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How can Indie Hackers be helpful in Covid times?

I'm fortunate to be relatively unaffected by Covid. I work from home (as always), physically healthy and my family/friends are all taking good care of themselves so I have a mental capacity to focus on stuff.

I have projects I'm working on but I started thinking if I should pause and build something to somehow be helpful to the people more affected by Covid. Mental health seems to be a big one, a lot of people I know are lost, don't know how to deal with the situation, can't take staying home without real life social interactions.

What are your thoughts on this? Have you started working on anything? There's a lot of PH launches on the subject, but most of it seems to be another version of a covid tracker.

I'd also appreciate any non mainstream products / tips you have that I could share with the aforementioned people.

    1. 1

      Nice, yea. That's useful.

  1. 2

    There's a cool website that's trying to gather ideas over here:
    https://codevid19.com/

  2. 2

    Hey @vhpoet,

    I saw some news on social media about people with 3D printers helping to build materials the hospitals need, respiratoris, masks, and so on. So I think that's a great example, at least in Spain they're running out of supply.

    I've also been having this same idea as yours in my head, like "man, I feel the responsibility to help somehow".

    So sharing here an idea that I had, don't know if it is good / practical but I might get into testing something:

    • Build an online community / tool to address the issues of people losing jobs and business going bankrupt
    • I know there are a lot of people for example in Spain that "got paused" their offline jobs and they have to rely on government help
    • I also heard about one case in UK that they were getting no help and since it's an offline business they were going bankrupt and going to let go all their employees
    • So I was thinking of some kind of platform to exchange feedback and provide help/mentorship to help people during this period, either with one time help or helping them to transition to an alternative job/business
    • I can picture this as an IH community, or a chat, or some other kind of tools, but I'm sure it has to be well thought and be practical / UX and actually be a great place where people can go and look for help

    Examples:

    • Person A had an offline job, now they can't do that anymore, they could be mentored into freelancing
    • Business B was already "online" but was relying on "offline" businesses that stopped their activity and so also paused their "online" projects, so business B needs alternative clients that were not affected, or other creative solutions/gigs
    1. 1

      This is a big one, but also a lot of work to make it work. Keep us updated on the progress.

  3. 2

    True. Since IH has numbers, they can mobilize developers into some kind of contest to come up with a product that addresses Covid-@19

  4. 1

    hi @vhpoet! I developed a mobile web app (FREE to use, it's called 3moves.club, that's the URL) with 100 at home workouts for all fitness levels. This also contains instruction videos from Youtube for each move. This is cool for people stuck at home without a gym.

    As for the social contact, I would recommend the Houseparty app: you can videocall and play games with multiple friends on your phone at once!

    Stay safe!

  5. 1

    I'm old school dev and one of pioneer of remote work and know how hard limit everything in life. It's shock. I looking a way how to deliver my app faster to appstore and help peoples join together though play remotely. Peoples can build new amazing communities on their mobiles and can found interest in virus stop apps, trackers, meditations or games. I need more resources and people can help, so welcome everyone http://animationcpu.herokuapp.com

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