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I see that Gun.io is trying to do something like this. It doesn't seem to be working very well yet. Not sure that specific implementation of the idea is right. Something feels off.
Background of question: I was just brainstorming some open source projects that I would like to exist. If I had more time or enough income that I could use some of my income generating time for purposes other than generating income, I would just build these projects. However, because of my life circumstances this is not the case (Early in career, stay at home wife and child, high cost of living, commitments outside of software world, etc...). These ideas are ideas that I believe a lot of other people could make use of and would generate income for many people if built. This got me thinking that it would be cool if I could either chip in a few hundred bucks towards the development of these projects or if I could get paid just enough to build these projects that I could afford the time to build them.
Related Side Rant: I greatly appreciate the open source communities commitment to donating time for the greater good of the community. I also think that it would be very beneficial to create more tools to further encourage the development of open source projects by compensating the talented engineers that lead the development in order to at a minimum offset the opportunity cost of time spent developing open source. I also think it is fantastic that companies and organizations like Khan Academy, P2PU and many others are attempting to build sustainable organizations based on open sourcing their code.
Related Discussions: Reflections on Using Kickstarter for Open Source Projects - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2875255 Gun.io Debuts Free Group Funding for Open Source Projects (gun.io) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3348358
Yesterday I bought the domain http://whatistheuscreditrating.com because I had big dreams of making it go viral. My initial attempt at putting together a joke site didn't go anywhere last night. So now I'm thinking I would like to use the domain for truly educational purposes and try and contribute in some small way to getting people informed on the United State's financial situation and what can be done about it. I have some ideas but I'm looking for some additional ideas on what could be done with a domain like this.
Obviously the financial problem is a huge one and decisions need to be made from the top down but I still believe there must be things that we as citizens can do to work towards a long term solution.
I'll take the feedback I get and try and put something simple together tomorrow.
Thanks
I'm a firm believer that great products solve real life problems and pain points. One of the largest pain points in my wife and my daily lives is meal planning, grocery shopping and cooking. Their are a whole bunch of inputs including budget restrictions, dietary restrictions, nutritional information and personal taste which go into the process. It is as lot of work to manually balance these different inputs and come up with an optimal grocery shopping/cooking plan.
I want a product that I can give all of these inputs to and it then gives me a list of recipes that I can drag and drop into a meal plan. I can manually input my own recipes from books that I have purchased. I can modify existing recipes to fit my diet/budget needs. This custom meal plan then gets automatically turned into a set of grocery lists with optimal shopping dates for ingredients that are perishable and calculates estimated costs. It could also suggest ways to modify my meal plan to make it more healthy, cheaper or both. What I want is the Mint.com of food.
I know there are a bunch of good food related sites out there but it doesn't seem like anyone has brought it all together in the way that mint was able to do with personal finances. Can anyone point me to the closest thing to this that currently exists? If it's not out there someone should build it, cause if it was built correctly, it could be tremendously successful. I know I would pay a subscription to this service if it was built correctly. The list of ways to extend a service like this are endless once you have a nice API and data set.
I would love to build this myself but I'm not currently in a place where I have the time/resources to undertake such a project. Maybe if I can find enough support for the project I would make it a priority or I would be happy to cheer on/support someone else who could solve this problem for me.