Houston #15 - 🚨Houston is going daily! Also, could we skip checking bags when traveling?
Find great problems to solve.
Hi there 👋 This is Houston issue #15 and here are the five interesting problems that we found this week:
I wish I could buy common necessities from my Airbnb host
I just stayed at an Airbnb in Madrid and I wish I had easier access to some basic stuff like wall adapters and some toiletries. I would be willing to pay a little bit more for the convenience because I don't speak the language and didn't want to leave my place at night after arriving from a long flight. I imagine a startup could offer these things to Airbnb hosts the way I've seen Uber drivers sell gum, water, and things like this in their car.
Packing is the least fun part about traveling. What if we could skip checking bags?
"A suitcase waiting for you in your hotel room when you arrive. Rent the Runway for vacation clothes. Never pack again." via Allyson Shontell. This might seem out there but a lot of people spend $25 for every flight they take to check bags. What if that money could be used towards getting new clothes for your trip? Presumably, people are willing to spend more when they're traveling because they want to have a good time so a startup can benefit from having customers in the right frame of mind.
Banking and transactions for kids is a bad user experience
“This week I was talking to a little cousin and I realized that if you're younger than 18, you can't really use Venmo or cash app with your friends because you don't have easy access to a bank account. I did some research on this, and there are some companies building banking products for kids (e.g. greenlight and step) but no one has seemed to crack the code.”
A site that shows a company's org chart over time is something that doesn't exist.
Request for Product: Crunchbase, but instead of funding history, I want to be able to visualize a company’s org chart over time. Why? In order to accelerate things like competitive analysis, company diligence, talent sourcing, and screening and for general research and intellectual curiosity. I imagine it would be quite handy for various purposes in other fields too (e.g., journalists regularly do this by hand.) via Adam Michela
As an executive coach I wish I had dedicated software to manage my clients
I am an independent executive coach and my current workflow consists of me jumping between google calendar, email, and google doc. I wish that there was one easy way for me to follow up with my clients, store notes on them, and share progress reports. A related issue is scheduling meetings and sending reminders. A lot of my clients are busy, so they have to reschedule and just handling that takes a bunch of my time. Executive companies like Torch and BetterUp are the future but I believe that it's a lot more impactful to build the picks & shovels of this industry and help all the coaches out there.
Quick Community Updates
Shoutout to Danielle Mair for sponsoring a couple of weeks of this newsletter. She doesn't have a particular product to sponsor but wanted to support this project! ❤️She's currently gathering stories for an anthology so make sure to check her out(:
We're running another experiment! We're moving Houston to this site and shifting to a daily schedule (as opposed to weekly). Don't worry we're keeping the newsletter running and each week we will send you the top 5 problems from the entire week.
Go visit the site! We've uploaded all the previous issues of Houston+ to the site for free! Future issues will only be available via the newsletter to Houston+ members but we wanted to give everyone an idea of what Houston+ is all about. Thanks to Yusuf (one of our readers) for making the suggestion(:
If you find Houston useful then please send this email to a friend. Let's see and share more great problems to solve ❤️
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