Tell HN: A disabled 40-year-old person founded a startup and makes a living

Congratulations, Michael, thank you for sharing your story!

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!

Thanks for reminding us. We are thinking about integrating Stripe also.

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'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.

Personally, I would love to start a top notch offshore software dev company here, but the sad fact is that this country doesn't allow 100% ownership for foreign investors.

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.

Precisely. We need more human care, for ourselves and others, not more software.

VA (virtual assistant) is a common path for women in the Philippines. They are family oriented and this type of role offers a lot of flexibility for mother's there. And some of their tasks can be fairly technical. I've worked with them before and had a positive experience.

Hi Michael, if you need any help integrating stripe. Let me know, I’d be happy to help, my email is in my bio.

The same issue can happen with Stripe.. They approve accounts before doing underwriting, once you hit a threshold your account is reviewed for underwriting, funds will be withheld, usually a 'rolling reserve of % of last X days of transactions' sometimes it's more. :(

Thanks for your information. I don't integrate Stripe because it doesn't support Viet Nam.

Hi Michael, your story put a smile on my face. Its so awesome that you were able to leverage the Google workspace add-on marketplace for your QR code. I think there is still a lot of untapped markets apart from Contact tracing which might use QR codes. So keep plugging and wish You and Your co-founder all the power in the world. Start Small.Stay small.

Thanks for your feedback. I like the book "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup" and I learn a lot from that book. We event don't have an office. 100% remote work.

I second your recommendation, it is a great book for small business founders.

One more comment, i think that Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business is a great book for founders.

App script? Nice!

Let's say you weren't disabled, what job would you have/is best for a founder?

Myself, I personally think coders should code for work and for their startup, this way you develop higher quality code in both sides, which creates better outcomes, you're always in the software soup so to speak, or in the phó in this case.

I personally want to be a stock investor. I read a lot of investing books such as Margin of Safety - Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor by Seth A. Klarman, memos and books from Howard Marks, other books about Buffett. Investing help me to minimize risks for my startup. I also want to have multiple passive income sources. Stocks and apps are great options.

Thanks for sharing this Michael. I'm inspired by your story of how all of us can take our destinies into our own hands through determination and perseverance.

All the best with your projects!

With <3 from India.

Thanks. Hacker News is a great community for startups and entrepreneurs and i learn much from entrepreneurs like you and others. Thanks for your support

Hi Michael, congratulations ! In what ways do you think your disability has been a force or an obstacle to your startup ?

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 :)

You and I have disability physically but not mentally. I wake up 4.45 am everyday and go to bus for work. I reply to customer on the go. Software is a great way to earn passive income so we can do both full time job and start-up job. I wish you all the best. Please contact me if you have any problems which I could help.

This is indeed inspiring.

Congratulations and Good Luck for the Future!

Wise words of advice in this post. I definitely feel that times are changing and many of us will definitely have to be more thoughtful about our expenditures going forward.

I am very proud of you. I spent a lot of time in Vietnam. I am always happy to hear about Vietnamese start up success stories.

How did you attract business? Did you advertise anywhere?

Thanks. I hope that we can drink beer in Viet Nam when you come back here. I only posted some posts in Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, etc. I haven't spend any money for advertising because we are living in covid-19 pandemic. I am an value investor also so I always want to minimize risks as much as possible. We think and invest for long term. Honestly, we were quite lucky because covid-19 helped our QR Code attendance get tractions very quickly. We keep our jobs so we have money to raise our children and family so we don't need short term thinking for our apps.

Congratulations Michael, your story is truly inspiring! What impact do you foresee the coming financial recession is going to have on your product, or indeed on any dependent functions (e.g., meetups, subscriptions, etc.)?

Thanks for your comment. I learn a lot of lessons from Ray Dalio, an American billionaire investor and hedge fund manager, who has served as co-chief investment officer of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates. He said that an idea could reach saturation point in 5 years generally. Therefore, we have been preparing new ideas from a year ago. To be honest, we failed multiple times. We developed some apps and most of them failed but we always try new ideas. That's why we still keep current job so we are safe during upcoming severe recession. Also, i am moving to be a stock investor to be diversifying my portfolios. I am currently investing in real estate, software, stock and may be crypto currencies. I believe that diversification is a free lunch during crisis.

Love your story Michael. More power to you!

Congratulations on your success! I have a hobby project I'm going to release soon I hope in time before the collapse so people can enjoy some of the work I've been doing.

Thanks. I wish you all the best. If you want to have a tester for your product, please fell free to send me the link so I can give you some comments.

I might do that! I'd like to hear what music you'd like turned into an orchestra work from Vietnam. It would be easy for you to set up microtonality if you need something special for the local scales. Its all python and pretty simple to read. But I have a lot of docs to write.

I like the song "Người về đem tới ngày vui" of Trọng Bằng author. Orchestra helps me to reduce stress during Covid-19. Python is a very powerful programming language and I have been using it for some work.

Super. Thanks for posting! Nice stack. I shall be using some of you're picks I think. I really want to go back to Vietnam some day.

Cool. Please ping me when you go to Ha Noi in the future.

Congratulations on your success so far. And great job creating something useful to people in a time of need.

Thanks. We learn much from the Rework book of Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. I rarely write publicly. But recession is looming so I would like to share our story and encourage start-ups to save money and prepare for the worst.

Keep going! Inspiring read - how did you meet your cofounder?

We are close friends from university so we are culture fit and easily to reach consensus on all things.

This is inspiring, Michael please keep sharing more updates!

Mate this is amazing. You are an inspiration for giving a big middle finger for disability and hurdles in your way. All the best going forward!

Very nicely done Michael. So happy for your success. More power to you , lots of <3 from India

Great story. Thank you for sharing. Did you have programming experience before starting a startup?

Thanks. I am a software developer for 15 years. Recently, cofounder (CTO) does technical things and I do all the other stuffs. I love my company and my boss so I don't want to go full time for 2HAC Studio. I and cofounder only spend free time for 2HAC Studio. We automate most tasks. For customer support, we can reply some hours later and most customers don't complain about that.

This made my day. Thanks dude, you're amazing and very inspiring.

Congrats on your success, and I’m wishing you the best through this coming recession.

Congratulations on your success. I hope you reach a point in revenue when you can quit your day jobs.

Thanks. Actually, we already reached this point but I love my company and my boss so i don't want to quit.

You're awesome Michael, inspiring words today, thanks for sharing your journey and keep rockin'

This is awesome! Thank you for sharing your story.

Congratulations! Inspiration mixed with good plain business sense. You rock!

I would say reading your post brightened my day. Thank you for sharing it. Cheers.

Thanks. I am happy that my post could help founders and startups at some points.

Congrats. I hope you become more successful.

Love from the Philippines.

Thanks your post. We are living in Asian countries. Hopefully, you can go to Viet Nam in the future and we can drink beer and discuss about start-ups

Congrats on the business, and thank you for sharing!

Great work! You're an inspiration for us

This was really inspirational. Thanks and congrats!

Thanks for taking time to read my post. Have a great week.

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.

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.

Sorry about that because I posted in Hacker News in the first time. I even don't know how to break lines. Hacker News interface is simple to use but I struggled to find how to break lines.

You need two lines to make a line break on HN. It's bizarre.

In what universe would adding line-breaks to a giant run-on paragraph be considered offensive? I can't imagine being that worried about offending people that I'd put an apologetic disclaimer on a reformatting of an internet comment.

Putting the disclaimer is still harmless. GP took some liberties with fixing grammar and wording in addition to formatting, on text from an obvious ESL speaker. Of course, OP's post is plenty comprehensible grammatically for a competent english-speaker, despite the minor syntax issues here and there.

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.

Fixing grammar could be annoying for sure (like you have nothing better to do, I worked with non-native speakers for 10+ years now and still find it astounding when some native speaker feels the urge to fix someone's grammar in online forums, which I would never do if the content is comprehensible), but adding paragraphs to unreadable block of text can't be even annoying, that's just common sense and everyone can agree Reddit/HN formatting is mess

The parent post also changed the words in addition to adding line breaks.

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!"

His Hawaiian pidgin seems much more efficient than your transcription and I would prefer it as non-native speaker. But English is like my 3rd or 4th language so what do I know...

> I can't imagine being that worried about offending people that I'd put an apologetic disclaimer on a reformatting of an internet comment.

Seems weirder to be this bothered by a harmless disclaimer, tbh.

I offend myself trying to decide where line breaks go in text I actually wrote. I sincerely re-edit multiple times to hopefully convey what I meant. It’s okay for someone to be careful about their indie edits.

In a universe where you're taking something that Michael has written and correcting his English grammar and formatting without being asked to do so. Some people may find that offensive, so it makes perfect sense to me to issue a statement of intent and to pre-apologize, just in case their attempt to help may have offended Michael (which, thankfully, it didn't).

By the way, good on you Michael and best of luck in the future.

Thanks. English is not my native language so I am thankful for editing my post.

In this very (sometimes crazy) universe we live in, unfortunately.

Erring on the side of kindness. Yeah, crazy.

I've edited the formatting similarly at the top now. Thanks for watching out for a fellow user!

This is quite rude, a tinge racist and unnecessary. Michael's post was perfectly readable as is. This distracts from it significantly.

With any conversation with someone whose first language isn't English, it's best to use context cues. Vietnamese is a tonal language which often drops certain grammatical conventions common in English which you'll notice from the way it was written.

I'm sorry but this is just not ok...