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. Fired up, I started looking for one.
I asked friends what annoyed them. I made lists of things that seemed broken. Nothing. I searched online too.
The problem was, there were no problems. The ones I thought of weren't unique. The ones online were already solved.
- 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
All this time, I'd been going out to find problems. What if I built a place where problems came to me?
Now I knew what, but not how. 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.
Posting could be anonymous, so nobody had to put their name on a personal problem. Votes sorted the feed, so the most popular problems got seen first.
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, more than 850 people signed up.
People posted 63 problems. Lots were jokes, personal problems, or problems that were already solved. But a couple were real problems someone could tackle: medical bills that could be $20 or $1,000 with no way to know beforehand, and finding a doctor who's taking new patients, which took one person 10+ hours of calls.
I set it aside when school started, then college applications and other projects took over. The site is still up.