I think certification gives the holder some potential credibility in a narrowly defined area IF an employer chooses to believe that a specific certification sufficiently covers the skills required for a business process.
That is clearer for roles that primarily need to operate software packages (word processing, CAD, etc) or systems where there is training content created by a solution vendor (cisco, juniper, etc), than it is for a multi-disciplinary "squishy" role like product management.
Consider that a product manager role might greatly by company size or by level of product / market fit. I'd say that an employer shopping for a PM might be looking for a combination of: subject matter expertise, deep knowledge of a specific market, and maybe a track record with KPIs. All of which are probably not easily evaluated by a common certification.
I had a similar experience with managed VoIP. The first almost-accidental customers seemed like a good sign that the most minimal viable product could work as a business. But we did not start selling early enough, and it played out almost exactly as you described.
Lessons:
1. Sales is hard, especially if you have never done it
2. Commitment -- everyone involved should have skin in the game
3. Hardware is hard, even when you don't manufacture it -- refurbishing + firmware modifying ip phones, poe equipment, etc ate into our runway
>>> 2. Commitment -- everyone involved should have skin in the game
For those who don't get it, this means :
- don't expect anybody to help you more than what he already helped (i.e. past help doesn't imply future help)
- someone not as involved as you can become predatorial (for example, by requesting, after years of super nice cooperation, a share of the profits, of the intelectual property, etc.)
- someone who helps your for nothing may hide some agenda
- someone who helps you may realize that what you do together might hurt some of his othe business (and thus starts to undermine your business, not just leaving it)
>>> 3. Hardware is hard, even when you don't manufacture it -- refurbishing + firmware modifying ip phones, poe equipment, etc ate into our runway
This is a great point, and brings back so many bad memories. Every phone provisions a little bit differently, and so many settings have unintended side effects. I spent so much runway building a dynamic, generic templating system when we should have just gone to market mostly static coded components customized on the fly.
The general pattern used by most of these "lightweight" implementations of system software is granular compile-time options for every additional bit of functionality.
Congrats, that’s a catchy domain name you got there.
I noticed it’s setup with a redirect, have you considered blogspot’s CNAME feature? It lets you host your blogspot blog at a custom domain like yours without redirecting to a subdomain.
The benefit is if you ever switch where the content/blog is hosted, any links/bookmarks to your site can still work.
They have a guide for various registrars (see below), but there’s likely a guide for whichever vendor you are using.
Congrats, that’s a catchy domain name you got there.
Thanks. It took some effort to come up with it.
have you considered blogspot’s CNAME feature?
No, I am not planning on using blogspot's CNAME feature. It breaks when you type in yourdomainname.com. You have to include the www for it to work. This is a bug that causes problems.
I would rather it just be a redirect for now. That serves my stated purpose in buying a domain name. Given the budget for this project ($0) and my own finances (dicey, at best), I don't anticipate changing to paid hosting. Besides, I am quite fond of blogspot.
I don’t currently use blogspot so I don’t know about that bug, or if they support multiple CNAME records.
It’s not obvious but, using the same mechanism that allowed you redirect to blogspot will allow you to redirect the bare “@“ record (pocketputer.com) to www.pocketputer.com
Since the last time I fussed with this, they fixed some of the issues that were problematic with custom domain names. One of those that I had forgotten was a security issue. So I do now have this set up as the actual domain name for the site and I think it all works without any weird security issues or bugs that I know of.
Not to simply pile on to the complaints about this, but I rely on the IRC gateway on my paid account for:
Memory constrained use
Bandwidth constrained use
_Attention_ constrained use
I hope there will be a text only or “low latency” mode in the native client.
It seems that Pinterest has had at at least three distinct revenue sources to date.
1. Commission earnings from inserting their own affiliate identifier into pins to things on Amazon. I'm not aware of what other sites they earn commission from, but that has probably dried up some as Amazon's commission structure changed. Notably they now allow users to post/pin things with links containing user's affiliate code.
2. Paid promotion for user pins, something in between "native ads" and "search ads". Pretty common for anything that might be considered a marketplace, but it works on Pinterest I guess.
3. Sponsored video content to play along paid promoted pins, not unlike Snapchat's corp paid video content.
They do, and they also have something Twitter typically does not, which is purchase intent. Lots of people go go Pinterest because they are looking for ideas on something to buy. If they can find it and purchase it all in one place, that makes Pinterest valuable from a direct response marketing standpoint.
Also, Pinterest's demographics are VERY desirable to marketers.
That is clearer for roles that primarily need to operate software packages (word processing, CAD, etc) or systems where there is training content created by a solution vendor (cisco, juniper, etc), than it is for a multi-disciplinary "squishy" role like product management.
Consider that a product manager role might greatly by company size or by level of product / market fit. I'd say that an employer shopping for a PM might be looking for a combination of: subject matter expertise, deep knowledge of a specific market, and maybe a track record with KPIs. All of which are probably not easily evaluated by a common certification.