Which of your needs don't have a good solution yet?
For what app or web service are you ready to pay about 5-10$/month?
Nothing wrong with outsourcing ideas, but if you don't have itches to scratch, perhaps there are various qualities you should be improving before implementing a random idea from an internet forum?
For example I always write down my MVP ideas, and keep them indefinitely. This also requires being observant and proactive about the world around you.
Unless somebody actually gives you their credit card, what they say they will pay for is largely an imaginary game
(sorry if this comes out too negative)
Don't focus on price. Don't focus on other people's ideas. The word "need" is overloaded; too many people will tell you the solution they think they need and not the emotional need itself that is not being met by a solution. Instead, try to understand how other people are suffering, and only then try to come up with ideas for how to alleviate their suffering.
* My phone is broken. I want to buy a new one. I want to find the best one, given it must have at least 48 hour battery life and be able to handle falling to the floor a lot. I don't care about cameras or big screens. Show me what to buy. I don't want the options to be influenced by what other people want out of a phone, like an ultraviolet infrared stereoscopic 3D camera and 0.5g weight, but my parameters.
* I need new hiking shoes. I want something that lasts a while. Which ones do I get?
* I drive a Mazda CX-5 from 2014, maybe time to replace it? I want low mileage and I'm quite tall so I need some leg room. Give me some options. Oh, maybe the answer is I don't need a new car. That's useful to know too.
Currently, this requires a lot of research as most reviews are bought, most product information is unreliable. I'd pay for a service that shows me what is in my best interest as a consumer, not what is in the best interest of the sellers.
There was something called bossasaservice or something but don't think they were able to keep up with the demand and closed. Also the suggested $10 might be too low a price point for this.
Read The Mom Test
I have no affiliation, it's just a great short read that will answer your questions.
Not for images/videos so much but instead focused on GLTF, Step and other 3d file formats
There is a huge wave of 3d apps/games coming to browsers. WebGPU starting to roll out this year will just further accelerate that trend. Many of them feature user content that will have to be converted and optimized to be used
At https://flux.ai we had to build our own pipeline to optimize geometries, triangle counts, auto correct UVs, convert step and other file formats to gltf.
I wish there would have been a turnkey service to just plug into!
For ex if I want to travel to some place warm sometime in say January - March, with some flexibility on length, I end up spending a lot of time figuring out if flying a week later of some random date is way cheaper, or if the airport waiting times or fly times are terrible. If you add hotel options and flexibility in destination itself, it's a huge search space but I'd be happy with just the flight solution.
Todoist to me is regular (habits) + irregular to-dos (e.g. buy book, follow-up on email, etc.).
Pure habit tracking apps don't work b/c you need build a habit to use the app and with the content always being stale, they have high churn.
I want an app that also lets me track personal OKRs (habits). My goal might be to do 15 pullups and my habit could be to do 5 pullups per day. I want to know how often I skip my daily pull up habit so I can know to make adjustments (e.g. maybe 5 is too many. I should start with 3.).
I just searched and found Sync.Com: "one of the best alternatives to Dropbox right now. SYNC is cheaper than Dropbox and also comprises more features." Is this any good? I'd like one with less features.
1. aggregation of status pages. This was free. It had all the popular SaaS ones and was kept up-to-date with polling scripts written with a variety of heuristics or explicit scripting.
2. "20,000 foot view" distributed log events. It was a distributed 'key-event' log that integrated with logging so that you could put in a request-id or user-id and get the high-level 'human-rate' events in a time interval. Each high-level event had a link to the Loggly search. It could also present the events in a sequence-diagram view through the chain of connected services.
3. Hosted (private or public) exact github repo trigram/regex search using Hound-Search (aka etsy/houndd). The automated provisioning using cloud vms (not K8s) was pretty neat to set up.
4. Others. Tried making some info aggregators for products or movies to make it easy for me to find things I liked. Not complete enough to be better than existing web sites.
Today I'm paying $20 for Marginalia while I wait for Kagi (and because I love Marginalia and the ideas behind it).
I'd probably pay for a "cloud provider with seatbelts" too for learning/testing (e.g. "GCP"/"AWS"/"Azure" but without the possibility to empty my bank account. Bonus if it let me attempt that without doing it and immediately tell me I messed up, etc.)
Edit: there are probably a number of other things I would buy if I could buy them in the form of tokens, not a monthly subscription. I have serious subscription fatigue so I try to only pay subscribtions for stuff that I love or need.)
Imagine a product that deals with domains. You might want to show icons next to each domain in your product. You can build this yourself, as many do, but I think there is room for a "gravatar" style API that does this
I actually think it's a pretty good potential application for a GPT-3 style prose-generating AI - I'd happily accept something that was 'readable' (for GPT-3 levels of readable) without human bias, editorialization, and sensationalization. The hard part is getting unbiased facts to turn into articles.
It's not that I don't have developer friends, it's moreso that I respect their time and would rather not bother them for tech problems related to my business. I would love to pay for help, but at the same time my friends would never accept my money, so you can see my dilemma. I've used codementor.io in the past but there's a lot of friction in terms of finding a developer/posting a "job", scheduling a time with them, and so on. I'd like to just field these questions into a discord group, feel zero guilt/shame about it, and feel like someone smart will be able to help me within a reasonable time frame.
Of course, whoever figures this out would need to figure out how to balance the costs and the scope of the problems (i.e. I obviously wouldn't be able to have someone just rewrite my entire app), but for example here are some things that I've recently had questions about that I would love to have solved for me that vary in difficulty:
- What CSS do I need to write for me to get these boxes to look this way given that the widths/heights can be variable? (css questions)
- Figuring out what is going on with node-sass and later versions of Webpacker preventing me from compiling assets. (js problems)
- I have no idea how to do this query in an effective manner, here is my data model, can someone help me write an ActiveRecord or SQL query for this? (DB-related questions)
- We have a massive performance bottleneck in this part of the app, here is the business context of why we did it this way, but also why it ended up being really bloated, I'd like some help talking through a better way of fetching and serializing this data for the frontend. (performance problems)
- Our site is going down intermittently and nginx is giving me weird errors (devops problems).
- Here's a feature we want to implement, what do you think is the best way to execute this in terms of tools, packages, and so on? (general consultative questions)
I know these questions on HN are usually fishing for some 100% automated software solution, but after 5 years of building SaaS, this is the one recurring problem I've had.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not looking to hire a consultant specifically, but rather that I think something like this can be productized if someone were ambitious enough to want to assemble this sort of marketplace.
Something like this, but up to date: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w3o6_cn-O8