Product ideas

Service where you just host a container

As a developer, sometimes you just want a container running somewhere easily. This could do that. And really cheaply too.

printandscan.com

A service that just prints and scans documents. Maybe will get some traction? But I need someone to do it ofc :)

Really easy mail/file server for your home

I think a lot of people are done with microsoft/google/apple/etc, and would really appreciate a box they could just plug in at home and have webmail, drive and backup available real fast. A single easy box for that would be awesome.

Should still be possible for developers to modify whatever they wanted. But for most people it should just be easy as one-click.

Encrypted ofc! Possibly also with a message-server? Like Signal? But also possibly not :)

Did some more investigation, and someone already did this and failed. It was called “Helm”. Random links from around the web:

• https://mashable.com/review/helm-server-review a review of the thing. Where you can see how it looks.
• https://thehelm.com/ their website which says “goodbye”
• https://github.com/HelmSecure/armbian-images their github repo
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18238581 the hackernews thread where they get introduced. There are a lot of interesting thoughts there about why this doesn’t work and what market they are trying to hit. They also have a ton of ideas for products that do “the same thing but better”.
• https://nextcloud.com/ One of the things that did the same thing but better. The server is no longer in your home, so you don’t have to worry about that burning down, but you are running your own infrastructure in the cloud.