Show HN: Willpayforthis.com – Ideas people will pay for
willpayforthis.comAh, there's a dumb easy hack to figure out what ideas people will pay for. Search "I'd pay for" on Twitter and you'll find hundreds of posts from people talking about pain points and products they'd pay for to solve them.
Do this enough and you realize you have to filter through a lot of slop. slop. slop.
I created willpayforthis.com to accumulate high signal, high quality posts and save you some time.
I love thoughts from the community on how I can make it better, save you time, and help you work on the best ideas.
This project is one example of what made me lose faith on the Indie Hacker movement. Many "indiehackers" just started creating projects for other people that wanted to become indie hackers.
The value to society of many tech-based businesses lately is appalling. They feel more interested in grabbing your wallet first than in creating any actual value.
There’s a fine line between validating an early MVP by verifying whether users will pay, and scamming users. An entrepreneur acting in good faith would ideally take this strong positive signal, listen to their initial users feedback, and iterate towards something better.
A natural consequence of the currently low barrier for developers to ship a whole product indie, is that you’ll see more low value projects online. I can understand how that’s annoying.
But when one strikes gold and creates real value, I think it’s pretty cool how it’s ran by an individual who truly cares and understands the target user and problem.
I prefer that to an over funded VC project that gets dissolved, or a Google project that gets EOL from layoffs.
Yeah, I love the idea of empowering individuals to create many meaningful businesses than a few super large tech companies
My hope is to save people time and thought $30 is fair to save hours searching through posts one self!
"I created willpayforthis.com to accumulate high signal, high quality posts and save you some time" - Really ? How you filter for high signal, high quality posts to save me some time while paying you $20/month ? Otherwise I can search myself "I'd pay for" on Twitter for free. I don't see the added value for your product.
I had an AI classification system review 30,000 posts and picked the top 300 or so.
I was actually AB testing the $20/month but people didn't like it so I switched back to $30 lifetime order.
I'd love any other feedback or input you have.
these are things people *say* they will pay for.
They're saying this on twitter for likes. It's different from what they or the org they work for actually thinks.
you're better off asking yourself, "would I pay for this" and being brutally honest.
Stripe Driven Development : Build a landing page with a stripe payment. If people pay, build the solution. Rince and Repeat for unlimited money.
Isn't that kickstarter.com & indiegogo.com (or possibly fiverr et al)
Even this can be an over investment as it presumes potential customer find the landing page.
Pro tip: just go find the potential customers.
Too many sweats, if you do this but with crypto you don't need the last step of building the solution.
PumpFun Driven Development (PFDD) : Launch a Solana Token without any project behind it. When people buy it. Rug pull them. Rince and repeat.
Name your token $WILLPAYFORTHIS. Because they literally will.
Instead you’ve added multiple extra steps, and guaranteed normal think you’re a scam.
THIS + 1.
I would go a step further. People kid themselves all the time. Even being brutally honest, I might say I would pay for something and bail at the last step, changing my mind. It's kinda like if you write a book and ask your friend to read it and they say "sure, I will!" and they never do.
thus brutally! I really mean brutally. If you think "ahhh, i might pay for that"... that's a definite no.
It needs to be "take my money now" energy.
I'm a pretty miserly guy, a better question is "would someone I know pay for this"
Well I'd imagine some % of people that say this are serious, even if 10%, that's a significant signal
Hmm $30? I dunno. I just looked at
https://x.com/search?q=%22I%27d%20pay%20for%22&src=typed_que...
and I don't mind looking thru them all for free.
There is also:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/
No problem if you prefer to search yourself, but I had an AI system narrow down 30k posts to around 1000 posts and then I manually looked at each one to narrow it down to 300 so it may save you a bit of time.
$30 is like two chipotle burritos these days.
To each their own
Maybe we need a "What would you pay for?" thread on HN every month.
I'd love that
Where is the tweet that says people will pay for willpayforthis.com?
lol
How are your orders since last time you posted? [1]
Have you reconsidered creating an actual demo?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42671589 (it was flagged)
Orders are ok.
I don't know what causes flags. I've submitted again because the previous time didn't get much attention.
oh snap! so why does HN allow dup posts in the first place? Why not give user the error at the time of submission?
They allow duplicates to give people multiple chances to launch their product, recognizing that not every post that deserves to front page will do so the first time around.
Yet i see nothing changed since last he was criticized. Just low effort attempt.
I will pay $500/500€ for a 500g subnotebook with a proper keyboard (a la ThinkPad), A5/11" b/w e-Ink screen and a battery that lasts for a week. No hires graphics card, no GPU, 1 CPU (1-4 ARM cores, possibly RasPi-based), 16 GB RAM + 1 TB SSD suffice. (Doesn't have to have much compute power, as it would ba a reading/writing/editing appliance.)
I would pay a LOT for whoever reactivates my collection of RIM BlackBerries.
I have a Onyx Boox with a Bluetooth mechanical keyboard which met my similar desire
Beware: as I'm sure most people intrinsically understand, it's much easier to say you'd pay for something than it is to actually bust out your wallet
Or, worse IMHO is that developers would gladly pay if they had a stipend card but trying to convince your manager, or their manager, or procurement, that it really would make your life $20/mo better can be infuriating
That's why I love the AWS Marketplace: it can often hide "quality of life" services in the AWS bill, which almost never gets the same level of pushback as does "please, sire, may I have $10/mo?"
Yes, the logical next step for this site is to add escrow.
When that happens, I'll re-consider signing up for it. At the moment, I can't justify $30 for access to what could be, admittedly, a lot of pie in the sky.
Added to my website iwontpayforthis.com
ok
I would not pay for this. :P
ok
This would be a more compelling site if there was evidence that people were tweeting “I’d pay for a mobile app to hail rides from freelancers” before ridesharing existed. But I doubt that was occurring.
I think this service is valuable. It provides an insight into what people are annoyed by, even if it does not provide actionable solutions.
Jobs wasn't too far off when he said:
Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
Huh, I suspect you completely missed the point of the quote.
Jobs was talking about how people don't know what they want until you show them. He was fighting in reaction to the idea that what people say they want will guide you in the right direction.
No, I get it. That's why I'm saying that the valuable thing about the resource is that you find out what annoys people, even if they can't come up with good solutions to their problems.
maybe that tweet would have said "I will pay for a faster horse". It's up to you to bring the solution.
How fast are we talking?
This is a great idea to put together for fun and/or to show off some skills. The moment (very early on) it asks me to purchase access to it was when it became a cheap money grab, of the sort I’d pay never to see again.
Ok, feedback received. I removed the "order now" at the top because people don't like that.
Great book on this subject https://www.momtestbook.com/
So, basically a newer version of halfbakery.com? Which is kind of the SCP of stoner ideas, but maybe less well-edited.
never heard of that, interesting
The hard part is a lot of people say they will pay for stuff but they won't... They just want to present themselves on social media as being the kind of person who would pay for that.
Once put in front of a paywall, a whole bunch of doubts can pop up out of nowhere and for no particular reason. Maybe the user just doesn't trust the app sufficiently to give money. Insufficient brand recognition to cross the threshold to actually pay.
I think a better way to validate ideas is to go to acquire.com and actually see what people are paying for already. They are frequently 1 person businesses and already have paying customers
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is everything. Well, marketing is everything, with execution a close second.
It's interesting that this is being posted on Y-Combinator, which is exactly what this company does.
When you say "Lifetime", is that my lifetime or yours?
It’s the lifetime of the project.
So like, a week?
mine
If you had some further validation like someone actually clicking pay besides someone just saying they would pay for it then the website would be worth paying for. You should just give the tweet database away for free and then charge for the actual validation. I think your website still has value though, I know users saying they would pay is step one on the way to paying
Ok, interested input. Thank you, I'll consider that.
likes & or what people say vs actual paying customers; conversion rate is much lower man.
Being frank this is utter garbage.
Ok, interested to hear more.
A buck a tweet.
there are 400 tweets so more like $.10 a tweet
fuck way to make me the product lol.
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> You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.
Fix that. And when it's enabled all the twitter links are broken anyway. Find a way to show something useful on that landing page without downloading 100 MB of JS files first.
Last but not least, users may not be the best clients for you as they always need random impossible things, and they may not be prepared to pay for all the crap they are asking on twitter. I guess that most of the time it's joking or venting.
You got me curious, so I went ahead and looked at the requests my browser makes. While I do think 200 KB of JS is waaay too much for this, it's nothing compared to the 3.15 MB favicon.
oh shit my favicon is too large?