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Show HN: A website that gives voice to unfulfilled customer needs

iwantthisstartup.com

31 pointsandygo15 comments

How does it work?

You just write a short title of what you want like “24/7 cafe in my town”, a short description why you need it - “I like to work late, don’t like to work at home and all coffee places close at 9” and how much you would pay per visit. If many people subscribe to your idea, hopefully someone will see it and open that coffee shop. You can also see what others want and maybe get inspired. Or you can just use the website to track your ideas.

What problems am I trying to solve?

1. Many startups fail because they build something that customers do not want 2. Customers do not get services they need because their voices are not heard

This project attempts to solve the two problems by giving the voice to the customers and a platform for startup founders to research customer demand backed product ideas.

The project is at its earliest stage, so any feedback, bug reports and feature requests are welcome!

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I like it. I've wished for something like it in the past. I'd like to see it get widespread popularity.

Some things:

I set my price at $100 per use, but I see there's a $20 per year in my listing along with it. Not sure where that came from.

Also, location info would likely be helpful- if someone opens/starts my idea elsewhere that's great for elsewhere, but doesn't help me.

At the bottom of the page where I'm scrolling through the list of tiles I can't tell there's more unless I scroll or I look at the scrollbar. The way the footer blends together at the bottom now doesn't look right to me.

I think the header should be locked like the footer is so when you scroll it stays visible, the part with the tags, not the account one. Maybe if the account one were to become visible on scrolling up from anywhere, but the tags one should stay locked visible like the footer is.

I think the items in the footer belong at the top.

This seems like the kind of thing where RSS feeds would be helpful to keep people up to date on trending stuff.

I was thinking about the ideas I can work on at free time, and realised they are all not very good, so I decided to work on this project:)

I agree that these listings can be a bit confusing. I set up some simple maths to convert everyones expenditure into revenue per year. So let's say if you put 10$, 2 times a month instead, it would calculate 10$212months = 240$/year, and would sum up over all users that subscribed to the idea.

Since you picked 100$ 12 times per life, I just assumed that you would live around 60 years more (could be optimistic or pessimistic assumption, depending on your age and where you live), which results in 100$*12 times/60 years= $20 per year

It gets even more confusing for ideas that involves monthly subscriptions. Like, let's say I use Netflix once a day, how much am I ready to pay per use? I would put like $15, once a month just to not do mental calculations

I agree this part needs some reworking

You could clarify that by putting it in a box called recurring revenue or annual revenue or just revenue. I don't know the right term for that.

I agree about location, I will add another field to specify the city/town for every idea

Nice idea, design wise I like that the page has high information density instead of pointless white space. You're missing some cursor: pointers; on things like the "Read more" and some other minor details.

The loading when going back is pretty annoying. If you're going to dynamically fetch things with JS, you should go fully SPA in my opinion and cache that stuff locally. So when I push back, it's instant. Or go full server-side rendering with caching, so when I press back, I get a quick 304 and it's _basically_ instant. Hitting the loading screen each time is really bad UX imo.

On a side note, is the data prepopulated by ChatGPT? I clicked on a few things and some of the ideas + comments look AI generated ;).

Thank you for the feedback! I will have a look into SSR with caching since I am already using Next.js, but I haven't used any SSR functionalities yet. I will add the "cursor:pointers", in general I haven't done much work on design for larger screens yet, just scaled up the mobile version.

At the moment, around half of the content is generated by ChatGPT, and around half by me and my friends. It could be that I am not good at using ChatGPT, but human ideas looked more interesting/fascinating to me

The site design is overwhelming and feels mobile-first. Also is there a way to filter out the AI generated content?

It looks like today, 9/28, the AI generated content is filtered out automatically, kind of nice to know it's all organic.

I'd like to be able to simply vote for a product. If you already can, I'm missing the UI where you can do that. There's a cool one for a woman that I wouldn't use but is so good I want to vote for it.

It is not there yet, it is work in progress, I will reply to this thread when it is ready

There is a like button now for posts, as well as additional geography field for every idea

I had to "Like" my own post, a bit redundant.

That tennis court one has nerd-sniped me. It feels like it should be possible.

Tennis courts in my area need to be booked, so it is pretty simple: have you booked? I am guessing this is for tennis courts that are not booked but you just rock up. The only way I can think is computer vision and surveillance of the courts. But it could be lowish resolution. A single well positioned ring cam could probably cover multiple courts for "is someone playing" detection.

A colleague worked on a similar project, but for detecting if there was a free court outside his house where he could play: https://blog.roboflow.com/computer-vision-twilio-notificatio...

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