London’s Lonely Unicorn: Two Frugal Expats and Their Billion-Dollar Startup

I don't think product hunt solved this.

I'm not really that impressed with their results. It's more like popularity based marketing channel(what's with all those videos ? ), because of the lack of good search and deep metadata. Heck many products don't even have a rich, textual description. It's almost like aggregating product reviews from relatively unbiased sources(unlike the cesspool that Amazon has become), and filtering by depth and building a decent search around them and a good community would work better. Than after all this, a video would be very useful.

Ah, and one more thing - try to filter out the bullshit apps, the ones without much value on product hunt. "A dating app where you can only date 1 guy"? and other stuff like that. Sorry but i have much better ways of wasting time.

But let's think about an ideal service. Such a service would have 2 forms:

1. It gathers in some form, all the "jobs" i need to do, and how well they are done today, and how much i pay for them - and than from time to time offers me concrete recommendations how to improve my life: "you could save $X each month , if you'll use this new money transfer startup". Or "you could use this recipe book, to save a lot of time and get similar level of food you're making now". etc.

Amazon does that to some extent, but it has still has some ways to go.

2. Another successful mechanism is create a RICH and DEEP tagging system for each product and search/browse through those tags - jinni.com once did it for movies - and it was a phenomenal movie discovery tool. Far better than anything we have today.

Of course, ideally such tool should also include a price comparison mechanism, and maybe "performance levels" per each relevant performance dimension, kinda like the one you get in digikey, the electronic component store, where you can select chips by speed, power,etc.

The question is, how to get there, and how close it's possible to get?

While this sounds true and everyone likes to harp on it, there's another consideration. An immigrant is somebody who intends to stay forever, an expat is someone who plans to go back home eventually.

There are also legal considerations. My US visa for example specifically says it's a non-immigrant visitor's work visa. Legally speaking, I'm an expat.

Culturally ... I like to call myself a dirty immigrant. Riles people up a bit :P

edit for background: I come from the border between Central and Eastern Europe. Some say Slovenia is one, some say another. In the UK I would most definitely be an evil evil immigrant. In the US nobody really cares as long as I'm not brown.

Reminds me of the recent The Grand Tour episode, when they mention how if you're famous for something positive you're called British, otherwise you're Scottish/Welsh.

I've seen an awful lot of references to Eastern Europeans in short to medium-term stints in the UK as "migrant workers" and nearly as many characterisations of British retirees buying property in Spain as "expats"...

If you have a need to transfer large amounts of USD-to-CAD or vice versa, have a look into Norbert's Gambit. It'll effectively let you perform the transfer for 0.2%. Probably not worthwhile for small amounts, but if you're converting ~$10k, might be worth the effort.

This site seems to break it down: https://norbertsgambit.com/