The story "How We Recreate the Idea of Educational Content [Part #1]" you can read . here Let's continue! Creating Digital-First Content 1. It all starts with research, quantitative and qualitative. We interview students and teachers, conduct in-house and outside polls, collect feedback after each lesson, analyze most frequent customer support requests and customer feedback on social media. Then we conduct UX tests and work with product heat maps. 2. Then we create a roadmap for the course and two or three pilot lessons on the platform. After getting feedback, we make adjustments or reject the course. The feedback from both students and teachers is important as we view teachers as our clients too. The test period usually doesn't take more than a week. In that week, we can test the course with thousands of students, dozens of thousands if needed. We can specifically choose new or old students or teachers, depending on our goal. Only after all those tests are completed, we start working on the main body of the course. We can make adjustments in the content and/or teaching methods based on the feedback. 3. The next step is wave improvements (WI). We monitor these metrics weekly: likes/dislikes ratio for lessons and homework slide rating inside lessons common mistakes and their frequency % of completion for lessons and homework feedback on the content We calculate all those metrics as we go. Slides, lessons, and exercises with low scores are excluded and sent to WI. 4. We also correct mistakes overlooked by proofreaders and layout designers (no one’s perfect) — we don’t have to wait for the next reprint. Tuning and Setting The right level of difficulty is key. If a task is too easy or too hard, students lose interest and motivation. We use a CMS (content management system) to adjust the difficulty. After the first few lessons, methodologists can see how often students make mistakes in each task and adjust them accordingly. We log all students’ attempts with the exercise and analyze them both to improve our teaching methods and customize content for this very student. Content producers collect feedback from students and adjust topics, ideas, and dynamics. In 2–3 months we can create and customize a course including all supplementary materials for teachers. Right now, we’re working on a recommendation system that would suggest appropriately difficult content for each student and predict the score for the next task. A Pinch of Customization We have a pool of tasks that can be used as homework. Teachers choose tasks individually for each student. In our newer courses, students can choose how much time they want to spend on homework. That improved our homework completion metric by 5 pp which means students do more homework and are more satisfied with the results. Nothing motivates better than knowing you’ve done a great job. We’re also testing a script that would analyze student's mistakes and suggest exercises to improve lacking skills. Teachers see those suggestions too and can add those exercises to the lesson right away. Another project we’re testing is a predictive model that would suggest content based on the predictions about the score for the next task. This may allow reaching the education goal 15–20 % faster. We also employ speech recognition to analyze the mistakes students make while speaking. Now we can detect an error with the article and tense usage and some others. But there’s one problem we cannot solve yet: Speech to Text software corrects most mistakes automatically. If you know how to deal with this, we’re open to ideas. How we choose the educational track In a traditional school, you’re just told to learn something. You cannot ask why. “No pain no gain” and “Just push yourself’ are some common phrases in academia. School students don’t understand why they have to learn this or that. But our students always have a concrete goal — they want to travel, or go to college abroad, or pass a language exam, or they want to watch TV shows in English. It’s our goal to choose the best course and educational track inside of it that would fit this very student. Students never need to “learn everything in English”, they want very specific results. Let’s take an example. You need to take IELTS to go to college in Australia. In most cases, you won’t need the highest score — 6.5 might be enough. Those 6.5 points are comprised of four scores: for Reading, Listening, Writing and Speaking. Now you have to choose your strategy: You can polish each skill to perfection. That’s what they do in traditional schools, but it’s the longest and most expensive strategy of all. You can find your weakest skills and improve them. Or you can work on skills that are in the yellow zone. Some skills will remain in the red zone but they won’t affect the score. Our colleagues from Arizona State University used this approach when developing courses for GMAT preparation. Another example: you want to move abroad and start working there as soon as possible, You don’t need all 12 English tenses to that, 4 is enough. And 800–1000 words will cover 95% of your daily conversations. If you learn another 100–200 needed in your line of work, you’re all set. We prefer this approach — showing the shortest way to the result. It’s not our goal to sell to more courses. As soon as the student reaches the goal, we also do. We’re partners. We know that after achieving one goal students will have another as the language needs some upkeep. That’s lifetime learning. And if students see the result, they’ll come to us again. We’re not afraid to give tips on how to save money. We say, “Look, to get to the next level, you need to study for 100-120 hours. You can do all of them with a teacher or you can do homework and save 40%. If you watch movies in English, you’ll save another 20%” and so on.

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When you start your journey in Front-end Development, as you are introduced to HTML and CSS preferably in a project-based learning system, everything about it is very interesting. You get to develop your first project and the next after that most probably through cloning existing pages to exercise your learned knowledge which I have to say is indeed highly satisfying. As time goes on with you acquiring more knowledge in the field, that feeling of interest never seems to depreciate. (If you are not familiar with project-based learning, I greatly recommend you check out written by a friend of mine known as ). this article Witah Georjane But as you make further progress and get quite advanced, you will soon start to realize that the projects you are working on are getting bigger and bigger, and the pages demand more input and work in the course of their design and hence require more time for their completion which time you technically do not have much of. This will lead you to ask yourself a question many programmers and developers such as yourself have asked before which is, “ ”. How can I make the development process of my HTML web-pages quicker and simpler, and still produce great work and output ? Lucky for us, many programmers and developers with whom you share a mind on this have come up with numerous solutions all of which can not be covered in this article. But in an attempt to answer this wonderful question, this article will focus on as tools we can use to boost efficiency in the development process of HTML web-pages. CSS Frameworks and Preprocessors But before we get to that, written by another friend of mine known as is also a good place to look concerning boosting efficiency as a Front-end Developer. this article Lucas Delbel What are CSS Frameworks and Preprocessors and how can you use them to drive efficiency? Firstly it’s important to understand what efficiency is, According to the : Cambridge Dictionary Efficiency is the good use of time and energy in a way that does not waste any. With that definition in mind, let’s dive into how we can use CSS Frameworks and Preprocessors to achieve it. Note: This article assumes you have prior knowledge and a fairly good understanding of HTML 5 and CSS 3. If you don’t, take a look at . this course Let’s take a look at the CSS Frameworks first. There are several definitions of a framework but according to , Jeff Croft A Framework is a set of tools, libraries, conventions, and best practices that attempt to abstract routine tasks into generic modules that can be reused. Well simply put, A CSS Framework is a set of tools and libraries involving standardized CSS properties that can be reused to make a developer’s design job easier and thus more efficient. Think of it this way, say you have a color that is generally going to appear in several elements through-out your page, you could simply assign that color to a class and use that class on all the elements you feel require that specific color in your web-page. CSS Frameworks use this above theory on a broader level; you could create your own, or you could use the already existing ones on the internet. There are numerous open-source CSS Frameworks all over the internet and the most common ones are (Bootstrap) and (Foundation). For the purposes of this article, we will only be looking at Bootstrap. Twitter Bootstrap Zurb Foundation Bootstrap is a CSS Framework that was created by developers at twitter to standardize the use of repetitive CSS styling properties used through-out their pages to ease their designing phase for more efficiency. Again, lucky for us, Bootstrap was made available to the public to benefit all developers and like any other CSS Framework, it enables you to style your HTML elements from within your HTML file by assigning bootstrap classes to those specific elements. For example, you could create a fully responsive and styled header section for your web-page by easily copying the following code from the and pasting it into your HTML file: Bootstrap web-page Fluid jumbotron This is a modified jumbotron that occupies the entire horizontal space of its parent. < = ”> div class ”jumbotron jumbotron-fluid < = > div class ”container” < = "> h1 class ”display-4 </ > h1 < = > p class ”lead” </ > p </ > div </ > div All you have to do is to import the necessary bootstrap files required to enable your project to recognize the above Bootstrap classes. You can learn how to do this and a lot more Bootstrap functionalities by viewing this short videos series tutorial below, which would essentially make you an expert in bootstrap or at least gets you up and running in 1 or 2 hours. Also, visit the official and take a look at the various classes that would provide styles to your elements ranging from colors, borders, grid systems, typography to the box-model such as margins and padding, to mention a few. bootstrap website With this, except for custom styling that would be specific to your web-page, a CSS Framework like Bootstrap would nullify the need to create a CSS file for styling your HTML elements which in my books is a pretty good boost of efficiency. Now let’s take a look at CSS Preprocessors. According to , Steven Bradley A CSS Preprocessor is a program that takes a code written in a preprocessed language and converts it into the same old CSS we have been writing for years. CSS Preprocessors enable developers to write more specific, flexible, and maintainable CSS. This is because they are not bound by the limitations of plain old CSS. Since a CSS preprocessor is written in a programming language, it provides more freedom by providing various functionalities such as variables, nesting, inheritance, mixins, functions and mathematical operations which enable easy automating of repetitive tasks such as CSS styling properties. There are numerous CSS preprocessors, the most popular ones being SASS, LESS, and STYLUS. For this article, we shall briefly look at SASS. SASS stands for “Syntactically Awesome Style Sheet” which is written in the RUBY programming language, and just like any other CSS preprocessor, it permits developers to use abstracting in their CSS code. In simple terms, this means you can generalize CSS code that applies to the styling of numerous HTML elements in a single location and get to reuse it to style those various elements. For example the use of variables that enables assigning of CSS properties to a variable name of your choice and calling that name in styling various elements of your choice in CSS. Here is a quick demonstration that is written in .scss: : red; : blue; { : ; : ;
} $primary_background $primary_color body background-color $primary_background color $primary_color You can learn how to set up and use SASS as well as its associated advantages by viewing this short videos series tutorial below which will get you up and running in a few hours as well. You can also visit this for more information about SASS and CSS preprocessors in general. site In Conclusion We all agree that efficiency is highly valuable and beneficial in any production process, and the HTML pages design process is not any different. Any steps and solutions taken to boost efficiency during this process are steps in the right direction. For this reason, I believe CSS Frameworks and preprocessors ought to be incorporated by any Front-end Developer in their design process. They help to immensely reduce the work invested and time spent on styling various HTML elements which ultimately reduces time spent on each project, thus increasing the rapidness with which more projects are designed.

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Globally, COVID-19’s impact has been seen throughout all aspects of life. One such clear way is through remote work. In order to control the spread of the virus and to keep employees safe, many companies are restricting travel and requiring people to work from home. This rapid shift has illuminated shortcomings in corporate digital identity infrastructures that need to be fixed for effective economic recovery, in an increasingly digital environment. Likely, these changes have affected you and those around you. Read on to see some specific examples of problems with identity management that have surfaced throughout the last few months. Problems With the Status Quo : establishing secure connections with mobile phones, tablets, laptops within a flexible workplace environment poses unique vulnerabilities while outside of a secure work location. Mobile device monitoring and authentication this refers to the idea that employees can integrate their personal devices into a corporate network. This introduces variability around device type and operating system that all need to have different permissions in a network. The current lack of consistency prevents a unified approach to network security. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD): with each new device added to corporate networks, a new potential entry point is created for hackers. It has also become clear that it is inconvenient and costly for both employees and companies to verify on every device, every time they want to log in. Endpoint security: maintaining data security and privacy is challenging due to an increase in targets and human error. Users are using personal devices that increase entry points and that are not to the same security standard as corporate devices. Maintaining data security: as businesses open back up, employees may begin to use public WiFi, which presents additional vulnerabilities. Public WiFi : Paths forward Nobody can predict how long these challenges will persist, but it is clear that this new reality will last for the foreseeable future. However, there are some easy paths forward that will help increase your company’s data security while maintaining business functionality. Secure authentication should be a base standard. Multi-factor authentication should be a priority and can be implemented remotely. Many identity management providers provide strong authentication that is fast, cheap, and more convenient for users. Some store user data on personal devices and require biometrics to access that data, ensuring that not only the device is the same as before, but also the person is. This effectively eliminates social engineering frauds because both the device and person need to be authenticated. This approach is faster, as users only need to scan their biometrics each time they log in, instead of continually manually doing MFA (e.g. tying in a secret code that they receive by SMS) that is vulnerable to attacks like SIM swapping. Lastly, shared-KYC technology is cheaper because companies do not re-authenticate each time a user logs in, saving costs with per-transaction verification providers. Companies may even generate revenue by selling these secure verification credentials to other businesses, benefiting both consumers and companies. A key takeaway from the last few months is that data security should be a priority so that all companies can be prepared for all situations, even though caused by non-digital forces. This situation has given an opportunity to reevaluate digital identity as it pertains to the digital corporate world. It is clear that companies should immediately build more robust digital identity infrastructures before preventable catastrophic incidents occur. Companies and users have lost approximately $13.4 million due to outbreak related scams, and there has been almost a 20% increase in fraudulent transactions. The globalization of the economy, compounded by vulnerabilities exposed by the growing pandemic, illustrates the importance of creating and implementing more robust digital identity access structures. Written by Katie Lu, Business Development Associate @ Unum ID

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Currently, video markets get about 66 percent more qualified leads every year. if you want to sell a product online, you can’t possible ignore numbers like these. For every marketer, it has become obvious that success is almost unachievable without video content. Videos are interactive and highly engaging, and they can completely redefine the marketing journey for you. Videos allow you to approach your audience in an effective, highly unique manner. Sadly, a lot of marketers tend to ignore them. How Videos Help to Concert Audiences Investing the time and effort required to create a video is a pretty prudent decision for anyone looking to sell a product. So, why is it all important? Well, it really is all about visualization. Currently, vision is the dominant type of sense. It is what brings the most memory retention, and it can go a long way in allowing you to keep things in mind. Statistics show that a person will remember about 65 percent of the information that they see in a picture after about three days. For written information, however, you get just 10 percent retention rate after the same period. Yes, it sounds astonishing. However, it’s true. Video is still the most psychologically-appealing form of advertising, and it can go a long way in bolstering the leads you get. So, what are the ways that it improves your lead generation? Video can improve lead numbers If you can get more money and invest it in bolstering your video marketing, you will get higher leads. Both informed and uninformed customers will see your video as the critical factor in moving down the sales funnel. For uninformed customers, video can help to introduce your product effectively. For informed buyers, however, it’s all about seeing and appreciating the effort that was put into creating the actual video. Videos create continuous leads A video will stay up for a long time. This will allow you to create more constant leads over time. When you have a great product video or a tutorial video online, you can generate interest more constantly. Also, if you can create a high-quality video, you will be able to promote it more and get even higher lead numbers as the days go by. Videos could very well be the missing sauce A lot of the time, you have customers who are just one nudge away from moving along the sales funnel. These people need some convincing, as they might not be so comfortable without buying from you yet — most likely, they’re still unsure. No matter how many solutions your product brings to issues, there are people who you just won’t be able to convince through word of mouth. Seeing is believing, and these people will need to see the benefit of your product to purchase it. So, you need a video to educate them on why your product is good and they should get it. all you have to do is follow their purchase patterns and drop videos at the right instance. Videos help to build anticipation Even before you design or create a product, you could promotional videos to create fanfare and hype around it. people will want to see this awesome thing that they saw online, and you can throw in an explanatory video to seal the deal. By using video content, you will essentially shape what you have in mind and share it with the world. With these points, it’s pretty easy to see how and why videos go beyond just getting hype and receiving attention for your product. A video is a canvas for you to show the uniqueness and strengths of your product, and you can use it to give a prospective customer that final push that they need to move down the sales funnel. To be fair, there are quite a lot of things that will determine how well your video will be able to draw leads. However, it all starts with having a high-quality, well-edited video available and ready to be rolled out to the public. Filmora: Your All-in-One Video Editing Tool Making sales is much easier this way, and you will begin to see results in a short while. With that in mind, it’s also worth noting one of the most impressive tools that can help you get high-quality videos; Filmora. was developed by Wondershare Technology Co. Ltd, a Chinese tech firm. The service has over 50 million downloads, with rave reviews all around. Filmora is available on iOS and Android platforms, and the service allows you to access optimal video editing tools. Filmora With Filmora, you can get a full editor and features like magnetic timeline, music, and effects. The product comes with all the high-level tools you need to edit and create videos, while also reviewing your finished work to see if you want to make any adjustments. Filmora has impressive text effects, which are properly designed and include animations too. You can make adjustments to text effects as you see fit, thanks to an Advanced Text Edit Tool. The product also offers music and audio tools that give you access to 22 background songs. With an audio mixer, you can control various aspects of the song to make the right selections. When you’re done with the project, you can share your output on platforms like Facebook, Vimeo, and . Output formats include FLV, MP4, MKV, AVI, and MOV YouTube Filmora is available for the cheap price of $44.99 and $59.99 for subscription land permanent licenses respectively on Mac. For Windows, the service costs $39.99 and $59.99 for yearly subscription and subscription licenses.

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My teacher once told me in school, “Your shoe reflects a lot about your personality,” which seemed weird because our school forced us all to wear the same shoe. Today, I feel the phone has taken that place in life. “Your phone reflects a lot about your personality.” We can go on for the next 5–10 paragraphs of different traits that you can judge by different phone brands or the device. But that will be just digressing from the topic. I wish to help you to search for the one that suits your personality. The whole idea for this blog came from my personal phone search for the past few days, and by . The whole idea was to, given the budget, divide the money into various parts of the phone if you were a company. this twitter post MKBHD This got me thinking, why don’t we go through the same process and find the phone that suits our liking the best. So, here is a rough road-map that I have followed. Maybe this will help you in your search too. Fix the budget. Money is everything, at-least when you want to purchase something in the market. So fix an approximate budget and an upper limit, something that you will never cross ever. Step 1: Make a list of companies from which you are willing to buy your device. Doing this pretty early will just make the journey easier. At-least make a list of companies that you don’t wanna purchase your devices from. Be it lousy custom support, late software updates, or just some country you want to boycott. CHINA Step 2: *cough* *cough* *cough* *cough* From the above list by Marques, find the ones you prioritize. For me, it was a good display, average specs, okay camera, average battery, okay hardware, excellent software. Many times these features are correlated, so look out for that too. Like you can’t have 8K video recording or QHD screen with a low-end processor. Step 3: Make another list of some of the features that you want in your next phone. With the word feature, I mean some uniqueness that you might like on the phone. E.g., Wireless Charging, NFC, Matt black back panel, Headphone jack :P, Pop-Up camera, Lightweight, Water-resistant, 5G support … things like that. Step 4: Search for the phones that match your criteria as close as possible. Are released less than a year ago or to be released in less than 3 months in the future. The website that helped me a lot is . This gives you an extensive range of filers and option to pick the correct phone. Also, check multiple websites to confirm the specs. Step 5: GSM Arena Phone Finder Next comes the part where you see the review of your choice. Here you can use YouTube channels, my favorite being MKBHD, , , and , or read some online reviews like from . This helps you get a virtual experience and some more clarity with which one to pick. Step 6: Dave2d LTT Beebom digit And if there is step 7, it means you are already too confused and now don’t know what to do. At this point in time, I usually suggest people go to an offline store, if there is no country-wide lock-down, and have a hands-on experience of your top pick. How many reviews or guides you see, hands-on experience is incomparable to anything else. Try to avoid the salesman because more than often, they just wanna sell you than support you. Step 7: Enjoy the new phone unless you are waiting for some sales to happen to cause a dip in the price, or waiting for its release. Step 8: PS: For me, that phone turned out to be Google Pixel 4a. Good luck with your search. Edit. I bought OnePlus Nord instead, as Pixel 4a wasn't available in my area Thanks for reading ❤

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In security protocols, a is some data sent to the client by the server in order to generate a different response each time. Challenge-response protocols are one way to fight against where an attacker listens to the previous messages and resends them at a later time to get the same credentials as the original message. challenge replay attacks The is challenge-response based, though the "Basic" protocol isn't using a real challenge (the realm is always the same). HTTP authentication protocol Learn more on Wikipedia. Challenge-response authentication View Previous Terms: Block cipher mode of operation Certificate authority Cipher Cipher suite Ciphertext CORS CORS-safelisted request header CORS-safelisted response header Cross-site scripting Cryptanalysis Cryptographic hash function Cryptography CSP CSRF Decryption Digital certificate DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security) Encryption Forbidden header name Forbidden response header name Hash HMAC HPKP HSTS HTTPS Key MitM OWASP Preflight request Public-key cryptography Reporting directive Robots.txt Same-origin policy Session Hijacking SQL Injection Symmetric-key cryptography TOFU Transport Layer Security (TLS) Credits Source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/challenge Published under license Open CC Attribution ShareAlike 3.0

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Believe it or not, almost sway away from annual plans and waste at least 9 weeks on an average while trying to cross-collaborate with different teams, across diverse geographies, and using a myriad of tool sets. 85 percent of global IT firms An IT project is best characterized by a quantifiable deadline, well-defined deliverables, and cross-collaborative outcomes. However, every IT project requires adequate levels of planning, to succeed, . Be it designing and developing a website or simply redrafting the User Interface of an application, IT projects require a roadmap of sorts that work in tandem with the existing project plans. regardless of the methodologies Project Roadmap: How is it Different from the Project Plan? Before understanding how a project roadmap works, it is necessary to ascertain the aspects of a project plan. Project managers create plans which include all the task-level insights and details of the concerned venture, paired cohesively with the exact timelines. In simpler words, a project plan is more of a granular representation of the processes, best used by the project team as an internal resource. Image Source: Infodiagram.com A project roadmap, on the other hand, is more of a strategic view of the project with approximate timelines, prepared specifically for the stakeholders, top-level leadership, and coordinating with other adjoining teams. It wouldn’t be wrong to assume that both the project plan and roadmap are necessary while defining project management standards and guidelines. Besides that, if you are a project manager who is looking to define the scope of an assignment for the executives, without having them delve deep into the technicalities of the project, a roadmap comes across as a handy resource. How Does a Cohesive IT Roadmap Look? Unlike a project plan that chalks out all the minute details from a more technical perspective, the roadmap needs to be more graphical while talking more about the goal and associated deliverables. Here are some of the most essential aspects of an IT project roadmap: Project objectives Existing goals, both long and short term Essential deliverables Project milestones to track the progress Existing risks Project dependencies Significance of the Roadmap Entities Every IT project has some sort of strategic importance, like financial gains, philanthropic ideologies, or anything else. The roadmap considers these objectives and ensures that the team is committed towards the same, not necessarily in a planned way. Therefore, even if the project plans change, due to cost-cutting, revamped budgeting, or any other reason, the roadmap is most likely to remain constant. Even if the task-centric, minute details change due to a shift in priorities, the roadmap is expected to cover the same, in the form of project milestones. Besides that, the project deliverables, risks, and dependencies often need to be conveyed to the stakeholders and high-level executives, who can then identify priorities, investments, and overall expectations. Each one of the mentioned elements of an IT project roadmap offers a perspective regarding the progress of the project. Top-level professionals aren’t always interested in the technical status and mostly look for strategic-level updates, best voiced by the roadmap. Image Source: Pinterest.com IT Roadmap Tools, Resources, and Templates If you are serious about an upcoming IT project, you will first consider a roadmap and then move onto the finer details. As mentioned, developing the roadmap helps you envision the end-result of the project, something that stakeholders would be interested in. However, for presenting the roadmap for evaluation, you must always resort to high-functioning templates. When it comes to creating the complete roadmap, it is necessary to use strategic tools that offer visualization perks, options to create timelines, and the Swimlane flexibility for . Agile frameworks Regardless of the preferred resource, it is advisable to stick to the same for a significant period of time, as organizations who keep switching between apps and tools experience an almost . 40 percent fall in project productivity However, if you are looking for minimalistic and uncluttered tools, project templates can be the best possible choices, courtesy of the ease of usage, ability to pair multiple milestones upon encountering task-specific changes, and the collaborative structure. by HiSlide Corroborating Project Management Strategies using Roadmaps If you are a project manager who needs to take care of both the plans and roadmaps, it is necessary to use , and task lists for a more granular approach. However, if you are only looking to offer a strategic-overview of the previously mentioned aspects, the IT project must be presented using resources like the Casual that allow you to create roadmaps via an interactive UI. resources like the Kanban Boards, Gantt timelines When IT projects are concerned, roadmaps are difficult to create as there would be stakeholders who would want to learn a bit more about the technical whereabouts of the product or service development process. This is where exceptional project templates are required to pair the technical details with the strategic objectives, to create the most holistic roadmap ever. Tools like Roadmunk are extremely efficient as they allow you to create a basic roadmap while supporting extrapolated, technical viewing, if and when desired. Updates, Updates, and More Updates!!! Each one of the mentioned aspects, if taken care of, can help you create a complete IT project roadmap. While we did mention everything, right from the segregation, processes, roadmaps essentials, and tools, it is necessary to keep the roadmap updated. Make sure you update it based on the existing status of the project, addition or removal of team members, changing threat landscape, and especially the evolving dependencies in the post-COVID19 era. Lead image Source:  RoadmapPlanner.io

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I’m in the process of launching a new startup. The competition there is fierce, with the top company getting roughly 60,000,000 visitors a month. At scale, it has the potential to make $15 million+ in revenue. We’re fighting an uphill battle and I love every minute of it. Based on my experience, there are specific elements that go into launching a new brand to give you a fighting chance – irrespective of the competition. Here are four crucial things you need to get right. 1. Branding Branding is a nebulous term that can mean different things. Some people consider it the color scheme and the fonts. Others say it’s about the tone of voice. I think it’s all those things and more. It’s how people think and feel about your company when you’re not there. Nike is the ultimate example of branding done right. We know it’s a sports brand that isn’t afraid to champion controversial causes and it’s loved because of it. For the new startup I’m launching, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time on the colors, the fonts, design, and all of that. More importantly, we’ve gone with a unique brand voice. We’re the underdog attempting to disrupt. Not with our products alone but with our philosophy towards those products – our messaging. I’d like to compare it to how Patagonia was ethical and sustainable before it was cool for brands to do that. 2. Positioning The other element that many new startups miss is their positioning and they spend months – sometimes years – trying to figure it out. Once they do get it right, their revenue explodes almost overnight. Positioning can be hard to pin down but, in a nutshell, it’s who you are as a company and who you serve. For example, most email marketing companies are a great fit for anyone and everyone. ConvertKit came along and said it’s the email marketing service for bloggers (now creators). It went from $5,000 in monthly revenue to while landing a spot on the . $23 million in annual revenue Inc. 5,000 list Positioning matters. Of course, there were many things involved beyond just positioning. It used a sound strategy that involved direct sales, webinars, and a few online courses. The point is that when you position your brand properly, direct sales are easier, hits the mark, and you can create an online course people actually want to take. your webinar 3. Market Research Many startups do a few Google searches, assess the market size, give the competition a glance, and decide they’ll capture 10% of the market and call it a day. It takes more effort than that. When starting my latest venture, I did preliminary research to find out things like TAM, my top competitors, and the common positioning. After that, I built a prospect list, closed my laptop, and started making calls. I focused on nothing but customer interviews for weeks so I could get a deep understanding of the problems people were experiencing and the most common use cases. This helped us define our positioning and understand if the brand we wanted to build would be accepted by our target customers. 4. A Solid First Product Even if you get everything else right, it doesn’t matter if your product is subpar. People won’t use it. You don’t have to have all the bells and whistles, but the features or aspects you choose to work on have to be good – really good. This is especially true if you have entrenched competition. If the product isn’t ready, go back and get it right. The first-mover advantage is overrated. What’s on your go-to list of things when you’re launching a new product or starting a new venture? Let me know in the comments below!

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4 Crucial Elements to Get Right When Launching a New Startup 

Remote workers will be drained very soon — both cognitively & emotionally, if not helped by innovative approaches to collaboration. Your team is exhausted, and the only way to restore its vitality is to start innovating processes and operations right now. Businesses operating on outdated assumptions in the COVID times are killing workers for fewer results. It is now clear that hub-and-spoke distributed work models, along with remote only offices, are here to stay. And while opinions do vary on whether employees can be as productive at home in the long-term, there are a number of things to be addressed and re-configured to avoid the emotional and physical drain. : longer hours and doubled workloads and constant juggling collaboration tools & messengers result in the overuse of limited cognitive resources. Ethical Issues Most often than not, remote work implies stretching yourself thin both mentally and physically. The Stanford psychologist has spent two decades studying virtual communication between humans cataloging the ways existing technology fails us. Jeremy Bailenson He affirms that the commonplace managerial assertion about employees working better when controlled and present in one physical space, completely fails when applied to the online setting: “I believe that had we run our studies over days, weeks, and months, productivity would have a very steep decline.” The takeaway? Online productivity trackers and long video calls don’t really work when trying to boost performance and keep up the morale. : larger workloads, more time spent on collaboration, constant follow-ups lead to project delays and worse performance. Managerial Issues According to a recent survey by the Society of Human Resource Management, over 70 percent of employers report struggles with shifting to remote work. Another survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers finds that about half of companies believe they are witnessing a dip in productivity with this shift. When businesses stick to the old ways instead of adapting to the new normal, the anxiety levels only increase causing higher stress, reduced life expectations, and happiness levels. To make the ongoing shift from smoother, we may want to look for tips to remote-first companies and founders that intentionally structured their companies differently emphasizing things like thorough documentation, latest technology, employee well-being, and flexibility. synchronous to asynchronous work model To tackle the emotional and physical fatigue, these three things prove feasible and easy to implement: to establish trust in remote-only interactions (especially in a high-stakes negotiation) Introduce new mechanisms the disproportionately imposed tasks Re-allocate to unload people from coordinating small things that are the main drivers for frustration and stress Streamline collaboration Desperate times call for faster innovation: how ethical, lean infrastructures can help your team cope The number one issue cited by strategy advisors is a and difficulties associated with the time and effort needed to locate information from coworkers. There is only one thing C-level execs and CEOs dealing with the uncertain fate of their businesses can rely on today — new patterns for interaction and keeping up the mutual knowledge base among remote workers. lack of access to information This pandemic has proven that those companies and SMBs that already had some sort of collaboration tools and the practice of on-demand, quick adoption of new tools have won both in productivity and revenue over their less agile counterparts. It’s not only the economic indicators that are rising in quick-to-innovate organizations. Innovative leaders pay much more attention to the motivation and team spirit without sacrificing the ethics to let them build relationships and communicate just as effectively as they can in an office. And the first thing they are looking at is a complete revision of all internal collaboration models according to the propertied of the asynchronous workplace: Think about how digital-only interferes with the brain and morale. Think about the stress level of needing to be able to self-serve. Be ahead of the curve and make work less stressful with novel collaboration infrastructures HBR highlights the importance of and keeping all interactions in sync when shifting to the remote. establishing clear frameworks for internal and external communication Giving a variety of communication technology options to your team depending on the scale and purpose of the interaction is crucial. However, this has a significant pitfall when applied to operations with external vendors and partners. The ‘bring-your-own collaboration suit’ approach fails completely, leading to project delays, trust issues when sharing sensitive commercial information, and other coordination overheads. Since most asynchronous communication happens in writing, there’s always a clear record of all business conversations and decisions —  and a more transparent interaction model that gives workers the context when they need it. What is still lacking is a quick way to bring all the stakeholders on the same page without forcing them to copy-paste data from one app to another. The good news is that there is a whole slew of new tools that aim to minimize the information silos, build integrity, and maintain the knowledge base across your collaboration stack. Coming either in the form of Chrome-extensions ( , , , ), or downloadable applications ( , , , ), they all help remote teams free up time for more meaningful, creative work, instead of worrying about searching for messages and filtering out data. FYI Keeper Slapdash Clew Station Command E Onna Workona Knowledge bases and information search/discovery become essential when work is both distributed and asynchronous. Another common need observed in this new landscape is automating internal auditing and compliance. Blockchain-based adds the unique layer of trust to everyday remote operations infusing them with accountability. Taraxa The novel infrastructure for secure data collection and auditing removes the worry that critical transactional data might get lost in operational silos. Everyday operations of any scale become easily traceable, and stakeholders reduce the time spent coordinating approvals between departments, external vendors, and partners. Lead image illustration by https://www.behance.net/davidacevedo Author of this story has vested interest in Taraxa.

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