Tell HN: A disabled 40-year-old person founded a startup and makes a living
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://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/qr_code_attenda... . 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.
156 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadI would love to try this but I am not able to read your language to find what I need. If you can provide a link to a page that contains a midi file I can turn that into arranged an arranged chamber orchestra recording. A midi file ends in .mid and should be found by searching for the song + midi or .mid. If you can't find that one, there's got to be something else you could find!
https://twitter.com/refsrc/status/1527238287471292417?lang=e...
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I am Michael Cao. I am from Viet Nam. I suffered from polio and became disabled when I was one year old.
When the covid-19 pandemic hit the world, all people suffered a lot. My Canadian friend and I 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 a minimum (only spend 9.99$ per year for domain). I kept my job at American company in Viet Nam and my cofounder continued working at a Bank of Canada. We spent our free time implementing and marketing our products.
We have been developing the Google workspace addons. Out technology stack is App Script, VueJS for addons, and Hugo for our website. We hosted our website in Google Cloud, use Paypal as our payment system, and use Tawk for customer support. All of them are free.
In 2020, we had a pain point in Viet Nam because health official required to do contact tracing when people went to events, churches, schools so we scratched our own itches and developed a QR Code Attendance addon: https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/qr_code_attenda.... After that, we provided 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 are continuing to work on QR Code and barcode solutions. Our startup has survived and thrived during Covid-19 while a lot of startups have failed miserably. Our business model is 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 our main jobs. A financial recession is coming and a lot of pain is ahead. We highly recommend that most founders keep their jobs and reduce spending as much as possible for a while during early stage of their startup. Also, I would like to encourage disabled people and older people to escape their comfort zones 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.
As a bilingual non-western national, I find the disclaimer respectful and appreciate it! FWIW, I would not have been offended per se, but would have been mildly annoyed without it.
I grew up with a family member who spoke (and wrote) Hawaiian pidgin. His emails would be like, " Eyyy! Me an bruddah Brent goin to get plate lunch. You want?"
Obviously, his Hawaiian vernacular was an important part of who he was, and retyping that could change the identity of the speaker, e.g., "Hey, my close friend Brent and I are going to pick up some Hawaiian take away lunch. Would you like me to pick some up for you?"
Now, not all folks are that attached to how they write, or may be self conscious about their English and really appreciate the corrections.
Hence, a gentle warning and note that if the author is bothered, they'll remove it seems just about right. It's extending a courtesy to the author and saying, "please assume I had good intent!"
Seems weirder to be this bothered by a harmless disclaimer, tbh.
By the way, good on you Michael and best of luck in the future.
All the best with your projects!
With <3 from India.
How did you attract business? Did you advertise anywhere?
Love from the Philippines.
Also, combining your main job plus building a startup must have been very hard. Do you have an idea of how many hours you spent working each week in total ? I'm asking that because I too have a disability, and it's very hard for me to work more than 20h per weeks, but I'd love to start my own startup one day...
Have a great day too :)
For me, the rule is to keep making progress. If I’m always making progress I’ll eventually end up in the other side of this thing.
I push myself as far as I sustainably can in my current condition. I read papers and I do my best to control my medical narrative and experience. I try every new (or new to me) thing that I think might help. I just push and push and keep pushing.
It’s not unlike being a founder. Everything is two steps forward and one step back. Sometimes a new problem is just two steps back. In both cases you have to plow forward on your own and make a path where none (or almost none) exists.
Edit: feel free to drop me an email if you want to talk to someone about it, it’s in my profile.