/daily-startup-idea/raft

“Distributed consensus for major life decisions. Three of your five closest friends must vote YES before you can text your ex, cut your own bangs, or send ‘we need to talk.’ The Raft paper, but for people.”

The Problem

At 1:47am, with 14% battery and half a glass of wine in, you are a single-node system committing writes that will be replicated to your entire social graph by Tuesday. There is no review. There is no consensus. There is only you, a draft text that begins “hey I know this is random but”, and a Send button with no rate limit.

The Solution

Elect a five-friend council. Risky writes — texting an ex, quitting a job, cutting your own bangs, RSVPing yes to a destination wedding, adopting a third cat — require a quorum (3 of 5) to commit. Below quorum: rejected, go to bed. Above quorum: committed, replicated to the group chat by morning, immutable.

PROPOSAL #4471 · “text Andrew happy birthday”

term 14 · t+0:23

leader

Mara

absolutely not

follower

Dev

we’ve talked about this

follower

Priya

—

is asleep

follower

Ash

YES

DO IT

follower

Tasha

YES

what’s the worst

tally: 2Y / 2N / 1 unreachableREJECTED — no quorum

Proposal States

Every life decision passes through the protocol. Rejected proposals are logged forever, because you will try them again at 2am on a Sunday and we need to keep the receipts.

PROPOSED

Open for votingYou sent the council a screenshot. The clock is ticking.

COMMITTED

Quorum reachedThree friends said yes. You may now ruin your week.

REJECTED

Voted downThree friends said no. The proposal is dead. You are not.

VETOED

Strong NOAny one friend invoked the “you’ll regret this” veto. Goes to appeal.

STALE

Timed outVote open >24h. Auto-rejected. The feeling passed.

OVERRIDDEN

You did it anywayBypassed quorum. Logged as INCIDENT. Postmortem Monday.

Split Brain

The classic failure mode. The stable nodes are asleep. The remaining cluster declares itself the quorum and commits anyway. By sunrise the partition heals and the regret log replicates everywhere.

SPLIT BRAIN · 02:14 LOCAL

PARTITION A

Ash + Tasha

awake, online, unhinged

self-declared quorum: 2/2

⚡

PARTITION B

Mara, Dev, Priya

DND on, phones face-down

unreachable

You text the ex. You get the bangs. You buy the ticket to Lisbon.
cluster reconverges at 09:14 — conflict resolution: shame

Pricing

Single-node

free

No quorum. No friends. You vote yes; the write commits. As nature intended, and as your therapist warned.

Replicated

default

$14 / mo

5-friend council. Veto support. 24h proposal TTL. Override fee: $99 (donated to the friend who said no).

Byzantine

enterprise

talk to sales

Assumes one friend is your mom in disguise. Tolerates up to 2 lying nodes. Used by founders dating their cofounders.

TAM

Bad ideas committed without review (global, daily)

4.1B adults × 0.6 regrettable writes/day × $14 ARPU × 365

= vibes-large

We rounded down because two of us were unreachable.

The Ask

$6M seed. Builds: a Raft implementation in TypeScript that addresses you by name, a sentiment classifier for “is this a real proposal or just a vibe,” and a panic button that pages all five friends with ‘CODE BANGS’.

Series A pitch:“We’re Paxos, but for people who text their ex.”