The summer before junior year, I went to the M.E.T. Innovation Academy at Berkeley. The instructors kept repeating one line: businesses solve problems. I started looking for one.
I asked friends what annoyed them and wrote down problems I ran into myself, but nothing I came up with was new. I searched online too, and everything there was already solved. The problem was that there were no problems.
- business ideas for high school students
- what problems do people have
- unsolved problems list
- startup ideas that haven't been done
- how to find a business idea
I stopped looking and instead decided to build a place where people would post their problems.
I had no idea how to build it. I found Marc Lou, who builds and launches small products by himself, and used the same stack he did. I took some of his attitude too: people will call parts of it suboptimal, but that doesn't matter if it works.
I posted it to Show HN, and it reached 107 points and 63 comments. The top comment was also the most common complaint: people wanted to see the problems before signing up. Shortly after, I let everyone read without an account. In total, 850+ emails filled the database.
Most posts were jokes or problems that were already solved, but a couple were real, like how unpredictable medical bills are.
I set it aside when school started, then college applications and other projects took over. The site is still up.