3 Good Ideas: A Micro-Collection of Startup and Policy Ideas We Want Someone To Steal

"3 Good Ideas" is our regular vertical surfacing challenges we've identified and solutions we think could help resolve them. Consider these articles our intellectual property donation box. Take what you like, build it better than we ever could, and maybe just send us a thank-you card.

The world is drowning in problems while simultaneously drowning in brilliant people who could solve them. The bottleneck isn't necessarily intelligence or resources, it's the weird friction between having good ideas and actually executing them. So here's our contribution to reducing this friction: three ideas we genuinely think could work, presented with enough detail to be useful but also enough ambiguity to leave room for your genius. Think of this as open-source entrepreneurship. We're not asking for equity, attribution, or even a coffee meeting. We just want these things to exist.

Idea #1: The Municipal Wikipedia Project

The Problem: Local government information is scattered across dozens of poorly designed websites, buried in PDFs from 1997, or locked in the heads of three people who've worked at City Hall since the Carter administration. Citizens can tell you everything about Marvel Phase 4 but nothing about their city council voting record.

The Solution: Create a Wikipedia-style platform specifically for municipal information. Every city gets a standardized but customizable wiki covering budgets, ordinances, meeting minutes, development projects, elected officials' voting records, and upcoming ballot measures. The key innovation is the editorial model: combine professional local journalists (paid through a subscription model for premium features) with trained volunteer editors from the community.

Why It Could Work: Wikipedia proved that crowdsourced information can be more accurate and comprehensive than traditional alternatives. Local news is dying, creating an information vacuum that this could fill. Municipalities would likely pay for premium analytics and citizen engagement tools. The model scales naturally: start with one city, perfect the template, and then expand.

The Business Model: Freemium for citizens, SaaS for local governments who want enhanced features like citizen polling integration, multilingual support, and API access for their own websites. Revenue streams include municipal subscriptions, premium citizen accounts, and sponsored civic education content.

Why We're Not Building It: It requires deep expertise in local government structures, content moderation at scale, and the patience to navigate the glacial pace of municipal adoption. Plus, someone needs to figure out how to make local budget discussions actually engaging, which might require wizardry.

Idea #2: Reverse Mentorship Matching\

The Problem: Traditional mentorship assumes wisdom flows down from older to younger, but the modern world moves too fast for that model. A 22-year-old TikTok strategist knows things about human attention that a 50-year-old CEO desperately needs to understand. Meanwhile, that CEO has pattern recognition about business cycles that could save the 22-year-old from three expensive mistakes.

The Solution: A platform that facilitates mutual mentorship: two-way knowledge exchange between people from different generations, industries, or backgrounds. Instead of the classic "senior executive mentors junior employee" model, create structured exchanges where both parties teach and learn simultaneously.

The Mechanics: Users create profiles highlighting both what they want to learn and what they can teach. The algorithm matches people based on complementary knowledge gaps and strengths. Sessions are structured as formal exchanges: 45 minutes where Person A teaches Person B about customer acquisition, followed by 45 minutes where Person B teaches Person A about emerging social platforms.

Why It Could Work: It removes the awkwardness and power imbalance from traditional mentorship. Everyone is both teacher and student, making the relationship more equitable and sustainable, and it also addresses the real problem that expertise is increasingly distributed across age groups and traditional hierarchies.

Revenue Model: Subscription-based for individuals, enterprise licenses for companies wanting to facilitate internal knowledge sharing. Premium features include AI-powered matching, session recording and transcription, and learning pathway recommendations.

Why We're Not Building It: It requires solving the cold-start problem of getting enough diverse users to make matching work, plus building trust and safety systems for what are essentially intimate professional relationships. Also, someone needs to figure out how to scale genuine human connection, which is notoriously difficult.

Idea #3: The Skills-First Job Board

The Problem: Job hunting is broken. Candidates spend hours tailoring resumes for jobs they'll never get because an ATS rejected them for lacking "5+ years React experience" when they have 4.5 years. Meanwhile, employers miss great candidates because they're filtering for credentials instead of actual ability. The whole system optimizes for perfect keyword matching rather than human potential.

The Solution: A job platform where candidates demonstrate skills through micro-challenges instead of listing credentials. Think of it as "LeetCode meets Upwork meets The Voice" - companies post skill-based challenges (not job listings), candidates submit solutions anonymously, and hiring happens based on demonstrated competency rather than resume pedigree.

How It Works: Instead of posting "Senior Frontend Developer Wanted," a company posts a real problem: "Build a responsive dashboard component that handles 10,000+ data points without performance lag." Candidates submit working solutions within a standardized environment. The best submissions get fast-tracked to interviews. No names, no schools, no years of experience visible until after the work speaks for itself.

The Magic: Companies get to see actual work quality before investing time in interviews. Candidates get to show what they can do rather than describe what they've done. Self-taught developers can compete on equal footing with computer science PhDs. Career changers don't get auto-rejected for lack of "traditional" experience.

Why It Could Work: GitHub already proved that code portfolios matter more than degrees for many tech roles. The rise of no-code tools means skill-based work is expanding beyond engineering. Remote work normalized "show, don't tell" hiring practices. Plus, it solves the diversity problem naturally - bias is harder when you're evaluating anonymous work output.

Business Model: Companies pay per challenge posted and per candidate contacted. Premium tiers offer advanced analytics on submission quality, industry benchmarking, and AI-powered candidate matching. Revenue share with educational platforms that want to validate their training through real hiring outcomes.

Why We're Not Building It: It requires building industry-specific testing environments that actually reflect real work (harder than it sounds). You need critical mass of both companies and candidates simultaneously. Plus, someone needs to figure out how to prevent cheating while keeping the process anonymous, which is a fascinating puzzle we don't have time to solve.

The Fine Print (But Not Really)

These ideas are hereby released into the wild. We retain no rights, expect no credit, and won't sue anyone who builds them better than we described them. In fact, we hope you do build them better because these are sketches, not blueprints. The world's problems are too big for any of us to solve alone, but maybe they're just the right size for all of us to solve together.

Now stop reading articles about good ideas and go build something that matters.