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Ask HN: What is a simple product that you would pay a monthly subscription for?

8 points by staticgarden ↗ HN
I am planning on creating a new online business for a simple product which people would pay money for. Would love to hear your thoughts. I have a few ideas:

1. A simple service which notifies you about tips through various channels (slack, email, telegram). It rotates through a list of your tips that you've created. These could be programming tips, quotes etc,.

2. A service which sends you a kindle document containing all your pocket links every week.

3. A service which converts an open source code repository into a readable ebook which can be read on a Kindle like device.

4. A service that allows you to create a private website and share it with only a few users (authentication via email).

5. A simple blogging engine driven by a Dropbox folder and Markdown.

12 comments

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cVwEq
A news curator that learns what news and articles make me happy, productive, and wealthy, maybe allows me to select certain websites (e.g. HN, NPR) as preferred sources, and then sends me a separate email per news story/article. I can rate whether the news story/article was worthwhile or not and the system learns and improves.
staticgarden
That seems like a really nice idea. There is already a curated newsletter which sends you a bunch of good links from HN http://www.hackernewsletter.com/. However, you are probably thinking of something more personal which learns things every day. Thanks for sharing it.
arthurcolle
Succinct analysis of upcoming ICOs that conveys the team/credentials, viability of the product in question, with some kind of grade that summarizes all the above
staticgarden
Interesting, this would require a thorough understanding of this particular domain.
Lufton
There are already a handful of sites which aim to analyse and grade ICO's.

They can be good for gathering information quickly, but the issue's in the confidence for the site itself. Nothing beats your own research.

tedmiston
1 - I don't think I'd use.

2 - Instapaper has offered Kindle bundling for a long time.

3 - This sounds interesting. I'd like to hear more.

4 - I don't have a use case for it today.

5 - I think this kind of thing has been done for a while.

staticgarden
Thanks for your feedback.

For 3, I really think we as developers don't spend as much time reading source code of others as we should be. So, this solves 2 problems:

1. Give repo creators ability to define the order in which people should read source code using a simple manifest which just lists the source files in an order. We can also default to an order based on the framework/language. E.g. Rails apps have a structure vs Elixir apps which have their own structure.

2. Build an epub/mobi/pdf which can be sent to Kindle or to any other device where the user can browse through the code at their own pace.

segmondy
A service that tells me what profitable product I should build.
staticgarden
That is a bit recursive :) Now that I think about it, there are many websites where users post their ideas. I should probably check them out.
mabynogy
TBH none of the list.
staticgarden
Those were just some ideas that I had, do you have any idea/product that you'd pay for which is not currently available in the market?
mabynogy
Yes many. IMO it's not really important if it's already available. "How" is more important than "What".