Show HN: Thinkerous - Collaborative ideation and think tank
thinkero.us
thinkero.us
So maybe if this were to be adjusted so that it was more of a place to talk about problems you wish people would solve. PG wrote a good post where he briefly talked with problems, and he wished people would solve them. Why not structure it as a place for people to complain about inefficiencies.
I'll start right now with a complaint of my own:
Startups are best started by people who can build things themselves. Unfortunately, people also tend to work on problems they know really well. As a result, a lot of startups are focused on tech-focused problems, and completely ignore broader world problems. Create a place for regular people to complain about issues in their business they wish worked better, and you'll allow builders of technology to understand problems they never would have encountered.
Thinkerous provides a creative, social platform to help people network and collaborate as teams to create and realize great projects or products that would otherwise be difficult to do alone. And not only tech related ideas! We aim to answer questions like "What can a chef, medic, and police officer create together to increase high school graduation rate?"
We'd appreciate any and all feedback!
The important and hard part(if you want this to solve problems and create businesses) is to expose creators/entrepreneurs to good problems , and connect them with domain experts and the relevant knowledge.
This way, you leave the details of the solution(IP) private, which should help motivate the creation of a product and a business
By making it as a business creation platform, and highlighting the companies it started, or even the groups that that formed and are working through this, you create a very strong incentive to domain experts(which are usually very busy people, think doctors, lawyers, etc) to publish problems on the platform, preferably in some detailed, and interesting way.
And by having interesting content about really good problems, you gather high quality entrepreneurs and creators, which also post resumes and details about themselfs, to make creating good connections easier.
And by making you're content interesting, you could get much wider readership(which helps with marketing), also among people who are not entrepreneurs but might hold useful knowledge. If you'll figure someway to incentivise them to contribute, the better, but you'll have to be very carefull with signal to noise.
EDIT:also , by creating a different stream of important problems, you create stuff for bloggers/journalists to write about , which is great for marketing.
This app is certainly pretty, but I think the real value is in solving hard problems, whereas this looks like it's just making easy things slightly easier. If it solves any hard problems, I'm certainly not seeing it based on the landing page or video.
That said, there's something cool about this and it looks like it could be the foundation of something interesting.
edit: Also, don't limit passwords to 20 characters.
One of the motivating factors for Thinkerous was that in the beginning, I had an idea that I thought was interesting. But... I had no clue how to start. Would people laugh at me if I revealed my idea? What kind of people do I need to get started? Wtf is Node.js?
All in all, we're not going to solve hard problems for our users. But we'd really like to make it easier to start, to GO FOR IT instead of "nah it probably won't even work anyways."
Thanks for your feedback!
Edit: We've also upped the password max to 100 characters.
Good luck! I've signed up and look forward to using it.
We're hoping that with a little less friction and a lot more diversity, some incredible things can me made.
Thanks so much!
No option to use the desktop/full version via my mobile device? Maybe some information about your offerings that compel users to open their laptops and check it out would be beneficial.
FYI - The link you posted hangs up on:
"Loading... (or you have javascript disabled)"
Using Chrome / iOS
I signed up then went to add my real name to my profile from the 'settings' link, but it kicked me out when I tried to save it. Now it won't let me log back in. I use the same username as I do on HN.
I use Lastpass & it has my password correct in it's settings, but it doesn't look like the field is allowing it to all be entered into the field- some characters are missing.
If I log out of Lastpass I can log in.
I still have to disable LastPass, login, then re-enable Lastpass for my other sites to keep working.
It's strange, because when the password field loads from the main page, at first it shows it has all the characters of the password filled in, but then something happens and then it only has half of the characters filled in anymore, with tiny dots instead of the bigger dots that were there at first. And I can't click into it and type anything either, unless I disable Lastpass entirely. So I can't just type my password into it, it keeps having the tiny dots there with half the characters of the password in there.
When I have Lastpass disabled it looks like by default you have tiny dots in the password field, & that's what I'm seeing, so maybe Lastpass isn't able to populate the field at all, rather than what it looks like to me where it seems to be populating halfway with those little dots.
I'd like to see something simple for login that works rock-solidly with Lastpass so I can set it to autologin & I don't have to click to get in ever.
When I update my user info it doesn't display on the profile either.
Issues section is for posting civic or other issues you find in day-to-day life that can be solved through community involvement or discussion.
As for the info not showing up when you view your profile, we're aware of the issue and will fix it as soon as possible!
"Could not get anyone to help on the website design" is a HUGE problem for so many startups, even this one when we just started. Hopefully we'll be able to help you find some help on your next project!
Interesting concept