Visa list has both government website and visa agency link. Users can choose to use what is convenient for them. Visa list also provides all document requirements so anyone can do it themselves.
When I see a potential problem, see if I can solve it. See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people. If at least 50% got excited. I pick this idea to build.
You can find problems in your day to day life. Travelling is another way of discovering new problems. Every problem is not worth building a solution for. Only the burning ones with business potential.
> See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people.
And how do you find these 'few people' to pitch to? You would have to find the right people with skin in the game, who are actually impacted by this right? How do you do that? For me, this has always been the part I could never crack.
If you don't have first-hand contact with your potential users, and you don't know where they are, then you likely lack the empathy to build a great product for them.
For anyone scrolling by and getting sucker punched by halpert here, I'd like you to know that not being surrounded by people whose problems can be solved with software startups doesn't mean you 'lack empathy'.
I think boffinism's comment below hits it, but to also add -- its important to try and find a charitable interpretation of comments when possible. Here I think empathy was meant literally as understanding other people's needs and points of view. If you don't know people with some problem directly, and also don't know how to find them -- how sure are you that the problem you are solving is real and in need of a practical solution? You have to understand user needs very well to build a novel product that people want to use. Its not about software startups solving the worlds problems -- I think its just a very general point about solving problems you understand and not ones you don't have any experience with.
To give a more concrete example, I know of a successul life insurance company. It was started because the founders had a bad experience with purchasing life insurance. They then worked with (and as) life insurance agents to better understand the customer (and insurer's) needs. THEN they built a company, one solution at a time.
Q: I am having trouble understanding why people think / do X
A: You should talk to people who think / do X and ask them why they think / do X. Until you do so, you lack sufficient empathy to address their issues / change their behavior.
Its good feedback that it is worded in a way that has ambiguous meanings, one of which (you are a sociopath) is an unwelcome character judgement. But IMHO the charitable interpretation is perfectly practical and important feedback: Don't build products for users you can't talk to and learn from.
I feel like 'and you don't know where they are' is maybe the redeeming phrase in halpert's post. If you have an idea that you think would help some people, and you have no idea where such people are concentrated... maybe it's a sign you don't know enough about said people to really be able to help them?
He did not say „lack empathy, making you a bad person“.
He said „lack empathy for building this particular type of software“, meaning you would not be getting enough emotional feedback (due to lack of connections).
I love solving problems by building solutions. I Travel every now and then. Make a backlog of new ideas, keep pitching them to friends, work on my current one. One step at a time. I took things very slowly instead of rushing and getting into pressure.
Yes there were a few. But I try to always keep the cost of failure small.
This is how I try to be frugal.
* I see a potential problem, see if I can solve it. See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people. If atleast 50% got excited. I pick this idea to build
* I set a goal on day 1 on what the microstartup should
achieve once its launched. * I try to take no more than 4 weeks to build it.
* I do a public launch in IH, PH, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Reddit. In few weeks if I reach the goal that I set at the beginning, then I continue working on it to improve. If not then I will drop it and move on the next.
You have objective in making this choice, most people cling on to the sentiment.
i use cloudflare and host it on GCP, i dont use automation tools. I have my backend on GoLang and its pretty good, never had to scale my servers sofar except in the very beginning.
Yeah I think people way overestimate how much scaling they will really have to do. If you write something reasonably efficient you can serve a surprising level of traffic with just a regular ol' big-fat-server and a cache.
Cheers mate! Its summation of my microstartups in 2021. ACrypto is actually available on both android and ios. you can check it out https://acrypto.io/
