Validating an idea or problem you find on Houston is tedious
Before spending time on building your MVP, you should test your idea within your target audience. IdeaCheck uses a standardized validation process to design a questionnaire, find the right respondents, and deliver the results within 48 hours. #sponsored
Hi there 👋 This is Houston issue #13 and here are the five interesting problems that we found this week:
The stocks app on iOS and Android is a bad user experience
Every stock app on my phone has a better pro version (Email → Superhuman, Evernotes → Notes) but there's nothing like that for my stocks app. Every year the stocks iOS app has gotten worse. I can’t see charts in landscape mode; the spaced layout makes it hard to compare stocks and getting basic info summarized for quarterly reports is basically impossible.
A dedicated social network for just close family and friends is something that doesn't exist
I don't use Facebook a lot anymore but I wish there was something like it but just for my close friends. There was this app called Path that did just that, but it was shut down. Group texts are fine but you can only have one conversation at a time and pinging people with your pictures and updates all the time feels intrusive. Having stories just for your grandma and parents is also way better than having them on Snapchat or Instagram.
With so many coding bootcamps & retraining programs figuring out which one is the best fit is hard
As more people decide to explore alternative career paths due to the high cost of education and the rise in automation, the number of students enrolled in coding boot camps and retraining programs will increase substantially. A massive problem for these workers will be figuring out what's the best program given their skill set. A "talent agency" that can place students into the best programs and find them jobs on the other end can be tremendously valuable.
Customer surveys are a terrible user experience
I wish there were something like Intercom (little bubble chat on the side of websites) for customer surveys. Sending a google form isn’t as effective as capturing users when they’re using the product. A solution to this problem shouldn’t be too intrusive though because otherwise, you’re preventing users from using your product. Nevertheless, it’s very likely that it will convert better than a form sent via email
AWS documentation really sucks.
It's pretty straightforward. If you're a developer, you know that AWS documentation is terrible. If someone could take all that information and clean it and prettify to look like Stripe's documentation, they could charge developers for access to that and be very successful.
Quick Community Updates
Our friend Parthi Loganathan from Graduate Fund answered some of the questions that you guys have repeatedly sent us. You can see Parthi's answers here. If this is something you find useful, please hit reply and say "give me more"! It helps us provide more valuable content to you(:
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