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Ask HN: New web service idea that you would pay for?

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Re: Ask HN: New web service idea that you would pay for?

#71

Post by eitland »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #66
eitland wrote: post #18

I have paid about $5 a month for a couple of years for the most promising Google+ replacement I could find at the time. At some point after sending feedback multiple times on a specific pain point I gave up.) Today I'm paying $20 for Marginalia while I wait for Kagi (and because I love Marginalia and the ideas behind it). I'd probably pay for a "cloud provider with seatbelts" too for learning/testing (e.g. "GCP"/"AWS…

To be fair, my search engine isn't really trying to be google, it's more of an exploration and discovery tool even though it dresses up as a search engine and sometimes does a decent job at it. Unless someone sends me a ton of money, I just don't have the budget to be more than that. I also think the "better google" space is getting a bit crowded anyway, I think there's probably more interesting niches to be carved o…

Of course if I had to choose between Marginalia and Google I'd probably have to choose Google.

But don't underestimate the value of proving that it is possible to create a delightful (fast, less patronizing, less spamful, surfaces more real content) search engine without having a FAANG budget or backing from a national state or someone with a FAANG budget.

Edit: also don't underestimate how cool it is. ;-)

Re: Ask HN: New web service idea that you would pay for?

#73

Post by lazyant »

Not a subscription but I'd pay $100 after booking of a vacation travel planner that could give me options tailored to what I want, on flexible dates.

For ex if I want to travel to some place warm sometime in say January - March, with some flexibility on length, I end up spending a lot of time figuring out if flying a week later of some random date is way cheaper, or if the airport waiting times or fly times are terrible. If you add hotel options and flexibility in destination itself, it's a huge search space but I'd be happy with just the flight solution.

Re: Ask HN: New web service idea that you would pay for?

#74

Post by solatic »

bckr wrote: post #63
solatic wrote: post #39

IMO this kind of question will get "faster horse" kind of responses, not "a car" kind of responses (context: https://www.inc.com/michael-graber/people-would-have-asked-f... ) Don't focus on price. Don't focus on other people's ideas. The word "need" is overloaded; too many people will tell you the solution they think they need and not the emotional need itself that is not being met by a solution. Instead, try to unde…

It's a good point, but I think this is still a valuable exercise. The strategy shouldn't be "listen to what people say they want and then build that", but instead listen through what they say they want and into their problems. If nothing else this may lead, eventually, to discovering a class of problems you weren't aware of.

If you listen to what people say they want, it becomes difficult to actively ignore that in favor of a better overall solution. The sheer fact that a solution was proposed becomes ammunition that the proposed solution is what you should build. It becomes a form of authority bias.

Part of the insight that good product managers have is that their customer base aren't omniscient gods. They're flawed human beings like the rest of us, with limited experience and perspective. Our customers often don't know what we're capable of building, so why should we let our customers' proposals limit us?

This is why it's most important to focus on customer suffering. The facts of the gap that stands between them and happiness. That is the purest signal.

Re: Ask HN: New web service idea that you would pay for?

#75

Post by guavaNinja »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #55

I'd pay money for a service that finds me the best product according to parameters I provide. Like, not the product with the fanciest advertisement, but something that is actually good. * My phone is broken. I want to buy a new one. I want to find the best one, given it must have at least 48 hour battery life and be able to handle falling to the floor a lot. I don't care about cameras or big screens. Show me what to…

Sellers can easily pay to the site more than the buyers and it won't be in the buyer's interest

Re: Ask HN: New web service idea that you would pay for?

#76

Post by marginalia_nu »

guavaNinja wrote: post #75
marginalia_nu wrote: post #55

I'd pay money for a service that finds me the best product according to parameters I provide. Like, not the product with the fanciest advertisement, but something that is actually good. * My phone is broken. I want to buy a new one. I want to find the best one, given it must have at least 48 hour battery life and be able to handle falling to the floor a lot. I don't care about cameras or big screens. Show me what to…

Sellers can easily pay to the site more than the buyers and it won't be in the buyer's interest

Right, I want someone to solve that.

Re: Ask HN: New web service idea that you would pay for?

#77

Post by karmakaze »

Old ideas: I've built a few but never put in (proper) sales/marketing effort.

1. aggregation of status pages. This was free. It had all the popular SaaS ones and was kept up-to-date with polling scripts written with a variety of heuristics or explicit scripting.

2. "20,000 foot view" distributed log events. It was a distributed 'key-event' log that integrated with logging so that you could put in a request-id or user-id and get the high-level 'human-rate' events in a time interval. Each high-level event had a link to the Loggly search. It could also present the events in a sequence-diagram view through the chain of connected services.

3. Hosted (private or public) exact github repo trigram/regex search using Hound-Search (aka etsy/houndd). The automated provisioning using cloud vms (not K8s) was pretty neat to set up.

4. Others. Tried making some info aggregators for products or movies to make it easy for me to find things I liked. Not complete enough to be better than existing web sites.

Re: Ask HN: New web service idea that you would pay for?

#78

Post by marginalia_nu »

eitland wrote: post #71
marginalia_nu wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, my search engine isn't really trying to be google, it's more of an exploration and discovery tool even though it dresses up as a search engine and sometimes does a decent job at it. Unless someone sends me a ton of money, I just don't have the budget to be more than that. I also think the "better google" space is getting a bit crowded anyway, I think there's probably more interesting niches to be carved o…

Of course if I had to choose between Marginalia and Google I'd probably have to choose Google. But don't underestimate the value of proving that it is possible to create a delightful (fast, less patronizing, less spamful, surfaces more real content) search engine without having a FAANG budget or backing from a national state or someone with a FAANG budget. Edit: also don't underestimate how cool it is. ;-)

Yeah, I do think that's sort of one goal of it, a "show, don't tell" contradiction about some of the less well founded assumptions that seems widely accepted about software development and webdesign. It's too easy to dismiss words.

Re: Ask HN: New web service idea that you would pay for?

#79

Post by karmakaze »

How about storage/sync? Is there something that's as easy to use as Dropbox used to be and based on S3, Backblaze, etc? The things I pay for are slightly more convenient than rsync and far slower.

I just searched and found Sync.Com: "one of the best alternatives to Dropbox right now. SYNC is cheaper than Dropbox and also comprises more features." Is this any good? I'd like one with less features.

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