Victoria Gostroverhova

1. Recently, several small bloggers have talked about ProblemHunt: a few from the USA, a few from Spain, and one from France. And we noticed an obvious thing: traffic from these countries, although not much, has started to grow.

2. But the most important thing is that people from these countries have started sharing problems more actively. For example, in the last month alone, France has already submitted 4 problems, three of which were published yesterday and today.

Guys, over the past 3.5 months, we encountered one significant problem at ProblemHunt:

1. Many contributors who shared problems aren't very motivated to provide feedback to developers for various reasons. Even among those willing to give feedback, not everyone agrees to work with more than 3 5 different developers (for context: currently, one contributor receives messages from 7 15 people on average). And without quality feedback, it s difficult to clarify all the details and build a great product.

2. To solve this problem, we talked to some of the contributors and found out: they are willing to provide feedback much more actively if they can receive 1% equity in the future startup. According to them, this would give them strong motivation to help with advice and actively participate in testing.

3. Therefore, we decided to run an experiment over the next few months. Now, in the problem submission form, contributors can optionally indicate that they want to receive 1% equity in the future startup. And we will mention this in the publication for you.

4. By the way, if you currently have a problem and also want to get 1% equity in a future startup, you can seize this opportunity right now on ProblemHunt!

My journey in startups began 10 years ago, and I've launched 18 startups, most of which failed. Briefly on why they failed:
1. Contract Online my first startup in 2015, which was supposed to be an online service for remote signing of contracts for any transactions between individuals. A kind of analogue of a secure transaction. For this startup, I even managed to attract a business angel who invested $16,500.

Reason for failure: I had two lawyers on my team who discovered in the process that the legal framework at the time could not provide reliable grounds for protecting our users in remote transactions. The contracts would not have been considered legally signed.
2. Natural Products In 2015-2018, I became very passionate about healthy eating, but in the process, I discovered that products in all chain stores are full of chemicals, and stores with truly natural products are inaccessible to the majority. Hence, the idea emerged to create my own online platform where you could order natural products directly from farmers at affordable prices.

Reason for failure: For several years, I tried to launch this project, even trained as a baker of natural bread and tried to create my own farm, but in the process, I found that few people are willing to pay for truly natural products, even if these products were only 20-30% more expensive than market prices, and not 2-3 times more, as in premium stores. Hence, the market was so small that all my attempts were doomed.