A weekly list of
problems worth solving.

This founder was making $4,200 a month and losing 8 to 12 users a month. Exit surveys kept saying "too expensive" or "missing features." Session recordings in PostHog showed the opposite: four out of seven users who had cancelled never finished getting set up. The data was in PostHog, Gmail, and event logs the whole time, but no tool put it on one timeline per user.

Every software founder using multiple data tools runs into this same problem. There is no ready-made way to see the complete history of a user who left, all in one place. The poster did it by hand for seven users and found the exit survey answer was wrong or incomplete every single time.

University schedules change every week. New rooms, shifted times, professors swapping slots last minute. The founder says it was "a mess to keep track of," and manually adding each change to a calendar wasn't working.

$1k a month on a simple app, with no paid ads, shows students will pay to skip manual data entry. The app grew from a single YouTube mention to steady word of mouth. Running paid ads is hard to justify for a cheap, simple app, so finding new users is the open question for anyone building here.

A solo lawyer on r/Lawyertalk has a client "VERY behind on paying his bills" while the case is already underway. Professional conduct rules make it nearly impossible to withdraw once a case is active, which removes any pressure to collect. The post asks both how to get paid now and how to screen clients before taking them on.

General billing tools don't help once you're already mid-case and professional conduct rules prevent leaving. A shared database where lawyers record non-paying clients, checked before taking on anyone new, could serve the roughly 450,000 solo and small-firm lawyers in the US.

She looked for lovies made from fully organic cotton, including the fill, and found none. Every option had polyester inside or a synthetic component somewhere. She also searched for medical-grade silicone teethers, not just food-grade, and found nothing. Her words: "What is the point of a wooden and organic cotton baby toy if the filling is polyester?"

She said she doesn't trust non-toxic parenting blogs because they're paid to recommend the products they cover. A brand whose materials are independently verified wouldn't need to compete on that. The parents looking for this are already shopping at the high end of the market.

The poster wants a flip-phone handset that pairs over Bluetooth to their smartphone, so they can leave the phone out of reach and still answer calls. After searching, they found only wired units that plug into a wall outlet. No portable, Bluetooth flip handset for smartphone pairing is available to buy today.

Apps that limit screen time mostly block phone use entirely. This fills a narrower need: staying reachable for calls without picking the phone up. More people are trying to cut their screen time, and those who don't want to switch to a basic phone have almost nothing to buy.

A 3-van HVAC shop used far more parts last quarter than it billed for. Techs say they "forget" small items like capacitors and PVC fittings when rushing between jobs. The owner uses ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, and QuickBooks but says all of them need "10 clicks" to log a single part. He wants "an idiot-proof way to make sure the tech actually logs the parts before they leave the driveway."

The same problem shows up in any trade that sends workers out with a stocked van: plumbing, electrical, appliance repair. The tools that exist are full job-management platforms, not a quick way to record parts before leaving a job. A mobile app that does just that could sell per van per month. It would pay for itself from the parts that finally get billed.

The poster is a 5-year field tech doing large commercial assessments solo, checking heat exchangers, thermostats, and worn parts across 13 units in a single visit. His workflow is typing notes per unit into his phone, then copying everything manually into BuildOps afterward. He says his apprentice "found out the hard way you'll never remember what part went for which unit." He's considering buying an iPad hoping it "somehow" makes life easier.

BuildOps is a paid app built for service technicians, but it doesn't let you write notes on each unit as you work. The poster is ready to spend money on hardware just to get around something the software doesn't do. Solo commercial HVAC techs checking 10-plus units in one visit are common, and none of the current tools give them a fast way to record what they find on each unit as they go.

The dog reacts to any sound or movement outside: cars, people, other dogs, bikes. The family has closed every window, run white noise all day, and put the dog on prescription medication. It only works when someone is actively watching and redirecting. They say "we cannot have our attention on him 24/7" and are now looking at residential training programs.

They've already paid for a year of professional training and ongoing medication, and they're ready to spend more. Dog owners dealing with this are a large, vocal group. They try trainer after trainer, vet after vet, and camp after camp, looking for something that reduces the need for constant human supervision.

This dentist placed 140 implants over two years with only 3 failures, then switched practices and implant systems and watched the failure rate climb to 30–40% per case. No tool flagged the change, so the problem ran for months before they stopped placing implants entirely to investigate. Without case-level records tied to variables like irrigation method, torque, or implant brand, they cannot pinpoint what changed. Implants are one of the most expensive procedures a dentist charges for, so a 30–40% failure rate means lost income plus the cost of re-treating every failed case at no charge.

Dentists who place implants have no standard way to track their own failure rates over time or see how their rates compare to other dentists. A simple case-logging tool with failure-rate alerts could catch a problem like this in weeks, not months. This dentist is already spending on continuing education courses and new implant systems, which means they likely have money to spend on a software subscription if it protects that income.