Today we’re filing the first immigration application auto-generated using Visto.
What does this mean, and why is it so exciting? Great question…
As you know from my solopreneur blog earlier this week, we built a tech platform that makes it easy for Canadian companies to find developers from abroad and bring them to Canada. In short, this includes our automation that makes it quick and easy to prep and file immigration applications.
So with our tool, companies can fill out a few simple forms, upload the documents we need, and everything is auto-populated and prepped for our legal team to review, revise (if needed), send for e-sign and then submit.
I’ve been prepping and filing immigration applications for years – the slow and boring way – and let me tell you… our app is pretty cool (I’m obviously not biased at all…).
Most of this week has been spent hand-holding our first few companies through the process, and making sure everything is working as intended. Of course, there were a few small hiccups, but overall it’s going great.
Better than the crash and burn I was mentally prepping for… but not actually, because our tech team is awesome (can’t emphasize enough how valuable it is to have a reliable tech team…).
Our strategy for now – as I was advised by my CTO, and a few other people with far more tech experience than I – is to limit the number of clients/users to around 10, and make sure the first few weeks go smoothly.
The main reason is with a new app there’s bound to be bugs and issues, and it’s better to find and fix them when there are 5-10 users as opposed to when there are 20, 30, 50, etc.
So for the next 2-3 weeks my plan is to work closely with the ~10 companies we have, make sure everything is working as planned, prep and file our first few applications for them… and then start to hit the ground running to get even more companies signed up.
In the meantime, it also gives me time to work on some things I had kept putting off because it wasn’t as important or urgent as helping get our first users setup and using the platform.
I spent a decent amount of time building out the content for our new knowledge base.
In the immigration process, as you can imagine, many clients – companies who are sponsoring tech workers, and the tech workers themselves – inevitably and understandably have a lot of questions. For now, we’re handling those with a chat widget.
But we’re always thinking longterm over here…
So we’re building out a knowledge base – early on – where we can essentially turn any question we get into a short article/response. Over time, and with good search functionality, this effectively becomes a chatbot (and a lot of saved time answering questions “the slow way”).
My hunch is that if Visto keeps growing and sticks around for a while, this knowledge base will actually turn into a VERY valuable asset in-and-of-itself!
Anyway, I’ll keep you posted on whether my hunch plays out or not. And maybe spend some time thinking about how you could build something similar into your business that might take some setup time, but become hugely value the longer and more it’s used?
That’s it for now – keep grinding, hope you’re enjoying my solopreneur blog posts and don’t miss out on my daily email updates here.
