← /daily-startup-idea
July 15, 2026

Consensus

“Raft consensus for group chat dinner plans. Every ‘where should we eat’ triggers a leader election. Followers replicate the log. Sarah walks into a tunnel — heartbeat lost — term++— and you end up at a Thai place nobody voted for.”

The Problem

Six people. One group chat. One question: “where should we eat.” This is not a coordination problem. It is a distributed systems problem, and your friend group is running zero consensus protocols. Nobody is the leader. Everybody is a candidate. Consensus is never achieved. You eat cereal standing up at 9:47pm.

replicated log · #brunch-crew · term 47
quorum: 0 / 4
6:03 PMalexwhere should we eatRequestVote
6:04 PMkateim down for whateverVoteGranted
6:04 PMjamiesame lolVoteGranted
6:11 PMalexthai?AppendEntries
6:12 PMsarahwait im on the LHeartbeat lost
6:18 PMsarahactually indian is closerterm++ · new election
6:19 PMjamiewait what happened to thailog divergence
9:47 PMyoueating cerealcommit index: 0
time to first bite: 3h 44mcommitted entries: 0

The Solution

We embed a Raft implementation directly into your group chat. Exactly one person is elected leader per outing. Their message becomes the source of truth. All follower messages are appended to the log but do not commituntil the leader acks. When the leader misses a heartbeat — usually by opening TikTok mid-plan — we trigger a graceful re-election instead of the current process, which is passive-aggressive silence.

state machine · per participanttimeout: 15 min · then re-elect
follower
“im down for whatever”
listens for heartbeats. means it. is lying.
candidate
“i could do sushi”
requests votes with plausible deniability. one thumbs-up and it’s over.
leader
“7:30, i made a res”
issues appends. absorbs blame if the pad see ew is mid.

Beta Metrics

Six months of production data across 1,412 friend groups. Bars are the share of plans that actually happened.

with Consensus™
leader elected in < 4 min
87%
“lol whoever wants”
no leader · term never advances
22%
one indecisive libra
split vote · goes to term 14
9%
sarah is invited
guaranteed byzantine partition
3%
the ‘planning’ chat
log has 4,000 entries · 0 committed
0%

Pricing

Follower
starter
free
You get a vote. That is the whole product.
Candidate
individual
$8 / mo
Auto-nominate on your behalf with a low-commitment opener. “i could do sushi” and similar.
Leader
most popular
$29 / mo
Guaranteed election, every outing. Term never increments. Your restaurant pick becomes the log entry. No one else may run.
Byzantine General
enterprise
$249 / mo
Send conflicting plans to disjoint subsets of the group. Chaos as a service. HIPAA-adjacent.

TAM

addressable market · humans in a group chat with at least one Sarah
4.1B adults × 2.7 unresolved dinner plans / wk × $0.14 per committed entry
= $1.5B in prevented cereal dinners
Methodology: extrapolated from one (1) Tuesday.

The Ask

$4M seed. Half goes into porting Raft to TypeScript (there are already six npm packages that do this, don’t worry about it). The other half funds the Byzantine GeneralSKU, which requires a legal review that our lawyer keeps rescheduling because he’s waiting on his own friend group to pick brunch.

Series A pitch:“We’re etcd, but the cluster is a group chat and the leader has a therapist.”