FailScout

Hey PH! We never hear about broken and worn-out products. Pretty much all gear nowadays is baseline ok, it’s the negatives that really set things apart. For once, let's turn it all upside down: We should build a collection about how things break. It's simple: You upload your broken products and quickly describe how long you owned them, how often you used them, and where they failed. Everything breaks eventually, but when it does, can you easily repair/fix it? That's why users can suggest a fix to a broken product. What could we do with all this data?📉 🔹 Identifying the common failure modes of product 🔹 Collect fixes for common product failures 🔹 See if a product's quality has changed or gone down at some point 🔹 Open-source the data so other sites and projects can leverage it What's next? 🔵 Integrating repair guides from iFixit 🔵 Add a voting system and user profiles (think of StackExchange for fixing/mending products) 🔵 Add stricter moderation and rules 🔵 Recurring reviews: Users can add a product when they buy it and we send a yearly reminder of the products they have added and if they want to update their status/condition. With this information, we could track the % of product failures and potentially notify/warn users of potential issues that come up before the product breaks Let me know what you think!

Whenever I purchase something, it can be easy to spend a couple of weeks reading reviews and exploring other customers' experiences with the products I want to buy. As effective as this is at finding the 'best products' by feature or by customer experience, finding information about how long the product will last or how repairable the product is, is always hard to find. Of course, when I do need to fix something, it's also easy to fall down a rabbit-hole of different Reddit threads and help guides to find how to fix something, or where to source repair parts. Failscout makes it a whole lot easier to find this information and I'm excited to start using it for sharing my own experience with products and as a great tool when researching products to purchase or how to fix the ones I own! Congrats on the launch @krebs_adrian! 🚀

Love this idea not only for finding great products but using less. I get bummed out at how little materials can be recycled. Best of luck with the launch!

Congrats on the launch! 🚀 I would like to discuss your projects and some ideas. Let’s meet up soon 😉