Ask HN: What is your's “I would pay $5 to get that problem resolved”
Sorry, English is not first language. What issue or problem would you pay up to $5 (one time, weekly, monthly, etc) to get resolved/fixed for you. Today, I was dealing with foreign currency conversion and was confused about a few things, but to get an answer, I'd have to open Reddit, find the right community, click self-post and ask what I wanted, then wait for an answer. A service that did this for me would be cool but it would annoy/'ruin' Reddit, so I think a better idea is what I've outlined below. I've never used Mechanical Turk but from what I hear, each action pays out pennies. I think the world is connected enough to where a person should be able to ask a question and get an immediate answer, no matter the subject. People would surely pay for that, in my opinion. It could work with some sort of verification process where answering gets you the most money but the person confirming an answer gets paid too, albeit a smaller amount. An answer with 5-10 confirmations gets sent to the user, depending on the difficulty of the question. There could be a ranking system where harder questions cost more money to be answered. Imagine you're visiting a city and want to ask the hive "what's a good hipster cafe?" or, a problem I recently had, construction workers were making lots of noise early in the morning and I wanted to know if that's legal to disturb the peace that early. Big companies want this kind of task to be handled by AI but I'd much prefer a human element to it (like Ask HN/Quora, only on steroids). You could try Ask Metafilter. - 20$/year: better facebook (with all my friends migrated magically, no adds, no spying bullshit) - 5$/month: a good windows backup (audited encryption + cloud or easy management of multiple external drives. Single system image once per month, versioned backups for all my documents). Currently trying arq but it has no proven crypto and no system images. - find me the best nieche software for X with these requirements. On a human level. For many things there are 5 good softwares and one clear winner. Somehow it's still hard to find the winner without skimming a few human authored comparisons (if you find them) and installing 2 or 3. E.g. bulk-crop pdf pages¹ or visual click automation². ¹ https://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/?source=typ_redirect 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. I'd pay $5 for someone to find and schedule a dr appointment for me to help deal with my anxiety and depression. I've been putting it off for months. :\ I'm thinking of a {life coach, personal assistant, concierge, gopher, personal trainer} service for people with motivation issues. It might hold you a little accountable for things like exercise and offload some errands and legwork for easy things like PP is asking. There are services for this already but I'm thinking more opinionated and motivational. 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. Wow, I live in Queensland, Australia, and here if you put up a sign on your letterbox that says "Australia Post Only" or "No Junk Mail" or similar, your junk mail intake drops to basically zero immediately -- it's really effective. So effective actually that I've never had to lookup what actions to take if I still receive junk mail, because it just never happens. I looked it up just now and found this: https://www.ehp.qld.gov.au/waste/advertising-material.html I am in Norway and all I have to do is put a sticker on my mail box, which basically says "No unsolicited mail" which stops the postman from filling my mailbox with junk mail. I usually take off the sticker during Christmas or near black Friday, so I can see if I am missing out on any good deals. I wonder, if it would make sense, to have a service, which would receive all your mail, sorts it for you, throws out the junk, scans the rest and email that to you. In Norway, I rarely receive any important physical mail, especially since the government has started a secure email service[0], where you can receive your payslip and other important documents from government departments. The senders are pre authorized and pay a small fee to send an email to the user but the service is free for the user of the service. 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. There was a service like this, right? It opened and scanned all of your mail and sent it through email. Junk mail wasn't scanned. You can contact your local USPS office and just tell them you do not want the junk mail - and they will no longer deliver it. 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. 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.