What is Real Problem AI?

Real Problem AI is a curated directory of 200+ real problems worth building an AI startup around. Each problem is scored honestly on severity, AI feasibility, market signal, and competition gap. We're for builders looking for what to build, not for ethics debates about AI.

What is the difference between Real Problem AI and AI ethics or AI risks indexes?

Real Problem AI catalogues problems AI can solve — productive, commercial opportunities for builders. AI ethics indexes catalogue problems with AI itself (bias, environmental cost, copyright, consciousness). Different intent, different audience: founders and indie hackers vs researchers and policy folks.

What should I build with AI in 2026?

Look for problems with high severity (it costs people hours, sleep, or revenue every week), high AI feasibility (LLMs, vision or voice are great at this today), strong market signal (Reddit threads + willingness to pay), and a clear competition gap (incumbents miss the same obvious thing). Real Problem AI scores 200+ such problems for you on those four axes.

Where do Real Problem AI's startup ideas come from?

From three sources, scanned each cycle: 1) Reddit threads where people describe a real friction in their own words, 2) podcasts and talks of founders young builders trust (Nikhil Kamath, Aman Gupta, Ankur Warikoo, Raj Shamani, Andrej Karpathy, Greg Isenberg), and 3) a continuous 1,000+ source scan covering forums, app store reviews, regulator filings, and field interviews.

Is Real Problem AI free?

Yes. Browsing every problem, opening every score breakdown, raising your hand on a co-founder match, and the founder vault are all free. There is no paywall.

How is each problem scored?

Four axes, each 1-10, weighted: Problem Severity (30%), AI Feasibility (25%), Market Signal (25%), Competition Gap (20%). Weighted average is the Opportunity Score on each card. Only problems clearing 7.0+ make the live list.

Why do HOA management portals hide the one document I actually need?

Homeowners cannot find CC&Rs, bylaws, or meeting minutes inside FirstService or Associa portals because search is broken and PDFs are unlabeled scans.

Category: PropTech / Real Estate · Trend: Multimodal · Opportunity score: 8.3 / 10

What is the “Why do HOA management portals hide the one document I actually need?” problem in 2026?

Homeowners cannot find CC&Rs, bylaws, or meeting minutes inside FirstService or Associa portals because search is broken and PDFs are unlabeled scans.

Who has this problem?

HOA homeowner trying to dispute a violation or architectural denial.

Evidence this problem is real

“I know the rule exists somewhere in the 400 page CC&R PDF but their portal search is useless and half the documents are scanned images with no OCR.”

Sourced from r/HOA threads on portal usability and document search.

Existing players in this space

FirstService Residential portal — No semantic search, scanned PDFs.
Associa TownSq — Document library exists, search is keyword-only.

What existing players are missing

OCR plus vector search across a homeowner's full HOA document set with citation back to page and section, answering plain-English rule questions.

How Real Problem AI scores this opportunity

Aggregate score: 8.3 / 10. Four-axis rubric:

Problem severity: 7 / 10
AI feasibility today: 10 / 10
Market signal: 7 / 10
Competition gap: 9 / 10

How to build a solution: stack hints

Tesseract OCR
Voyage embeddings
Claude with citations
Cloudflare R2 storage