[stanmancan]

Sharing idea's are pretty useless in general, if you're not excited enough to work on your own idea, why would someone else be excited to work on it?

I'm curious if people posting things they NEED would be more functional, along with a bounty. Other people who also want it can contribute to the bounty. Anyone can work on the idea's and the bounty is awarded to whoever solves it first/best. (I think you would need some sort of oversight to make sure the bounty is awarded to the rightful solution).

"$1,500 - An API that lets me send send snail mail by posting a PDF and address to an endpoint"

Maybe it slowly gets up to $4,000 with 15 other people contributing to the bounty. That's finally high enough that someone solves it, posts it, collects the bounty, and already has 16 customers.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I have more ideas than I have time to implement, so I focus on the ones that are most interesting/doable/potentially profitable.

The bounty idea is a good one, but again, I think it will rapidly become a race to the bottom on price. As soon as the bounty gets to the point where someone in e.g., Eastern Europe thinks it's good money, they'll bid on it even though a dev in SF thinks it's pocket change. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that in a lot of cases it will happen as soon as the bounty hits $100.

[bgdam]

Wouldn't this be a win-win-win situation for everyone? The guy with the idea gets it built, the guy in eastern Europe, earns some decent money, and the guy in San Francisco didn't waste his time for chump change.

[fhbdukfrh]

Don't we already know the magic number is $5?

[sailfast]

Wouldn't that be an excellent outcome for the person with the idea?

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Absolutely. But OP is focused on getting good projects for the developers and usually the devs saying they can't find customers are in locations where the COL is too high for this to be profitable for them.

One to get around this problem is to focus on only doing the same kind of work and getting better at doing it quickly so it becomes profitable to you, or doing it in a more Productized Service fashion. But that's a solution to a different problem, not what the OP was asking about.

[fullstackchris]

This is huge, and what plagues a lot of software engineers / product developers to this day. You may find a super cheap software company somewhere out in the world - but if the project is anything more than something like a webpage with jquery (as most modern projects involving software are) you end up spending more on fixing, re-fixing, and billing than you would have if you had just paid one time for the more expensive company / service / consultant that is well vouched for or acreddited

[sailfast]

Sure, this is absolutely true. That said, if you can test a prototype for $100 and validate the business idea it's easier to figure out how to pay for (and/or that it is worth spending the time building yourself) the better, built from scratch version. You'll probably also get some good feedback.

I think this is the disconnect for me when reading this question. If the question is "where do I find good ideas for my personal tinkering projects" that's one thing, but if you're looking for profitable startup ideas it's not about the engineering - it's about testing quickly and validating the business so the development piece can be much less important (unless of course the business is software tooling)

[Jarwain]

There's a site I used to look at that does something similar called mindsumo.

They do more than just tech problems though, and the solver doesn't really maintain ownership

[cdiamand]

Someone actually developed an MVP of this concept. It was really highly upvoted on hacker news but I can't remember the name of it. I don't think the project ever got off the ground, but I can say it was definitely a popular idea amongst developers. So you'll have no problem getting that side of the equation to show up.

It's finding folks with a problem and some money that is the challenge. But if you figure it out you're gonna be in a great spot!

[cvhashim]

Inkit? Pretty cool product https://www.inkit.com/

[rtb]

A quick search for "send letter online" shows there are at least 2 or 3 companies that offer this currently.