Tell HN: A disabled 40-year-old person founded a startup and makes a living
704 by michaelcao | 133 comments on Hacker News.
I am Michael Cao. I am from Viet Nam. I suffered the polio disease and became disabled when i was one year old. When covid 19 pandemic hit the world. All people has suffered a lot. I and my friend, Canadian guy, decided to cofound 2HAC Studio because we thought that we need to do something to help people. We don't want to hire any employees to keep the cost at minimum (only spend 9.99$ per year for domain). I keep my job at American company in Viet Nam and my cofounder also still worked at a Bank of Canada. We spent our free time to implement and marketing our products We have been developing the Google workspace addons. Out technology stack are App Script, VueJS for addons. Hugo for our website. We hosted our website in Google Cloud. Paypal is our payment system. Tawk for customer support. All of them are free. At 2020, we had a pain point in Viet Nam because health official requires to do contact tracing when people went to events, churches, schools so we scratched our own itches and developed QR Code Attendance addon https://ift.tt/T8mPowu... . After that, we provide our addon in G Suite marketplace and a lot of customers used our addon for contact tracing, for example take temperature, name, health status of attendees and give data to health official. Currently, we continue working on QR Code and barcode solutions. Our startup has survived and thrived during Covid-19 while a lot of startups have failed miserable. Our business model are both subscription and lifetime pricing. We have more than 5 million users for all our Google workspace addons. We make a decent living but we don’t want to risk to give up the main job. Financial recession is coming and a lot of pain is ahead. We highly recommend that most founders should keep the job and reduce spending as much as possible for a while during early stage of their startup. Also, I would like to encourage disabled people, older people to escape your comfort zone and make changes in the world. All of us could develop outstanding products with open source or very cheap tools. If you have any questions and feedback, please fell free to contact me and send me an email. Have a great day, everyone.
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