My approach is to build a few end user apps. Silly things or something that will make the life easier for my parents, for example - recently I made a self-hoste

My approach is to build a few end user apps. Silly things or something that will make the life easier for my parents, for example - recently I made a self-hosted family photo gallery with backup to cloud. This way, you can see the problems of building apps, and that could give you new ideas for your core platform services - it certainly gives me ideas.