One smaller use case that comes to mind is for immigrants like myself. On an H1 visa, you are only allowed to receive a paycheck from the sponsoring employer, so you cannot do contract work for cash (stock is ok), but paying down debt might be a cool way to accept "payment" for services.
That's a very interesting use case. We'll have to explore more the limitations of H1 payments, but this could be a way to receive "payment" by directing it to your bills / debts.
Recently started working on a search engine specifically targeted towards finding sperm donors. A friend mentioned they had to go to each bank site individually to find donors and it seemed like a common problem in the space that could be easily solved. I've been maintaining a list of project ideas for some time and now I'm planning to just go through and build some of them out to solve some problems I encounter and think about regularly.
If anyone is willing to collaborate on these or other projects, please let me know (my email address is on my profile)! Following are some of the projects on my list (I realize many are ambitious):
* Personalized finance management - finding financial products for my specific financial situation. Goal is to potentially create a platform that allows me to discover and "install" financial products on my accounts. There's too many fintech companies out there and there's no way that I know of that allows me to discover/try them with minimal work and risk. An app store of sorts would be very interesting to build for this.
* Pet EMR/prescriptions - Every time my vet gives me a prescription and I want to order it online, I have to wait for the eCommerce site to "confirm" the prescription with the vet. If there was a central place to coordinate this information, it could be beneficial to vets and eCommerce sites.
* Creator tools with native NFT minting abilities - Mostly to learn blockchain
* Site to find study partners/groups for taking MOOC courses together - I find I am more committed when there are others I'm accountable to as well
* Crowdfunded, open-sourced Buy-Now-Pay-Later solution - Unsure about the regulations around this, but thought it would be an interesting project to learn risk modeling and have potential virtuous cycles because investors would be inherently incentivized to advocate / evangelize the platform. Also, BNPL platforms tend to skirt the credit score, so open sourcing it would appease regulators. It could also provide a way for companies to white label and start their own BNPL programs.
* Creating a more contextual Google Places / Yelp that enables relevant place discovery
Very cool! I've been reading up some about Integer Programming and this seems like a very interesting problem to solve with that. I would imagine this would apply across a lot of marketplaces as the author mentions.
