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Ask HN: Hunch gave me an idea, a troubleshooting website

6 points by cake ↗ HN
I just had an invitation from Hunch www.hunch.com, it's ok but too simplistic in my opinion.

Nevertheless it just gave me an idea : I'm having troubles with my old car, electrical stuff. I browse the web to find answers to my questions (what's the alternator supposed to output etc...) since I find myself quite able to repair on my own. However, I often lack knowledge on technical things, I miss questions I should have asked myself or just can't find any answer to them.

So I thought it would be nice to have a web app, in the same spirit as Hunch but based on actual technical facts, helping you to get out of a problem on your own. Troubleshooting checklists.

Let's say I want to solve a problem, it would ask me a series of questions (witch may already contain the answer of my problem) leading me to a series of others topics if I need to go further. The users could contribute, add questions and answers, as well as ways they solved their problem if they did.

It could apply to any logical stuff, repairing your car, your computer ...

I know forums are supposed to help, but the human factor always seems to bias the answer you get, one person telling you the opposite of another.

I'm sure someone had this idea already, I couldn't find any website.

Do you know any ?

7 comments

[ 7.8 ms ] story [ 24.8 ms ] thread
raquo
That's a really great idea as troubleshooting and checklists are much more deterministic than "what city you should live in" type of questions
HeyLaughingBoy
I have four road vehicles and a Honda 4-wheeler. All of them have needed a repair at some time and the online forums geared to each type of vehicle are excellent. I think you'd be hard pressed to improve on the expertise of people who have solved the same problem asking you questions that you can respond to, warning of potential mistakes and 'gotchas' etc.

Checklists are nice, but people who recognize the problem immediately and can give you the solution and save you hours of time and hundreds of dollars are much nicer.

arohner
I've had similar experience with the Subaru forum I visit. However, if you spend any amount of time on the site, you'll go crazy with people asking the same damned questions every day. These kinds of sites have no "long term memory". Having a troubleshooting site that learns from previous experience could be pretty powerful.

That's the idea anyways. :-)

ShabbyDoo
I've seen some forums that have a special first post that acts sort of like a wiki, but stuff still gets lost in the deluge of topics.

I have a vehicle which is the first model year of a re-design. In mid-year, Ford apparently decided to change the design on the door lock actuator. So, I blindly found a part that was supposed to be for my model year, and it turned out to be wrong. I'd love to have a "forum topic" in the vein of what you're proposing. I'm imagining a decision tree with places for people to comment, add photos, links, etc. It ought to have Wikipedia-like community categorization. There should be a topic for "My Ford Explorer's door lock doesn't work" which would walk through diagnostic steps along with part identification/repair procedures. People post stuff like this to automotive forums all the time, so it's no stretch to think that they would add their knowledge to the tree as well (with attribution to encourage ownership).

I like the idea a lot. Forums are a sloppy hammer used to attack community problems that are sort of like nails.

From a monetization standpoint, you can't do much better than a "how to fix X" forum since most repairs involve the purchase of parts/tools. And, you'll know exactly which parts people likely need depending on where they are in the decision tree. So, you ought to get really good click-thru rates for advertising.

arohner
I'm building it as we speak. Working on the demo today to submit to Capital Factory (http://www.capitalfactory.com/)

The code is basically working and I'm tweaking the UI as we speak.

I'll of course post to HN once it's ready.

cake
When is the first release ?
kbhangui
I think this is a good idea. I've thought about creating a computer troubleshooting site where the solution is downloadable (as say a bat file on windows, shell script on linux) and will fix the problem for those not as experienced with computers.

Of course, this doesn't translate well to real life, but could be a source of revenue.

Just throwing the idea out there, haven't given it much thought.