Ideas Lab

Real problems people complain about online, pulled every morning and scored out of 100. Build, validate, or skip. How scoring works

Ideas: 4,820
BUILD: 702
Sources: 8
Last sync: 3h ago

Ideas Stats

752 ideas

Palus Finance (YC W26): Better yields on idle cash for startups, SMBs

Hi HN! We’re Sam and Michael from Palus Finance (https://palus.finance). We’re building a treasury management platform for startups and SMBs to earn higher yields with a high-yield bond portfolio.We were funded by YC for a consumer-focused product for higher-yield savings. But when we joined YC and got our funding, we realized we needed the product for our own startup’s cash reserves, and other startups in the batch started telling us they wanted this too.We realized that traditional startup treasury products do much the same thing: open a brokerage account, sweep your cash into a money market fund (MMF), and charge a management fee. No strategy involved. (There is actually one widely-advertised treasury product that differentiates on yield, but instead of an MMF it uses a mutual fund where your principal is at considerable risk – it had a 9% loss in 2022 that took years to recover.)I come from a finance background, so this norm felt weird to me. The typical startup cashflow pattern is a large infusion from a raise covering 18–24 months of burn, drawn down gradually. That's a lot of capital sitting idle for a long time, where even a modest yield improvement compounds into real money.MMFs are the lowest rung of what's available in fixed income. Yes, they’re very safe and liquid, but when you leave your whole treasury in one, you’re giving up yield to get same-day liquidity on cash you won’t touch for six months or more. Big companies have treasury teams that actively manage their holdings and invest in a range of safe assets to maximize yield. But those sophisticated bond portfolios were just never made accessible to startups. That’s what we’re building.Our bond portfolio holds short-duration floating-rate agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS), which are an ideal, safe, high-yielding asset for long-term startup cash reserves under most circumstances.[1]The bond portfolio is managed by Regan Capital, which runs MBSF, the largest floating-rate ag

Hacker News7mo agoToolAI

VALIDATE

67FL score

Vela (YC W26) – AI for complex scheduling

Hi HN! We're Gobhanu and Saatvik (brothers), building Vela (https://tryvela.ai) - AI agents that handle multi-party, multi-channel scheduling.Scheduling is a constraint satisfaction problem disguised as email! It’s easy when it’s two people, one timezone, one channel. But it becomes a constraint satisfaction problem when inputs are unstructured natural language across multiple communication channels, constraints change mid-solve, and the objective function includes social dynamics that don't exist formally anywhere.What if scheduling just happened? For example: a recruiter sends one message, and every interview across five candidates, three hiring managers, and two time zones gets booked, confirmed, and updated automatically. No links, no back-and-forth, no one spending hours with 20 emails. Everyone just gets the right invite at the right time, on whatever channel they actually use. That's what we built Vela to do.You loop in Vela into your emails, SMS, WhatsApp, Slack, phone or integrate into an ATS etc and it takes over: reads context, checks calendars, proposes times, follows up when people ghost, and rebooks when things shift.One of our first customers is a staffing firm that searched for a scheduling solution for almost eight years. Their coordinators manage hundreds of candidate-client interviews where each side needs separate email threads, separate Zoom accounts to avoid double-booking links, and calendar invites connecting parties who never directly communicate. A client reschedules one interview and it cascades into four others. A candidate responds on SMS to a thread that started on email. Vela solved this in just 10 minutes of onboarding.The hardest part has been the data problem. Scheduling behavior varies enormously across populations. C-suite folks respond to email within hours and expect formal 3-option proposals. Truck drivers applying for logistics roles respond to SMS at odd hours from shared devices with "y tm wrks.

Hacker News7mo agoToolAI

BUILD

77FL score

Claude-replay – A video-like player for Claude Code sessions

I got tired of sharing AI demos with terminal screenshots or screen recordings.Claude Code already stores full session transcripts locally as JSONL files. Those logs contain everything: prompts, tool calls, thinking blocks, and timestamps.I built a small CLI tool that converts those logs into an interactive HTML replay.You can step through the session, jump through the timeline, expand tool calls, and inspect the full conversation.The output is a single self-contained HTML file — no dependencies. You can email it, host it anywhere, embed it in a blog post, and it works on mobile.Repo: https://github.com/es617/claude-replayExample replay: https://es617.github.io/assets/demos/peripheral-uart-demo.ht...

Product managers spend hours manually mapping user flows, identifying edge cases, and creating design variations—work that's error-prone and inconsistent. They lack a systematic way to validate their UX decisions against proven patterns, forcing them to rely on intuition, design reviews, or expensive external consultants. This slows down product iteration and increases the risk of shipping suboptimal UX.

Product Hunt8mo agoToolAI

VALIDATE

62FL score

Can't access mental health support when needed due to cost, waiting lists, or stigma

People experiencing anxiety, stress, or emotional distress often can't get timely professional help—therapy waitlists are months long, sessions cost $100-300+, and many feel uncomfortable seeking in-person care. They struggle alone or rely on inadequate free resources, missing early intervention when they need support most.

Product Hunt8mo agoToolAI

BUILD

69FL score

Developers struggle to find a community of peers who share knowledge about self-hosting, local AI, and avoiding vendor lock-in

Technical builders who want to own their infrastructure instead of relying on SaaS subscriptions often work in isolation. They spend significant time researching configurations, troubleshooting self-hosted solutions, and staying current with rapidly evolving tools like local AI models. Without a focused community, they miss out on battle-tested configs, early tool access, and peer support that could accelerate their projects and reduce trial-and-error time.