Privacy focused applications
Hey IH, looking for some advice.
Right now I think is the time in internet history to be building a privacy focused service or application. For more reasons than I can list users are sick of being taken advantage of and new regulations like the CCPA and GDPR are also forcing businesses to be privacy first (if not they have to spam users with consent banners).
I am inspired by the success some companies are having in this space:
Chat: Signal, Telegram, Matrix
Analytics: Plausible, Fathom
But there are many other markets that are not yet served by privacy focused applications.
For the last few months I've been working on Portabella as a privacy first alternative to Trello/Asana/etc. I'm still very much focused on it, however my aim was to always provide a suite of products that can help usher in this new age of privacy focused applications.
In building Portabella I've built out a toolkit to quickly pump out end-to-end encrypted and privacy preserving applications, so my question to you is, what should I focus on? I've been thinking about this for a little while and built some proof of concepts, e.g.
- Privacy focused Hotjar alternative
- End-to-end encrypted Intercom alternative
- End-to-end encrypted Strava alternative
However nothing is sticking out to me like a project management system did.
Hey, it's awesome that you're worried about your users' privacy, but I think there's a big logical leap here with regards to the market viability for something like this.
Disclaimer: This is just my opinion as kind of a middle of the pack tech person when it comes to privacy. I personally don't like the idea of Google/MS/Facebook/Amazon knowing crazy amounts of our personal lives, stalking us across the Internet without our permission, and potentially selling the data. I don't like ads being targeted at me either. On the other hand, I'm not on the level of using Tor, de-Googling myself, or whatever else super privacy concious people do.
That being said. Nothing comes to mind when I ask myself, "Is there a problem with those companies knowing about my list of tasks for my product". I'm not the CEO of the company I work for, sure, but I feel like if I asked our CEO: "Do you care that Atlassian doesn't encrypt our JIRA tickets?", the answer would be: "Not at all. Should I care?". And honestly... the answer is probably: "Not really.".
Privacy is a pretty personal thing. I sometimes worry about my own "Internet privacy", but I really haven't given a second thought about my product's.
Maybe there is a good reason to. Again, I'm not particularly privacy concious. But if I can't think of one off the top of my head, maybe it's a sign that the market is not ready for it.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, @alex_b_h
Good luck!
This looks great. I'm really interested in this types of projects, privacy first. I been trying to learn how commercially viable would something like this be and how to best implement. I'm not an experienced indiehacker so I am still trying to read a lot and learn from others.
I got really interested in how Draw.io business model works, since the software works with local data only and also it's free, but they still make money. However as I understand your solution is cloud and using e2e encryption, that is really interesting too.
Your idea is great I hope you succeed!
Hi Alex,
Privacy alternatives in the MarTech space for Intercom could be really helpful. I'm not sure if there are any alternatives in this space. If it exists, Businesses would be definitely be paying for it. Now that you have a product in the PM space, I would say trying a product on MarTech could be interesting. Just my opinion.
Hey Alex,
very much appreciate that you are build products with privacy in mind +1
Portabella looks very nice. My suggestion is that because you said "However nothing is sticking out to me like a project management system did.", I would stick with Portabella right now and dont switch.
See if you can build a business with it and if there are enough customers willing to pay for it. Making it open-source may help and get you some traction, you could think about an open-source business model.
Your toolkit to quickly pump out e2e encrypted services sounds valuable, no? I don't know a lot about this space but that was the first thing that jumped out to me. Releasing your own encryption SDK thats dead simple to install could give you more leverage than building an arbitrary UX on top of it.
Take my words with a grain of salt but I think your toolkit is way more exciting than the options you listed :)
Some extra thoughts on this. In my mind the toolkit alone isn't enough to release, there has to be the hosted backend service (like Firebase) that supports applications, data storage, realtime data, pubsub, etc.
I've already worked for a company doing that (deepstreamHub) earlier in my career and it was so much work. I don't want to go back to providing a platform (PaaS)
thats fair. I'll make one last argument for this direction 😬
Segment.io started as an open source framework that the founders had initially neglected until it started gaining traction. At the very least I think you could open source your toolkit and see what the community thinks. Then maybe study how Segment was able to monetize that early framework into a business.
Back to your original question... I guess I would try to select business that has the most to gain from privacy as a feature. I think Strava is the best option from your list bc they have been hit with privacy issues in the past. But then again, i'm not sure if consumers care as much about privacy/security as much as businesses do. Maybe theres another B2B service that has been plagued with privacy issues that is ready for disruption.
100% I agree with you. Unfortunately there already exists Etebase which takes care of SDKs in multiple languages, a hosted backend, etc.
Potentially an end-to-end encrypted plugin for existing backends? A firebase integration?
Hey Alex, I actually wrote about something similar a while ago - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/privacy-is-a-hard-sell-c64b597f8a (I'm posting the IH post because the comments are valuable as well).
Privacy should be the most important feature of your product, but it's hard to sell privacy as a product in itself. Your product still needs to be competitive with other products in terms of pricing and functionality. Although a lot of people are getting privacy conscious these days, the majority will still settle for a less private, free product rather than paying for a privacy-focused product.
In my opinion - if the price of a product justifies the value it provides people will buy it, whether it's privacy-focused or not.
a lot of commenters are talking about being commercially viable so you need to educate people about privacy and why they need it. I'm building a privacy learning tool which hopes to educate privacy in a simpler and better way. We also hope to collaborate with you guys in the near future. We hope to give privacy friendly apps a bit of a push in marketing as well.
Great idea Alex, I've been working on Mogul for a long time and decided to double down on user privacy by adding E2E.
I tried implementing it myself but realized E2E is more challenging than anticipated and ended up using a third party SDK to implement it. I think it would be great to see more competition in the E2E SDK space so +1 to you productizing end-to-end.
I gave an upvote on PH.
I have a question, do all team members have to share one secret?
Hey, cheers! Good question.
The secrets lie in the project level and the team level, yes.
So if I invite you to a project, we now share the project private key, same for a team. However the projects within a team have different private keys.
This comment was deleted 5 years ago