Show HN: RealProblemHunt – Find problems to solve | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: RealProblemHunt – Find problems to solve

realproblemhunt.com

As far as I remember the oldest attempt to create something like that was http://theinternetwishlist.com/

These sites always seem to suffer from the same problem - not enough contributing members. It's quite understandable - what is the incentive to post a problem? What is a chance that someone will solve it? When will it happen? How will I know about it? etc. All these factors result in a situation in which people rather treat such sites as an entertaining curiosity.

My suggestion to improve it is: make it an inverted Kickstarter - if I've got a problem I pledge X dollars for someone to create a solution for it. Other people with similar problem add their pledges. When the sum starts to look tasty developers pick up the challenge and compete (?) for the bounty. The backers get the solution at discounted prices. Everyone's happy and live long ever after ;)

I've been thinking about the reverse kickstarter for years. It is an awesome idea, but it would also suffer from a lot of problems:

- Just like any "network": not enough contributing members.

- People would pay now or when the problem was solved? Are they going to guarantee payment for something without a certain date?

- Who would decide if the problem was solved or not?

Thank you so much for those valuable feedback and suggestion! It will really help us think of ideas on how to improve the site. Cheers!

ReverseFunder: http://blog.oxify.co/2014/10/09/our-mission-make-ideas-come-...

I went to the site expecting to find "real" problems in the vein of "I'm a single working mom and it's hard to help my son with his homework" or "I have to care for a sick relative but it's hard to get medical advice for small ailments", etc. Most of these just seem like problems in search of a narrowly-focused consumer internet product for upper-middle-class white people or other engineers.

That might be a feature and not a bug.

My friends and I have a term, narp, for "Not a real problem" for exactly these cases. It can also be used a verb, you can say someone is narping when they are devoting time to solving non-real problems.

Sure these are problems, but they are limited to a very specific demographic in many cases. Let's not pretend that working on these is more meaningful than it actually is.

You really expected "I'm a single working mom and it's hard to help my son with his homework"? Like any start-up, real people join at a later stage once the company has millions of users.

I really like the idea, but the cheeky part of me now suddenly really wants to make a parody site called "RealREALProblemHunt" where the top problems are things like "I have no access to clean water" and "First world countries keep exporting their garbage to my country's shores" as a counterpoint to the ones on this site like "Need to live to be 300 years old" and "Cannot find a place to order late night food past midnight.".

"It's hard to find problems on RealProblemHunt that are problems outside of PH"

This is great. It'd be very powerful if it existed for major industries or functions within a business (eg business intelligence, it, etc). People would pay to listen in. Almost like https://www.doximity.com/ for other businesses.

Explain please

Imagine a community of business intelligence analysts, or a different community of data scientists, maybe another one of accountants, or a separate one of structural engineers. Each online community is invite-only, and you can talk about your trade, new/interesting solutions, and the problems you have with your software and tools. I think conferences and associates often fill this void for many industries, but it'd be cool to have a "realProblems" site that's focused.

I think this is a more viable (and beneficial to society) product than the generic RealProblemHunt site that is presented to us. The generic site is, in my opinion, vulnerable to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. A more focused tool like this could help professional communities prioritize problems within their field in a public way.

For example, a similar product for game developers might prioritize fixing game monetization. A "global" board like the one presented here would likely never prioritize such an idea.

Agreed. And these communities will likely bubble up from someone in it, or very close to it - not just someone building a generic platform.

Great idea. Based on the feedback and suggestions we gathered, we're now planing to split the site into different categories or at least focus in a specific community of people first.

So I've seen this idea in different incarnations. My favourite was probably the one that scraped Twitter for people complaining about various things and had people rank those.

This seem like a decent attempt to actually make it viable though. Good luck!

Do you have a link for that? Sounds cool

I guess someone made such thing and posted on HN a few years back. I don't know URL

This looks like it needs some type of integration into existing "let's build this" and "let's fix this" types of sites:

  - https://assembly.com/discover  
  - https://www.bountysource.com/

@all - Hi guys! Thank you all for the feedback and suggestions. It will really help us improve the site. We're still at a very early stage so we really have lots of things to fix and improve.

Be sure to visit the FAQ page to get an idea on what are the use cases of the site - http://realproblemhunt.com/faq

To improve the site we are planning to split the site into different categories or at least first focus in a specific community of people so the problems listed will be more relevant to the type of visitor. What are your thoughts about this?

did you make this using microscope?

Nope. It's built on Django

Drum? It seems like I recognize the general format. Anyways, props, and best of luck.

Wow sucks to be in the Philippians right now :D

I fear that having very localized problems will end up killing the site. Most people can't act on these problems but they are taking up valuable space on the front page.

"Join our newsletter to receive problems to your inbox" does not sound very fun. You might rephrase that to emphasize some positive outcome.

edit: I'm taking my own advice and would like to congratulate you on launching and trying to drive some social good via startups. Good luck!

Thanks for the feedback! We will change it :)

I'd say it is probably more like a Stack Exchange for problems than a Product Hunt for problems.

Browsing Product Hunt is too distracting for me because there are so many solutions to problems I'm not having, which inevitably get me off track of what I am trying to do.

This is awesome - I'm a big fan. I'm running an early stage startup and having somewhere to ping problems to a community would be extremely beneficial. Really interested to see how it grows over the coming months.

Great initiative, but I wouldn't just "copy" the model of PH/HN/Reddit in the long run. Lots of cool new things could be done.

This site is just...wow. A parody containing other parodies. And there most likely be actual serious start-ups be started off of some of these.

Also came up this idea two nights ago before falling asleep, and two days later someone did it! Looking forward to see how it evolves.

Cool idea. I especially agree with this problem:

"It's hard for multiple developers to share one staging server".

My company has two staging servers, but with a team of 6 devs, someone often has to wait. Does anybody know of any solutions to spin up/down staging servers in a cost-effective way?.

If your application is *nix based, then running a system with Docker at it's core could be an option. Some folks have a staging domain for their application, then use the SHA/tag of a release in a subdomain, and route based on subdomain to a running container.

Partition them into VMs?

Alternately, I use vagrant-aws (https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws) to quickly do this on Amazon. Just be very careful to not check your keys into source control.

Yeah, VMs were my thought too -- VMs are easy to spin up and cheap/free, so why bother having everyone share one staging server? Use a configuration management tool like Chef/Puppet/Ansible/etc. to make sure everyone's staging VMs are configured the same, and you're good to go.

Hey Kcole, we are actually currently building product to solve this problem at Runnable, http://runnable.io. Email us at support@runnable.com and we will be happy to give you an invite. We would love to hear what you think

@all - Hi again. We're planning to add categories and tags. Any suggestion on what categories and tags should we add? And do you think splitting the site into subdomains makes more sense or using categories and tags is enough?

Thanks in advance.

Good intention. I would work on your copy. Perhaps "request for solutions".

I like http://www.halfbakery.com/ -- ideas there aren't quite serious.

Problem: How to I find solutions to my problem? Answer: Yahoo Answers, AskVille, AnswerBag, Stack Exchange, Quora, Hacker News Ask, Google ...

I want an RSS feed, but I don't see an RSS feed.

Wow what a great idea!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com