tixocloud

Great to hear the positives about congestion pricing. It would be great to see how it can ease the congestion in Toronto. Unfortunately, I suggested congestion pricing as a possible solution as part of an academic project and was laughed off.

The Canadian market lacks innovation because the market doesn’t want innovation. Most Canadian businesses and startups thrive in the U.S. simply because the Canadian market is so much more risk-averse. Buyers are afraid of change and investors afraid of risk.

When you say business loans aren’t an option because of size and location, is it because you’re a 1 person company or because you’re in Ukraine? Just trying to understand where these companies consider risk.

With something like an IoT development framework, advertising and promotion is certainly not the way to begin. Have a look at the book called "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg to get an idea of the different GTM strategies.

You should have a target customer in mind and that will guide the strategies that you'll need to reach them.

Without experience in the field, the other alternative are some educational resources to help you understand the typical discussions: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/preparing-for-the-systems...

You could also look at projects where the scaling factor is something else other than users. For example, documents, files, databases, etc. The basic principles should remain the same.

Would you not be able to solve this by having a messaging queue and getting the database to publish it’s updates?

Curious what products you’ve seen as well.

I’ve seen small businesses use something like Zapier. A better way would be to have a pub/sub system but that may be overkill given the complexity.

Thanks for sharing. Really interesting that you've focused on dividend scheduling which is something I haven't quite seen anywhere else. The app also mentions stock prediction using AI - do you have more details about it?

Previously led data teams in banks and you’re right. There are dozens of flags for test accounts. When auditing, we screen out these accounts. Of course, with a proper data cleaning process, analytics gets a lot easier

Remote desktops are generally the access point for anything sensitive like source code or data.

Social engineering is likely the easiest way to get through security systems.

I’d be interested in learning more about your friend’s service.

It’s hard to give meaningful advice without understanding the full context of the business. Details such as maintenance, customer acquisition, etc. all play a factor in your next step.

Personally, I’ve mostly used LinkedIn, email and a spreadsheet but I’ve seen other tools like personal CRM float around.

LinkedIn and other social media tools are great because you can always comment on things other founders have/shared posted.

There are many data providers serving the financial services/capital markets sector that provide everything from raw data feeds to insights based off of web-scraped data. What will be important for you is to identify a good niche, understand which part of the data value chain your customer needs, and deliver the data in a way that fits their workflow.

The value is in the decisions that can be made based on the data being sold rather than the method at which you extract it from. If you focus on the value of the data and who needs it, you’ll likely find a viable business model.

As you rightly pointed out, the funding strategy will be quite different for hard tech startups. They have different milestones and different investor bases with different risk appetites. You’ll also look at other options (grants, collaborations, etc.)

What resources are you looking for in particular? There are plenty that apply to freelancers/consultants that would apply with a quick Google search.

Ideally, it would be useful to setup a corporation to limit personal liability and keep your finances/accounting organized (I.e. use 1 account for everything, keep track of key dates to file things, keep a log of all finances, schedule time for admin)

Start with your immediate network. Folks that already know what you can do are likelier to hire you first and as you build out your reputation, feel free to piggy back on other consultancies, VC firms, etc.

I’m actually toying with the idea because I’m finding more projects/demand that I know technical folks who can deliver. Would you like to connect?

I wonder if there’s opportunity to build a community/collective/agency to help software developers manage the admin similar to a brokerage model.

Great advice. In addition, first-time founders should focus a lot on how the product addresses the customer problem and build no more than what is needed to solve that problem. I sometimes work with founders who have too much luxury with time and money (from their full-time job) that so much time/effort is wasted on building features that aren't necessary. That being said, the hard part is that it's an art and not exact science but there are frameworks you can use to minimize waste.

We've built product without even having a website. Just cold outreach and talking about how we solve our customer's problems.

Feel your pain. Canadian citizen who previously founded startup in London and had to pay double taxes. Enjoyed the life in London though. Would love to go back some day.

Would this be fairly similar to what a recruiting agency would do?

Sure drop me an email in my profile.

We're actually thinking of building something like that and would love to have a chat to learn more about use cases.

A friend and I are actually looking into the space and would love to have a chat if you're up for it?

There's a plethora of opportunity for version control for almost every other domain. The technology is already there. The key to winning the market is in process change and sales/distribution.

Culture eats strategy (and tools) for breakfast. Until there’s a cultural mindset shift towards how companies value data and metadata, nothing will ever truly change.

I do have personal experience so Happy to have a chat through. I haven’t come across any decent material and would love to connect if you stumble upon something.