To make a long story very short: my friends and I started a company, it failed, but we have a decent amount of money left over (~100kish). We talked it over with our investors, and both of us want to use the remaining funds to chase a new idea.

Right now, our team is in the discovery phase of picking a completely new direction to go in. We're researching tons of different routes, and because of my already-established interest in prediction markets, I was tasked with scoping out the space for any leads on a potential idea. (Apparently, prediction markets are "hot", according to our investors...who knew my fake-internet-money gambling addiction might pay professional dividends?)

So far, I've found lots of interesting ideas on potential use cases of prediction markets, from things like policy markets or replication markets to solving two-sided adverse selection across a ton of different areas like grants programs, employee hiring, and venture funding.

I love these ideas, but startup 101 (and partially the reason we failed on our first shot) dictates that you can't build towards an idea, you must build to solve a specific problem. Additionally, it's really hard with our limited funding to build out consumer-facing applications that require a critical mass of users to turn profitable. So, I ask everyone who reads this:

What problems exist in the prediction markets space where the form factor of a solution could be a company?

Where are the gaps in wider market infrastructure that need to be filled?

Who, if anyone, needs anything built that a handful of twenty-somethings with $100k could build?

I'll reward bounties for anything I deem helpful. The questions are specifically about prediction/betting markets, but feel free to drop an answer if you have a problem of any type that we might be able to solve. If there's anything you don't want to talk about publicly, feel free to reach out via email at jasuch@uw.edu.