I had work visa and had similar thoughts and was deferring starting a business until green card. I was wrong. Building business takes time, and there are a lot of tasks that could've done on work visa, even without idea: - networking (future customers, employees, investors) - market analysis - marketing (content marketing through blog, twitter)

One way to find feedback without investing into coding - talking to potential customers or people inside targeted market. This I wish I done while I where on work visa :)

I enjoy coding, and that's the part I want to pursue. I have no idea about marketing.

What is networking? I know how to make friends through communities (e.g. the CouchSurfing meetup, church, volunteer groups), and I've have 3900 Facebook friends who I met face to face. But they don't have money, either as customers or investors. They're just friends.

What is market analysis? Do you mean looking at the Facebook Likes of my friends, and trying to build something that they will enjoy? I already have my ideas, but I don't think anybody is interested in them. (education tools, some deep learning research, calendar/map data management system).

Where should I post a blog? I wrote some blogs for Pingtype, but they didn't attract any traffic. What should I use? Wordpress.com? Medium?

https://pingtype.github.io/docs/blog.html

I just wanted to make a point, that a work visa by itself is not a real blocker, more of a mental one. At least it was for me :) Networking for me is about building credibility around myself in the area I will need for a business, online or offline. For education projects, it can be going to education-related meetups or talking to teachers in real life or online.

Market Analysis - there are many books on entrepreneurship (for example - https://goo.gl/tyJSu1) for education tools you can talk to people who will use them - teachers or students, and try to estimate how many of them, and how much they are willing to pay, or if you can make money off ads.

for your example project, you send a to teachers at local community colleges and try to get their feedback and maybe they will recommend it to schools. Also, you can post the link to your project at language learning online forums or meetup groups.

I mean, not every side project will be big business or even business at all, but I think about it as a good practice if you really think about entrepreneur path.

I myself went back to coding for now, I enjoy it too :)

Thank you for explaining; I think we both agree that the code is the easy part.

I guess I did Market Analysis, although I didn't know that's what it's called. I made a list of all the universities in Taiwan, and then found all the ones with language centres. Then I went to each of those websites, found the contact email address for the language centre (or in some cases, individual teachers). I emailed them from my personal GMail.

I sent 102 of those emails. Only one replied, telling me that I can post it on their Facebook.

I tried contacting some famous polyglots to just give me feedback. One of them was actually rude in his reply, told me to post on the forum, and then banned me (links are banned, but I wrote to tell people to search for it). The others didn't reply.

It's been almost total discouragement by everybody except my Chinese tutor, who I pay so I can study with her once a week. I actually have to pay people just to talk to me. This is why I get discouraged and give up on other projects, because I really need a community to discuss these ideas.

I imagine some kind of group where 12 people can share their resources (providing basic income within the group), and have each person give a presentation once every 3 months.

Nice! what you describe is basically a standard sales process. You will very often be ignored, and people will not reply to you - don't get it personal. Read more about cold emailing and sales. It's a complex process, but essential for bootstrapping entrepreneurship.

> I really need a community to discuss these ideas.

there are local pitch events (at least in the silicon valley) where you can practice or sites like HN.

Although at this stage it's less about sales and more about understanding your potential customers and what problem do they have. That's why I would recommend starting side business project by talking to customers first, understand what problem they have - what jobs they need to be done, and then actually coding

I don't live in Silicon Valley, and I don't think are pitch-events in Taiwan. Certainly not where I could give a presentation for free, I'd probably have to pay to join.

Customer-driven innovation means I have to find people who will give me money first, and then make a product to sell so I can take their money.

The problem is that I don't know anybody who will give money to me for any reason, even though I have plenty of friends. We're all too busy just trying to pay for food and shelter. I think that rich people can easily start companies because they have rich friends who will pay them. So the only products that get made are things that benefit rich people, not poor people.

By customer-driven, I mean the first talk to customers, then code. Understand what kind of job your customers are doing (don't talk about a product, just try to understand your customers), for example, people who study Chinese what kind of day to day tasks/job/activities they do related to learning Chinese? What gives them the most pain/problems? Is there anything that you can do about it?

Before trying to sell, try to understand your customers. If you really solve an important problem for them - people will pay.

I don't agree with "rich people statement". I started my first web-consulting company by self-learning how to code websites and then lived in a shitty room in Russia with my girlfriend, barely making money for a rent and food. I found first customers by browsing and phone-calling through local classifieds.

By customer-driven, I mean the first talk to customers, then code. Understand what kind of job your customers are doing (don't talk about a product, just try to understand your customers), for example, people who study Chinese what kind of day to day tasks/job/activities they do related to learning Chinese? What gives them the most pain/problems? Is there anyting that you can do about it?

I don't agree with "rich people statement". I started my first web-consulting company by self-learning how to code websites and then lived in a shitty room in Russia with my girlfriend, barely making money for a rent and food.

Can't you make an app and say sell it in the app store of your home country? Or run it out of there? Is that a conflict? What about investments?

I don't have a "home" country, but the discussion of that is too long for this comment thread.

I had an developer subscription for one year, 2012-2013. I made YouLing, a mouseover translator for Mac. It got about 557 downloads. It was free. One person donated $25. The developer subscription costs $100. It wasn't profitable, so now I just self-publish on my Github.

http://peterburk.github.io/programs/index.html#youling