Idea: Consumer Products Troubleshooting By Crowdsourced Flowcharts

My airport extreme died few days ago. I restarted it a billion times, restarted the cable modem too. I had the weirdest problem – one computer gets the real IP and all others get distributed ones that start with 10.0.1.x and they don’t work. After tweaks, changes in name, hard resets I figured out somebody plugged the cable in the local port instead of the WAN port.

In the process of trying to figure out what the heck was going on, I made desperate tries to search for the problem in Google. I found a billion problems, all different from mine. I had to read the full threads to see what is actually going on and to find out the guy forgot to plug the cable. I thought how useless all those forums are. The days of the forums for that purpose are gone. Now that wikipedia demonstrated the power of crowdsourcing for building an almost complete set of knowledge on a certain topic and well organized too, it is time to dare a little more and aim at gathering the full pack of information and not answering only random questions that pop up.

So here is another startup opportunity: If you could make site where people can build trees with branched problems, specified tests and complete solutions for a certain product, no one would ever go to forums anymore. Basically a well done flow chart but real life problems instead of variables and expressions. For example, you start from the beginning: Is it powered? The you check the lights, and either go to branches for fixing power either you go forward to next step. And at every level you are told specifically how to check what you don’t know and what it means. All of this of course has to be editable by the public. Getting all the possible problems for an airport express I am sure is actually much more achievable than it seems, considering how many millions of people there are that have knowledge on the topic.

It is basically a flowchart. I am sure a lot of companies use flow chart for problems, but I think time has come for this to become a standard practice for consumers to crowdsource all possible outcomes into one manageable application.As with all other ideas I have posted I believe there is huge potential, it is not difficult to make but I am just busy with other projects and just don’t have the resources to create it. If you do decide to do it, write out a message, I will give you extra hints, ideas, maybe help with other things. I definitely want to be a tester and can bring bunch of users too 🙂