Startup #1 - Beaco

The first startup in my 12 startup challenge is Beaco, a physical presence tracker for Canadian Permanent Residents.

The idea

When you become a Canadian Permanent Resident, you are required to keep track of any of your travels out-of-Canada. You can apply for your citizenship once you have been physically present in Canada for 1,095 days (or 3 years) out of the last 5 years. I was keeping track of this in Google Keep for a bit, but it means that I had to keep calculating the number of days each time I traveled out of Canada. So I built this to help keep track of that and to send me a reminder when I finally reached those number of days.

Competitors and other options

There are a few competitors out there:

• The official tracker from CIC
• Different apps in both the Android and iOS App store
• Keep track in Excel, Google Sheets or other spreadsheet or note-taking app

So what is missing from these that I wanted to solve?

• The ability to save the details each time I do a trip
• I do not want to have to download an app for something that happens irregularly
• I want to be reminded whenever I’m about to reach the date I’m able to apply for my citizenship

What I built

So this is what I’ve built:

• A web-app that allows you to save your trip details
• It automatically sends you an email to remind you on dates leading up to your citizenship eligibility

For those interested, here is the tech stack, otherwise feel free to scroll below for more non-tech details:

• Backend

  SST (Serverless Stack) — I used the SST Framework built on top of the AWS SDK. The reason for choosing this, is the ease of use and amazing community behind it. Also I love the serverless architecture as costs are generally related to the amount of usage instead of leaving a server up and running regardless of traffic.

• Web App

  Expo — I used Expo to develop this using react-native-web. This was primarily because I wanted to test out react-native-web and thought that if I ever wanted to deploy an app in the app stores, I should be able to do that easily.

• Landing Page

  Gatsby — I’ve used Gatsby a few times in the past, so I just thought to use it again for a simple landing page.

How will this make money?

At the moment, you will need to pay a subscription fee of $2/month or $20/year to use this service. I’m still unsure if this is the right model, but it was an easy one to setup with Stripe, so I just took that route.

How have I marketed this?

I haven’t put too much effort into marketing this, but here are what I’ve done:

• Posted on 2 Facebook groups related to PR
• Posted on a subreddit related to PR
• Cold-reach to 4 Canadian Immigration influencers (no response)

I am debating on whether or not to go into Google Ads or Social Ads at this point as I’d rather spend the money on something else.

Results

After about a month, here are the results:

• 30 visitors/month
• 5 users signed up (free signups in exchange for feedback)

What’s next?

As part of the challenge, I will be pausing any work on this and moving onto my next project. But I will continue to think of more ways to market it and monetize. If you have some ideas or feedback on the idea, or just how I write, please reach out!

Bonus trivia — Where did the name come from? Beaco.ca is from ‘Be a citizen of Canada’. But really, I was googling some domain names and misspelt something that came up with beaco as a suggestion and thought it was a cool name and worked backwards from there.😛