
Show HN: RealProblemHunt – Find problems to solve - johnkevinmbasco
http://realproblemhunt.com/
======
ArekDymalski
As far as I remember the oldest attempt to create something like that was
[http://theinternetwishlist.com/](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 ;)

~~~
fiatjaf
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?

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eastbayjake
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.

~~~
glup
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.

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RankingMember
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.".

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

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hackerews
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/](https://www.doximity.com/) for other businesses.

~~~
sogen
Explain please

~~~
hackerews
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.

~~~
mfisher87
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.

~~~
johnkevinmbasco
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.

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Kiro
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!

~~~
tomweingarten
Do you have a link for that? Sounds cool

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metasean
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/

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johnkevinmbasco
@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](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?

~~~
Toast_
did you make this using microscope?

~~~
johnkevinmbasco
Nope. It's built on Django

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

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davidrusu
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.

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blakerson
"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!

~~~
johnkevinmbasco
Thanks for the feedback! We will change it :)

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stevesearer
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.

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itschaffey
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.

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dataker
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.

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Dirlewanger
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.

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txu
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.

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kcole16
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?.

~~~
juliangregorian
Partition them into VMs?

Alternately, I use vagrant-aws ([https://github.com/mitchellh/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.

~~~
smacktoward
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.

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johnkevinmbasco
@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.

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

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Erwin
I like [http://www.halfbakery.com/](http://www.halfbakery.com/) \-- ideas
there aren't quite serious.

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

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

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aerialcombat
Wow what a great idea!

