Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is your's “I would pay $5 to get that problem resolved”

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 17 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is your's “I would pay $5 to get that problem resolved”

#2

Post by rdtek »

An app to help with learning human languages better. Back in school I struggled learning foreign languages and wish I had a fun mobile app or even PC game. Duolingo is good and there's Rosetta Stone and various subscription pod cast sites plus vocabulary memorizing apps but I think there's still room for improvement in language education software.

Re: Ask HN: What is your's “I would pay $5 to get that problem resolved”

#3

Post by brudgers »

To me, this is probably not the question behind a sustainable business. $5000 or $500 are price points that are more likely to work. $5 problems are often not worth paying to solve. Big problems more often are.

To put it another way, the time and effort of signing up with a new service (password email etc.) and dealing with its payment process is one of those $5 problems. The pain of obtaining the service is about equal to the value of the service.

Re: Ask HN: What is your's “I would pay $5 to get that problem resolved”

#5

Post by tpv »

brudgers wrote: post #3

To me, this is probably not the question behind a sustainable business. $5000 or $500 are price points that are more likely to work. $5 problems are often not worth paying to solve. Big problems more often are. To put it another way, the time and effort of signing up with a new service (password email etc.) and dealing with its payment process is one of those $5 problems. The pain of obtaining the service is about eq…

I think you're over analyzing OP's question. He didn't ask for some specific business plan and obviously he wasn't thinking anything big.

An answer could be anything as "getting a coffee once a week", "potluck to fix the office's X/get new office X", "stop sublime from notifying you haven't bought the full version"... infinite number of things.

Re: Ask HN: What is your's “I would pay $5 to get that problem resolved”

#6

Post by personlurking »

Today, I was dealing with foreign currency conversion and was confused about a few things, but to get an answer, I'd have to open Reddit, find the right community, click self-post and ask what I wanted, then wait for an answer. A service that did this for me would be cool but it would annoy/'ruin' Reddit, so I think a better idea is what I've outlined below.

I've never used Mechanical Turk but from what I hear, each action pays out pennies. I think the world is connected enough to where a person should be able to ask a question and get an immediate answer, no matter the subject. People would surely pay for that, in my opinion.

It could work with some sort of verification process where answering gets you the most money but the person confirming an answer gets paid too, albeit a smaller amount. An answer with 5-10 confirmations gets sent to the user, depending on the difficulty of the question. There could be a ranking system where harder questions cost more money to be answered.

Imagine you're visiting a city and want to ask the hive "what's a good hipster cafe?" or, a problem I recently had, construction workers were making lots of noise early in the morning and I wanted to know if that's legal to disturb the peace that early. Big companies want this kind of task to be handled by AI but I'd much prefer a human element to it (like Ask HN/Quora, only on steroids).

Re: Ask HN: What is your's “I would pay $5 to get that problem resolved”

#7

Post by brudgers »

tpv wrote: post #5
brudgers wrote: post #3

To me, this is probably not the question behind a sustainable business. $5000 or $500 are price points that are more likely to work. $5 problems are often not worth paying to solve. Big problems more often are. To put it another way, the time and effort of signing up with a new service (password email etc.) and dealing with its payment process is one of those $5 problems. The pain of obtaining the service is about eq…

I think you're over analyzing OP's question. He didn't ask for some specific business plan and obviously he wasn't thinking anything big. An answer could be anything as "getting a coffee once a week", "potluck to fix the office's X/get new office X", "stop sublime from notifying you haven't bought the full version"... infinite number of things.

Sure, I'd pay $5 to have a $4 cup of cup of coffee delivered to my desk. Or $5 for all the functionality of the $70 version of Sublime Text. To put it another way, I'd pay $5 to solve the problem of not having $10 or $11 etc.

On the other hand, anything for the office has to be worth $100's of dollars before it is worth pursuing. Other wise the productivity lost obtaining and installing it is less than the value.

Re: Ask HN: What is your's “I would pay $5 to get that problem resolved”

#9

Post by a1371 »

codegeek wrote: post #8

I will pay $5/Month to make sure that I don't get any junk physical mail in my mailbox (US). I hate sorting through mails and I almost always know that 95% are junk.

I am in Canada so I don't know how things work south the border. But I heard from a neighbour, and a postman confirmed, that if you stick a piece of paper in your mailbox saying "please don't put ads", they won't do it.
Post reply on HN