The Real Talk: Why Launching an Immigration AI is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

We know you’re waiting. We know you’re excited. Every email asking, "When is the Immigration AI platform ready?" fuels our fire. The simple, honest answer? We’re almost there. But to understand why "almost there" took a little longer than planned, you have to understand the messy, unglamorous reality of start-up life—the side that venture capital newsletters and glossy tech magazines never show you.

This is the story of two dedicated entrepreneurs, numerous replatforming headaches, and the relentless pursuit of delivering a product that not only works, but also has the potential to become globally transformative.

The Funding Paradox: Caution in the Capital Market

Earlier this year, MigrateSpace was focused on securing investment. The plan was simple: get funded, scale the engineering team, and launch a dedicated chat app instantly.

The reality was a classic start-up paradox. Investors told us our idea was "cool", "interesting", and "impactful," but that the market was too cautious. The consistent advice? "Launch first. Prove the revenue. Then we'll talk."

Meanwhile, we’d already gone without salaries for months, now almost a year. We were spending our own savings to pay a small team of specialised freelancers, and doing 98% of the intense engineering work ourselves. The journey of the immigrant founder is often defined by hustle and resourcefulness, and building this company has been no different.

We tried the "right" ways: applying for prizes, grants and participating in accelerators. Obtaining grants requires a very complex application process, contracts with government agencies that we are not yet large enough to manage, or imposed terms that impede future investment opportunities. They also don't pay out immediately, and payments are split over multiple years. Accelerators either slowed us down or didn't pay; they just attracted more cautious investors. But we didn't let this hold us back. As migrants ourselves, the struggle is real, but so is the hustle. We took the feedback and got scrappy.

The Great Replatforming: When Your Brain is Too Big

As a small team, we have to fight like a well-trained guerrilla force, not a San Francisco valley giant with infinite computing power. Our core problem was technical scaling: our AI knowledge base, built from thousands of vetted legal and administrative documents and curated material, was simply too large and too complex for our initial architecture.

Every time we scaled our data ingestion, we hit a wall. We had to replatform several times to find a smarter, more cost-effective way to train our model and recall data. The solution was decentralising access to the knowledge base, dramatically reducing our ingestion costs and making the whole system more efficient.

This required weeks of focused, late-night engineering that was frustrating, but absolutely necessary. We refuse to compromise on the fidelity of the information; it’s what gives our AI immigration assistant its power and trustworthiness. The delay was the cost of achieving that without running out of cash.

Getting Creative: Immigration AI Testing, and Taster Products

To avoid any further delays to your immigration support, we had to get creative with our product launch.

• Chat MVP: We had to make the difficult decision to launch our core AI accessible via Telegram instead of a dedicated, high-cost app. This acts as our Minimum Viable Product (MVP), allowing us to deliver the core guidance immediately while we secure the revenue needed to build the full application you deserve, with the game-changing bells and whistles. The dedicated app will follow soon after.

• No Freemium (Yet): As we are working with capped personal funds, we won't be able to offer a freemium service right away. However, we believe in giving back to the community that supports us, so we created a second, snackable audio product for those who want to stay informed whilst sampling the breadth of our knowledge—but we won't ruin that surprise just yet!

  
  

This is the side of start-up land that people don't often see: two dedicated people forging their own path, using their life savings, and battling technical and financial headwinds to deliver something they profoundly believe in, even when others are sceptical.

The ongoing support and faith you place in us propel us forward. If you want to support change and be a part of something mega—a global movement for fair, affordable, accessible, and ethical migration support—then sign up for the waitlist now to be notified as soon as MigrateSpace becomes available.

Your journey is our journey. Let’s finish this, together.