dionys

first one to run doom on a vape would do great numbers on youtube

Poor agents, finally taking a break

it's an interesting point, could you please go into a bit more detail on how you structure the retainer (certain amount of hours per month)? How many you can stack and so on?

For me: - Birlik which is a turkish store for pretty good bread, vegetables, legumes - Wurstico for meat products - Brunnenmarkt for meat/veggies

cigarette vending machines are still super common here in Vienna as well. There's always teens hanging around them asking people to swipe their cards to buy the cigarettes in exchange of cash

Maybe it really depends on the industry and the size of your clients. But if you target small/medium business, they won't have crazy enterprise requirements. Of course they will want a good product and something that fits their criteria. But often times they won't need to replace their whole X solution, they just might need a small API/plugin that connects their platform with Y.

I'm not a salesman either, but I think it's easier to persuade 1 business person to spend $400/mo on your solution rather than persuading 100 individuals to pay you $4/mo. Individuals (even I'm like this) tend to have high, almost unreasonable, standards for the quality of service you get for $4 per month. Comparatively I think for a lot of business, $400 a month is nothing.

I've had similar experience, also coming from a small Eastern European country. It feels like the market within the country is not big enough, including two nearby countries improves the situation, but you still need to deal with the language differences. To me it just feels there's not enough money, both from the possible customers as well as from investors.

My current employer is originally from the UK, but they started in the US. That included a corp in Delaware alongside the main office in the UK. The product is B2B and it worked quite well in the US, but expanding to European customers in the recent years has been more complex. Luckily since it's a B2B product, the language differences are less pronounced. The product itself is only provided in English and luckily we have European CS colleagues so we can offer support in other languages as well. I think the main challenge in this space was that in the US there was only 2-3 big players who we partnered with initially. In Europe, each country has 5 of them and each of them work slightly differently. The company never needed outside investment, we kept lean for a very long time and we were profitable very early on.

My recommendation - focus on US, English-speaking customers first. If you can, do B2B and provide excellent customer support. B2B customers have different expectations, but they are also easier to deal with from my experience. If you can, try to bootstrap and become profitable as soon as possible.

I'm feeling the same. Two of my teammates are in Ukraine right now. Bosses are now talking about hiring new people to keep up with the workload. And this is the same meeting where my boss said we have a lot of work, but nothing critical. All the systems are running fine, no major bugs recently, the work is purely adding new features. And they're ready to replace them after ~4 days. It just makes me think we are all absolutely expandable. Hopefully no major crisis happens in my life, cos they'll drop me in a heartbeat :(

Same here, getting <domain> unexpectedly closed the connection on a lot of requests.

Restarted the dynos and it seems to have helped at least a bit

edit: seems like it was resolved for our app. Still it was down for 20+ minutes

In my mind I knew the hourly rate was a bit lower than what the company would pay a local person, but I didn't expect it to be that much lower. Most of my colleagues are from Eastern Europe, so I think the company is pretty much outsourcing the work and getting it very cheaply.

So thank you for this info, my next job hunt will be different. I'm hoping that with this pandemic, more companies switched over to remote, so it should be easier to find bigger/better paying opportunities. Do you have any tips on good sources for jobs like these? Should I just use linkedin/job boards?

Sorry, I just meant a low cost of living country.

Thanks! Yea, I think I'll need to research this a bit more myself.