I'd like to understand the steps leading up to these six years. What motivated you to create that particular product? was it simply something that interested you and that you believed had potential? What was the goal when you created TinyPilot? Thanks!
>I'd like to understand the steps leading up to these six years. What motivated you to create that particular product? was it simply something that interested you and that you believed had potential? What was the goal when you created TinyPilot? Thanks!
It was a "scratch my own itch" kind of path. I had a home VM server[0], and any time I messed up its network settings or wanted to install a new OS, it was a huge pain to drag it over to my desk, disconnect my main desktop from my monitor and keyboard, swap everything over to the server, and then put everything back how it was.
I saw an article about how Raspberry Pi could emulate a keyboard, and I tried that out and got it working.[1] And then I felt like there had to be a way to capture video and stream it too, and I finally found a way to do that.
I came in at a lucky time because people had been experimenting with Raspberry Pi as a KVM over IP for years, but there weren't great video capture options. But right as I started looking, these cheap HDMI to USB dongles appeared on the market,[2] which made it cheap and easy to build a v1.
In the beginning, I thought it was too niche to be a real business, but it got a positive response when I launched on HN,[3] and more and more people kept buying, so I stuck with it.
[0] https://mtlynch.io/building-a-vm-homelab/
[1] https://mtlynch.io/key-mime-pi/