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 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.
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.".
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.
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.
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!
@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.
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?
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.
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.
"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?.
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
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.
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.
@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?
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 ;)