Suffering with a very similar situation but from Facebook. This hyper growth companies don't give a shit about customer support. They let their AIs and Machine learning models do all the work, which inevitably flags healthy businesses.
Reminds me of collateral damage and kills in a war.
But if you take into account the engineers' salaries you'll have to pay, servers, having to be on call every time the site crashes, cost of not having a super optimized checkout, etc.
You'll realize that Shopify is an excellent candidate.
Let Shopify take care of the commerce part and focus on what really moves the needle: your product and marketing.
Disclaimer: I work for Shopify (But I also use it for my side hustles)
The biggest benefit is that with the Shopify checkout you can support credit cards, Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Crypto and more with ONE integration.
You also get discounts codes and logic out of the box (buy one get one, X percentage off, fixed amount off, etc)
And all you have to do is listen to the order completion web hook and do whatever you want on your side.
I made the original comment, and I think we see the world in a different way. This is how I see it:
Creating a business is a creative act. It involves logic and rationality as much as intuition and imagination.
I do think it's an expression of yourself, you're packing all you've learned into something that you think will be valuable to other people. Your personality is reflected in your product, so is your voice.
Ultimately it's up to the creator to treat their business however they seem best. If you want to be all about profits, good for you. If you want to explore ideas, try things and enjoy the creative process while slowly building revenue, also good.
I see a lot of comments criticizing your path and progress. Making remarks like "why didn't you stay at Google".
I applaud your decision, effort, and perseverance. I admire your risk taking and having skin in the game. Trying to make it out on your own.
People forget the journey is not just about the money. It's about learning, growing and bringing your ideas to life. Being an artist, and expressing yourself through products.
Keep on going my friend. There's no doubt you'll get there.
Very interesting that you point to a Meditation book (The Mind Illuminated) and a Stoic book (A Guide to the Good Life).
I've read both, and I like both philosophies. While they both share similarities (non attachment, living in the present), it seems that in Vipasana you wouldn't try to get rid of a bad thouhgt by using your rationality. You would just observe it.
While Stoicism demands engaging rationality to overcome the emotion or bad thought.
Have you thought on how to reconcile the two? This is something I've been pondering for a while.
Small business are on their knees. They are just surviving and living paycheck by paycheck. They sell whatever they get access too. Their profits are worth nothing in dollars (if they manage to have profits). An inflation projected to be 700% this year makes it extremely hard to survive, you need to adjust your prices every hour.
Nobody is doing well in Venezuela, except the corrupt people in the government who keep stealing money.
The shortages are extremely serious at this moment. We're having a humanitarian crisis because medicines can't be found, people use social media to ask for medicines.
The government limited the days where you can go to the super market to the last digit of the "Social Security Number". So if yours end in 0 or 1 then you must buy on Monday. And nothing guarantees that you will find what you're looking for.
Lines outside supermarkets take 2 hours or more and they only sell you a limited amount of items. 1 Chicken per week.
The government also installed finger print scanners to make sure that you don't buy more than you're allowed.
All this measures are failing and will fail, because the problem is that they destroyed the private industry making us heavily relay on imports. Now that the price of the oil is down there is not enough money to import, so there's simply not enough food, medicines, etc.
It's definitely not safe. But it's very hard to stop visiting family. Just avoid public places, don't go out during the night and stay with your family.
The best way to protect the money would have been to buy US dollars on the black market.
Another way would have been to buy a car, motorcycle, alcohol, etc. Anything that preserves it's value over time. The worst thing would be to have it on the bank.
I'm currently living in Montreal. I love Canada and all the opportunities it offers. People are very friendly and it's extremely multicultural! But my heart will always be in Venezuela.
Answering this question has been harder than I thought. I hate to say "Don't go to my country right now". But I've to be honest, I don't think it's worth the risk visiting right now due to crime, robbery, murders, kidnaps and more.. Even though a dollar will go a long way, your life is worth a lot more.. Hopefully things will get better soon you will be able to see the Angel Falls and Los Roques with your own eyes!