Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or the popular Emacs package.
Or the headgear.
Or the standard for encoding nucleotide or protein sequences:
Looking Back On Helm
21–30 of 36 posts
Re: Looking Back On Helm
#22Well, this sounds remarkably similar to our story. We were fortunate that we didn't experience serious manufacturing issues. We had built in some padding for inevitable delays and cost overruns. We ended up shipping all of our units on time (most well in advance, actually!) but our unit costs were about $60 over our initial expectations of $85.
Like Helm, we identified a sizable audience for the product. However, we didn't - and couldn't - anticipate the serious run up in acquisition costs which were largely attributed to Facebook in 2017-2019 (there was another article written about this on HN some time back). This made it impossible to grow the customer base within the slim margins afforded with hardware.
And because hardware is so massively capital intensive, without impressive M/M growth numbers, it was quite difficult to attract Series A investors.
IIRC we had discussed a marketing partnership with the Helm team at one point, though I'm not sure if that ever got off the ground.
Re: Looking Back On Helm
#23I was assuming go-to-market was the main pain point here. I've never even heard of Helm, and now that I read up on it I want one :-(
Did the design and software get released as the company shut down, or is there a hope of resurrecting it?
Re: Looking Back On Helm
#24I had one of these devices and the user experience was superb. Essentially you got all the benefits of a home email server without the headaches. You also (and many people could not wrap their heads around this) didnt give up privacy for your emails - Helm provided you an IP and proxy (via ec2) but assuming TLS protected SMTP connections (most are these days), inbound mail was protected with a cert that lived on your…
That sounds pretty neat. I wonder why they didn't pivot away from hardware to a service?
Curious how you would do it as a service, interesting idea. It always felt to me like you couldn't do it without the hardware component, because without a box in your home how can you be assured of privacy? The box is where the cert protecting your privacy lives, and it it's in some data center it becomes a "trust us, we won't look at it" situation (and if your threat model involves subpeonas or PRISM type requests you are SOL).
But maybe I'm missing something.
Re: Looking Back On Helm
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds pretty neat. I wonder why they didn't pivot away from hardware to a service?
Curious how you would do it as a service, interesting idea. It always felt to me like you couldn't do it without the hardware component, because without a box in your home how can you be assured of privacy? The box is where the cert protecting your privacy lives, and it it's in some data center it becomes a "trust us, we won't look at it" situation (and if your threat model involves subpeonas or PRISM type requests y…
if your threat model involves subpeonas or PRISM type requests
Very very few people have that threat model and Helm probably wasn't secure enough to beat the government anyway. The "cloud providers don't look at your data" security model is good enough for people who are just looking for privacy.
Re: Looking Back On Helm
#26I’d have bought it as a raspberry pi in a cardboard box. Is there a “fail faster” lesson to consider? Would a lesser initial product have helped reduce the scope for manufacturing and maybe helped avoid some of these pitfalls?
Re: Looking Back On Helm
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds pretty neat. I wonder why they didn't pivot away from hardware to a service?
Curious how you would do it as a service, interesting idea. It always felt to me like you couldn't do it without the hardware component, because without a box in your home how can you be assured of privacy? The box is where the cert protecting your privacy lives, and it it's in some data center it becomes a "trust us, we won't look at it" situation (and if your threat model involves subpeonas or PRISM type requests y…
> because without a box in your home how can you be assured of privacy
Right, the idea is to install it on an existing box at your home… your always on desktop, or a raspberry pi, or whatever. Lots of people have home servers, and it would be much easier to install on an existing home server than to get a single function hardware device.
Re: Looking Back On Helm
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds pretty neat. I wonder why they didn't pivot away from hardware to a service?
Curious how you would do it as a service, interesting idea. It always felt to me like you couldn't do it without the hardware component, because without a box in your home how can you be assured of privacy? The box is where the cert protecting your privacy lives, and it it's in some data center it becomes a "trust us, we won't look at it" situation (and if your threat model involves subpeonas or PRISM type requests y…
I haven't thought hard about this, but maybe sell a little usb dongle or something?
Re: Looking Back On Helm
#29I’d have bought it as a raspberry pi in a cardboard box. Is there a “fail faster” lesson to consider? Would a lesser initial product have helped reduce the scope for manufacturing and maybe helped avoid some of these pitfalls?
Maybe not quite cardboard, but I had similar thoughts reading that. Relatively fancy industrial design, entirely custom board apparently (i.e. not using an SBC or SoM) sounds expensive up front. But it's hard to judge without more background knowledge (estimated volume, covering up-front expenses is what venture funding is kind of for, exact requirements software-side ... if there is a more indepth breakdown I'd love to read it!) and in the end it'd been a good chunk of luck to hit the right path at the right time to avoid the pandemic struggles.
Re: Looking Back On Helm
#30I'm a bit confused on what exactly helm was, would it be acceptable to compare it (functionally) to having an email and calendar server on a raspberry pi with a private vpn and a hosted ip address?
The is a good technical overview in this review: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/30/helm-email-server/