Docket

VALIDATE VALIDATE VALIDATE your idea before building

• I'd only I'd spoken to companies first and validated the need for a product like Docket, I wouldn't have spent so much time building
• Who you validate your idea with is VERY IMPORTANT - I got great feedback from employees, but they're not the ones paying for the app. I should have talked to customers

I did learn a LOT about building with bubble.io - Key features and methodologies that will help me on future projects.

What Next:
I'd watched a ted talk by Cameron Herold on "Raising kids to be entrepreneurs" a long long time ago(https://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_herold_let_s_raise_kids_to_be_entrepreneurs)

This has always stayed at the back of my mind and I want to build something that can help more kids be entrepreneurs.

I gave myself a month until my birthday, to at least get 5 actual corporate customers (or even non paying users).

The day arrived and I had exactly 0.
I had a few great friends who had helped connect me with their immigration contacts at work, who I'd pitched the idea to.

Here's what I found - There are two types of companies that were the target:

1. Large Companies with many employees on visas at any given time -- These companies all worked with large Law Firms that already had their own tools with a similar or additional features.
2. Small companies with very few international employees -- These companies had very few employees on visas that they could manage them very easily on spreadsheets and didn't really need a tool, however cheap it was.

Figured, this was a B2B SaaS app and not a consumer product... so I didn't need to have a massive launch on Twitter or Hacker News or something.

Instead I learned everything I could from Microconf, IH, YC and other startup/bootstrapper resources and drafted the "Perfect" introduction email and started my outreach through my connections.
Having moved from India to the US on a visa 8 years ago, I knew a lot of other folks in similar situations at various companies and also people who worked in immigration departments at various companies.

I knew I was going to get a FLOOD of interest, so decided to keep everything organized and tracked all my outreach on a spreadsheet with details on followup, etc.

Now that I had a complete product ready, how do I sell it? Simple, all I have to do is build a landing page and people would flock to it once they know about it.
Spend a bunch more time (just nights and/or some weekends) building a landing page to explain what Docket does.

Finally the page was ready: https://docket-page.bubbleapps.io/version-test

(I guess subconsciously I kept pushing this part further and further down to road as I love building and have never done any selling)

In my head,I had validated the need for this product (Employees I spoke to, including mostly my friends loved it) and I started building a complete corporate dashboard for companies to manage multiple visa applications across for multiple employees.

At this point I hadn't spoken to any actual potential "Paying" customers (i.e. Companies) and was building away (This was quite slow as I had a regular job and Docket was for nights and weekends)

Finally after a few months - Had a pretty complete product with an employee portal and a corporate dashboard.
The "PERFECT" solution to immigration management nightmares for companies and employees.

I jumped on bubble.io to build my MVP.
Having built hunqry.online on bubble, I was pretty familiar with how I could build something really quick and test the idea.

The first version included features for an employee to view and track all communication and documents related to their Visa application, in one place.

I showed to MVP to a few friends and they all thought this was amazing (If only I'd read the Mom test at this point)

As my wife and I were going through the arduous H1b visa process with my company, I wondered if there was a better way to do this.

I wished there was a platform to connect companies with their employees to manage all things immigration.
This was a problem I also faced at previous employers and wondered why there wasn't a solution for this.

The idea - A platform where all communication, exchange of documents, visibility of status, anything related to a visa application, could be housed for help companies and employees manage this better