[jcadam]

There are a lot of us with the technical chops (and/or can get a team together) to make a good software solution/product/service that are stuck on step 1: Identifying a real problem that companies will pay money to have solved for them.

I wish there was a place/service that would connect businesses with real problems (that they either can't or would rather not solve in-house) with aspiring (tech) entrepreneurs. I'm sure there's a large number of such opportunities out there, probably in industries/domains most software devs don't have much experience in and wouldn't think to explore.

[truckerbill]

Looks like you've just identified a real problem that entrepreneurs will pay money to have solved for them.

[yourapostasy]

You identified a sales problem. There is a giant gulf between problems that companies say they have, even say they want to pay for, and actually cutting a purchase order when the rubber meets the road.

What we are lacking is a blockchain-verifiable reputation audit trail into an escrow-like system tied to an ideas factory on one side, implementers on another side, and funders on a third side, down to the individual natural person level. The problem with an escrow is no one wants to park unused capital, but implementers are screwed if they put up the effort and when it comes time to collect all the "funders" evaporate.

Milestone-based backing also encounters problems with funders getting screwed when implementers reel off an endless stream of milestones with no real end in sight, like with Star Citizen.

If you can trace escrow and delivery promises (perhaps with time bounds) not just to an organization but to a natural person sponsor within that organization, then over time the actual probability of funders and implementers actually delivering can be tracked and algorithmically computed for present and future promises to fund or deliver. This tends to flush out sociopathic individuals who hide their track record behind their hops from organization to organization (especially those who implement dark patterns that only show up in the long-run).

This is just recognizing a general scaling problem with monetary systems in general: they preserve pricing information but lossy encode all other aspects of the transaction, and that doesn't work efficiently in a global economy.

[pseudozach]

oh please don't bring blockchain into this and put a simple task/bounty website on a giant replicated public db.

[yourapostasy]

Sure, how else can I ensure that the records are distributed, replicated and simultaneously not tampered with? And timestamps with verifiable attestations? I thought of trying to use signed keys, but the key management quickly became a non-starter, so how else could I structure this without it turning into a nightmare human factors challenge?

Upvoted, because I honestly was hoping someone would challenge the blockchain part and show me a better solution. I'm not keen on that piece myself, but don't know how to design around it without raising other concerns I'd rather not deal with.