<story><title>Tell HN: A disabled 40-year-old person founded a startup and makes a living</title><text>I am Michael Cao. I am from Viet Nam. I suffered the polio disease and became disabled when i was one year old.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;We don&amp;#x27;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&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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 &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;workspace.google.com&amp;#x2F;marketplace&amp;#x2F;app&amp;#x2F;qr_code_attendance_for_classroom_employe&amp;#x2F;372652717544&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;workspace.google.com&amp;#x2F;marketplace&amp;#x2F;app&amp;#x2F;qr_code_attenda...&lt;/a&gt; . 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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions and feedback, please fell free to contact me and send me an email. Have a great day, everyone.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>wyclif</author><text>I am currently staying in the Philippines, and I am constantly trying (and mostly failing) at getting Filipinos interested in software engineering and programming, especially women. Women here just don&amp;#x27;t consider technology to be a valid career. The traditional professional career track for Filipinas is usually nursing, physical therapy, medical coding, or other medical careers based in hospitals.&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would love to start a top notch offshore software dev company here, but the sad fact is that this country doesn&amp;#x27;t allow 100% ownership for foreign investors.</text></item><item><author>michaelcao</author><text>Thanks for reminding us. We are thinking about integrating Stripe also.</text></item><item><author>avnigo</author><text>Congratulations, Michael, thank you for sharing your story!&lt;p&gt;A cautionary note on using Paypal as your sole payment system. If this is a considerable source of your income, I would caution against only using Paypal or keeping a large amount of money in that account. There are too many Paypal horror stories out there to mention of people getting their accounts limited or shut down without recourse because their automated checks flagged accounts for suspected fraud or violating their ToS. Best of luck!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tomxor</author><text>&amp;gt; failing) at getting Filipinos interested in software engineering and programming, especially women&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t get people interested, &lt;i&gt;find&lt;/i&gt; people that are interested and lack the resources and opportunity - then help those people. There may also be a lack of interest due to cultural relevance, tech that looks cool and interesting to the west might not in SE Asia, finding local help could improve this.&lt;p&gt;You mentioned women - If you are concerned about countering artificial biases in tech, ensure fair opportunity, but you cannot expect to force people to be interested. There may be inherent statistical differences in the interest and values of technology as a career between cultures and between genders just as there are with other subject that bias in either direction. The goal should be to counter unfair, artificial biases that result from prejudice, including your own... this is an unpopular opinion, but reality is more complex than SJWs like to think, there are multiple causes for the proportions of minorities in a particular area, and this needs to be understood in order to help people effectively do what they want - in short fighting bias with bias can be harmful.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tell HN: A disabled 40-year-old person founded a startup and makes a living</title><text>I am Michael Cao. I am from Viet Nam. I suffered the polio disease and became disabled when i was one year old.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;We don&amp;#x27;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&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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 &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;workspace.google.com&amp;#x2F;marketplace&amp;#x2F;app&amp;#x2F;qr_code_attendance_for_classroom_employe&amp;#x2F;372652717544&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;workspace.google.com&amp;#x2F;marketplace&amp;#x2F;app&amp;#x2F;qr_code_attenda...&lt;/a&gt; . 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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions and feedback, please fell free to contact me and send me an email. Have a great day, everyone.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>wyclif</author><text>I am currently staying in the Philippines, and I am constantly trying (and mostly failing) at getting Filipinos interested in software engineering and programming, especially women. Women here just don&amp;#x27;t consider technology to be a valid career. The traditional professional career track for Filipinas is usually nursing, physical therapy, medical coding, or other medical careers based in hospitals.&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would love to start a top notch offshore software dev company here, but the sad fact is that this country doesn&amp;#x27;t allow 100% ownership for foreign investors.</text></item><item><author>michaelcao</author><text>Thanks for reminding us. We are thinking about integrating Stripe also.</text></item><item><author>avnigo</author><text>Congratulations, Michael, thank you for sharing your story!&lt;p&gt;A cautionary note on using Paypal as your sole payment system. If this is a considerable source of your income, I would caution against only using Paypal or keeping a large amount of money in that account. There are too many Paypal horror stories out there to mention of people getting their accounts limited or shut down without recourse because their automated checks flagged accounts for suspected fraud or violating their ToS. Best of luck!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Thorentis</author><text>Why is it important for more people to be software engineers compared to nurses? We need more nurses in the world, not more software engineers.</text></comment>