https://servicehq.ca Built this over about 2-3 months with the help from a Beta customer satisfying their requirements slowly, but still ensuring that the platform is generic and modular enough.
It’s now averaging about $1000/month with 2 customers. I’m now planning to slowly rebuild the mobile app (need to improve UX and add offline functionality). Once ready, I can start selling to more customers, Also thinking of adding a few integrations with tools like Google Drive, Office 365 & Slack to improve market visibility.
$1000/month with 2 customers (for a SaaS) is impressive. Any tips for other SaaS-devtrepeneurs to achieve the same, without needing 100 customers per $1000?
This kind of things are rarely problems for locals* , so I can see how they might be a low priority for the government/police. Instead, solving poverty issues+better education seems to be a better solution (for me and for the cities) than trying to make it into a police state.
Example: one of the safest places in Spain I've seen are libraries in Universities. People leave their laptops and go to the toilet/for lunch and nothing happens. The unsafest places I'd say are beaches, clubs and main statios.
* which happens all around the world. I never thought I'd be scammed like this, being from Spain, but I was scammed in Vietnam!
This. People generally prefer to make an honest buck but when honest bucks are few and far between skimming your cut off the people who pass through using whatever means necessary becomes very attractive.
You even see this dynamic in in college towns where the college town and associated services are generally ok but all the surrounding communities run speed traps like their going out of style in order to skim a few bucks off of all the people passing through as a result of the college and the commerce it generates.
A healthy local economy generally prevents too many people from trying to make a dishonest buck.
At least for Barcelona the theft is incredibly organised, and with the assumption that a passing tourist will just pay to replace their phone or use their insurance, the theft itself might be far more lucrative than whatever honest buck is available.
It is generally only the tourists that are targeted, to the point where some people will tell you to yell at the assailant in Spanish to guilt them into giving your stuff back to show you're not one of the people they should be stealing from.
To show how bizarre this can be, on a purely anecdotal level, I was jumped in Barcelona more than once, and even with the opportunity to take my wallet and cash they ignored it and went only for the phone. Physical violence is avoided, more often than not.
Barcelona in particular has had an anti-tourism mentality for quite some time (and not without good reason) so a lot of this petty crime appears to exist as a result of that. This is just from experience of living there a few years, though.
Surveillance and police presence won't really solve this because of how sneaky the theft can be (e.g. knifing your pocket or rucksack while you sleep on the metro and sliding your phone out), the best deterrent is your own awareness. Good luck with that if you're out there to party.
Of course, the same can be said for any country enjoying its influx of wealthy tourists. Barcelona isn't unique in this.
in my experience, there's a tradeoff curve with "honesty" of income on one axis and time/effort spent per money on the other axis, and different people have different curves (at different times in their lives.)
Just ask my local police department - no point in pissing off your neighbors and voters issuing tickets when you can stick it to people passing through...
Sorry to hear you were robbed 10k. I'm not sure how much we can solve the robbing problem with surveillance.
I can talk a bit about the typical robbing that occurs in the more touristic places in the city. The police is very much aware of who the robbers are, and in fact most of them have been caught dozens of times, if not hundreds; they simply don't get punished, except with a small fine, so they keep doing it. It's disgraceful.
> they simply don't get punished, except with a small fine, so they keep doing it. It's disgraceful.
Violent thieves (robbers) get punished. Non-violent theft is treated more lightly unless is done on a big scale. This gives criminals a high incentive to not be violent.
I have heard that the theory is that if you hard punish any thief, then thieves are going to be more violent to not get caught. If you focus the police force on violent crime, then violent crime goes down.
Most criminals know that if they give themselves in when caught, they will get a more favourable sentence that if they resist.
The goal is to keep people safe first, then property. To punish criminals is a means to that goal, but just that. I think that in the USA there is a moral component where punishing criminals is a moral imperative, even if this causes worse crime or if people get wrongly punished. Or, at least, that is what I interpret from the news.
We have a number of holes in our legal system. The cause is not what you say, even if it's very reasonable. The cause is where we came from and technical debt after so many years of patches. We suffered a dictatorship until 1975. The climate was against police and pro-reo. It was good to abolish capital punishment and other relics. But we swinged too much the other way. A more dramatic example is how people under 18 can get away with rape and murder, just a slap in the wrist. Also parole is almost a given after doing half the sentence. So effectively our longest punishment is 15 years. That has changed for rapists and terrorists, but it's basically true for most other crimes.
No it is not that. The main reason is that even if you get caught stealing you only get something like 15- 30days of jail. It is like a two week vacation for a pocket picker, then they are out again.
In SouthEastern countries they get 1, 2 or up 4 years in jail. Guess, what? There is less of them in the streets and if they are less likely to do it again.
So, being too lenient in crime creates the nightmare that Barcelona is, and draws in criminals from the rest of Europe (it is still a very beautiful city to visit).
I know, by reputation the Balkan Region doesn't look good, but when you look at the data it paints a totally different picture. My hunch is that a lot of petty thieves types have moved into Western Europe as the business is more lucrative there.
numbeo is a measurement of perceptions of crime, not actual crime rates. Looking at Stockholm vs. Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), Stockholm comes off the worse for safely walking at night.
Agree. I installed a Nest Camera to keep my garage and car safe...guess what: they broke into my garage anyways and all I got is a useless video of it.
Camera’s are not a solution to stop crime!
One thing I gotta say though is that it helped with figuring out what got stolen ;)
Geez that's a bummer. My wife and I are going this summer and I've been researching all of the different scams. Definitely going to get a belt wallet for me and her, it sounds like pick pocketing is the most common issue.
I did this before I relocated there for a few years. It will raise your blood pressure and you'll be trying so hard to protect yourself from one scam that you'll get hit by another, and by the time you've done researching you'll have so little trust that you might see everything as a potential robbery.
Enjoy your time there, it's a beautiful city! Just make sure to minimise your risk by limiting what you carry around with you and never take your eyes off it. That way if you do get unlucky, you can still recover from it.
Within 5 minutes of arriving in Barcelona, a friend of mine was pickpocketed. Slick operation, 2 pretty girls as distraction and a boy to do the deed. We grabbed him and he gave it back and then the three of them just wandered off as if it was nothing. Which I suppose for them it was. This was in the main train station so there were cameras, cops around, clearly no deterrent.
My experience with Barcelona too, I witnessed a botched pickpocketing attempt just to the person next to me, when arriving to Plaza Catalunya. Way to give a bad first impression, after that the rest of the week was fine.
Apple Macbook Pro 15: $4600 (Mine)
Apple Macbook Pro 13: $2600 (Wife’s)
Ipad Pro: $1000
Versace Glasses: $400
Ray Ban: $300
Airpods: $250
Cash: $1300
Backpack: $150
Apple Fast Charger: $50
Fast Charging Brick: $45
The nice thing out of this incident was that I was able to transfer my Apple Care from my Apple Devices to my new replacement devices.
If you just walk in looking like a tourist to almost any metro car in barcelona people will attempt to rob you. I have never been to a place with so much blatant crime and I am from New Orleans.
The low level crime is absolutely insane in barcelona to the point I would recommend not going unless you are ready to get in shoving matches with attempted thieves.
I would absolutely recommend visiting. Barcelona is one of the most incredible cities in the world. Do a little research on the different areas. Don’t carry around 10k of valuables! And don’t leave your stuff lying around on the beach. Have an amazing time!
What the hell are you talking about. That has never been my experience nor the experience of people I know that have been there within the past 2 years. Don't fearmonger about crime.
I'm not fear mongering at all. I was there for like 3-4 days and had upwards of 3 encounters with people attempting to separate and rob my group on the metro.
That is insane. I'm not like some country bumpkin either, I am from New Orleans and so was my entire group. We didn't get robbed because we had to become physically aggressive with these groups of people and get in shoving matches and shit. It was ridiculous.
I have never experienced so much rampant theft in my life and I am fairly well traveled.
There are beautiful sights in Barcelona, but I doubt I will ever go back because it is completely lawless.
I have had gun fights happen right outside my house in New Orleans, almost everyone I know was mugged at some point growing up, there was an attempted rape in my driveway once, but it still has nothing on the volume of crime I witnessed in Barcelona.
> WITTES: The exact quotation, which is from a letter that Franklin is believed to have written on behalf of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, reads, those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
> SIEGEL: And what was the context of this remark?
> WITTES: He was writing about a tax dispute between the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the family of the Penns, the proprietary family of the Pennsylvania colony who ruled it from afar. And the legislature was trying to tax the Penn family lands to pay for frontier defense during the French and Indian War. And the Penn family kept instructing the governor to veto. Franklin felt that this was a great affront to the ability of the legislature to govern. And so he actually meant purchase a little temporary safety very literally. The Penn family was trying to give a lump sum of money in exchange for the General Assembly's acknowledging that it did not have the authority to tax it.
> SIEGEL: So far from being a pro-privacy quotation, if anything, it's a pro-taxation and pro-defense spending quotation.
> WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means.
Its also a question of mobility, if you are staying far would you spend money and time to travel just to eat and get back, especially given you have to work the whole day as well.
Same thoughts here about MobX. I tried my best to like Redux from my early on React days but could never get myself to like it, Mobx on the other hand has been a way more pleasurable and productive experience. I don't know or understand much about the pros and cons around Immutability and FP paradigm of Redux, but I sure can ship my apps faster and quicker using Mobx - which for a small bootstrapped startup like mine could mean the difference between life and death.
After having used Mobx for more than 10 months now, I still have to find areas that I dislike about Mobx.
Doing Ruby/Rails/JS/Nodejs for past 4 years roughly. Things did dried up a bit over the past ~3 months, But I'm sure if I were to do some sales outreach, I'd be able to find work in a couple days. (Good that I have some of my clients on retainer contracts for supporting and maintaining their projects which keeps the bank balance and cashflow stream healthy)
Not too worried about the downtime though, because I always wanted to take a few months off from consulting to build our own product. So, i've been happily utilizing this time to build: https://servicehq.ca
Once we roll out with 3-4 customers, My plan is to do a time split between consulting gigs and my own product.
Yes. It has been scientifically proven that if you eat all your foods in an 8 + \epsilon hr window that you will gain 5lbs whereas if you eat them in an 8 hr window you will not gain any weight.
