Sick of building things no one wants? I built a tool to find problems worth solving!
I just launched the beta of Novara - a simple tool to discover real, community-driven problems, gauge demand, and help builders focus on what’s actually worth solving.
What it Does:
For Users:
Post problems from daily life/work
Upvote issues you relate to
See solutions others suggest
For Builders:
Explore a feed of real, high-signal problems
See demand + value indicators (upvotes, WTP, solution gaps)
Connect with a potential community of early users, allowing you to build user-focused products.
Why I built this:
Every builder I know has wasted time building something that felt smart but ultimately had no real demand behind it. Novara tries to fix that by flipping the process: Start with the problem, not the solution.
This is the initial launch, and - ironically - I’m testing to see if this is an idea worth solving. I’d love your feedback and help to pressure-test whether this is useful!
It's common for people to say "I would pay $X/month" but that's different than them actually doing it. How are you thinking about that?
Yeah this is an issue I thought of initially, and I first jumped to complicated ideas like having users 'donate' to the problem if they think it's important enough - but honestly, that seemed like a very risky route that would push people away from voting, since there is no concrete product.
So to simplify it, the willingness to pay indicator is just an initial signal. It starts building a database of potential 'high-value' users, and if someone is working on building a solution to that problem, we would be able to connect them for further validation. I've had ideas about facilitating some sort of crowdfunding, early investment, or pre-payment system, which provides more certain validation.
Thanks for the feedback!
Cool idea, and definitely have faced this problem. Since it relies on marketplaces, it would be interesting to see if you get enough posters/builders to use it (on both sides).
Yeah fair. I think that's where I need to test it initially. If there are enough people using I am hoping it will lead to a network effect, but let's see!
The community building must contain cull time community management features
This looks interesting.
What's your monetization strategy?
Could kickstart the process by researching problems that people could relate to and adding them to the feed. This will give builders data and allow users to start with examples to work with.
Looks interesting. Expecting aggregation of some sort and finding related problem, clustering them. Posted one.