DEV Community: 🧠💼 Unvalidated Ideas

💡 ArticleCache - read past the paywall

🧠💼 Unvalidated Ideas — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 12:02:36 +0000

Paywalls are everywhere. This newsletter has some!

One thing about the internet is that publishers often allow some traffic to view a link and read it's content, and paywall the content later (for example if the article is popular).

💼 🧠 Build an extension that gets web surfers past paywalls

The average person doesn't know what Reader Mode is (and they don't use Firefox).

The opportunity here is to build a Chrome/Firefox add-on that activates on any site with a paywall and instantly gives people a way to travel to a version of the site without the paywall.

You won't be first to market (you don't want to be, anyway!), but the others that do it have not reached critical mass -- there's opportunity here.

This was originally posted @ Unvalidated Ideas (Edition 45)

💡 Build (AI?) for Box

🧠💼 Unvalidated Ideas — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 10:08:04 +0000

Most people think of Dropbox or Google Drive for sharing files, but you know what enterprises use surprisingly often? Box.

Compare Dropbox's free cash flow versus Box's free cash flow. If we go off that alone, Box is about 1/4th as successful -- you know how many developers are building for Box? It's a rounding error compared to Dropbox.

💼 🧠 Build tools for the enterprise-friendly Box platform

The idea is vague because there's a lot of ways you can go with it. You can:

Find the most used Dropbox integrations and clone them
Create a new sexy integration (AI)
Pick an extremely boring task (PDF scanning) and get good at that
Find a startup that does document processing and build a similar functionality
Pick a feature from Dropbox/GDrive that Box doesn't have and implement it

The possibilities are endless, but what's clear is that we have a huge enterprise population on Box who are not getting much developer attention. Give them some attention.

This was originally posted @ Unvalidated Ideas (Edition 42)

💡 Hosted Syncthing (discovery, relay and backups)

🧠💼 Unvalidated Ideas — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 10:34:13 +0000

Here's an Startup/SaaS idea to try out:

💾 Hosted Syncthing discovery, relay and backups

For technical users, Syncthing is the next coming of Dropbox. Syncthing has a booming community, active user base, runs on a bunch of devices, and people trust it with their data.

There used to be one big problem with Syncthing -- transfering files from one device to another, you needed both devices to be online. That changed, when the untrusted (encrypted) devices feature was merged.

💼 🧠 Build a service for untrusted (encrypted) syncthing devices, enabling users to copy files asynchronously.

Users create their Syncthing setups as normal, then add an untrusted device (a URL you give them), and they can start to treat their Syncthing instances as cloud drives.

It's a hard sell -- many people use Syncthing precisely so they can get away from hosted services, but here's the thing -- they don't have to trust you (and you don't have to convince them to). Thanks to the encryption Syncthing uses, users can treat you as just a dumb redundant temporary host for their data.

Think the user base for this kind of service is impossibly small? Syncthing has close to 50,000 stars on Github. Ansible, the industry standard automation toolkit, has ~56k stars.

More importantly than popularity, there's a r/Syncthing subreddit, which means you have distribution -- even if it doesn't work out, validating this idea should be fast.

This was originally posted @ Unvalidated Ideas (Edition 40)

💡 Pandoc aaS

🧠💼 Unvalidated Ideas — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 15:43:41 +0000

Here's an Startup/SaaS idea to try out:

📑 Pandoc aaS

Ever heard of the swiss army knife that is Pandoc? It can convert and reformat just about any document into another document.

Pandoc is amazing -- look at the insane generated map of input to output formats.

💼 🧠 Build and offer Pandoc aaS for enterprises and individuals

Build and offer Pandoc aaS for enterprises and individuals

This is a no-brainer service -- most people don't know this exists, and I'd argue most developers don't even know this exists (until they search, then all roads lead to Pandoc for document conversion).

Search for "pandoc online", though, and you get just about nothing.

It's not rocket science -- build a service that makes it easy to convert documents using pandoc. You could build this service in less than a day and launch it to HN (for a start), especially if you use providers for the "hard" parts (uploading documents, launching pandoc processes).

The hard part of this idea is probably getting the SEO juice up enough to rank first for "document convert" online or "pandoc online" or some such search. Use Google trends to your advantage.

There are a lot of juicy integrations and enterprise value to explore (think context menu integration in Google Docs/Office 365/etc), so let your mind wander.

This was originally posted @ Unvalidated Ideas (Edition 39)

💡 GetXaaS - SaaS Listing Service

🧠💼 Unvalidated Ideas — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 15:39:03 +0000

Here's an Startup/SaaS idea to try out:

🔍 GetXaaS - SaaS Listing Service

The world is drowning in SaaS. Continuous improvement demands continuous payment.

How do enterprise purchasers find the best SaaS companies? How can you find out the real differences between one SaaS product and another in the same niche and possibly which one of your competitors is using what?

💼 🧠 Build a SaaS listing service that offers concierge research.

Sure, "alternative to" sites (like AlternativeTo) exist, but they're all well known to be SEO plays and sometimes have useful information but can be spammy.

Then there's SaaSWorthy which is an excellent competitor. In fact, simply cloning the effectiveness of SaaSWorthy (and maybe incorporating their ratings) is a great start, but not where you should end.

Photo by Guzel Maksutova on Unsplash

This was originally posted @ Unvalidated Ideas (Edition 38)

💡Hosted ETCD aaS

🧠💼 Unvalidated Ideas — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 13:37:22 +0000

Here's an Startup/SaaS idea to try out:

🌩 Hosted ETCD aaS

You know how Kubernetes is absolutely blowing up? Well there's one piece of technology that it all depends on -- etcd.

ETCD is kind of known to be a pain to run and manage properly, but it's the central pieces of Kubernetes that not many people acknowledge -- Kubernetes does nothing but read & write from ETCD all day.

Why would anyone pay for a service like ETCD from you when they can run EKS/AKS/GKS and so on?

Companies run their own clusters (sometimes for cost reasons), using tools like kops, and kubeadm to set up their own clusters.

This is especially the case for companies running on bare metal. Those companies dont want to manage ETCD on top of everything else.

Some people were already wondering when AWS would do this back in 2021.

This was originally posted @ Unvalidated Ideas (Edition 37)

Photo by benjamin lehman on Unsplash

💡 Private IP resolution service

🧠💼 Unvalidated Ideas — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 11:59:38 +0000

Here's an Startup/SaaS idea you might like to try executing on:

🌎 Private IP resolution service

Finding out your public IP is a funny fundamental problem on the internet -- turns out one of the easiest practical ways is to actually just ask some other device outside the network!

Turns out it's actually quite taxing to run this service (despite it's relative simplicity), and so many people used it that it made HackerNews when they shut it down. The site was getting 30B requests a day -- I'll let you do the math on if what this could be worth if you can get 1% of people who need/use this functionality to become paying customers, and get them to pay some reasonable amount per 1000 requests.

There's some risk here of technical difficulty scaling up (30B is a lot of requests), but if you start small and make sure to build in profitability from the get go, sell to proper enterprise clients who may need SLAs, security features, or latency guarantees, there's lots of meat on this bone.

NOTE This might also be a fun project for trying out something like Cloudflare Workers or other gratuitous free tier functions-as-a-service providers.

This was originally posted @ Unvalidated Ideas (Edition 4)