When we start learning how to create a web page and are presented to CSS, it can be quite daunting (or exhilarating) to see the list of properties we can use. So many of them, so much we can do! So, when we're fumbling through the pages and are presented with "easy" ways to become web-developers, we grab them without a second thought. But beware the promises of the Dark Side, young padawan. You can do big. You can do shiny. You can do squishy and with lots of effects, but BY THE LOVE OF THE INTERNET GODS, learn the regular first. When you add that cool snippet of code you took from Stack Overflow without fully understanding your own code, you're bound to lose so many days debugging your page you'll be wanting to throw your computer on the wall in no time. I promise you, it won't be fun. Believe: you can do AMAZING sites with plain simple CSS3 - without the use of any external frameworks. So, hear me, and hear me well: forget Bootstrap. No, drop that rock, let me explain. I don't know if you already know about CSS Precedence Rules. If not, I'll explain, briefly, for the sake of those who already know. CSS is a list of rules. You write something like " ", and it will  move away from the right margin. However, what happens when you have in another part of your CSS rule sheet that says that it should move only ? Then you have a question of Precedence. What rule is more important? margin-right: 3px 3 pixels 1 pixel The rule to be applied first is the more specific one. This is the Specificity Rule. For example: if you apply to all , this has a lesser specificity than a with an ID of . Remember, if more are being targeted, then it is less specific. So: color: blue h1 h1 "title-of-article" { : blue; } { : red; } h1 color h1 #title-of-article color In this case, all will be blue, except for the that we deliberately gave an to manipulate the Precedence Rule and apply the style to it. h1 h1 ID If no Specificity Rule is on action, then we follow the sequence of declaration. The last to be declared, from top to bottom, will be the one to be really applied, not because the first wasn't applied, but because it was applied, and then overridden. { : black; } { : white; } p color p color So, all our paragraphs were first black, and then became white. We can't actually see it, because they're rendered before they're displayed to us, but that's how it happens. For our eyes, the last one is what counts. Since you know how it will happen, you can decide where to put it in you CSS sheet, and take full control of your website. Padawan, these were just the good ways of the Force, but I must talk about something Dark, something forbidden. Something that is... . I must talk about the use of the . To complete your training, padawan, you must understand it. When you apply a rule in your CSS sheet, you can, beside it, write " ", and the browser will be kind of mind-controlled to recognize it as more important than anything else in the whole multiverse, no matter the order of Precedence. It breaks the natural order of things, padawan! It's unnatural! Let's say you use it once, you may remember of it when you're debugging, but the temptation of making every rule you make just as important as the other is too great. To debug it later, is a nightmare. bad practice !important !important And that's where we get to Bootstrap, my padawan. Everything in Bootstrap, EVERYTHING, has . So give goodbye to all CSS rules of Precedence, because you won't be using them. You want to change how round is the corner of that "card" class? Forget it. Oh, you want to apply a specific size of padding, say , but they only give you (p-1) or (p-2)? That's too bad. And you can't override easily, because their rules are all , so you'll soon feel like you just cursed your website. You either use it in their style, or you remove Bootstrap entirely. If you know Bootstrap, you'll soon notice that all sites that use it look pretty much the same. !important 0.3rem 0.25rem 0.5rem !important So, I'm not saying (yes I am) you shouldn't use Bootstrap (but yes, you shouldn't), but if you want to be a free web-developer, able to fully customize your website and create a product that completely fulfills the needs of your client, you really have to learn HTML and CSS, through and through. You can't escape it, the website will be made withe these rules, and you must understand them. So roll up your sleeves, and find yourself good courses (there are thousands free around the Internet!) and practice, practice and practice. One more note about Bootstrap. Do learn about it. As I said, it is part of your training, padawan. People will use it, and you'll have to debug their sites (and have lots of patience with it). So you better understand it. But don't fall for the promise of the "easy" and tempting ways to "quickly" become web-developers. Padawan, there is no easy way. Only the good way. people of Twitter, you are all a lot more professional than me, and I would be most proud to work with you guys! Bootstrap was certainly an incredible advance for everyone at the time. I am by no means trying to diminish your work or ability or importance, please. Thank you for everything. I am a profound admirer of you guys, although a hater of Bootstrap, but we can't love everything, right? Disclaimer: Just... !important everywhere? Guys? References: CODEDGAR. (2019, Dec 20) Why I don't use Bootstrap anymore. Retrieved from: https://dev.to/codedgar/why-i-don-t-use-bootstrap-anymore-b8 jenkov.com (n.d.) CSS Precedence. Retrieved from: http://tutorials.jenkov.com/css/precedence.html The !important exception. (n.d.) The MDN Web Docs. Retrieved from: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Specificity

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Why Not Use Good Old CSS3??? And Forget Bootstrap!

With Android 9 (API level 28), Google officially started supporting what’s famously known as the notch, a cutout display at the top (because the last two years were the years of the notch?). I can’t claim that but with the notch support, most of the brands came out with their version of a cutout display and with that, we as developers need to think about yet another edge case, especially if we’re working with a completely experience. immersive To give you a little knowledge of what I’ve researched, what I noticed while dealing with the notch is that the devices’ notch are either the size of the status bar or the status bar is adjusted vertically is the notch is a bit longer. So since the status bar is not technically a part of your app, it is almost always taken care of by Android. But.. What happens when you want to hide the status bar to make your view fullscreen? That is something you need to solve as a developer. And since I’ve already taken my time solving it last week, I thought of it as the perfect new tutorial for everyone of you to save your time dealing with it. Let’s get started. Prerequisite ☝️ For this tutorial I’ve used but things should work on other versions of AS as well. Android Studio 4.0 Preview Project Setup ⚙️ First things first. We need to have the problem to solve the problem. In order to disable the status bar to go immersive in an app. Do the following: 1. Open a new project. 2. Select an Project Template. This would create an empty screen with an Action Bar. Empty Activity 3. Type any name for the project and select Kotlin from the language 4. Click Finish. 5. Run the project to see the look of your initial app. Material Dependency 😍 Since we need to style our app a bit, we need Android’s Material library which is not part of the app at the moment, so first thing is to add the Material library to our project. To do so: Open (Module) build.gradle Add this line in the dependency section: implementation 'com.google.android.material:material:1.1.0' At the time of writing, the latest Material version was 1.1.0, but you can use any latest stable release you want from or . Note: Google’s Maven Repository MVN Repository 3. Sync the project. Adding a custom Toolbar 🖌 You must be thinking if we already have a toolbar set up, why add another. It is because the default toolbar that’s set up by the project is from a parent layout that we do not have a control of, so when we enable fullscreen on the app, the toolbar hides along with other system elements, but we want to have control over it in order to not hide it automatically. Here’s how to set it up: 1. Open styles.xml. 2. Replace your parent theme from to (running the app at this stage should not display any toolbar) Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar Theme.MaterialComponents.NoActionBar.Bridge . 3. Open activity_main.xml. 4. Add the following lines in place of the placeholder to add a toolbar (running the app at this stage should display an empty toolbar) TextView . < = = = = = = = = /> androidx.appcompat.widget.Toolbar android:id "@+id/toolbar" android:minHeight "?attr/actionBarSize" android:layout_width "match_parent" android:layout_height "wrap_content" android:background "?attr/colorPrimary" app:layout_constraintTop_toTopOf "parent" app:layout_constraintStart_toStartOf "parent" app:layout_constraintEnd_toEndOf "parent" 5. Open MainActivity.kt. 6. Add this line after to setup our own toolbar and display the app title. setContentView() setSupportActionBar(findViewById(R.id.toolbar)) Enabling fullscreen 🌅 To enable fullscreen, we need to hide the top status bar and the bottom system navigation bar, to do so, Android Developer Guides has just the right doc for it: : https://developer.android.com/training/system-ui/immersive 1.Open . styles.xml 2. Add a new style below the AppTheme: < = = > style name "AppTheme.Fullscreen" parent "AppTheme" true shortEdges < = > item name "android:windowFullscreen" </ > item < = = > item name "android:windowLayoutInDisplayCutoutMode" tools:targetApi "p" </ > item </ > style 3. Open AndroidManifest.xml 4. In the MainActivity attributes, add the attribute with the styles that you just created: android:theme < = = > activity android:name ".MainActivity" android:theme "@style/AppTheme.Fullscreen" < > intent-filter < = /> action android:name "android.intent.action.MAIN" < = /> category android:name "android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" </ > intent-filter </ > activity 5. Now in your , add the following lines: MainActivity.kt { .onWindowFocusChanged(hasFocus) (hasFocus) {
            hideSystemUIAndNavigation( )
        }
    } { decorView: View = activity.window.decorView
        decorView.systemUiVisibility =
            (View.SYSTEM_UI_FLAG_IMMERSIVE or View.SYSTEM_UI_FLAG_LAYOUT_STABLE
                    or View.SYSTEM_UI_FLAG_LAYOUT_HIDE_NAVIGATION
                    or View.SYSTEM_UI_FLAG_LAYOUT_FULLSCREEN or View.SYSTEM_UI_FLAG_HIDE_NAVIGATION
                    or View.SYSTEM_UI_FLAG_FULLSCREEN)
    } override fun onWindowFocusChanged (hasFocus: ) Boolean super if this private fun hideSystemUIAndNavigation (activity: ) Activity val // Set the content to appear under the system bars so that the // content doesn't resize when the system bars hide and show. // Hide the nav bar and status bar 6. Run the app and you’re good to go! Except that you’re not. If you run the app at this moment on a device with a notch / cutout display, you’d notice that the toolbar is hidden by the notch: And that’s the problem this story is all about. The Fix 🔧 Approach I: In order to solve the issum, the first approach you might be thinking to take it to simply add padding to the toolbar to position it below the notch. But since we have in different heights on different devices, we can’t hardcode a constant value (for instance, 24dp or 48dp) in order to add a margin on top of the toolbar. But there must be a way the height of the status bar is set by the system, you must think. Yes there is, and you access it by but since that’s a private value, adding a to your toolbar throws a build error: @android:dimen/status_bar_height android:layout_marginTop=”@android:dimen/status_bar_height” AAPT: error: android:dimen/status_bar_height is private. resource And even if you did add a constant value, it might work for the notch but not for no-notch devices: Approach II and the magic: 🎩 The approach that I had to take to solve this issue is to simply work on it programmatically: to add padding only when needed. And since Google has a few new APIs to deal with the notch, achieving this hack is quite easy: 1. In your , add a new method: MainActivity.kt { (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= Build.VERSION_CODES.P) { windowInsets = window.decorView.rootWindowInsets (windowInsets != ) { displayCutout = windowInsets.displayCutout (displayCutout != ) { safeInsetTop = displayCutout.safeInsetTop newLayoutParams = toolbar.layoutParams ViewGroup.MarginLayoutParams
                 newLayoutParams.setMargins( , safeInsetTop, , )
                 toolbar.layoutParams = newLayoutParams
            }
        }
    }
} @SuppressLint( ) "NewApi" private fun adjustToolbarMarginForNotch () // Notch is only supported by >= Android 9 if val if null val if null val val as 0 0 0 2. Call this method just right below in to let the change affect when we hide the system UIs. hideSystemUIAndNavigation(this) onWindowFocusChanged Since some of the methods that we call here are quite new to the Google APIs (for instance, , etc), they’re supported by Android 9. And since the notch is quite a new trend in devices, all the new devices with the notch do run Android ≥ 9, so we’re all good here. 👌 Note: rootViewInsets, displayCutout only If you run the app now, you see that the margin is only added when we do have a notch: Extra: Styling 🎨 So far so good, we just need to add some style to the empty area or extend our toolbar to the top to make it not look very odd. To do so: 1. In your , add a new view with a size of the toolbar (?attr/actionBarSize) on top of toolbar, like: activity_main.xml < = = = = = = /> View android:layout_width "match_parent" android:layout_height "?attr/actionBarSize" android:background "?attr/colorPrimary" app:layout_constraintTop_toTopOf "parent" app:layout_constraintStart_toStartOf "parent" app:layout_constraintEnd_toEndOf "parent" 2. Run the app to see the changes. And so, you can play around with the background of the view and/or the toolbar to adjust the style according to your taste: Happy coding! 💻 Source code for the Final Version GitHub As always, let me know if my tutorial helped you in anyway and the things I can improve in writing tutorials by sending a DM or a Tweet at: ✌️ twitter.com/waseefakhtar Previously published at https://proandroiddev.com/android-material-toolbar-vs-displaycutout-6ae99b2b7ef0

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Android Material Component: Toolbar vs DisplayCutout

Today APIs have become a key way for application developers to generate revenue, meaning monetisation is becoming a sought-after feature in the API Management space. Even though API monetisation has a broader meaning than simply charging for APIs; in our experience, most companies want to charge for API usage. There are a number of different ways that this can be achieved, but let’s take a look at the two most popular and how they can be effectively rolled out to bring in revenue. Charging per subscription Under this model, a fixed amount is charged from the application developer at the end of the billing cycle, where a certain number of calls are allowed per month. Irrespective of whether they use these or not, they will be charged. This model suits purchasers who prioritise full visibility and certainty around costs, with no “nasty surprises”. Subscription-based charging can be further broken down into two models. Tiered pricing and Freemium. In tiered pricing, different request quotas can be sold for different prices. For example, when implementing this model, you can create three tiers: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. They can be priced at £25, £40 and £60, which would offer bundles of 1000, 2000, and 3000 requests per hour. When it comes to the freemium model, you offer a free tier with a stringent limit on the request quota and a paid tier that offers a higher quota. For example with freemium model you can introduce a free tier, with 100 requests per hour and offer the other tiers for a price. Depending on your requirement, you can choose to either block the additional requests or continue the flow when the quota depletes. Charging per request In this model, price is calculated based on the number of requests made. This model is also known as a “pay-as-you-go” model, where there’s no fixed payment. If the pricing is set at £0.01 for a single request, and then if 1000 requests are made during the month, a user would be charged £10. There is no fee if no requests are made. This model suits purchasers for whom more requests equal more revenue, so the payment per request effectively becomes part of cost of sales, to use accounting terms. It means the purchaser doesn’t run the risk of paying for requests that are never made. Implementing these models requires integrating an API manager capable of gathering and publishing usage data with a billing and collection engine, such as Stripe, to charge the customer. Here’s an example of how it works: Integration with Stripe The API Manager uses Stripe to manage interactions between API providers and Consumers. From Stripe’s perspective, the API Manager operates as a platform. Therefore, as a part of the configuration, an admin for the API Manager needs to create an account and configure it as the platform account. API providers would also have to create accounts in Stripe and link it with the platform account using Stripe Connect, which gives the ability to the admin to charge consumers on behalf of an API provider. How the integration works When charging for API usage, two parties are involved: the API provider, who hosts the API and who is responsible for the upkeep and management of the API, and the API consumer, the party that uses the API. API consumers would use an API through an application. In a typical paying scenario, API consumers would pay API providers for using the API. As the first step of configuring, the admin needs to create an account and configure it as the platform account. API providers would also have to create accounts in Stripe and link it with the Platform Account using Stripe Connect, which gives the ability to the admin to charge consumers on behalf of the API provider. Once you have done the configuration, you can start charging for APIs simply by creating billing plans in the admin portal. Simply fill in details such as how much you need to charge and what charging model (subscription, pay as you go) you want to follow. You can also specify the request count and whether to block the invocations once the allotted quota is depleted. Then, API providers can log into the publisher portal and select the billing plans they want to enable. While saving the API, they also have to provide an ID that maps the account at Stripe’s end. Hey presto! You have created an API that can be charged for. Start using the APIs When creating a billing plan through the admin portal, a corresponding pricing plan will be created on Stripe. This will be created via the Platform Account (the account created by the Admin), so that the plans are available to different API providers. And then, the API provider can enable monetisation and select a plan for the API. When doing this, a matching product with the API’s name will be created in Stripe; the selected pricing plans will be added into the product. These products are created in the API provider’s account. Next is the part performed by the API consumer (or the application developer). When an app developer logs into the Dev portal and creates an application, a matching customer object is created in Stripe. So, for each application created, there is a separate customer object, bearing the payment details specified by the API consumer. At the time of subscribing to the API, a subscription will be created on Stripe, under the product corresponding to the API, with the billing plan selected. This ensures that the API accesses are charged according to the billing plan as usage data is published. Using an API manager to integrate with a billing engine is a neat and seamless way to monetise your API. At WS02 our API Manager 3.0.0 has been developed to help you quickly and easily monetise APIs by integrating with any billing engine – it supports Stripe out-of-the-box - so you can offer the right consumer pricing and subscription model to your market, in record-quick time.

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Monetizing APIs with WSO2 API Manager

Artificial intelligence is not an imaginary future. It is here and now. AI is more than just auto-complete in our search engines, more than self-driving cars. From machine learning to robots, artificial intelligence offers us a rich array of technologies that enable machines to sense, comprehend, learn, and act. Considering to incorporate fantastic AI opportunities into your business? Before you decide, here are some pros and cons of AI digital assets. First off, artificial intelligence can be divided into two categories — . weak (narrow) AI and strong (wide) AI The one existing in our world today is . It refers to , no matter an easy one or complex. For example, a chatbot answers questions, personal assistants organize and maintain the information, Google map routes calculate different options for the most effective way, recommendation engines usher users to choose specific products and services. Thus, , but nothing else — even much simpler things are beyond its powers. weak AI teaching a computer to perform one specific task weak AI can outwit humanity only at a particular task At the opposite extreme, a much more extensive range of abilities to simulate humanlike intelligence is known as . It should be capable of behaving wisely across a variety of tasks, from . It is to replicate human cognitive skills, apply data from one field to another. Strong AI is supposed to be aware of itself as a person and experience consciousness. , but already controversial in its moral values. strong AI driving a car to answering abstract questions Strong AI is still a theory, like science fiction A detailed review of AI advantages and disadvantages will shed light on the key factors that will lead you to a better outcome for your business. Main Advantages of AI AI is becoming popular among companies of all sizes. It drives dramatic transformations across various organizations and industries. So, it would be useful to get into some exciting pros of these changes. Less routine Artificial intelligence brings about evolution by . automating our day-to-day work Undoubtedly, . With routine tasks automated, the robots can assume work related to analyses, subtle judgments, and problem-solving. machines surpass humanity in meticulous tasks Thus, applying artificial intelligence at work will decrease the workload, . Free from monotonous work, employees will be able to focus on the creative aspects of their jobs. Eventually, this combination of man and machine will make the world a better place.f empower humans to upgrade their skills Less risk will reduce the risk to human well-being and safety. Artificial intelligence technologies will overcome many limitations. For example, it can help to predict wildfire threats and fight it with the help of drones. Aside from that, artificial intelligence takes part in tackling one of the primary causes of climate change — deforestation. AI systems can detect and transmit sounds of illegal logging. Modern AI-driven robotics and autonomous underwater vehicles allow access to the seabed to collect marine ecosystem data and shed new light on the variety of species. Employing AI capabilities for dangerous tasks AI-powered robots can handle radiation, so they are frequently used in the nuclear energy industry to remove pieces of debris, especially after disasters. Even if they do not eliminate the danger, robots bring great value helping to deal with a catastrophe. No brakes To be productive, people need to have refreshment from time to time. A great reinforcement of this human weakness can be obtained with AI-powered machines. They will not get tired, bored, or distracted. Artificial intelligence-based machines will not need a break. Once programmed for long hours, they will . work 24x7 Besides, they can take over some extra hard work and with much higher capacity. No human error Human beings are prone to physiology, fatigue, stress, emotions, aging, etc. All of these might poorly reflect on decision-making. For example, an overly-stressed doctor or pilot of a falling plane might make a fatal mistake, which will lead to a tragedy, to say nothing of the accidents caused by drunk drivers. (if adequately programmed, of course). AI computers are error-free Industries that aim at ensuring a high level of correctness and precision can benefit from adopting artificially intelligent machines. Eliminating costly errors leads these businesses to higher output. Unlike emotional humanity, customized AI can improve the decision-making process, when its set of algorithms uses nothing but previously collected information. No slowdown Augmentation of human work is also among the pros of artificial intelligence. Capable of running without stopping, I computing power also . It is stronger in modeling and forecasting, combining large data sets. A bypasses humans in speed and quality of work For instance, AI reduces the time of reviewing insurance claims. When it takes days for an insurer to come up with a decision, an artificial intelligence mechanism can cope within minutes. Still, advanced technology needs human insight in shaping the adoption of innovative solutions. Fewer chores AI at home? Yes, not only Mark Zuckerberg benefits from these AI pros. Apple, Google, and Amazon provide free access to their assistants. Smart technology helps busy people to run their household routine and manage basic tasks. Some AI assistants can even understand the context of a request and synchronize data between all the devices like phone, car, tv, and even fridge. Thus, it is possible to control them from any point inside and outside the house. AI-powered smart homes not only make life simpler and more dynamic but help to save money and reduce water and energy consumption. High-efficiency systems include appliances that intelligently regulate the use of specific resources. When integrated into a smart network, these devices can reduce costs even more. Better forecasts Meteorologists can trace potential severe storms faster by analyzing clouds movements with the help of artificial intelligence. More and more researchers use . This functionality allows us to properly prepare for natural disasters that impact the lives of millions. computer vision and machine learning techniques to detect coming cyclones in real-time Besides, the weather determines the best time to plant and harvest crops. With accurate weather information in hand, farmers will be able to maximize their yield. Better resources distribution Power consumed by our houses and machines can be significantly reduced with AI. Whereas, machinery lifetime and efficiency are likely to increase. On a real-time basis, AI can run the most profitablе appliance algorithm. For instance, indoor air control improvement relates to AI sensors usage. They adjust and maintain the desired humidity and temperature in the room. Besides, such a carefully tailored to consumer’s preferences approach prevents mechanisms from wasting resources. Not only home utilities are going to benefit from this innovation. Power cars, warehouses, and growing crops equipment will also see reduced energy consumption. Another key opportunity for AI is cargo delivery. AI ​​can find the most effective route, minimizing as many transport distances as possible and saving fuel, in the long term increasing the car lifespan. Less disease One of the most important pros of AI system usage is extending knowledge in the medical field. An AI wearable device can monitor a person 24/7 and ensure fast diagnostics and disease prevention. Image-based artificial intelligence can help doctors better treat their patients and reduce the time specialists spend studying data of a patient. AI algorithms can help doctors assess risks for health. They will be able to know the side effects that various medicines can have beforehand. Artificial intelligence surgery simulators are currently used for the education of medical specialists. AI helps in detecting and monitoring neurological disorders by mimicking real brain capacities. Nowadays, cutting-edge radiosurgery technology is used in some clinics for operating tumors without damaging the surrounding tissues. Main Disadvantages of AI A general benefit of AI is based upon cognitive function replication. It has no morals or experience, though. The foremost disadvantages derive from this lack of ethics. Fewer workplaces Will the fourth industrial revolution end up with a robot at your desk? Not really. Still, one way or another, AI will impact more than 95% of jobs either by displacing or complementing them. Moreover, the effect will be uneven for various industries. AI will hit harder laborious areas such as manufacturing, agriculture, and logistics and cause a decline in manual work. Whereas, the healthcare and education spheres are likely to benefit from new technologies. What comes instinctively and without any specific preparation to humans is extremely hard for robots. Artificial intelligence is mindless; “It follows logic algorithms and complex set of instructions. Incapable of comprehensive thinking, artificial intelligence cannot be motivated, inventive, sensitive, or be conscious”. For example, philosophy lies outside of the realm of AI scope and is not likely to be conquered by AI. Lack of ethics Morality or fairness measurable for a machine is hard to design and convey. AI can hardly be taught what is right unless the engineers provided this concept. The cost-benefit approach will remain the most reliable for robots when they need to estimate a specific situation. To prevent disastrous outcomes, we need to realize the relevance of ethical principles. More sloth The convenience technology delivers just one side of the coin. People let AI think on their behalf since there is no need to learn something or memorize. One can always ask a machine. Dependency from a machine is indeed a matter of individual choice. If the technology is used wisely, for delegating and automating simple things to an AI assistant, it will help to grow other parts of the human brain. So, laziness will not be a disadvantage anymore. Pros and Cons of AI Summed Up Above all, people need to adopt AI thoughtfully to avoid abuse and unwanted consequences. Embracing a more cautious approach towards AI will turn even cons into pros. Artificial intelligence technology benefits assimilation into your business, can help build up agility, decrease costs, promote productivity, lessen setbacks, minimize failures, and enhance customer happiness. AI innovations will surely bring more value with less input, driving sustainable growth to the company. Still, AI initiatives planning should be viewed through the lens of particular business powers rather than technologies. A thorough review of business goals and internal processes is crucial in getting the most considerable benefits of AI usage. With the toughest business problems uncovered, it will become clear which component needs an AI to deploy — scale, decision-making, personalization, or energizing some legacy systems. Strategy and transformation alignment will lead your business to the sort of future you want. Interested in implementing AI solutions within your product? Just drop me a hi to discuss your action plan!

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Benefits and Risks of AI: All You Need to Know

I’m the CTO of ONEm Communications Ltd. We’ve built a developer framework and platform that allows developers to rapidly build fully functional omni -channel micro-apps. In this article, I’ll show you how to build an example micro-app from scratch using our simple Node.js SDK. The tutorial assumes a basic knowledge of Node.js. We’ll retrieve the movie details courtesy of the free api provided by please make sure to abide by their ). http://themoviedb.org ( terms We'll write a web widget that can be integrated into any website... And the same codebase will also support an SMS client out of the box... The ONEm platform lets you host your micro-app anywhere on the Internet. For local testing, We’ll use to provide a publicly accessible URL so that we have a bridge between our app running on localhost and the ONEm Framework. ngrok Pre-requisites 1. Sign up for a free api key at https://www.themoviedb.org/account/signup 2. Sign up for a free ONEm developer account at https://developer-portal.onem.zone/ 3. Install ngrok from https://ngrok.com/ Micro-app basics When users make requests from web a widget or via SMS, the ONEm Framework will invoke an HTTP callback to the micro-app’s web server. The micro-app should respond with HTTP status code 200 and include, in the response body, some JSON which tells the ONEm Framework how to render the response to the user. If you’re intrigued and want to know more, you can checkout the developer docs at . https://developer-docs.onem.zone Our Node.js SDK provides an abstraction of the JSON format so you don’t have to worry about the details. You have two options, you can use the SDK to produce JSON by passing parameters to the functions provided, or alternatively you can use a templating library and write your micro-app’s views in HTML :) In this tutorial, we’ll be using the second option and specifically as the templating language, you can use instead if you prefer. pug ejs Ok, enough chat, let’s get coding! Project Structure and Code The code used in this tutorial can be accessed via the git repository here Our project structure will look like this: / index.js package.json .env /app_api /routes index.js /views landing.pug movieView.pug /public /index.html Install and the project’s base dependencies: Express $ npm install express dotenv jwt-simple request-promise url-join We’ll also use the ONEm Framework’s Node.js SDK: $ npm install onemsdk Create an in the project root with the following content: index.js ( ).config() express = ( ) api = ( ) app = express() PORT = process.env.PORT || app. (express.json())
app. (express. (__dirname + ));
app. ( , api)

app.get( , {
    res.sendFile( , { root: __dirname })
})

app.get( , {
    res.sendFile( , { root: __dirname })
})

app.get( , {
    res.sendFile( , { root: __dirname })
})

app.listen(PORT, () =&gt; console.log(`Example micro-app listening on port ${PORT}`)) require 'dotenv' const require 'express' const require './app_api/routes' const const 3000 use use static '/public' use '/api' '/' function (req, res) '/public/index.html' '*' function (req, res) '/public/index.html' '/*' function (req, res) '/public/index.html' When users make requests from our micro-app, such as selecting a menu option or submitting a form, the ONEm Framework will issue a HTTP request to the micro-app’s callback path. In the we set as the ‘basepath’ for all requests coming from the ONEm Framework with this line: index.js /api app.use('/api', api) When the micro-app is launched for the first time by a user, the ONEm Framework will display the micro-app’s “landing page”. This is a bit like the of a typical web application. The landing page is invoked by the ONEm Framework issuing a request to the micro-app’s API base path, in our case index.html /api. So we’ll want our app to handle a basic call to and respond with some initial content that the user will see. GET /api For our example, we’ll create a static menu, so that our users can view three different movies: When the user clicks on a movie title, we’ll show the movie’s image and description. First off, let’s create the landing menu options by creating a in the folder: landing.pug /views Movie Menu a(href= ) Mad max a(href= ) Ad Astra a(href= ) Sonic the Hedgehog section header ul li '/movie/76341/' li '/movie/419704/' li '/movie/454626/' And let’s connect the base route in Express in : /routes/index.js jwt = ( ) express = ( ) request = ( ) urlJoin = ( ) { loadTemplate } = ( ).parser { Response } = ( ) api = express.Router() READ_ACCESS_TOKEN = process.env.READ_ACCESS_TOKEN (!READ_ACCESS_TOKEN) moviedbProps = { : , : } VIEWS_PATH = views = { : , : ,
}

api.get( , (req, res) =&gt; { { rootTag = loadTemplate(views.VIEW_LANDING, {}) response = Response.fromTag(rootTag)
        res.json(response.toJSON())
    } (e) { .log(e)
        res.status( ).json({ : , : })
    }
})

api.get( , (req, res) =&gt; { movieId = req.params.id { data = request(urlJoin(moviedbProps.baseUrl, ), { : , : { : + READ_ACCESS_TOKEN
            }
        }) (data.poster_path) {
            data.poster_path = urlJoin(moviedbProps.baseImagePath, data.poster_path)
        } rootTag = loadTemplate(views.VIEW_MOVIE, data) response = Response.fromTag(rootTag)
        res.json(response.toJSON())
    } (e) { .log(e)
        res.status( ).json({ : , : })
    }
}) .exports = api const require 'jwt-simple' const require 'express' const require 'request-promise' const require 'url-join' const require 'onemsdk' const require 'onemsdk' const // get this by signing up for an account at https://www.themoviedb.org/ const if throw "themoviedb.org READ_ACCESS_TOKEN not found in environment variables" const baseUrl 'https://api.themoviedb.org' baseImagePath 'http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w185/' const './app_api/views/' const VIEW_LANDING ` landing.pug` ${VIEWS_PATH} VIEW_MOVIE ` movieView.pug` ${VIEWS_PATH} '/' async try let let catch console 500 success false message 'server error' '/movie/:id' async let try let await `/3/movie/ ` ${movieId} json true headers 'Authorization' 'Bearer ' if let let catch console 500 success false message 'server error' module /* *  Here we set the a path to the landing.pug file */ const views = { VIEW_LANDING: `${VIEWS_PATH}landing.pug`, VIEW_MOVIE: `${VIEWS_PATH}movieView.pug` } /* * The api's base path is called when users hit our app * for the first time.  We'll use the onemsdk to parse the * pug file and generate the raw JSON response */ api.get('/', async (req, res) => { try { let rootTag = loadTemplate(views.VIEW_LANDING, {}) let response = Response.fromTag(rootTag) res.json(response.toJSON()) } catch (e) { console.log(e) res.status(500).json({ success: false, message: 'server error' }) } }) also contains a route for the movie view page, when the user clicks on a movie title, the ONEm Framework will issue an HTTP GET callback to the associated with that option, eg in we have the following line: /routes/index.js href landing.pug a(href='/movie/76341/') Mad max Later in this tutorial, we will tell the ONEm Framework to use the base path of , which will eventually translate into when the user selects to view Mad Max. /api HTTP GET /api/movie/76341 Ok, so a quick recap. We have created two views using pug. Our web server is ready to accept callbacks from and /api /api/movie/{:id} So what’s remaining now is to complete the setup of our micro-app. Create a file in the project root path: .env PORT=3000 READ_ACCESS_TOKEN=<themoviedb API Read Access Token (v4 auth) 2. We’ll use to give us a publicly accessible url to our Micro-app at . ngrok localhost:3000 ngrok http 3000 Copy the link provided by ngrok, it will be something like https://6f1ca0d4.ngrok.io 3. In the ONEm Developer Portal, select “Create App” and set the to your app appending /api to the base path, eg: callback path https:// 6f1ca0d4 .ngrok.io /api 4. In the ONEm Developer Portal, select your new app and then select “Web channel”. Copy/paste the javascript code shown in the tab, into the section of the of your Micro-app: body /public/index.html ... <body> <h1>Movie micro-app</h1> <script src="https://bot.onem.zone/bundle.js"></script> <script> ONEmStart({ app_id: "5eb948e62d60d1001f32fb83" }).render('body'); </script> </body> Tip: This code snippet can be included in any website, if you have access to another website’s index.html, then go ahead and try it. Running Fire up your micro-app: $ node index In your browser, visit (or where ever your app is configured to listen). localhost:3000 The ONEm Micro-app should be visible in bottom right-hand corner. Click the icon to open. You can also view the SMS client from the developer portal After registering your mobile number, you can test out the SMS interface by entering # followed by your micro-app name in the input box. test client. This is of course just an introduction, if this has intrigued you to learn more then you can access more details at https://developer-docs.onem.zone

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How to Build an Omni-Channel Micro-App with Node.js and Express in 2 Hours

Why “forced” distributed teams are not indicative of what remote work is usually like In the wake of a pandemic, many companies are looking at remote work for answers. It’s easy to assume remote work will be a “plug and play” solution to this crisis. Remote work keeps employees safe and productive as well. Unfortunately, my prediction is that many workers will have a miserable first-time experience. It’s not going to be easy to get back to the same productivity that they’re used to. Jarring cultural changes, faulty VPN, and the backdrop of our remote work will cast a shadow on the success of other distributed work. My fear is that “working from home” is going to get a bad rap. The truth of the matter is, this is a scary and bizarre time. This is not indicative of what it’s usually like to work from home. For Starters, There’s Going to Be a Culture Shock Contrary to popular belief, many teams are already used to making themselves available online. My co-workers at Ford keep up on Slack, email, and WebEx with lightning speed. I doubt workers will find it hard to make themselves available online. What is going to be hard is having the ability to “grab a room” when the email chain gets too complex to sort through. not By going distributed, you don’t gain anything — all the online tools are still there. Instead, you the ability to have an in-person meeting. It’s going to be harder to find solutions without that tool in the toolbox. lose On the optimistic side, video calls and screen sharing capabilities will soften the blow. Being patient with others is going to be very necessary. Many of your common extroverted-workflows for fixing problems will change. and yourself Be prepared for a different “feel” to work. You may not get your question answered as quickly. You may feel more alone when solving issues. Lacking Hardware Is Going to Be a Week #1 Killer If you’re planning a trip to Antarctica, you need to bring the right gear. You need to bring a nice windproof and waterproof coat. Maybe some thermal gloves. Definitely something to feed the penguins! Much in the same way, working from home requires hardware — a good camera, microphone, and something to feed the dog! I suspect many developers and business people will be woefully underprepared. If you can, grab as much “stuff” from the office as you can before it closes. Buying monitors and a mouse is not what you should be doing with your time or money! What you can’t prepare for is VPN and internet issues. Many companies will not have an internet infrastructure to support remote workers. This is an annoyance many distributed teams will have to deal with. The Backdrop of COVID-19 Simply Makes This Environment Rough The best part about working from home is the freedom. In the office, you may feel some pressure to take shorter breaks or shorter lunches. You may feel pressure to stay extra late or come in early. When you work remotely, you get this sense of being the master of your own destiny. As long as you’re getting your work done, then you get more freedom. Maybe a “working from home break” looks like going to the gym, walking the dog, or going grocery shopping. I suspect many first-time distributed teams are not going to appreciate this culture. They may even mandate that a team member be online from a strict 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Moreover, though, remote workers understand how important it is to get out of the house. They might work from a WeWork or some shared creative space. They go to the gym. They go to concerts. They go to restaurants midday and after work. You can’t do any of that in a COVID-19 era. Working from home is going to be followed by more… home. That’s going to be psychologically challenging. I encourage distributed workers to take walks and get out of the house as much as possible. Keep in mind that usually distributed work feels a lot more liberal than this. Context Matters — First Time Remote Workers Will Need to Adjust With great power comes great responsibility. Just because remote workers have newfound freedoms, they also need to exercise excellent time management skills on themselves. It’s going to be tough to learn how to be productive at home — where workers are used to relaxing. Context matter. If an employee is used to working at their desk in the office, it’s easy to stay productive there. does Creating a space within your own home that is designated for work will be crucial. Turning the “videogame table” into a workspace may be a tricky context shift for first-time remote workers. Having said all of this, I imagine that many first-time remote workers will learn to enjoy it at some level. But it’s certainly not “plug and play.” There are serious risks and challenges to switching to remote work. Additionally, if you do end up hating working remotely, please understand that this is an unusual time. This social experiment really isn’t a great test for what remote work really is like.

Chain

Slack

2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Game Development

2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Gaming Industry

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Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Gaming Industry

Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Game Development

Dear First-Time Remote Workers,

Marketing trends and actionable insights on what works today Building a marketing plan should be the first focus of every organization. To help marketers with this not so easy task, the Growth Marketing Stage team has released a 2020 Marketing Benchmark Report. What’s in it for you - a collection of 90 dashboards with a clear guidance on the tough decisions marketers constantly face: budgets, strategies, tactics, channels, and more… To build this report, we interviewed hundreds of respondents from a mix of industries, company sizes, and levels of seniority. KEY INSIGHTS: Marketing challenges becoming more relevant to organizations Which of the following marketing challenges are currently most relevant to your organization? (check all that apply). This chart represents the growing marketing challenges marketers have faced from 2019 to 2020. Year after year, the greatest marketing challenges are generating traffic and leads, providing ROI to marketing activities, and generating PR “buzz”. Marketers increasing investment into content and growth marketing Please select the statement that best describes how you expect your organization's budget will change for the following categories in 2020. The majority of marketers are increasing their marketing budgets for content marketing, SEO, growth marketing, website design, social media, PPC and PR. When considering outbound efforts, TV, and print ads, there are no huge plans on investment. The growing potential of utilizing inbound tactics and growth marketing is most likely a result of cost effectiveness of these channels. The effectiveness of marketing tactics Please indicate the effectiveness of the following marketing tactics for your organization. A huge preference of utilizing inbound marketing tactics can be seen in the above chart. The least effective tactics are outbound. The implementation of growth marketing Did you try to implement growth marketing in your organization? The adoption of growth marketing is becoming a popular approach. 39% of respondents said that they tried implementing growth marketing. Another 38% of respondents indicated that they had plans to implement growth marketing in their organization. In this report we’ve analyzed each of the marketing tactics separately to better understand the execution and effectiveness of each of them for different organization sizes and industry sectors. The . data is available in the full version of the report Marketing Budgets: Marketing budget as a percentage of revenue by organization size Please enter your organization's marketing budget as a percentage of revenue. The smaller the company is, the larger the percentage of revenue dedicated to the marketing budgets is. The allocation of marketing budgets Approximately what percentage of your marketing budget is allocated to each of the following tactics. A lot of significant expenses are required when participating in trade shows: travel, booth rental, etc., making this tactic to get a significant portion of marketing budgets of the respondents. Growth Marketing and PPC top the list after Events. The allocation of marketing budgets by industry sector Want to get all the insights? Download the full version of 2020 Marketing Benchmark Report . here

Winner of Noonies 2020 for the award Hacker Noon Contributor of the Year - PRODUCT MANAGEMENT.

2020 - Hacker Noon Contributor of the Year in PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

The 2020 State of Marketing

A work revolution has been a long time coming, but who would have thought it would take a pandemic to finally usher it in. As the fear of COVID-19 grips one nation after another, and cases spread like wild-fire, more and more companies globally are adopting a work-from-home policy to ensure social distancing and curb the spreading of the virus. In the UK, banks such as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Barclays are trading facilities to workers homes, in the US, companies including Amazon, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Google have for their workers to stop coming in the office, Twitter making work-from-home compulsory last week Wednesday. moving pushed Though this work-from-home push results from a crisis, more and more are believing it will stick around when normality slowly returns. Even before coronavirus panic hit, remote working was growing in popularity. Research by the International Workforce Group (IWG) polled 150,000 people across 80 countries in 2019 and found that remote working was not only the “new normal” but was a deal breaker for many. 83% of those involved said that, faced with two similar job options, they would turn down the one that disallowed remote working. conducted Indeed, working from home has far greater benefits than just stopping the spread of the scariest virus the world has seen (which is a pretty great benefit). It also promotes far lower infrastructure costs, curbs negative impacts on the environment, and increases worker satisfaction and productivity- all giving both employer and employee a greater competitive advantage. Gone is the eye-roll that comes after a three-hour meeting that could have been an email. Since the start of the COVID 19’s push to remote work, stories have flooded in of the benefits that had been discovered, from a  One City executive whose two-day meeting in Asia a one-day video call and the employee whose days now tossing in a load of laundry during a work break or combining her lunch hour with a yoga stretch to decrease anxiety. It is also pushing those technophobe colleagues to come face to face with their fear and embrace the age of remote working with conference calls and digital diaries. turned into include For those that offer remote working tools, this is their time to shine. Slack, a business chat software, has stated that they are and have given out free resources like consultations for companies adapting to remote work for the first time. Microsoft is offering its cloud “productivity suite”  for free to small business for six months, Google followed this path with its own business subscription, while Zoom , a videoconferencing service, has extended its free tier by allowing conversations to go longer than 40 minutes. companies “fully prepared for the situation” There is no doubt that it is a worrisome and stressful time. Illness is spreading, and the world is still trying to grasp this huge change of lifestyle with social distancing and self-quarantine, our main weapons for combating mass illness and hospital inundation. But when this cloud of uncertainty is finally lifted, be it in a week, a month, or a year, it is highly unlikely those that have gotten used to working from home and understand that it is not only possible, but beneficial, will be ready to return to the workplace. And if they don’t, is it the worst thing? A new era has dawned, we have the technology, we have the desire, and we have the proven benefits, working remotely is here to stay.

JPMorgan Chase

Microsoft

Morgan Stanley

2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Future

2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Internet

Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Internet

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Coronavirus Ushered in the Work-From-Home era, and It’s Here to Stay

REST APIs are commonly used in web development. They are programming interfaces that web apps use to 'talk' to each other. They are used to access features and data. 'REST' (Representational State Transfer) is a concept that defines the APIs properties. This article will focus on the use of web-based APIs to retrieve data from a database. Axios is an npm package that allows apps to send HTTP requests to web APIs. To use Axios within your React app, use the following commands: npm install axios or yarn add axios Before creating the react component, import React and Axios into the file as follows: React ; axios ; import from 'react' import from 'axios' Axios requests were utilised within the React lifecycle method 'componentWillMount'. Although this method has since been deprecated, it is still available for use at the time of this writing. It will continue to be until the release of React 17. It isn't considered safe for use when asynchronous rendering is required. In its place, you should use the method 'componentDidMount'. This method runs after the component has been updated to the DOM, and is a good place to register API calls. The basic structure this far is as follows: { (props) { (props); .state = { : []
    }
  }
  componentDidMount() { }

  render() { ( );
  }
} . class YourComponent extends React Component constructor super this posts // Your axios request here return //  Your jsx goes here Axios requests have the following basic structure: axios({ : , : }); method 'http request method' url 'Api url' As seen above, basic requests take an object as an argument. In that object, method and URL keys are specified. The HTTP request method type and the API URL are set as their respective values. GET Requests With this basic pattern in mind, an Axios GET request would be as follows: apiUrl = ;

axios({ : , : }); const 'https://your-api.com/' method 'get' url ` ` ${apiUrl} When API receives the request and processes the request, a response is sent. The component will need to handle the data received in some way before it can be used in the app. In this example, we defined a key in our state, named 'posts' and set it equal to an empty array. Axios requests are asynchronous. We need to handle the response by chaining 'then' on to the end of the request. Inside the then block, we can update the component's state as follows: axios({ : , : })
  .then( { .setState({ : response.data
    })
  }); method 'get' url ` ` ${apiUrl} => response this posts (PS. if we were utilising redux for state management, we could call a dispatch function in the 'then' block. That way, we can save the response data in the redux store). POST Requests In the case of a typical POST request, data is passed along with the API request. This data usually can reside either in the component's state or a redux store. Usually, the data that the user wishes to post to the database is obtained from a form.  We would update the component's state with the handleChange function. Our Axios request would be made in the handleSubmit function. When the form is submitted, a POST request is sent to the API. This can be done as follows: { (props) { (props); .state = { : }
  }

  handleChange(e) { { value } = e.target; .setState({ : value
    });
  }
  
  handleSubmit(e) {
    e.preventDefault(); { post } = .state;
  
    axios({ : , : , : post
    })
  }

  render() { ( );
  }
} . class YourComponent extends React Component constructor super this post '' const this post const this method 'post' url ` /posts` ${apiUrl} data return //  Your form resides here DELETE Requests DELETE requests are similar to POST requests. They are made upon interaction with a button in the view. In this case, a handleClick function can be employed to make the request when a 'delete' button is clicked. This can be done as follows: { (props) { (props); .state = { : [
        { : , : }
      ]
    } .handleClick = .handleClick.bind( );
  }
  
  handleClick(e) {
    e.preventDefault(); { id } = e.target; apiUrl = ;
    
    axios({ : , : })

  }

  render() { { posts } = .state; ( <div key={post.id}>
            <p>{post.content}</p>
            <div>
              <input 
                type="button"
                id={post.id}
                value="Delete"
                onClick={this.handleClick}
              />
            </div>
          </div>
        ))}
      </div> . class YourComponent extends React Component constructor super this posts id 1 content 'The first post' this this this const const 'https://your-api.com/' method 'delete' url ` /posts/ ` ${apiUrl} ${id} const this return {posts.map(post => ( < > div );
  }
} Once the button is clicked, the DELETE request is sent to the api and the post is removed from the database. For this to be reflected on the front-end, another GET request has to be sent to update the component's state. Requests with JWT JWT (JSON Web Tokens) can be used to authenticate users in web-based applications. These tokens are usually generated by sending a POST request to a properly configured API. Once the token is generated, they are stored for use via localStorage. In such a case, the token would need to form part of the HTTP request made. To illustrate this, we'll revisit the GET request example: apiUrl = ; token = ;

axios({ : , : , : { : token }
}); const 'https://your-api.com/' const `Bearer ` ${localStorage.getItem( )} 'jwt' method 'get' url ` ` ${apiUrl} headers Authorization The token is passed as another key in the object argument passed to the Axios call. POST and DELETE requests can be altered in a similar fashion with the token being passed in via a 'headers' key. And there you have it. This was a very concise look at Axios requests in react front-end components.

Target

How to Handle REST API Requests in React

This article is Part 2 of the ongoing series From Zero to Product Manager. A set of articles that help you transition to a Product Management role. In this post, I provide four essential steps to transition to a PM role If you read of my ongoing series, you hopefully now have a better understanding of the Product Manager position, and you might still be interested in this role. Now, let’s have a look at how to transition to this career path. part 1 What you will find in this article: Four steps to prepare for the PM job: The difference between transitioning internally and externally How to create an online presence How to prepare a portfolio How to write the perfect Product Manager CV 1. Transition internally is easier than externally PM within the company The first advice any PM would give you is always to try to find a PM position within your company. It’s always easier because your colleagues already know how you work, and you have a good understanding of your Product. You can talk to your Chief Product Officer (CPO) and express your interest in working with the Product Team. You can also directly approach PMs and see how you could work with them in one project and start shadowing them to get familiar with the job and the team. Quickly getting the trust from the Product team and the CPO, it’s easier for you to “sell your case.” Always to try to find a PM position within your company PM outside the company The ideal scenario might not be currently possible at your company because there are no open positions or because your organization doesn’t have such a role. In this case, you have to show your PM abilities within your present situation to prospective companies. You can build PM experience with Side projects (building a straightforward app, write about a new feature for an existing product). Your branding is crucial: make sure you have a robust online presence. Your branding is crucial: make sure you have a robust online presence. Within your company, try taking projects that match with PM Responsibilities. Lead a cross-team project that requires managing multiple stakeholders. Get to know your customers by talking to your users. Learn more about your metrics and investigate your data analysis. Approach the Management Team and offer strategic recommendations. PM if you are not currently employed. The best way to enter the job market is to start with an internship. Ideally, you intern into the Product team, but working within a company that has many Product roles in a different role could also be beneficial (as you could follow the tips from PM within the same company). Many experts recommend starting with a Project Manager role to get your foot-in-the-door. Investigate companies that build a Product you love and approach them; it helps when you are passionate about what the company is selling. Start with an internship for a Product team you admire Summary transitioning: An internal transition is more natural than an external one: approach your CPO and get close to the Product Team. You can transition externally by getting projects that have PM responsibilities (user research, stakeholder management, analytics) Not employed yet: You can intern for a company that has a Product team you admire. (Image Credit: ) business2community 2. An online brand helps you to stand out Having an online brand is very helpful, even more within the Product career path. You need to stand out with your branding. There are three easy steps to boost your online presence: : Building a website today is pretty straight forward you need to get a domain, host it, and put a link in your CV. Coding with Bootstrap library allows you to develop your page super quickly. If you have zero coding skills, there are code-free alternatives, such as . allows you to create a free personal website from your Linkedin profile in seconds. 2.1 Create your website WIX Strikingly Opening Twitter to the Public is an excellent opportunity to post articles about Product. Ensure that you are not publishing anything that could damage your brand. Avoid any political tweets to appeal to a broader audience. 2.2 Be active on Social media: Write about product management. Use the website you created or Hackernoon, which the Tech industry uses heavily. This an opportunity for you to display your product and technology knowledge. 2.3 Start your blog: Promote your product and technology knowledge on a blog, social media or even your own website 3 Show off a portfolio or side project We mentioned doing side projects as a technique when transitioning outside your company. Create new projects or look at past projects and “rebrand” them. Set a Product perspective to your project by discussing it in detail and adding images. Remarketing pre-existing project could save you precious time, and it’s an excellent opportunity to assess your past with a Product glance, that is very helpful when rewriting your CV (see next section). When you are presenting a project, follow this simple structure: Problem Possible solutions Metrics Results Outcomes Knowledge gained The more Product minded you appear to be, the better. I love this example from Hardip (an ex Skimlinks coworker whom I loved working with). She created her , outlined the summary of she has been working on clearly showing her UX expertise, and finally, she provides full details case study in her . Building a website and writing a blog might seem a lot of work, but it surely pays off. website different projects medium blog (Image Credit: ) growth-hackers 4) Create the perfect product manager CV Think about your career and highlight any experience you have that aligns with what a PM does day-to-day. Creating your CV is deeply connected to the section about transitioning outside your company. You need to look at your experience wearing Product glasses and see when your responsibilities were close to a PM. Those experiences include projects you have led with much cross-team communication that manifests strong stakeholder management skills. Provide examples where you talked directly with the users of a company product or where you had to perform user research. Introduce projects where you worked directly with the Product team. Show your project management skills: give examples when you had to expand or reduce the scope, manage the timeline, and reported on the outcomes. Prove that you have a data-driven mindset, show that you love numbers, and having to solve complex issues. Finally, make sure you quantify everything that is in your resume. Every point of your CV should be quantified Summary — Include the following experiences for a perfect CV: Projects with cross-team communication User research Projects lead jointly with the Product team Scope and timeline management Data analysis (Image Credit: .com) projectmanager Congratulations if you made it this far! I hope this article helped you to switch to a Product Manager position. If you are interested to learn more make sure to read and Part 3 of the From Zero to Product Manager series. Part 1 Please let me know in the comment section if there additional tips that you would find useful. And don’t forget to check my other posts about Product Management and Agile Methodologies.

How to Transition to Product Management [Part 2- From Zero to Product Manager]

shouldn’t need any presentation, but just in case, let me give a quick intro. Y Combinator Y Combinator is an American seed accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch over 2,000 companies including Stripe, Airbnb, Twitch, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, and Dropbox, to name a few. The combined valuation of the top was over $155 billion as of October, 2019. YC companies While nowadays Y Combinator includes mentors and coaches coming from the gotha of the startup elite, the mind behind the company is , a very well known tech-guru that I would credit for the contribution he made to language and for the launch of , among all his other achievements. Paul Graham Lisp Hacker News I was tracking down Y Combinator Startup School (YCSS) for a couple of years, and well, this time was the right one. The 8-week online course for startups is totally free, and from 2019 it’s held twice a year, so it’s not so hard to get a spot. All you need is to send some information about yourself and your project and grant some commitment. There aren’t specific milestones to pass, like exams or things like that but you need to attend a number of peer reviews to graduate. In the end, the value of this course it’s mostly up to yourself: if you’re willing to study the lectures, take parte in the forums and AMA sesh, interact with other students and attend the video lessons, it’s definitely worth your time. Otherwise, it’s no more useful than scrolling a  Reddit thread ( ). /r/startups The YCSS is structured in an eight-week time frame. Each week you have to submit your goals for the week and the main challenges you are facing. This is the base for the bi-weekly peer review. Then there are the lectures, videos and live sessions with the coaches. Y Combinator even created a dashboard where you can handle the totality of the course, with links to forums, special deals, Telegram group chat, video lessons, Q&A, and more. A video conference room is integrated as well, so you don't need any other tool than a laptop with an internet connection. I liked the YCSS pretty much, considering that it’s a free program. It also provides a good insight over Y Combinator method and the approach of their mentors. I was positively impressed by diversity within the classes: participants were from Indonesia, Thailand, India, North Africa, Russia, of course a lot were from the US West Coast (be ready to attend video confo at wee hours of the morning). And no matter what part of the world you come from, what background you have, what project you are working on: for better or worse we are all facing the same problems, with the same difficulties and constraints. As a side comment, I would not have minded to have a little bit of challenges here and there. A sort of final examination is something that is missing at the moment. But let’s jump back to the purpose of this post. What the hell did I learn during this process? I had many A-HA moments, but let me sum up my 10 most important takes. 1. Talk to your users: Talking to your users is essential. Perhaps the most important thing you should do. You would never ever make a product that nobody wants. Worst, to spend billions of marketing to push it down the customers’ throat. As you may know, having no market is still the first reason startups fail, accounting for more than 40% of the deaths. YCSS program is stressing a lot on that point, even asking you how many surveys you made and what feedback you got from your customers on a weekly basis. You have to become a problem seeker. You need to understand people's real problems. Don’t look for loonshot solutions addressing nobody issues. “Make something people want.” If this list would had to be a single bullet point, it would have been this one. 2. It’s not your customers’ job to give you solutions: A common mistake I see almost everyday it’s asking people what they want, instead of asking them which problems they have. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”, as Henry Ford said. It's not up to your users to tell you what they want, they just have to tell you their problems. Then it’s your job to find solutions for them. You are the product owner, not them. 3. No problem is too big to be a show-stopper: No problem is too big to have no workaround around it. During the peer reviews sessions, we discussed very different problems and issues each one of us was having at the time. And believe me, there were some hella big problems coming out. But the mood was always very good and positive. Bigger problems just need bigger workarounds. And that’s good. Let’s keep it going. 4. MVP everything: Don’t even think about spending half a year to develop a finite product. MVP, Minimum Viable Products, is your to-go word. Start small, test, develop, implement, repeat. Don’t waste away your money and your time to work on a product nobody wants or that would take so long to develop that, once it gets to the market, it would be already obsolete. 5. ABS - Always be Shipping Ship early, ship often, ship no-f*ckin-matter what. Design short product sprints, with frequent deploy. If it takes you six months to get to your first deployment in the production environment, your startup is probably going to be dead before you  get another chance to launch. 6. Forget about that “it doesn’t scale” thing: Y Combinator mentors told us this little story: it was rather common to find post-MBA folks who used to discard every single startup pitch they were evaluating by commenting “well, it doesn’t scale”. As a startup in its early stage, please, don’t deal with that. Ok your idea doesn't scale. Fine with that. It’s the starting point for everybody. First validate the concept, then worry about scaling your business. Some of the most valuable, and, well, scalable, startups on the market, started by doing things by hands or mimicking features they still had not. Who cares about that. In a world where the most ground-breaking tech is just next door, there's plenty of room to get your products to scale later on. 7. “Good product instincts” is a trap: Get rid of the  “I’m trusting my guts” BS asap. Nobody has it, and Steve Jobs is dead. Measure all your experiments and don’t rely on “instinct”, “guts”, or “good taste”. You may be surprised by the results, discovering that the ugly-looking template is converting way more than the polished, trendy one, because, well, the former has a better CTA. 8. Build a solid Company Culture: Company culture is often ignored by startups. The mood is like, “money first, culture later”. But well, there is no “later”. You have to set up culture in the very early stage of your company. It’s easy to share a culture statement among ten people, but then try to do it when the company grows to one hundred employees. Culture should work as a de-facto guideline: this is how we behave when there aren't further rules around. And culture should guide you in hiring your first employee, getting your first customer, dealing with product issues, and so on. Remember how much the simple “don’t be evil” quote meant to Google employees, driving their business and growth strategies for almost a decade. So don’t forget about culture and settle it down as soon as possible. 9. Leaders don't brag. You can’t say “I am a good leader”. That's something other people have to say. Do you want to find who’s a true leader? Ask the people around them, who they work with, but also their friends, the bartender where they have their coffee, their neighbors. Leadership is not something you turn on or off when you enter the office. And, by the same means, be careful when someone is claiming out loud their leadership skills. 10. Don’t get sad: This was from YC President Geoff Ralston’s parting advice, during the last lesson of the course. I loved that one. I never bought into the “creating startups is the coolest thing in the world” adage. Creating a biz from scratches is hard, it’s often painful. Things can go disastrously wrong in a startup and the founders feel sadder and sadder. And sadness leads to inaction. It leads to apathy. It leads to depression.  Don't do that. Don't get sad. Go, do, write code. Talk to users. Make your  product better. Always make forward progress in spite of sadness, anger, frustration. In the end it’s not the best that succeed, but the more resilient and prone to rise up failure after failure. And help others, too. If you see someone in trouble, another entrepreneur in distress, reach out to them. We live in an open ecosystem, let it thrive. End notes: "Keep it going" . Well, that’s it. Hopefully you found some inspiration and hint in my story. At least now you know a little bit better what this YCSS is about and around which pillars the course is built. If there’s something you’d like to discuss further, write me in the comments! Get back to work now. And don’t quit!

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The 10 Things I’ve Learned Attending Y Combinator Startup School 2020

The idea of optimum business success in this ever-advancing digital industry calls for smart work. Opting for white label solutions rather than building customized solutions that cater to clients’ specific requirements is the smartest thing that an entrepreneur can do to attain business success. What is White Label? Under White label, a business or firm is legally permitted to resell and rebrand the products and services developed by another.  Like Company A created the products & Company B sell these products under their brand name, logo, identity. A “White Label partner program” legally permits you to sell and rebrand the products or services developed by some other firm. A White Label software or service is created by one company but marketed and sold by another. The latter company or reseller purchases those products or services without any brand name and further markets or sells them to their customers under their own brand name, logo and identity. The customers, therefore associate the product with the reseller. There is a wide array of market-proven software or services that are in demand by the customers. To be a successful entrepreneur, you don’t have to be an expert at creating all those services. Also, exploring new domains and building solutions that fall outside your core competency can slow down your time to market as developing a new solution requires multiple processes and iterations. Outsourcing Key Stats by Fortunly: Almost 54% of all companies use third-party support teams to connect with customers. Globally, businesses spent $75.2 billion on outsourcing security last year. White Label Business Opportunities There are multiple services that you can select from a white label partner and offer to your customers. For that, you don't need to become an expert in every service that you are offering to your clients.  A non-tech person can easily establish their business with the help of white label services. Here we can share a few major one services: White label Web design development White-label digital marketing, SEO, Social media marketing, reputation management White label software marketing White label eCommerce solutions White label video creation & marketing White-label app building How To Choose The Right Best White Label Partner? There are large numbers of service providers offer white label solutions so choosing one is much difficult. Here We will share a few questions that you need to ask before finalizing the one. Experience Service & Support Online Reviews Past Work Cost Security Why White Label is Best Option to Build A Strong Brand? With white label solutions, you can easily build trust among customers by providing them market-leading products and services, built with extensive research by the experts. Here below are the benefits of using white-label services: Easy Way To Expand Your Business Adding more features to your business is not that difficult with white labeling. You can easily expand your business horizon and add more services to your list without actually creating those services. With white label solutions, you can offer a wide range of services to your customers and cater to their business requirements. Quick & Easy To Brand If you are thinking to add new verticals to your business, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to invest a good amount of time, resources and money on research, planning, designing, development, and testing. White label solutions are fully-integrated and ready-made, which can be easily rebranded. As a reseller, you can easily add your brand identity to the solutions and use them to scale up your business growth. White-Label Services or Software Take The Pressure Off White-label solutions are developed by some other company that specializes in that very vertical and you are entitled to resell it under your brand name. If anything goes wrong, or if the customer wants to add more features, all that is taken care of by the developer firm leaving you free of any burden. Make Your Customers Happy White label solutions cut-off the excess time required for research and development of the solution and enable you to offer market-ready solutions to your customers. By offering a prepackaged solution that immediately meets the needs of your customers, you can help them attain their end goal in less time. White label solutions help you provide faster and better services to your customers, making them happy. Focus on Your Business’s Core Competency & Gain Expertise You must focus on your business’s core competencies and invest your resources to gain expertise in there. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t expand your business horizon. You can add multiple features to your business without worrying about the development and other initial processes. With white label solutions, you just have to focus on the marketing and customer dealing of the products and services. Save Your Time & Money Building a solution from scratch requires a large amount of financial and human capital resources. Also, developing a complete solution is a multi-step process, requiring a good amount of time for planning, architecture, design, development, and testing. Opting for fully integrated, ready to use, white-label solutions prove to be more cost-effective and faster solutions. White label services are the most efficient way to utilize your business’s unique branding to offer a product or service without investing in its development, resources or infrastructure. With white label solutions, you can focus on building your brand and expanding your business through a variety of products and services that meet all the business requirements of your customers. Click here to read the The Beginner’s Guide to White Label Reseller Program

A to Z Complete Overview About White Label Partnerships

How did it all start? "Do you deal with technical manuals?" No. "Do you have to know coding?" No. "Do you read the latest technology news and rewrite it completely?" No. "Are you into technical journalism?" No. Every technical content writer comes across these questions. Well, why should I be writing this blog? Because I am a technical content writer myself. It is a designation sprouting out among startups and a handful of MNCs in recent days. Well, let me share the backstory. I have always been this backbencher with a flair for bunking classes. I was never a nerd. I used to open my book only a day before the exam. My story is like the majority of the engineering students who entered this domain without any real motivation. But, I was a gadget freak. I loved to read about the latest apps. I install it, check it in-and-out and write reviews on it. It was fascinating to read about innovative electronic gadgets like the smart cooker and robot vacuum cleaners. Besides that, writing was my love, passion and life in college. It went to such an extent that I used to be writing poems during my math lecture. In my college, I had a friend who always explained every hard concept in the form of stories to all of us, a couple of hours before the exam. By the way she explained, we were able to visualize how those microprocessors and semiconductors function. Many of us cleared the exams, thanks to her storytelling skill set. That sparked the fire within me to pursue a career in writing, with storytelling and simplicity as the driving force behind my content. The power of storytelling in the tech industry In an individual's life, stories play a prominent role. From the day of his birth, his first day at school, how he bagged the best employee award, how he proposed his lady love, the birth of kids, retirement and until the last day of his life, everything has a story behind it. Why not fuse storytelling with technology? Why not speak about the fascinating story behind how technology functions? It can be how smart ledgers operate in Blockchain technology or how AI is changing the course of Supply chain management. Why not let it reach the mainstream audience, away from the tech conferences or laboratories? That led me to become a technical content writer. How was my experience as a technical content writer? I have written an extensive arena of technical content. They range from gadget and technology reviews, technical journals to well researched blogs. Be it SEO-oriented blogs or demystifying the algorithms, it has been a holy ride! I enjoyed working on different projects. My way of researching would be understanding the basic functioning of technology and going forward with the other steps. Let's say that I am supposed to work on a technical blog on the evolution of machine learning. I would look into where machine learning was used, which companies are currently using it, how the technology evolved with time and other factors. I would have a talk with the subject matter experts pertaining to the topic. This would happen by preparing a set of questions to ask them. Making lot of handwritten notes is my favorite writing habit. Then I would structurize and format the article by segregating it into many blocks ranging from introduction to conclusion. I ensure that I put my 100% when I jot down the content. I would then thoroughly proof check the article for grammatical errors and plagiarism. Then I would send it to my team for review. Once the article is published, I would make a note on the performance of the blog by looking through the metrics. So far, I have written over 150+ technical blogs on many technologies  such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data, Data Science and much more. What do Technical Content Writers actually do? No, we do not write those technical manuals or carry out documentation related tasks. Those are the tasks governed by technical writers. There is a mammoth difference between a technical content writer and technical writer. Like any other content writer, we do focus on copywriting, UI/UX, website content, storytelling, SEO and other vital factors. But we do not really handle any documentation-related work. The difference between a regular content writer and technical content writer would be the way they master the technology. We are tech guys who do not code, but have updated knowledge about what is currently happening in the tech-front, be it Deep learning or Bitcoins. Unlike technical writers, we blend our creativity to create the most compelling story on the technology we are writing about. For example, you can find me referring about "The Matrix" on my blog on Artificial Intelligence. I might be speaking about the complex character of Joker aka Arthur Fleck on my article on cyber security. Sounds interesting, isn't it? That's how our job is. Technical content writers focus on bringing the tech product to the homes of the people. We weave tech stories in the form of blogs, whitepapers, E-books and much more. We demystify the complex technical jargons into simple, colourful words. Any industry would demand these basic skills from a technical content writer: Top-notch Grammar and Vocabulary Great grasp over the technology you are dealing with Ability to identify the Key Point Indicators (KPIs) of the performance of the content and work accordingly Interviewing skill set since you would require to talk to subject matter experts frequently Impeccable writing skills with a flair for converting technical jargons into simple words Be a master storyteller What does it take to become a Technical Content Writer? It is no rocket science. You need to possess an avid interest to learn more about the current affairs in the technology. Your primary interest should be on storytelling and simplifying the complex technical terminologies. Nobody likes to read an article full of tech jargon which might seem like Latin and Greek for the normal audience. You should be someone with an unquenchable thirst for research and learning. Technology does not get depleted. Every day, every hour, ever there is a new innovation happening. Your learning curve shouldn't cease at any point in time. Hence make sure that you are on the right track by updating yourself on the current trends and topics. How to train yourself to become a technical content writer? I have been there, done that. From my experience, these six vital points might help you build a robust career in technical content writing: All you need to do is choose your favourite technology. It can be AI, ML, Big Data, Cloud computing or anything for that matter. Then you need to build a strong base on the fundamental concenpts in those technologies. Do not choose to follow the crowd. Find which domain captivates you the most. Start writing on it. Choose your niche: Initially, it doesn't require you to submit your articles and blogs on bigger publications. With experience and practice, you would eventually get there. Writing on Medium, Quora and LinkedIn would suffice, if you are just venturing out. Create the best portfolio ever: Yes, you need to write it in simple words. But as Leonardo Da Vinci says, "Simplification is the ultimate sophistication." To simplify the jargons, you need to be someone with a clear grasp of the technology. Keep learning regularly to achieve that feat. Understand the technical terms: Getting a salesperson to read about Natural Language Processing (NLP) isn't a smoothie ride. When you persuade them to read your tech article, the last thing they would want is dealing with an article with a lot of techie terms and unstructured format. Let your content flow like a river. According to Sherry Gray in , a successful content writer would keep mastering different style of writing. At present, storytelling is the hot cake. Keep honing your storytelling skill to catch your audience at the hook of the seat. Got a story to tell about how Microchips work? Tell it in such a way that a Grade 6 student would find it captivating. Practice the art of storytelling: Entrepreneur According to , 60% of marketers would be creating at least one content every day. Such is the demand for content in 2020! Writing isn't a job. It is a way of life. Like any other art form, it requires constant practice. The way I write in my Grade 12, the way I write now and the way I will write after 20 years would not be similar. It would be different altogether. So, write daily, whenever you get time. Keep writing, every single day: eMarketer You do not become a technical content writer in a day. Update yourself with what is currently happening in the market. To know more about that, take a look at the topics that those recent tech conferences are talking about. Talk to tech experts to know what's happening. This way, you will understand where you need to focus. Stay updated: Apart from the above mentioned 6 tips to become a better technical content writer, remember these 2 add-ons, like forever: Not every client would love your blog. You might have those blue days when you doubt your ability to write technical content. It is always good to have a mindset where you take constructive feedback positively. Understand why your client or manager is not satisfied with your work. Take it easy. It happens. Work according to the demands of your audience by making note of constructive criticism and improvising constantly. Take criticism positively: So, you have written a blog which is simple to understand. But it would get messy when you put a 1000 word blog under a single paragraph. Any content writer should know how to segregate different sub-topics in a content. Learn about the usage of bulletin points and when to put your content under the H1, H2, H3 headings. This would increase your readability score. Try to use to check all these factors. Learn how to format your article: Hemingway editor How to earn a livelihood as a technical content writer? Technology is booming. Every day, you see disruptions in every industry. Kudos to the technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science, we have more solutions for the problems we faced for thousands of years in our day-to-day life. To communicate about the current trends in the industry and explain how the technology works, we need a strong technical content writer. The pay grade is also extremely good and if you have the right skill set, you can earn in millions. You can either work as a full-time content writer or a freelancer. You can find a plethora of tech content writing projects in websites like Freelancer and UpWork. Start bidding over there. Make the best use out of LinkedIn. It is the best platform for every business professional. You would find 'n' number of technical content writers willing to support you. Start being a part of the community rather than a lone wolf. There are also a few technical content writer forums where you can remain active. Make the best use out of it. To sum it up If you wish to be a part of this field, well and good! Kick start your journey today! Honing up your storytelling skills constantly and learning regularly about the technologies that are disrupting the entire world would take you to places when you are a technical content writer.

Ledgers

Content writer by day, memer by night!

6 Proven Tips to Become a Technical Content Writer

Looking for tips to develop a robust and incredible A compelling elevator pitch is pretty essential for achieving your business goals and objectives. Whether you want to raise money from venture capitalists or angel investors, or just willing to hire a perfect team for your business, elevator pitch is the most important task. elevator pitch? Basically, an elevator pitch is a short description of an idea that depicts your business objectives and visions. To be more precise, an elevator pitch can be delivered in 60 seconds or less than speech, a pitch presentation, or even as a one-page overview of your business. The best way to create an elevator pitch is to plan an executive summary that provides a quick overview of your business and details why you are going to be successful. Tips for building a winning elevator pitch in 6 steps If you are really trying to build a winning yet incredible elevator pitch, then keep on reading this article. While crafting your pitch, here are some important considerations to take into account. Accentuate your Strengths As a matter of fact, today's market is bombarded with a similar type of products and services. If you are also stepping into the market to the products like phones, laptops, or any other electronic gadgets, you need to come up with a great solution that your target audiences have been looking for. Therefore, before embarking into the market, ask yourself- How is your offering different from others? Are your products/ services satisfying the need of your customers? Do you have a patent for your business? Does the patent match the already existing in the market? Thus, find the answers to questions mentioned above and do the proper research work to avoid every hassle while launching your business. When it comes to identifying a product's unique selling features, each aspect must be carefully examined, and generally, the most effective elevator pitch is built on one single selling feature. Describe the Competition Every business has competition. Whether you are offering salon services, grocery, or even setting up an education institute, you will encounter several numbers of rivals. These rivals can have the same solution to what you are expecting to come up with. If you are stuck in this situation, then you should always have a backup plan. Like, convince your customers by saying that you have a proper solution for your existing problem. Let's take an example to understand this situation properly- The year 1886 is regarded as the birth year of the modern car. What do you think, what would be there, competitors? Obviously, at that period, people liked to walk and rode on their horses. Therefore, before even launching the cars in the market, they had thought about their rivals and the existing alternatives. In fact, they had thought about what benefits their solution can offer over them. So, they convince the customers about the comfort zone, speed, or even prices over walking and riding horses. That's how they had come up with a revolutionary change! That's why it is always advisable to describe your competitors in the elevator pitch. Mentioning your key differentiators from your competition is a great exercise and ensures that you are building a unique solution that customers will hopefully choose over other alternatives. Share who's on your team After describing your rivals in the elevator pitch, you need to share the description of your team members. Only the right team can execute and build a great company effectively. So, specify the portion separately in your elevator pitch. And in this part, you should talk about why your business partners and you are the right matches to execute your idea and vision. ''team'' Moreover, why your skill-set is precisely needed to lead your company to success. It has always been said that a company's leadership team is far more important than the idea. Trust it; this is true! It doesn't matter how much great or unique solution your business has, if you don't have the right person on board, you won't be able to see it to fruition. Share your Message As soon as you are done with crafting your elevator pitch, the next thing you need to do is to find out how you can share your company's message all over the world. Brand awareness is paramount for every organization so that the customers should get an idea about your offerings. Since the consumer attention span is quite short, it is less than one minute for them to get captured by their target audience's attention. Ultimately, it has been observed that the elevator pitch must be described briefly and to-the-point. Your powerful pitch should include: Who are you? What is your business objective? What you offer What problems does your brand solve? How your brand is different from your rivals? A call to action for your customers Include a Financial Summary What about your business finances? For an incredible and powerful elevator pitch, you need to prepare a financial summary to avoid any financial issues. Well, you are not obliged to add a full five-year financial forecast. You can just illustrate your business model. For a great pitch, what's more, important is that you understand your business model. In this model, you should know who pays your bills, what kind of business expenses you are willing to have. Complete all the Milestones The final key step to craft a powerful elevator pitch is specifying your business milestones or every scheduled task. In this part, you will talk about your future goals or visions and how you are going to achieve them.  And if you have accomplished one milestone, then it is important to mention that. -  If you launched a new mobile application, your potential investors will want to know how many milestones you have accomplished. To be more precise, what's the projected schedule for final approvals from the mobile companies? On the other hand, if you are thinking about opening a restaurant, investors will be curious to know about plans to sign a lease, design the interior, and open for business. For example Tip- Practice makes perfect As soon as you draft your elevator pitch, make sure that you are practicing properly. This speech should come across as natural and conversational. If you want to do more thorough studies, then do it right because the foundation of every work should be strong enough to hold the success of that. The one-sentence pitch- Conclusion By now, you should have got a proper idea of crafting a powerful elevator pitch for your business before attending any business meetings. Being able to deliver your business vision in one sentence or 60-sec speech is incredibly valuable. It aids you, or other entrepreneurs, to get an idea about your organizations. In fact, it also helps you to do marketing your business.  A simple, yet eye-catching lines (powerful elevator pitch) will communicate the core essence of your company and generate interest in learning more about what you do. All the best! as well as investors

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@Kerron KingKerron King

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