Pretty cool list, and all three look like things you could expand your earnings on with some moderate extra work. Just out of curiosity, What subjects do your non fiction books cover?
Really simple, an easy way of buying and selling them on the fly at almost any time and with minimal to no hassle worldwide. Bitcoin ATMs would be a great way of doing this but i'm thinking fo something as easy as walking into a currency exchange anywhere or something like it and buying some euros for dollars.
Digitally, make buying them as easy as using a credit card (prepaid or not) online to buy an ebook
This makes a lot of sense in fact, if for nothing else than the simple reason that most people really don't want to be sick or pretend to be sick so bad that they actually spend a lot of time at a hospital.. They have better things to do.
In Canada, where I'm from, most of the people I know avoid doctors and hospitals unless they really aren't feeling good. They don't want the hassle of waiting and waiting again to see specialists or get a procedure of some kind done.
The canadian socialized system is still really, really slow though for non emergency care but I never believed it was because of parasites wasting hospital resources.
"And yet at the same time it is a city notoriously plagued by poverty, crime, and political gridlock, all of which, like all problems, can be solved by the application of sufficient quantities of VC-funded smartphone apps and responsive websites built on Node.js and MongoDB."
When I read this line I thought the guy was some completely deluded silicon valley VC/tech junkie who'd never left the area to see the real world.. Took me a bit longer to realize the fairly decent satire.
The sad thing is that there really are a lot of people in tech who think like this article in some respects. They think that if you just through enough cool tech and apps at people anywhere, they'll just magically stop being the sometimes ignorant, deeply cruel or criminally minded humans they are.
Like toomuchtodo said, most of the serious problems are people problems.
That said though, I think technology can be used to shape peoples incentives and choices so that even if we're partly broken as a species, changing needs and options made by technology will make us do things that lead to more peace and cooperation. Pretty basic idea, sort of like how industrialized agriculture made people stop having wars over food. (mostly)
There are actually studies being done around implementing exactly that with antibiotics... However there is also the fun danger of your skin turning incurably silvery blue thanks to the silver component in the antibiotics... No really.
Think along the lines of simple business services for midsize and larger companies in Guatemala and the surrounding central American states in my opinion. If you can create a good pitch and show that you know what you're talking about, the very fact that you're a foreigner will make potential customers more likely to listen to you. At least in Mexico that mentality applies frequently.
Whatever locational disadvantages your startup has, they are (I think) more than made up for by the fact that you're working from a location with very low costs of living and a very undeveloped frontier market.
Now, Im not sure if you're building your startup for the U.S/developed market or for the Latin American market, but I'd say there are a lot of opportunities for you if you play to the latter instead.
I live and work from Mexico, just north of you and I can see all sorts of extraordinary opportunities for those of us who have a more expansive knowledge of services and product concepts combined with our familiarity with the language, culture and economic landscape of our newly adopted home in Latin America.
You can work on this angle and really create something for your region from your region, instead of working at a disadvantage by trying to reach the more established U.S market needs from a place where you arguably have access to less resources than someone in Silicon Valley does.
Thanks for the advice guys, Baliw, i'll be sending you a message shortly.
My impression is that a lot of the advice which can be applied to freelance coders (but not all) can also be used across the board as applied to writers, so I've periodically been looking through the Ask forum here for tips when I can find them.
Your reply is downright silly and it seems youre someone who really doesn't travel much or know many people who do.
Not every place outside the USA is automatically a totalitarian, xenophobic shithole where foreigners are so rare that they get stared at on the streets and followed by secret police.
I happen to be from Croatia and currently live in a less then touristy part of central America and guess what? While us western white folks aren't exactly saturating the local landscape, there are more than enough travelers/students/business people from the US and other Anglo countries here long term for us not really get considered that big of a deal.
Same rules apply to many other places I've been. There's lots of travel happening in the world these days and foreigners in developing countries are hardly a big wonder.
Ulbricht could have easily moved to a dozen different countries in central america, south america or eastern europe and southeast asia and comfortably stayed anonymous in any of them.
As someone who went through this very question a while ago, I'll give you the advice that worked for me.
First off, your best source of solid information is going to be a large dose of good old fashioned book reading. Youtube documentaries and blog posts are fun but badly inadequate as a detailed learning tools.
Pick the main periods of history or general historical fields (economic history, political history, etc) you'd like to know about and do a bit of research to find out which 4 or 5 books get the most frequent mention as expert sources of info for those periods or fields of learning.
Start reading those books and look through their references for more sources that might be interesting.
Repeat for each historical period you'd like to know about. It's a slow process but its very thorough.
Also, do read plenty of economic history and theory books, (especially those from the Austrian school and classical liberal school of econ) they will provide you with good context for why a lot of things in history happen the way they do.
Hah.. not too much, it was not as dramatic as seemed with my initial post. Mainly full of lots of stress and working fast to keep from starving... and to learn the language quickly.
In my case, I had something like 2,500 saved up before quitting my construction industry related job, moving to Mexico and giving myself 2 months to become a freelance writer. Worked out after all, though it was nerve wracking