Tell HN: A disabled 40-year-old person founded a startup and makes a living
I edited this for readability while maintaining as much of the style as possible. If doing that was offensive or not socially correct I can remove it.<p>***<p>I am Michael Cao. I am from Viet Nam. I suffered from polio and became disabled when I was one year old.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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: <a href="https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/qr_code_attendance_for_classroom_employe/372652717544" rel="nofollow">https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/qr_code_attenda...</a>. 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Have a great day, everyone.