[wriggler]

I left my last job and a toxic boss a few months back and decided the only viable future is to start my own thing again. But this time I was going to do it properly - lean customer development, speak to users before writing a line of code, etc.

Instead, I became fascinated by the massive improvements in OCR and how they can be applied to digitising boring paper records. Decided to start out with the most boring problem of them all - credit card and bank statements.

I decided this would also be a great project to make the leap to Python and Django. So, without speaking to a single potential customer, I threw myself into coding. After a while, I realised Laravel is so much better and jumped back to that. Have learned loads as a result.

I've built a local prototype that works really well with impressive accuracy. However, I noticed the signs of fatigue and self-doubt that often mean a project is abandoned at 80% without seeing the light of day.

So I decided to find a domain name and put the totally half-baked and not-yet-functioning version online. A crappy, embarrassing, non-functional version. But at least I might get some feedback, which is more likely to inspire me to keep going and work out how I could market this.

https://www.statementsamurai.com

I'm giving myself a week or two to refresh, then will press ahead some more and put the minimal functionality online while thinking about how to find users.

Yeah, about that lean thing...

[acjacobson]

This is something I've been wanting for a while now, and I even considered doing exactly what you're doing and trying to figure out OCR myself. The reason I wanted it is because I would like to keep track of my bank balance over time, but I am really not comfortable giving access directly (like Mint required). But I then have the same issue when it comes to using an OCR SaaS tool because you'd have data. How are you thinking about privacy in this regard?

I'd be open to testing and providing feedback if you're interested.

[jddj]

> Might get some feedback

Landing page says you're best rated over 37k reviews?

[wriggler]

Hah, yes. It's just the remnants of a template. As I said - totally half-baked and not ready for (or expecting) users yet.

[nerdix]

What are you using for OCR?

[is_true]

Second this.

Im starting a project that could need OCR and I'm not sure if doing it with open cv for preprocessing + tesseract, or use something like Google document AI which seems very good in a small test I run.