The demand map
Humanity's demand,measured.
Capitalism is a demand-and-supply matching system — so before making what people want, detect what they want. You can't ask (stated preference lies), but every real want leaks a costly signal: money spent, money bet, wages offered, queues joined, suffering endured. We triangulate those signals per problem; no single number can move the ranking alone.
● 41 signals live from open statistical APIs · refreshed daily · every cell cites its source
The power law of demand
Demand is not uniform. It falls off a cliff.
Every problem's composite demand score, ranked. The head of this curve is where the market's pull is strongest — match supply there and the market does the rest of the work for you.
The demand matrix
Seven currencies of demand, one problem at a time.
A demand signal's credibility is proportional to the cost of emitting it — so we read burden, willingness to pay, capital, research, policy, expert priors, and queues, and require at least two independent classes to agree. Attention is deliberately excluded: it measures crowding, not demand.
hover a cell to inspect the signal behind it — every number cites its source
Where the numbers come from
WHO Global Health Observatory ↗
feeds: burden · Open OData API, no key · rolling, per indicator
Our World in Data ↗
feeds: burden · Open chart-data API, no key (CC BY 4.0) · continuous, tracks upstream sources
OpenAlex ↗
feeds: research (all disciplines) · Open API, no key (CC0) · continuous
NIH RePORTER ↗
feeds: research (biomedical $) · Open API, no key · weekly
SEC EDGAR · Form D ↗
feeds: capital (new US private raises) · Open full-text search, no key (public domain) · continuous, ~15 days after first sale
Federal Register ↗
feeds: policy (US rulemaking) · Open API, no key (public domain) · daily
USAspending ↗
feeds: capital (federal awards) · Open API, no key (public domain) · daily
Wikimedia Pageviews ↗
feeds: attention (crowding, not demand) · Open API, no key (CC0) · daily
openFDA Drug Shortages ↗
feeds: queues · Open API, no key · daily
World Bank WDI ↗
feeds: scale series (problem pages) · Open API, no key · quarterly
Coming online next: IHME GBD burden (bulk load), SEC EDGAR Form D + NIH award dollars (capital & research $), USAspending (policy), and Exa Agent extraction of queue signals with no API — grid interconnection backlogs, housing vacancy, transplant waitlists.
Demand is step zero. Matching is the business.
Once you can see the power law, the play is to find the gap — high demand, thin supply — and put yourself in the middle of the match.
One problem.One whitepaper. Every week.
Each week we ship a deep-dive whitepaper on a top-ranked humanity-scale problem — built in the spirit of Musk’s Hyperloop Alpha and the transformer paper. Problem + market size + before/after vision + a proposed solution + the investors who would back it. Humanity’s Requests for Startups, sourced and sorted quantitatively. No spam. No marketing.
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