Ask HN: Which problems can we build an MVP for in a week?

#1

Post by mrborgen » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 12:11 PM UTC

I'll spend next week building an MVP together with a few fellow students at my coding bootcamp.

I understand that one week is far to little time to solve any problems at all. However, I'd rather spend this week trying to tackle an actual problem than prototyping an idea for yet another 'mobile/social/local app'..

I'd love to hear if people here know about problems they'd like to see solved.

Background info:

I'm currently attending a free coding bootcamp in London called Founders&Coders. I've been coding for about a year, mostly in Javascript&Node and Python&Django. I've also been running a kids app startup for a couple of years.

PS:

An area I'm quite interested in is the inequality in the real estate market. Both the issues of buying your own flat, (extremely expensive in London), and the issues of renting a flat/shared flat. So any problems in this sphere are highly welcome.

But so are all other problems!

Cheers, Per

http://foundersandcoders.org/

Re: Ask HN: Which problems can we build an MVP for in a week?

#2

Post by BerislavLopac » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 12:45 PM UTC

Here's an idea: aggregate available APIs (Google, Zoopla, TFL) to help people make decisions which neighbourhood(s) might be right for them. Make users answer questions (e.g. What newspapers you read? Where do you work or regularly commute to? Do you have children? etc) and narrow the options based on the answers.

Re: Ask HN: Which problems can we build an MVP for in a week?

#3

Post by bliti » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 12:51 PM UTC

You won't get real answers here. Go and talk to people in the real estate market and listen to their pain points. Forget about finding actionable data on the web. The real world has it available right now. Just pick up the phone.

Re: Ask HN: Which problems can we build an MVP for in a week?

#4

Post by squiggy22 » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 12:52 PM UTC

Problems in Real Estate listings:

Accuracy (many expired listings out there)- a good MVP would be a third party solution to feed inaccurate listing reports back to Rightmove / Zoopla etc, along with information on what part of the listing was inaccurate.

Shared Flat - finding the perfect room mate. Kinda like a dating app, only for room shares.

As someone else mentioned, Neighbourhoods aggregation of data from Gov websites on Crime, that sort of thing made into a good pluggable in solution using a postcode. .e.g. Pass a Postcode into your MVP API, spit back aggregated neighbourhood info.

Re: Ask HN: Which problems can we build an MVP for in a week?

#5

Post by mrborgen » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 12:54 PM UTC

BerislavLopac wrote: post #2

Here's an idea: aggregate available APIs (Google, Zoopla, TFL) to help people make decisions which neighbourhood(s) might be right for them. Make users answer questions (e.g. What newspapers you read? Where do you work or regularly commute to? Do you have children? etc) and narrow the options based on the answers.

Thanks for the tip! I like it. This would make a great project for using D3.js, to visualize the data in an exciting way, if people are to browse through neighbourhoods for example.

Do you know of any services that does this already btw?

Re: Ask HN: Which problems can we build an MVP for in a week?

#6

Post by supercoder » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 12:55 PM UTC

If you're going to tackle something in the area of real estate for your MVP, I'd advise being careful not to create something that is a two sided market place.

So if the app requires people to list property, but as well as users to view the properties etc then it's something that will be hard to gauge any traction on quickly as you'll need both sides to be rapidly signing up.

Developing a product that is focused on either the seller or the buyer would improves your chances considerably for validating an MVP.

Re: Ask HN: Which problems can we build an MVP for in a week?

#7

Post by maaarghk » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 12:57 PM UTC

squiggy22 wrote: post #4

Problems in Real Estate listings: Accuracy (many expired listings out there)- a good MVP would be a third party solution to feed inaccurate listing reports back to Rightmove / Zoopla etc, along with information on what part of the listing was inaccurate. Shared Flat - finding the perfect room mate. Kinda like a dating app, only for room shares. As someone else mentioned, Neighbourhoods aggregation of data from Gov we…

gov info london - http://data.london.gov.uk/

and there's glasgow too http://open.glasgow.gov.uk

Probably some more if you searcha bout!

Re: Ask HN: Which problems can we build an MVP for in a week?

#8

Post by mrborgen » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 12:59 PM UTC

squiggy22 wrote: post #4

Problems in Real Estate listings: Accuracy (many expired listings out there)- a good MVP would be a third party solution to feed inaccurate listing reports back to Rightmove / Zoopla etc, along with information on what part of the listing was inaccurate. Shared Flat - finding the perfect room mate. Kinda like a dating app, only for room shares. As someone else mentioned, Neighbourhoods aggregation of data from Gov we…

Thanks! I know that SpareRoom does flat mate matching, but only for their own platform. But it works quite well, I believe.

The question is wether it would be better to have is as an independent service or on top of a platform (like SpareRooms). Not quite sure about that..

Re: Ask HN: Which problems can we build an MVP for in a week?

#9

Post by mrborgen » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 1:01 PM UTC

maaarghk wrote: post #7

squiggy22 wrote: post #4

Problems in Real Estate listings: Accuracy (many expired listings out there)- a good MVP would be a third party solution to feed inaccurate listing reports back to Rightmove / Zoopla etc, along with information on what part of the listing was inaccurate. Shared Flat - finding the perfect room mate. Kinda like a dating app, only for room shares. As someone else mentioned, Neighbourhoods aggregation of data from Gov we…

gov info london - http://data.london.gov.uk/ and there's glasgow too http://open.glasgow.gov.uk Probably some more if you searcha bout!

Awesome data sets, thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Which problems can we build an MVP for in a week?

#10

Post by falcolas » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 1:01 PM UTC

Might I recommend a quick perusal of the following resources for some ideas?

http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html https://github.com/samsquire/ideas https://www.reddit.com/r/codeprojects/

Lots of chaff, but there's a few pretty awesome ideas to be found which could probably be tackled in a week by a focused team.