my_name_is_sarah
New member
Hi everyone. I have been aggregating a now daily list of interesting problems that people have shared that if solved might turn into great businesses. A couple of interesting things have repeatedly come up and I thought this subreddit might find them interesting. Here are the 10-12 that seem to have resonated the most with people:
Personal trainers are one of the last few things that’s reserved to the ultra-wealthy and celebrities. Uber democratized chauffeurs so who’s doing the same for personal trainers? Virtual AI assistants probably won’t cut it in this case, but some sort of telepresence service could make a service like this scalable. New technologies and sensors like the Apple Watch might make it possible to give trainers detailed information on how their clients are doing even if they are not literally with them in the same gym.
If you’re on a diet, counting calories is something that you’re probably doing. However, the hardest part about counting calories is that when you go out, you don’t exactly know what you’re eating. Most restaurants do not appear on MyFitnessPal and similar databases. People already take pictures of what they eat so potentially doing this and figuring out what the food is could help people get an approximation of how many calories they’re eating. This might be a potential solution.
It would be really useful to be able to upload an image to a site/app and know whether and even how that image has been photoshopped. This story really made realize how valuable this could be for journalist and not just for people who are curious to see if their friend’s insta picture is photoshopped.
This is something that I feel everyone has wanted forever, but we never really end up getting. I’ve played with a couple of CRMs, but none seem to fit the bill. They are either too complicated, require too much manual input, or are just too complicated. In the age of Superhuman and Notion, it’s incredible that someone hasn’t Notion’d or Superhuman’d the personal CRM
I am working on a project where we do small transactions (i.e. $1-5) and we use Stripe to process payments. The problem with this is that when you have low purchase price you lose anywhere from 20-30% on fees! That’s crazy! It’s specially crazy when you consider that many of these are recurrent charges made by small creators. A tool that allows you to charge your user’s bank account directly will be amazing!
I just stayed at an Airbnb in Madrid and I wish I had easier access to some basic stuff like wall adapters and some toiletries. I would be willing to pay a little bit more for the convenience because I don't speak the language and didn't want to leave my place at night after arriving from a long flight. I imagine a startup could offer these things to Airbnb hosts the way I've seen Uber drivers sell gum, water, and things like this in their car.
“Recruiting people for your customer surveys with a specific demographic and recruiting enough of them to have representative samples is incredibly time-consuming. I really wish that there was a service where I could fill out a couple of parameters and request these users on demand.”
“I don't use Facebook a lot anymore but I wish there was something like it but just for my close friends. There was this app called Path that did just that, but it was shut down. Group texts are fine but you can only have one conversation at a time and pinging people with your pictures and updates all the time feels intrusive. Having stories just for your grandma and parents is also way better than having them on Snapchat or Instagram.”
“As more people decide to explore alternative career paths due to the high cost of education and the rise in automation, the number of students enrolled in coding boot camps and retraining programs will increase substantially. A massive problem for these workers will be figuring out what's the best program given their skill set. A "talent agency" that can place students into the best programs and find them jobs on the other end can be tremendously valuable.”
Where I live, there are a lot of parking lots and places that could be parking lots (vacant spots in the lots of churches, schools, etc.) that are underutilized and under-monetized by their owners. There must be a better way to help these owners do lot enforcement, payment collection, visitor registration, and customer support.
Internationalization of websites is incredibly inefficient, which means that only big players like Facebook or Google have the resources to translate their sites into a bunch of languages. It would be great for startups if they could get access to a service that scraped my site and provided me with a translation of words or that at least the translation work happens on the background and I just get the translated words via an API or a simple file.
Would love to hear your thoughts on any of these problems. What current solutions do you see to them? Do you think some of them could work or nah?
Personal trainers are one of the last few things that’s reserved to the ultra-wealthy and celebrities. Uber democratized chauffeurs so who’s doing the same for personal trainers? Virtual AI assistants probably won’t cut it in this case, but some sort of telepresence service could make a service like this scalable. New technologies and sensors like the Apple Watch might make it possible to give trainers detailed information on how their clients are doing even if they are not literally with them in the same gym.
If you’re on a diet, counting calories is something that you’re probably doing. However, the hardest part about counting calories is that when you go out, you don’t exactly know what you’re eating. Most restaurants do not appear on MyFitnessPal and similar databases. People already take pictures of what they eat so potentially doing this and figuring out what the food is could help people get an approximation of how many calories they’re eating. This might be a potential solution.
It would be really useful to be able to upload an image to a site/app and know whether and even how that image has been photoshopped. This story really made realize how valuable this could be for journalist and not just for people who are curious to see if their friend’s insta picture is photoshopped.
This is something that I feel everyone has wanted forever, but we never really end up getting. I’ve played with a couple of CRMs, but none seem to fit the bill. They are either too complicated, require too much manual input, or are just too complicated. In the age of Superhuman and Notion, it’s incredible that someone hasn’t Notion’d or Superhuman’d the personal CRM
I am working on a project where we do small transactions (i.e. $1-5) and we use Stripe to process payments. The problem with this is that when you have low purchase price you lose anywhere from 20-30% on fees! That’s crazy! It’s specially crazy when you consider that many of these are recurrent charges made by small creators. A tool that allows you to charge your user’s bank account directly will be amazing!
I just stayed at an Airbnb in Madrid and I wish I had easier access to some basic stuff like wall adapters and some toiletries. I would be willing to pay a little bit more for the convenience because I don't speak the language and didn't want to leave my place at night after arriving from a long flight. I imagine a startup could offer these things to Airbnb hosts the way I've seen Uber drivers sell gum, water, and things like this in their car.
“Recruiting people for your customer surveys with a specific demographic and recruiting enough of them to have representative samples is incredibly time-consuming. I really wish that there was a service where I could fill out a couple of parameters and request these users on demand.”
“I don't use Facebook a lot anymore but I wish there was something like it but just for my close friends. There was this app called Path that did just that, but it was shut down. Group texts are fine but you can only have one conversation at a time and pinging people with your pictures and updates all the time feels intrusive. Having stories just for your grandma and parents is also way better than having them on Snapchat or Instagram.”
“As more people decide to explore alternative career paths due to the high cost of education and the rise in automation, the number of students enrolled in coding boot camps and retraining programs will increase substantially. A massive problem for these workers will be figuring out what's the best program given their skill set. A "talent agency" that can place students into the best programs and find them jobs on the other end can be tremendously valuable.”
Where I live, there are a lot of parking lots and places that could be parking lots (vacant spots in the lots of churches, schools, etc.) that are underutilized and under-monetized by their owners. There must be a better way to help these owners do lot enforcement, payment collection, visitor registration, and customer support.
Internationalization of websites is incredibly inefficient, which means that only big players like Facebook or Google have the resources to translate their sites into a bunch of languages. It would be great for startups if they could get access to a service that scraped my site and provided me with a translation of words or that at least the translation work happens on the background and I just get the translated words via an API or a simple file.
Would love to hear your thoughts on any of these problems. What current solutions do you see to them? Do you think some of them could work or nah?
