Back from Vietnam

By Angus Cheng

I was in Vietnam from Wednesday to Sunday last week, so I only set two goals. Let’s see how I went.

✅ Finish the Certificate of No Criminal Conviction Form

All done! Form 172A is live and ready to be filled out. Should you need to prove to someone that you have no criminal conviction in Hong Kong.

❌ Eat Dog Food

Still haven’t done this, which is a bit ridiculous because all I have to do is use my app, fill in the form, print it out and take it to the Transport Department office in Admiralty.

Hiring

JsonForms should make it easier to define the UI and data structures. This means I can hire someone to collect PDF forms for Hong Kong based manual processes. I can also hire someone to create Json Schemas and UI Schemas for the collected forms. This shouldn’t be too expensive and will allow me to get a lot more forms done.

PDF Write Regions

At the moment, the configuration for where to write form data into the PDF is in Kotlin code. Moving it out to a JSON format will make validation easier, and will also mean that people who are not me can define mappings between fields and PDF regions.

No One Has Used AngusForm

This is really bad. I’m spending $20 USD a day on Reddit Ads, which get me about 100 clicks. Yet no one has finished filling in a form. To understand this better I will put in more tracking to see where users are dropping off while filling in the form.

Scary Pricing

After filling in a form, you are shown the rendered PDF and the cost of getting AngusForm.com to submit it for you.

The cost includes the fee the original entity charges. I think that’s a bit scary at the moment. So I’ll break it down so it’s clear how much AngusForm charges and how much the original entity charges.

This Week’s Goals

  1. Eat Dog Food
  2. Hire someone to collect manual forms
  3. Hire someone to create JsonSchemas and UISchemas for the forms in Goal #2
  4. Create a file format that maps form fields to regions on a PDF
  5. Put in more tracking to see where people are dropping off
  6. Break pricing into two line items