online program. I would go to this site, put down "$80" as a bet, "a certificate of completion email for "Machine Learning 101" from stanford.edu" as proof, and "December 30" as a deadline.
The website then bills my credit card for $80, and only refunds that amount back if a moderator receives the certificate of completion email from stanford.edu, verifying that I did complete the task. If the website moderator doesn't get the proof by the deadline, I don't get my money back.
The task could be anything, but the proof would have to be very difficult to fake, and would require some effort on the part of the website moderator to enforce.
I would love to make this service/website myself, as it would help people and be profitable, the only issue is that /I/ want to use the service as well, and by its very nature someone else would have to run it for it to work for me.
From that site I found this[1], which appears to be the closest existing service. The only problems are:
1. Bad site design.
2. Focused on exercising.
3. You have to choose who the money goes to. This could easily be an excuse to not complete the task, as giving up results in someone else benefiting.
4. No third party that judges whether or not you completed the task. You have to find someone yourself (they recommend family members and friends).
#4 is the biggest problem for me. The crux of the service is that you can't back out on a whim, so having a strict, default third party is essential.
"Simple, Cheap Usability Testing for Your Website.
Start a usability test for your site in two minutes. Submit questions about your site and receive 10 responses from our reviewers. The cost is $20."
I know folks that have used them, and loved it.
But some quick googling should turn up a lot of similar sites.
And by the way, I don't want to be harsh, but you don't even tell visitors what your service does. How do you expect to convert anyone?
1. Increase the padding on nearly all the divs; the text is too close to the borders.
2. Remove the "Confirm Password" field. IMO the risk that the few people who mistype their password will never return is worth making it easier for the rest.
3. The video could be shorter. You don't need the 4 second title before the video starts, and the simulation of the signup process takes too long and is boring to watch. Edit the video so that the text fields are filled in as quickly as the viewer can see them filled in, not as fast as it actually takes.
4. Consider adding a few bullet points outlining the benefits of being able to track users' mouse movements.
5. A unique icon would be nice.
6. Make the "Sign Up" button a unique color so that it stands out.
2. Meh, doesn't matter
3. Yes
4. Agree, I signed up and am intrigued, but still not totally clear on what it does.
5 and 6. Sure.
7. How do I add it to a wordpress blog? (just wondering, not a criticism).
You should have a few bullet points highlighting what Mousetrack does and why it's useful.
You should remove the registration process from the video, because everyone knows what registering an account is and how to do it. It currently takes up almost 50% of the video itself.
It's really hard to see what's going on in the video because I can't full-screen the video, and the text is quite small when highlighting and copying the script.
Add some text that explains what I'm looking at, what it costs, and why it's better than similar offerings.
I would love to have some software which reads my cronmail, figures out what's "normal", and warns me when something isn't normal.
I've had to write cron table entries with a blank mail recipient in the crontab itself, and handle the specific mailing cases in the job script. This sucks. I'm not sure I think the solution is something that reads cron-mail and automatically generates filters, but I would very much like it if cron supported e-mail lists based on return codes or something else like that.
2. I want an "Uber for babysitters" (yes I know of sitter city and the like, not impressed) ... we are very last-minute and spontaneous so our regular sitters aren't always available.
3. I often want to try making new/different cocktails but I never have all the ingredients ... ("birchbox for cocktails"?)
4. I have a close female family member that is overweight/obese and on a trajectory to get worse. No one else in the family knows how to help or even approach the subject.
One of the problems with consulting is that it's really hard for most people, while employed, to line up enough work that they can become consultants in the first place. Most people will never get the chance, even if they have the talent, because they can't front the initial financial cost. This keeps a lot of people out of self-employment who would otherwise be a better fit for it.
The Kickstarter-esque idea seems strong, but the biggest problem with this idea is that people who have serious ($150+ per hour) work to offer generally don't solicit on the Internet if they can help it. They prefer to source through word-of-mouth, which is pre-technological and broken and leads to that imbecilic situation where you have to be in to get in... but I don't make the rules.
That's why I haven't pursued it. It's one of those startups that requires fixing people, and any startup that goes long on human nature is facing extremely bad odds.
That said, someone who wants to make this transition needs to save enough for perhaps 3-4 months of not having a salary. If they can't pull that together, there might be deeper reasons behind them sticking to a salaried position. It's not likely the availability of work, because right now there are so many more opportunities than there are capable applicants in tech, you'd have to be trying hard to not find opportunities.
Factually, the problem with the idea you present (Kickstarter-esque capacity scheduling) is that every freelancer is different, there is no apples to apples comparison possible. Likewise, are you going to take every customer that is willing to pay you? I sure hope not.
I recommend that you block off some time and read The Win Without Pitching Manifesto. It is free online and seriously worth your time if you plan to work as a freelancer.
If I pledged to a kickstarter project to buy yet another iphone case and the project failed to launch, I'll just have to make do without yet another iphone case. No big deal.
If I need to hire a consultant to build an e-commerce website or to set up a payroll system, I need that to happen no matter what. I can't wait 21 days only to find out the consultant never gets enough pledges to "launch." Then what? Pledge to another consultant, wait another 21 days and rinse and repeat?
1. Visualizing code. Rendering C++ and/or Fortran as LaTeX would be very helpful for lines of code like this, where I've spent too much time tracking down misplaced parens:
k1(1,1)=-Im*(Omega_minus_n*(rho13(i,j)+conjg(rho12(i,j)))-Omega_plus_n*(rho12(i,j)+conjg(rho13(i,j))))+gamma1*(rho22(i,j)+rho33(i,j))
3. A language with the following characteristics: - Within 10% of Intel/PGI Fortran on tight numerical loops - Array and distributed/concurrent syntax with lightweight threads and syntactical support for GASnet/MPI. - Parallel load balancing, preferably across nodes. A few of the algorithms I use are adaptive or have parts of the solution domain that require much more work than other parts, leading to situations where naive/maintainable MPI code leaves most processors idle. - Hindley-Milner type inference, typeclasses/typeclass-like features, operator overloading/syntax extension, and effortless interoperation with C/Fortran. An IDE with syntax rendering like Maple or Mathematica's would be a HUGE plus. I don't know why this doesn't exist for usably fast languages. - Supports an interactive mode with easy visualization
The closest language I've seen is Cray's Chapel, but there are several things I don't like about it. Its imperative/oo design and lack of first class functions/tco are unacceptable, since the algorithms I use need to use the integer side of the machine as well as the floating point ones. Right now I use either Charm++ (http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu/) with Intel's array syntax, or Fortran 2008 for some inherited code. C++ has non-ideal semantics for numerical code, and doing non-trivial algorithms in Fortran is still a nightmare, especially when using MPI, as communication code quickly becomes the main part of the program. Something like Sisal (http://sourceforge.net/projects/sisal/), if it was modernized and extended to distributed architectures, would be amazing. It used to beat typical Fortran by 20%.
4. I absolutely need to account for cache behavior, otherwise my simulations will take months to run instead of weeks. I would love anyone who wrote a practical tool that automatically tiled loops, since doing this manually turns code into an unmaintainable rat's nest very quickly, or wrote a library of skeletons for tiled loops and cache oblivious algorithms.
Re 1: As yolesaber said, most decent IDEs/editors should give you tools to deal with parens. As for pretty-printing equations: I used to have a Perl script that would convert code to LaTeX according to certain rules, but it's lost in a previous job's IP. Still, this should be reasonably achievable with a set of regexs + LaTeX assuming you use a consistent syntax throughout for your equations, without too many ambiguous cases. :)