With the decline of industry and post-colonial exploitation, Europe should aim to become a global leader in the tech and service industry. But as the EU increasingly complicates the process for startups to thrive, the economic outlook appears bleak.
If you've missed recent AI news, Claude Opus now outperforms GPT-4 in most areas, making it the preferred tool for performance-focused users, many of whom are canceling their OpenAI subscriptions.
However, thats only good news if you are not located in Europe. Due to European Union (EU) regulations, Anthropics Claude 3 is inaccessible within its jurisdictions. This is only a minor example of how the EU inadvertently stifles innovation and jeopardizes its own economic future. This article examines the EU's absurd approach to the digital age, the challenges innovative companies face within its borders, and the necessary changes to prevent the loss of economic stability.
A Bad Place for Start-Ups
One thing the big 5 of tech (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft) have in common? Their American roots. But not only the biggest players in tech are US-based companies. The list of unicornsstartups valued over $1 billionshows that the US is home to 656 out of 1229 global unicorns, or 53%. China follows with 168, or 14%. Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and all other EU countries combined account for just 8.8%, or 108 unicorns.
All 27 EU countries together only represent 8.8% of startups valued over $1 billion
Can you name one European tech company that has brought forth significant innovation in the last decade? Nokias heyday is long past, and Europe has since lost its innovative edge. Once the heartland of the industrial revolution and global industry, Europe has outsourced its manufacturing sectors long ago. Today, only a fraction of Europeans actually produce anything. German car manufacturers are losing ground to Chinese competitors, and all of them put together value far less than Tesla. Not to mention centuries of post-colonialismfinally coming to an end, which will deprive certain European countries of resources that were never actually theirs, yet they felt entitled to and became used to them. E.g. there is not a single gold mine in France, yet the country boasts the worlds fourth largest gold reserves.
Teslas gross revenue vs. other car producers | Source: Hedonova
With no industry, no substantial progress in the tech sector, and growing resistance to post-colonial exploitation, the European economy has lost its pillars. If Europe doesn't redefine itself and fill the vacuum left behind with innovation, it may lose whatever is left of it's economic significance within our lifespan. As someone who has been operating various businesses out of various European countries for 10+ years, I can provide some hints on where the problems lie and how Europe could become a better breeding ground for startups.
Over-Regulation and Suffocating Taxes
Let's look at the central problems:
1) Over-regulation. The EU is predominantly a service economy, and innovation must be the driver of such an economy. Regulation hampers innovation. Entrepreneurs in Europe require a significant amount of time to keep up with new regulations, implementing them, etc. Good tax advisors and lawyers are a must, even for small or one-person companies. Not to mention the loss caused by tight restrictions e.g., due to limited insights because of the GDPR, or a loss of time/progress because of limited access to tech such as Claude. EU legislation such as the new AI Act restricts the deployment of innovative tech for personal and business use across Europe. Absurdly, the same representatives who voted for this legislation, on the pretext of protecting Europe from the dangers of AI, also voted to give themselves dystopian rights e.g., mass-surveillance with real-time facial recognition. This should leave citizens enraged, but for some reason, the heavily subsidized European media hardly mentions such issues, and interest groups find it difficult to raise attention.
2) Tax burden. Income taxes and mandatory social insurance account for half of most people's income in most EU countries. On top of that, VAT rates of 17-27% apply to most purchases. Entrepreneurs are additionally burdened with numerous other fees and taxes, ranging from additional wage costs to tourism tax. All counted together, the total tax burden is shamefully high and makes it extremely difficult for new companies to grow past a certain point. While I believe that the social contract is what makes Europe great, we are facing a situation in which fewer and fewer tax-paying individuals sustain an ever greater tax-fueled apparatus. Some might say the system is factually already broken, and it is only a question of time until the rest of it crumbles under the strain of the inverted age pyramid. Worst of all, much of the tax money is not even used to pay for pensions, education, or social services. A substantial part of the cake is wasted on non-transparent subsidies, crooked government bids, and other forms of cronyism. Otherwise, Europe wouldnt face a poverty rate above 20%.
Combined, the high tax burden, inefficient use of tax money, and an endless forest of new regulations make it much more difficult to successfully operate a company from inside the EU. Hence, for startup founders, especially in the tech sector, Europe is unappealing, and anyone who does their research will go to the US, Hong Kong, Singapore, or elsewhere to start their company.
Europe Has Many Advantages and Must Use Them
These developments make me wish the EU would go back to regulating the bend of bananas and stay out of the innovation sector. However, beyond all cynicism, it is clear Europe has managed to build a system that also has many favorable aspects such as strong workers rights, modern and accessible health care, and great infrastructure. These elements are no obstacles to innovation per se. The question is whether we need a plethora of bureaucrats in Brussels who regulate industries they dont understand, grasp power with dystopian surveillance tech, and squander our taxes.
My recommendation to EU institutions would be to shift their focus towards reducing bureaucratic barriers and strengthening economic ties between member states. And, for heaven's sake, ensure transparency regarding the exact allocation of every tax Euro! This approach would help create a more hospitable environment for startups and individuals alike. As it stands, Europe is moving in the wrong direction and failure to recognize this issue puts the economic future of the entire Union at stake.
Compliance on websites isn’t a fringe component. It’s a serious, legal matter, which can seriously affect your business.
Legal fees can be expensive, and add up quickly. Also, law is complicated, and can vary based on where you live and do business from. How does one accomplish compliance without getting their own law degree? (Or having a best friend who passed the bar exam?)
There is a way you can dot your I’s and cross your T’s, get all your ducks in a row, check all the boxes, cover your bases (this IS a post about full compliance, so one expression didn’t seem like enough ) – without draining your bank account, or losing your sanity.
Because WordPress is far and above the leading CMS, there are a good number of options when it comes to compliance regulation companion products.
We looked into the pool of offerings, picked the ones we thought were smart, solid, and sound, and are presenting them to you here.
Privacy is a major factor in today’s world, and personal information is protected by a fast-growing assortment of legal rights.
Throughout the first three-quarters of the 20th century, collected data was relatively minimal, there were few ways to store it, and demand for its collective use wasn’t really a thing.
However, from the ’70s through today, as the inherent value of data grew – along with improved methods to collect, store, use, and profit from it – so has the need for legislation to protect it.
Living in the era of Big Data, where the sheer volume of data has increased to previously unimaginable amounts, a true premium has been put on an individual’s rights to protect it.
Non-compliance with the legal safeguards comes with steep fines and other serious penalties.
A Timeline of Enacted Privacy Protections
While data protections may have started slowly, they will continue to pick up speed as the by-product of ethical examination and pivotal litigations surrounding privacy.
Let’s take a peek at the landmark protections in the history of privacy legislation.
The Privacy Act of 1974 established the Code of Fair Information Practice on the collection, maintenance, use, and dissemination of personally identifiable information from US federal agencies.
The Data Protection Directive was adopted by The European Union in 1995. The principles set forth were aimed at the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms in the processing of personal data. This was superseded by the GDPR in 2018.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was established in 1996 to protect Personally Identifiable Information maintained by the healthcare and health insurance industries from theft and fraud, safeguarding people’s medical information from being used without their consent.
The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) was enacted by Congress in 1998 and requires the Federal Trade Commission to issue and enforce regulations concerning children’s online privacy. The amended Rule became effective on July 1, 2013.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for data protection and privacy became law in 2018 in the European Union (EU).
The GDPR applies to the transfer of personal data outside of the EU and EEA (the European Economic Area is the countries of Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein), and replaced the Data Protection Directive from 1995.
Shortly thereafter, State Privacy Legislations in the US started…
California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) – signed into law 2018; effective 2020
California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) – also known as CCPA 2.0, enacted in 2020
Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA) – legislated in 2021; effective January 1, 2023
Colorado’s Privacy Act – will be effective July 1, 2023
Connecticut’s Personal Data Privacy and Online Monitoring Act – will be effective July 1, 2023
Utah’s Consumer Privacy Act – will be effective December 31, 2023
While the US does not have a single, comprehensive, internet privacy law, one is currently being proposed by federal privacy legislation: the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA). If passed into law, it will supersede all state privacy laws. Until then, it’s up to individual states to pass legislation that protects customer data.
Which Components Do You Need?
At this point you may be wondering, with so many already existing and soon-to-be-effective legal stipulations on data, which ones are you required to adhere to as a website or app owner?
That’s what we’ll lay out now in…
Compliance Requirements
To best meet overall compliance, websites should minimally have:
Privacy Policy
Cookie Policy
… and …
Consent (Record of Consent)
Let’s put a pin in Consent for a bit, and come back to it after we look at the policies.
A Privacy Policy addresses all the different ways your website or app might collect, process, and store data from users, both online and off.
A Cookie Policy specifically addresses how you use cookies and third-party services.
Because of the overlap, websites sometimes include a cookie policy in their privacy policy, as part of the overall data collection.
However, cookie policies need to be regularly updated (as cookies are dynamic and often change upon successive visits), whereas policy policies tend to be static.
More importantly, if you fall under the scope of the GDPR, your Cookie Policy must be separate from your Privacy Policy.
You can still incorporate a short Cookie Clause in your Privacy Policy, or cross-reference the agreements (for example, link your Cookie Policy to your Privacy Policy), but you shouldn’t combine the agreements into one.
Even if you don’t fall under the scope of GDPR, it’s safer and smarter to create a separate Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy, instead of merging them into one.
Let’s dive a little deeper into both of these important policies.
Privacy Policies
Most laws around the world require a privacy policy.
Privacy policies are legally required agreements when collecting any personal data from users (e.g. payment details, address and phone number, cookie data), regardless of the platform used (e.g. website, mobile app, desktop app, etc).
You may need a privacy policy to use third-party APIs and services (e.g. Instagram, Google Analytics, or Google Adsense), or to list your app in a commercial marketplace such as the Apple App or Google Play stores.
Without a privacy policy, you risk your business getting hit with hefty fines and/or having your website taken down, especially if you’re found to be in breach of privacy laws.
Key privacy policies or agencies, by country of origin are:
Europe/European Union – GDPR (businesses in or operating with EU/EEA)
United States – by state (CCPA, CPRA, CalOPPA, VCDPA)
Canada – PIPEDA
Australia – The Privacy Act 1988
Germany – BDSG, and DSGVO (German name for the GDPR)
France – CNIL (the commission overseeing privacy policies)
South Africa – The POPI Act (POPIA)
Brazil – LGPD (broadly aligns with the GDPR)
Lesser-known privacy laws exist around the world as well; the above is not to be considered an exhaustive list.
While privacy policies are generally referred to by location of origin, they can extend to any region that does business with them. Meaning, don’t assume that if you reside outside of Europe that the GDPR doesn’t apply to you.
The EU’s GDPR and US state laws (#1 and #2) are the most broadly reaching and widely followed privacy policies. But that’s not to say that the others don’t matter; it’s important to research any that might apply to your business.
Cookie Policies
Cookie policies are legally binding documents that inform website or app users how a company engages in data tracking and online privacy.
Cookie identifiers are considered to be personal data by the GDPR, so its rules apply to cookie usage as well. Also, any personal data collected by cookies falls under the GDPR’s jurisdiction.
The ePrivacy Directive (ePD) of the EU – nicknamed the “Cookie Law” – requires security measures be put in place to protect personal data. This regulates cookie usage, email marketing, data minimization, and other aspects of data privacy, and is largely responsible for the cookie consent forms that you encounter on most websites today. (Sidebar: This doesn’t replace the Cookie Law I grew up with; “Don’t ever serve chocolate chippers without milk.”)
The ePrivacy Regulation (ePR), the details of which are currently being hammered out by legislators, will replace the ePD once it’s passed into law.
Consent / Record of Consent
Taking out that pin that we placed earlier, it’s time to look at Consent.
The important distinction between Policy and Consent is this: Policy discloses details regarding the use of cookies, while Consent informs and records the allowances from users regarding usage.
Make sure you incorporate consent into your Privacy/Cookie policies. Full GDPR compliance means storing proof of Consent, and being able to demonstrate or retrieve details should they be requested.
I can’t stress this enough: having Privacy/Cookie policies without consent could cause major problems for you.
Additional Legal Protections
While protecting user data is of paramount importance, privacy isn’t the only concern for someone managing websites.
There are other important, legal considerations when it comes to engaging the public online.
We’ll take a look at them now.
Terms & Conditions
Unlike Privacy Policies, there are no laws that require you to have a Terms & Conditions agreement, though it is highly suggested to have one.
Without a T&C, it’s much more difficult to enforce your rules and community guidelines, copyright protection, or other issues that could arise from the misuse of your website/app content.
The majority of the public will act courteously, but that’s not who you’re protecting yourself from. It’s the small percentage of outliers who can sometimes do the most damage. Having explicitly stated Terms & Conditions can offer basic protections for you and your business, limiting your liability and declaring your rights over the content you create, in case anyone engages in abuse, intellectual property theft, or unlawful behavior.
The most common reasons for Terms & Conditions are to:
Prevent abuses
Protect your creative content
Terminate accounts
Limit your legal liability
Set your governing law
If you’ve ever seen a clause in a T&C stating where (geographic region) any dispute resolution must take place, that falls under governing law, and is quite useful if you don’t want to litigate legal matters in a country outside of your own.
Disclaimers
Disclaimers can be used to offset liability from a business to a client in ambiguous or gray legal areas, or where they are required by law.
Without them, you are opening yourself up to legal liability or the possible endangerment of others, especially on sites that share advice, DIYs, or promote/sell products (most of which come with claims).
Websites and eCommerce stores benefit from disclaimers in that they:
Let users/customers know that the content is not legally binding advice, nor should it be solely relied on
Limit the liability of the website/store in the event someone has an unsatisfactory result from its advice or products
Some of the most common disclaimer types are:
Copyright
Fair Use
No Responsibility
Views Expressed
Offensive Content
Past Performance
Errors and Omissions
Affiliates / Affiliate Links
While we’re on the subject, here’s an example in actual use:
Disclaimer: WPMU DEV is not a legal entity, nor does it claim to be an authority on the laws of any region, country, or the internet. While this post contains well-researched content from respected sources, it is for informational purposes only and not intended as a substitute for professional legal advice. As such, we cannot be held liable for any omissions or errors contained within.
That said, let’s get to the tools and services of the compliance trade, with…
Our Top 5 Picks for Compliance Companions
Some of these are actual WordPress plugins, while others are content generated directly in the company’s website.
Regardless of how you access them, all offer plenty of bang for the buck, and value for the venue (I’m coining this phrase to mean free products and their providers ).
GDPR Cookie Consent and Cookie Yes (by WebToffee)
WebToffee has a sisterhood of plugins, with versions available on two separate websites: CookieYes and WebToffee, plus the free version on the WordPress repository.
CookieYes is one of the most used WordPress GDPR cookie compliance plugins, with 1 million+ active installations and 5 out of 5 stars.
Starting with the free WP.org plugin version, you get a goodly amount of features, including:
a cookie consent banner with Accept/Reject options
single click automatic scanning and categorization of cookies
display list of cookies on your cookie policy page by using a shortcode
adds a cookie banner to your WordPress website to show compliance with GDPR
fully customize the cookie notice so it blends with your existing website (change colors, fonts, styles, position on page; even how it behaves when you click “Accept All”)
has a Cookie List module so you can easily show what cookies your site uses and display them neatly in a table on your Privacy & Cookies Policy page
can be configured to have a CCPA/CPRA ‘Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information’ control to the cookie notice
The free version also includes a connection (also free) with the CookieYes web app to access advanced features (cookie scan, consent log, etc) and manage all settings from the web app account. Note: You can still use most of the features from within the WP dashboard, without connecting to the web app.
The CookieYes dashboard gives you a nice snapshot of information.
One of the advantages here is the dashboard, which includes a Consent section. You can view or access details on user consent should you ever be audited and need to show this information. It even allows you to download this consent data in CSV format.
From the WP plugin dashboard, there’s a lot you can do:
Check banner status (active, inactive), regulation type (GDPR), last cookie scan, language
Customize banner
Maintain cookie list, add new cookies
Change/edit default banner language
Generate a Privacy or Cookie policy for your site
Add the user guide provided for setup, along with a video walkthrough, and you can see why this plugin is so well loved.
CookieYes banner and consent customizations.
If you want to go for a CookieYes paid plan, you have three tier options, payable per domain, monthly or annually. Each tier adds more pages per scan (600, 4K, 8K) and pageviews (100K, 300K, unlimited), plus a couple of additional features – like custom branding, and geo-targeted cookie banners.
As a third option here, we have the paid, premium version of GDPR Cookie Consent Plugin (CCPA Ready) – available from WebToffee’s website.
The final offering in the WebToffee family of compliance options, GDPR Cookie Consent remains in the territory of fastest-growing WP consent plugins, verifiable by a mass of happy users.
GDPR Cookie Consent offers a variety of notices, all with customization.
As far as features, most are available and common to both the GDPR Cookie Consent and the CookieYes paid plans. However, the GDPR Cookie Consent plans do not have:
Auto-translation
Global privacy control
Do not track
Monthly scheduled scan
Privacy policy generator
GDPR Cookie Consent pricing has three tiers, based on the number of sites (1, 5, 25) you want to use it on. Each includes one year of updates and support, and a 30-day, money-back guarantee.
The primary difference between The GDPR Cookie Consent and CookieYes paid plans is the technology they rely on. The CookieYes web app is a SaaS that requires huge cloud computing, storage, and security facilities. (This is also why the CookieYes paid plans are based on scans and pageviews.)
Bonus points for their support: I reached out as a free user to clarify a few points in this section and got a detailed response in less than half a day. (High five to Mark!)
iubenda
Iubenda has been quickly rising in the ranks of compliance with their all-in-one solution, currently sitting at 100K+ active installs and a 5/5 star rating on WP.
If you’re looking for that extra layer of comfort, iubenda has it, with attorney-level compliance solutions, all of which are fully WCAG Level AAA Compliant.
The free version of iubenda compliance solutions support the GDPR, LGPD, and US State Laws (CCPA/CPRA and VCDPA).
Content is auto-updated when laws change, so it’s always up-to-date. (Their built-in site scanner runs periodic scans on your site and alerts you if it detects something that should be added to your compliance documents.)
The free version comes with the following features:
Privacy and Cookie Policy Generator
a single policy, on one site, in one language
up to 4 (non-Pro) service clauses
does not include Cookie Policy
Privacy Controls and Cookie Solution
up to 25K page views/month (for compliance with GDPR, LGPD & ePrivacy and US state laws)
iubenda privacy controls and cookie solution settings.
The majority of iubenda’s standout features are found in their paid/pro versions, trusted by over 90,000 clients in more than 100 countries. These allow for multiple policies, sites, and languages, as well as Privacy Control & Cookie Solutions, a Terms & Conditions generator, a Consent Database, and more.
Privacy Control & Cookie Solutions helps you meet complex legal requirements at the click of a button, as well as create a fully customizable cookie banner.
Terms & Conditions offers powerful features like plug-and-go integrations for popular platforms and legislation monitoring. It’s customizable from hundreds of combinations, available in 10 languages, and capable of handling even the most complex, individual scenarios. Optimized for eCommerce, marketplace, SaaS, apps and more.
The Consent Database activates with one click to track, store, and manage consent and privacy preferences for each of your users all in one place, allowing you to easily upload proofs of consent and legal notices in PDF format.
They also offer an Internal Privacy Management, which documents all the data processing activity within your organization. To comply with privacy laws (particularly the GDPR), companies must record how they store and use the data they collect from their users.
Additional features in the paid plans are:
More Compliance Laws, like DSGVO, RGPD, UK-GDPR, CalOPPA, PECR
Cookie consent analytics provided for high-traffic sites
Detects bots/spiders and serves them a clean page so that your SEO efforts are never compromised
Built-in compatibility with WordPress comment form, Contact Form 7, and WP Forms; can also be manually integrated with any type of web-form
Pricing is offered as bundles with 3 tiers, based on number of license slots, with paid add-ons – Terms & Conditions, and Consent Database – available as extras.
Or, you can go with their Custom plans, with 3 tiers, broken out by options for Privacy & Cookie Policy, Privacy Controls & Cookie Solution, and Terms & Conditions.
iubenda’s pricing models with inclusions listed.
Head over to iubenda’s website for a more in-depth read about their compliance offerings, or to purchase one of their plans.
TermsFeed
TermsFeed doesn’t have a plugin; everything is generated directly from their website. But in no way does that detract from their fantastic functions.
The TermsFeed website has an abundance of compliance offerings, most of which they charge nothing for.
Since 2012, TermsFeed’s all-in-one compliance software has helped businesses get (and stay) compliant with the law, and the multitude of glowing, five-star reviews corroborates that.
Popular free features include:
Privacy Policy Generator
Terms & Conditions Generator
Privacy Consent
Cookie Consent
EULA Generator – gives users the right to use a copy of your product after they acquire it, through a granted license (with or without limitations)
Disclaimer Generator
Return and Refund Policy Generator
Shipping Policy Template – no generator for this, but a detailed, helpful template to assist businesses in creating
They also offer these additional, not-as-common free tools:
CCPA Opt-out – Free tool to manage opt-outs for CCPA
I Agree Checkbox – Free tool to enforce your legal agreements and policies on web forms
Embed Consent – Free tool to block embeds (YouTube, Twitter, Google Maps) from loading until you’ve got user consent
The TermsFeed site has a ton of helpful, visually appealing infographics.
All of the generators operate in the same, simple three-step: 1) Create a free account. 2) Choose what you need. 3) Download and integrate.
You answer a few quick questions, and your custom policy is ready in minutes, available to download in multiple file formats – which you can link to, edit, or update.
Or, download their handy privacy policy template (available in a variety of formats: HTML, DOCX, Google Docs), and write your own.
And the output isn’t limited to just websites; you can use it to create for mobile apps, eCommerce stores, third-party tools, SaaS, and even a Facebook page.
The TermsFeed website is well organized and chock full of helpful information, making an easy task out of finding what you need.
The majority of compliance agreements and policies on the TermsFeed website are essentially free. However, they do offer some optional, premium agreements with additional clauses to protect your business interests.
Paid items are available in two ways:
Privacy Consent Solution, which gives you access to all features, payable month-to-month, or yearly (with a discount).
Per Policy/Agreement, which allows you to select any number of policies from their huge compliance toolbox, and pay a one-time fee, per item
Both payment structures come with a 7-day refund policy, and 100% money-back guarantee.
A summary recap of Privacy Policy blog articles in TermsFeed.
As far as videos, walk-through processes, and documentation go, out of all the sites I reviewed in this article, they had the most. On YouTube alone, I counted close to 200 explainer videos (on their content specifically, and policy terminology in general), plus dozens of tutorials for using on a myriad of website types (Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Webflow, Shopify, etc) in addition to WordPress.
My final thoughts: the TermsFeed website is an embarrassment of riches, with compliance offerings galore, and little to no limitations on their use. Even the premium, paid-for options won’t break the bank.
Visit the TermsFeed website for tools, tips, and custom provisions, or their YouTube channel for a ton of valuable, well-produced info.
Complianz
Complianz is another widely used compliance plugin, available for free on the WP repository: Cookie Consent – aka the Privacy Suite for WP. (They offer an additional one for Terms & Conditions as well.)
Active installations are at 600K (and climbing), and rated 5/5 stars.
Complianz is a GDPR/CCPA Cookie Consent plugin that supports GDPR, ePrivacy, and more, with a conditional Cookie Notice and customized Cookie Policy, based on the results of their built-in Cookie Scan.
Free features include:
Cookie Notice configuration for your specific region (EU, UK, US, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, and Canada; or use one Cookie Notice worldwide)
Cookie Consent and Conditional Cookie Notice with custom CSS and customizable templates
Automatic configuration of your website based on wizard questions, WordPress scans, and dedicated service and plugin integrations
Proof of Consent for user registration (respects GDPR data minimization guideline)
Automatically detects if you need a Cookie Notice (aka Cookie Banner or popup)
Cookie policy generation through an easy wizard
Offers “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” (for CCPA/CPRA)
Complianz is one of the few WordPress native solutions, integrated with a wide variety of plugins and services. Once configured through the wizard, Complianz will work with most of your plugins and embedded content – right out of the box. Including our very own Forminator, Beehive, and the WPMU DEV Dashboard plugin (where you can integrate Complianz to allow site visitors to reject dashboard analytics statistics cookies).
Like iubenda, their policies are drafted by an IT Law Firm, and are WCAG Level AA and ADA Compliant. They closely follow the latest developments in ePrivacy regulation, the proposed Cookie Law for the EU, and other legislation worldwide, so you can be sure the content is spot-on, legally speaking.
Complianz also has premium, paid offerings for compliance, available from their own website.
Their website has documentation, and as a premium user, you get dedicated support from privacy professionals and developers who (and I quote) “don’t quit until a solution is reached”.
Complianz offers a full privacy suite for WordPress.Legal docs and Consent Management offerings on Complianz, free vs paid.
Easily install the free Complianz Privacy Suite plugin from your WordPress dashboard. For the premium version, you’ll need to download from your account on Complianz.io, or use the link in your purchase confirmation, along with your license key.
In addition to the free version, paid plans are offered as 3 tiers, priced per number of sites (25, 5, 1). All include the full shebang of required legal documents, compliant in multiple regions, along with records of consent, data request processing, A/B testing and statistics, and detailed cookie descriptions.
Termly
While Termly does have a plugin on the WP.org repository, it’s outdated, and I don’t recommend using it. But that doesn’t make their compliance options any less capable or appealing.
Instead of the WP repo, head over to Termly’s website, where everything you need is easily accessible and kept fully up to date.
Compliance solution offerings from Termly.
The Termly website comes with a host of features, ranging from a single policy to a full suite of compliance solutions.
Here’s a breakdown of Termly’s top features:
Consent Management Platform
Manage consent on your website or app while providing a robust and flexible solution to compliment your business needs and regulatory requirements
Policy Generators
Choose from the ever-expanding list of legally vetted policies to protect your business and meet your compliance needs
Additional Legal Protection Generators
Easily create other Agreements and Notices to further protect your website (like: Terms & Conditions, Disclaimers, EULAs, Shipping Policies, Refund and Return Generators)
Termly’s all-in-one cookie consent solution.
Termly’s free plan provides you with one legal policy, four edits, and 10K/month banner visitors, as well as their basic compliance tools, which are:
Privacy Regulation Monitoring
Cookie Policy & Banner
Cookie Script Auto Blocker
HTML Embeddable Policies
Quarterly cookie scans
In addition to their free/basic plan, Termly offers 3 paid tiers, priced per website. The first two go by number of policies, policy edits, and banner visits, and are payable per month or annually. The third tier is a custom “contact us” option.
With 4.5 out of 5 star rating on Trustpilot, Termly is trusted and revered by thousands.
Better Compliance and Reliance with WPMU DEV
As you can see, responsible data management is not only good business practice, it’s also the law.
In today’s landscape where massive amounts of data, along with infinitely more ways to store and use it are the norm, diligence is required in its care and handling, especially if you operate an online business (your own, or as an Agency for clients).
Regardless of what kind of business it is, where it is located, or where your visitors reside, you are bound by certain legalities.
Ignorance is not a defense, so compliance can be the difference between being successfully safe or professionally sunk.
Beyond research and recommendations for meeting compliance requirements, WPMU DEV works hard to keep your websites and web development business operating at peak efficiency.
That includes our free products and services, and our premium membership offerings – a suite of pro plugins (protection, optimization, form creation, SEO, and more), five-star always-on support, and sleek all-in-one site management tool. Plus our fast, dedicated, best-value-in-the-biz Hosting.
PrestaShop is the leading open-source ecommerce solution allowing you to create and manage multiple online stores. It has a highly responsive interface with hundreds of advanced built-in functionalities and tools, from payment processors and inventory management to support for multiple currencies and languages.
PrestaShop helps you create a customized ecommerce site for your business, owned and designed by you, in minutes. Below, you’ll learn all about what this platform does well and where it falls short.
PrestaShop Compared
PrestaShop didn’t make our top list of the best ecommerce platforms, a category crowded with quality options. Instead, our top recommendation is Shopify, which offers merchants the perfect mix of beginner-friendliness and advanced features. Sign up for a three-day free trial of Shopify.
PrestaShop is a free, user-friendly, open-source ecommerce solution that officially launched in August 2007.
Currently used by over 250,000 ecommerce merchants globally, PrestaShop can be used in 65 different languages and provides access to a feature-rich platform for running a digital business, including basics like shopping carts, product information, user management, and shipping and payment systems to advanced features for marketing your new business, international selling and fulfillment, and inventory management.
PrestaShop is a solid choice for business owners who want to develop a customized web store, manage multiple online stores, and sell to visitors in different languages and currencies.
PrestaShop Health and Stability
PrestaShop’s open-source nature speaks a lot to its core philosophy. Not unlike WordPress, this is a solution that naturally improves based on the contributions of users, who can share their expertise and what they develop on the platform with each other.
Thus, the main priority of the PrestaShop team is to develop world-class ecommerce software that enables everyone to have a successful online business. The company was on the 2016 list of Inc.’s 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in Europe and received the 2016 CMS Critic Award for Best Ecommerce Software.
PrestaShop has raised a total of $14.7 million in funding over four rounds and is funded by 13 investors, including renowned companies like Seventure Partners and Serena.
PrestaShop Pricing
Being a free, open-source solution, it costs nothing to download and use PrestaShop to run your online store. That said, expect to run into a few related expenses.
You’ll need to pay separately for website hosting, which will cost you a couple of dollars a month if you can get by with shared or cloud hosting. But if you want to run a large and complex store, you may need to invest in elevated site hosting that’s significantly costlier. Expect to also pay for a custom domain name and security features like SSL certificates.
While most of PrestaShop‘s offerings are free, you’ll have to spend money to utilize add-ons or site themes.
There are a few different paid extras you can tap into. Professional services provided by PrestaShop include site auditing and optimization, which can be priced by getting a custom quote from their team. Meanwhile, you can also use your PrestaShop account to access their international partner agencies and secure services for migration, SEO, web hosting, and more.
Then, there’s the souped-up version of the core PrestaShop software, the PrestaShop Platform. This turnkey solution gets your web store off on the right foot by ensuring faster load times, attracting more visitors through SEO, and helping you convert more visitors into customers from the moment your site goes live. You also get key extras like managed daily or hourly backups, Git integration, and even managed migration.
Pricing for the PrestaShop Platform ranges from around $470 to $900 per month.
PrestaShop Pricing Comparison
The total price of using PrestaShop depends on your needs and personal preferences.
Web hosting can range wildly, from as little as $2 per month to upwards of $20 per month or more, with basic shared hosting options usually staying in the single digits. Add-ons and themes acquired for your PrestaShop store are more varied, ranging from $35 to over $200 each. The costs become even steeper if you want to customize your website or bolster your online business by hiring a developer or other agency.
Comparatively, Shopify is more expensive to simply start using. Its prices start at around $39 per month but can go all the way up to $399 per month for a more comprehensive set of features and benefits. Further, if you don’t use Shopify Payments, additional fees apply for Shopify apps and their online card payment processing (which runs between 2.4% and 2.9%, plus $.30 per transaction).
Wix offers free and paid options, making it a bit more flexible than PrestaShop. The paid tiers start from $16 per month and go up to $59 per month. If you want a tailor-made plan, a custom-priced Enterprise package is also available with a dedicated account manager.
Overall, PrestaShop is one of the most affordable options on the market. However, if you want 24/7 support, along with included hosting, fraud protection, and other advanced features, you have to pay more—and it’s possible the ecommerce platform may cost more than others in the long run.
PrestaShop Trials and Guarantees
PrestaShop doesn’t offer a free trial or a money-back guarantee since the base version of the platform is accessible for free. Hence, you can start on PrestaShop today for no cost and try it out to your heart’s content.
PrestaShop Ecommerce Platform Review
PrestaShop’s ecommerce platform contains a wide array of features that make it easy to build and customize your own online store, add and market your products, accept payments, manage and complete orders, and even sell internationally.
The fact that PrestaShop is an open-source platform means you have access to its code and can edit and adjust it to suit your exact needs, leading to near-limitless customization options. However, it may be intimidating for users that want a less code-reliant solution with predictable pricing.
What Makes PrestaShop Ecommerce Platform Great
PrestaShop has a simple, straightforward installation process. You can have a fully functioning ecommerce site up and running in just a few hours.
Easy to install and use: Installing PrestaShop is a simple process. All you have to do is download the installation file from its official website and install it on your device. As the file is small, you can finish setting up the ecommerce platform rapidly, even with a sluggish internet connection.
Rich feature set: With over 600 features and more being introduced regularly, PrestaShop guarantees a lot of flexibility when building and running your ecommerce website. If you’re comfortable with coding, the open-source code lets you customize the software to your exact needs. Then there’s also the PrestaShop marketplace with more than 6,000 add-ons to boost your site’s functionality, plus built-in marketing tools like discounts, coupon codes, and email marketing to help you attract more customers.
Higher degree of customization: Use PrestaShop’s wide range of modules, templates, and themes to create the ecommerce website of your dreams. While the modules let you add features to your site to improve functionality and the user experience, the templates and themes can get you started quickly while not sacrificing the flexibility to personalize them to your brand. And that does not even touch on solutions created by the PrestaShop community, enabled by real users who develop one-of-a-kind features and tools through their access to the platform’s source code.
International selling: Implement different languages on your online store with ease on PrestaShop to allow visitors from all over the globe to read your website in their native language. That adaptability opens up entirely new markets to your online business and extends to handling currencies outside of the Euro or US Dollar. PrestaShop currently supports accepting payments from nearly 200 countries in over 20 different currencies.
Payment processors and security: PrestaShop supports all the major payment gateways, including PayPal and Amazon Pay, or you can opt for PrestaShop Checkout, the platform’s dedicated direct payment option. PrestaShop’s payment gateways are all PCI-compliant, ensuring the utmost security to protect your shoppers’ confidential information.
Product listing flexibility: Most free ecommerce platforms limit the number or types of product listings you can place on your web store, so the fact that PrestaShop allows unlimited product listings is a huge advantage. It’s why this platform is a good fit regardless of whether you have a few products or a few hundred products to sell, allowing you to either grow into something larger without stress or spin up your new business with an ambitious product line.
Where PrestaShop Ecommerce Platform Falls Short
PrestaShop doesn’t offer dedicated customer support options like phone, email, or chat.
Coding knowledge required: To truly take full advantage of the customizations you can make on your PrestaShop site, you need to have some level of comfort and experience with coding. You can certainly take the route of cobbling together a unique enough site from PrestaShop’s available built-in features and community solutions. But, if you’re looking to create a truly one-of-a-kind ecommerce site, you’ll need to be comfortable with digging into the source code (or hire someone that is).
No official support team: One of the main disadvantages of PrestaShop is the lack of a dedicated customer support team to help resolve issues. That said, PrestaShop has a very active user community with over 700,000 members. That user base, along with rich documentation, FAQs, and user guides, is enough to get you by, provided you’re willing to put in the effort to find the solution. But if you’re looking for hands-on or on-demand support, you’ll be disappointed, as there are no options for reaching someone via phone, chat, or email.
Not free at scale: With the depth of features in PrestaShop’s free core platform, you may wonder why anyone pays for it at all. Well, a major issue (that isn’t unique to PrestaShop, mind you) is a serious dip in performance if you have more than 20 visitors on your site at the same time. You can solve this without much trouble, but it will cost you one way or another. You’ll either have to pay for a higher grade of web hosting or opt for the paid PrestaShop Platform, which can support many more simultaneous users (for a pretty steep monthly cost, though).
PrestaShop Ecommerce Platform Compared
While PrestaShop makes a great option for those who like to get their hands dirty customizing and perfecting their online store, our top pick for the best ecommerce platform is Shopify, as it provides the most value and stress-free UX for its price point.
PrestaShop is a great choice to start your online store if you’re looking for an incredibly affordable and customizable ecommerce platform. It offers a robust set of features and functionalities and near limitless potential to make a truly unique web store, but the lack of formal customer support and the reliance on coding means it isn’t a fantastic choice for first-time ecommerce platform users or folks who just don’t want to deal with the issues that can arise on an open source platform.
Fulfillment.com (FDC) offers cloud-based B2B and B2C ecommerce fulfillment services to multichannel and omnichannel internet retailers. The company was established in 2011 and maintains eight fulfillment centers—five in North America, one in the United Kingdom, one in Europe, and one in Australia.
Fulfillment.com’s services are delivered through its BestOMS dashboard and include inventory tracking, warehouse management, backorder management, address verification, and carrier optimization. It offers more than 70 integrations with marketplaces, CRMs, and shopping carts, and offers an API for customized integrations.
Fulfillment.com Compared
Fulfillment.com did not make our top list of ecommerce fulfillment services. The best ecommerce fulfillment service is ShipBob because it makes it easy for ecommerce retailers of all sizes to streamline order fulfillment at an attractive price. Get started with ShipBob’s self-service Growth Plan for startups today.
These ecommerce fulfillment services offer something for everyone and can help you streamline the order fulfillment side of your online store.
About Fulfillment.com
Fulfillment.com focuses on one thing—seamlessly executing the details of high-volume order fulfillment, whether directly or via third-party logistics (3PL). It manages all aspects of order fulfillment and inventory management for online stores.
The company operates at scale, shipping millions of B2C and B2B orders to more than 150 countries. Its emphasis is on helping ecommerce stores manage high-volume order fulfillment.
Fulfillment.com really leans into working with large-scale ecommerce shops. It boasts a two-day shipping average and 99.7 percent success rate, noting that these metrics apply to even their customers sending more than 2,000 orders per day.
FDC gives customers an integrated order and warehouse management system—BestOMS, that can be accessed on a desktop computer, tablet, or smartphone. BestOMS provides a window into all things related to online orders, from creation to fulfillment. It also gives real-time and detailed inventory information, so you know when to reorder and maintain appropriate stock levels.
FDC also boasts an inventory shrinkage rate—the product that is lost or damaged and can’t be sold—of .001%, which is below the industry average.
Fulfillment.com Health and Stability
Fulfillment.com is headquartered in Atlanta, GA, and is a privately held company. It started as Vanguard Economics, LLC in 2011 when it first began offering order fulfillment services. In 2014, the company acquired the Fulfillment.com domain and rebranded under that name, in part to capture a top spot in Google search results.
Its most recent funding was in 2021 and involved debt acquisition of less than $5 million from a public-private collaboration. It reported $14.2 million in revenue in the most recent reporting period.
Fulfillment.com has several hundred employees. Given its longevity in the order fulfillment space, its commitment to global warehouses, and its healthy revenue numbers, Fulfillment.com appears strong and poised for continued success.
Fulfillment.com Pricing
Fulfillment.com does not reveal its pricing on its website. You’ll have to submit your information to receive a quote, including details like your current monthly shipments and number of SKUs.
Fulfillment.com Pricing Structure
Since there is no pricing transparency on the Fulfillment.com website, the actual pricing structure cannot be determined.
However, the company does disclose that it has a non-refundable prepayment due before new accounts can be created. The amount varies by the warehouse locations you select. According to at least one customer review, this fee was $1,500 as of 2021.
It also discloses that it requires a minimum monthly spend that includes separate fulfillment and kitting fees. The fulfillment fee includes integrations, order management, labeling, the BestOMS cloud-based dashboard, customer address validation, order grouping, and a dedicated Success Manager. The kitting fee applies anytime Fulfillment.com has a “touch” on an order—things like adding filler, putting a sticker on a package, bagging product before boxing, etc.
Fulfillment.com also requires a minimum contract of one year and accepts payment via credit card, wire transfers, and ACH payments.
Fulfillment.com Pricing Comparison
What is known about how Fulfillment.com approaches customer contract requirements, minimum spends, add-on pricing fees, and prepayment deposits demonstrates that it takes a very different approach than some of the other ecommerce fulfillment services on our top list.
ShipBob, for example, discloses that pricing starts at $5.66 to $6.03 per order. ShipMonk starts at $3 per order. ShipHero offers a flat rate/no zone approach to order shipping costs. Easyshop goes a step beyond and offers a free starter plan for up to 50 packages when you use your own postage shipping account.
These competitors also take a customer-centric approach to pricing that appeals to smaller-volume ecommerce retailers, while still offering scalability when the need arises. Fulfillment.com’s approach hits at the other end of the spectrum, targeting the type of ecommerce heavy hitters that are comfortable with bigger commitments from the start.
If you think Fulfillment.com might be for you, you’ll need to hand over some of your personal information and shipping data to really dig into how Fulfillment.com can help with your order fulfillment needs.
Fulfillment.com Trials and Guarantees
There are no free trials or guarantees promoted on Fulfillment.com’s website and none are mentioned in the limited reviews found on trusted review sites like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot.
Fulfillment.com is a dedicated ecommerce order fulfillment service provider that works with B2B and B2C online retailers. It operates eight warehouses around the world, offers two-day shipping across the United States, and focuses on high-volume worldwide fulfillment.
While Fulfillment.com did not earn a spot on our top list of ecommerce fulfillment services, it may be a good option for online retailers that process thousands of orders per day from customers around the world.
What Makes Fulfillment.com Ecommerce Fulfillment Services Great
Fulfillment.com is a leader in large volume, global shipping for online retailers.
Global reach: If your ecommerce shop has international customers, then Fulfillment.com’s global warehouses could be a great fit. Fulfillment can be accomplished from nearby locations, whether your customer is in Australia, North America, or Europe. This dramatically shortens delivery times.
Dedicated success manager: When you sign up for Fulfillment.com’s services, part of your monthly fee includes the services of a dedicated Success Manager. When you’re dealing with high-volume order fulfillment at scale, having a resource like this is invaluable.
Easy-to-use dashboard: Fulfillment.com’s proprietary BestOMS dashboard is available on all devices and puts all the information you need to manage orders and inventory at your fingertips. You can create, edit, and track orders, check inventory levels, and more, all on the cloud-based app.
Many integrations: Fulfillment.com can integrate with 70+ ecommerce platforms, CRMs, and marketplaces. Custom integrations are also possible via APIs, including Rest V2 and Soap V1. All APIs are 100 percent cloud-based.
High volume capacity: One of the biggest strengths of Fulfillment.com is their experience managing high-volume ecommerce order delivery. Fulfillment.com closed out 2022 by shipping more than 22 million orders with a 99+% performance rate on shipping the right products on time to the correct addresses.
Where Fulfillment.com Ecommerce Fulfillment Services Fall Short
Fulfillment.com operates at high volume and boasts impressive performance numbers.
Not for smaller ecommerce shops: The numbers for Fulfillment.com tell a story, from the volume of how much they ship each year (over 22 million packages) to the global reach they prioritize. They’re primarily a solution for higher-volume sellers, even those at the enterprise level. If you’re a smaller online shop just dipping your toes into the ecommerce fulfillment services pool, this solution may be a bit too robust.
Upfront commitments are high: While pricing is opaque, the minimum one-year contract and the non-refundable prepayment before service begins can be deterrents to anyone but the higher-volume, bigger-budget multichannel or omnichannel internet retailers. Add to that the lack of any “try before you buy” option and Fulfillment.com isn’t exactly positioned as a solution for newer, inexperienced online retailers.
Spotty customer reviews: Fulfillment.com just doesn’t have many customer reviews on mainstream review sites like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot. And of the few user reviews that do exist in those places, the negative ones elicit a sharp response from Fulfillment.com. There are numerous customer reviews on the Fulfillment.com website, but none are linked to any independent review sites making it hard to test their veracity. While user reviews should not be taken as gospel, it is always helpful to have independent insights from customers available to consider when making a purchasing decision.
Ecommerce Fulfillment Services Compared
While Fulfillment.com offers a robust global fulfillment network and impressive performance numbers, it is likely a solution best suited for mature internet retailers with a higher volume of online sales.
Fulfillment.com has been in the online sales fulfillment space for over a decade, and has the metrics of shipping wins to back up its success and longevity. It is global in reach and hyper-focused on high-volume internet retailers.
However, unless you’re at or about to reach those high-volume levels, you will likely find more success considering other options like ShipBob for most ecommerce brands. You can find out more about who we recommend and why in our Best Ecommerce Fulfillment Services review.
Many millions of people dream of flying the coop and spending time working abroad.
The opportunity to work abroad is a popular prospect, one undimmed by the years of restriction due to the pandemic and made only more accessible thanks to hybrid working and the rise of the digital native.
However, despite the still-growing desire to work abroad, many people — including professionals in the IT sphere — don’t know where to start. With that in mind, I wanted to write the ultimate guide for finding international employment opportunities.
The article primarily aims at seasoned developers, focusing on where to look for jobs, how to apply, and how to prepare a resume to get called for interviews. I will explore the dos and don’ts during international job interviews and hopefully provide the right sort of advice that should be able to help any IT professional, at any stage of their career, be able to seek out career options abroad.
How To Prepare Your Resume For Getting A Developer Job Abroad
Let’s start with the basics — your resume.
The critical thing to remember about creating a resume for an international employer is the relevance and flexibility of skills to match your target company’s needs and their specific market.
While there are some hard and fast rules to resume writing that apply no matter where you’re sending an application, your resume needs to be tailored to your new market. This is where a little research goes a long way.
I’ll give you an example: In Malaysia, it’s considered good practice to include your personal details like marital status or date of birth on your resume. However, in other markets, these sorts of details (especially around age, sex, or marital status) are unnecessary or, in some cases, considered inappropriate.
So choose the information you share wisely! Your resume has to reflect your desire to relocate to your chosen market/region, it has to be hyper-personalized in approach, and it needs to sound like you’re passionate about your work.
Resume Length, Format, And Size
Depending on your skill set and experience, the details in a developer resume will vary, but I stand by my rule of not making a resume more than 2 pages.
Your resume should be formatted in a simple, easy-to-read font (Lato, Merriweather, or Helvetica, for example).
You should also include succinct summaries in sections like About Me or Key Achievements. Keep it short, keep it direct, and don’t repeat information.
Achievements
Instead of giving generic lists of tasks/duties/responsibilities, I advise you to clearly communicate your achievements and accomplishments, with statistics to back them up. This will help you stand out from other applicants.
For example, if you helped develop an app, make sure you include a variety of proven KPI deliverables, such as engagement KPI metrics, UX KPI metrics, and revenue metrics, rather than just a final product showcase:
Developed a social sharing feature using Android Studio, which increased downloads by 150% in the first three months.
Language
Use strong action verbs, such as built, led, deployed, reduced, developed, automated, managed, re-architected, implemented, designed, overhauled, and so on to describe your experience/accomplishments. They will bring a confident tone to your resume.
Use industry-specific adjectives like scalable, fault-tolerant, multi-threaded, and robust (to name a few) to highlight your expertise.
Tailoring
Tailoring doesn’t mean changing every line of your resume. It means adapting the direction and desire of your resume for a specific employer and their market.
Tailoring your application can take many forms: you can write a personalized cover letter, adapt your introductory paragraph to reflect your desire to work at a specific company, add specific terminology used in the job listing you’re applying for, or angle your achievements to the market and needs of a particular employer. It shows you’ve done your research and are willing and able to adapt your skill set to the needs of an employer abroad.
For some great advice on writing an effective developer resume, head to Stack Overflow and FreeCodeCamp for a further deep-dive.
Where Do You Find An International Developer Job?
My advice is to build a strategy based around four key international job-seeking means:
Job boards and aggregators;
Networking and network news;
International recruitment agencies;
Boolean search logic on Google.
Jumping onto Google and leaving your international career in the hands of algorithmic fate is not the way to approach getting a developer job abroad.
Job Boards And Aggregators
Job boards and job aggregators (the differences between the two are sometimes vague but transformative to the scale of your international job search) are a popular and effective first port of call for job hunters.
I suggest using job boards for specificity (specific markets and employers in certain countries) and aggregators as overview searches (a generalist overview of where employers are hiring the most and in what sectors).
It’s also important to utilize international job boards that have filters for “relocation” and “visa sponsorship.” In other words, fish in the right pond. Here are some sites I recommend:
AngelList Talent is now one of the go-to websites for finding a tech job with a startup.
You need to sign up and complete the mandatory profile information in order to filter for positions that offer visa sponsorship. Once you’re all set up on the site, you can enter your search parameters at https://angel.co/jobs.
If you open the Filters tab, you’ll find a section called “Immigration.” Choose “Only show companies that can sponsor a visa” to narrow your search appropriately.
If you don’t turn on this filter, you’ll find all jobs that meet your other criteria, regardless of whether they offer visa sponsorship.
Relocate.me is a job board for IT professionals (mainly software engineers) that is designed with relocation in mind.
You can see job opportunities in Europe, Asia, and North America from verified employers who offer relocation benefits. The listings include specific details about the relocation packages, making it easy to compare your options.
Japan Dev is a job board for finding a variety of tech jobs in Japan.
This site features hand-curated jobs from companies that have immediate openings. You can search for positions that offer relocation benefits by clicking the “Jobs with Relocation” button on the home page. You’ll be taken to the Jobs page, where you can further refine your search.
Most of the listings are for software developers and programmers, but other positions for those who work directly with developers are listed as well.
TokyoDev is another site that helps foreign developers find positions in Japan.
You’ll be able to filter your search with labels such as “No Japanese Required,” “Apply From Abroad,” “Residents Only,” and so on.
Landing.Jobs is specifically for tech jobs in Europe, with a focus on Portugal.
When you’re looking for jobs through this site, be sure to find the “Visa & work permit” filter section and select the options you need.
SwissDevJobs is, as the name indicates, specifically for IT jobs in Switzerland.
The site is well-designed, with a modern and easy-to-navigate UI. In the advanced filters, you can narrow your search down to only show jobs that provide visa sponsorship with a simple checkbox.
Arbeitnow is based in Berlin and features positions in Germany. It makes it simple to filter for jobs that provide visa sponsorship and many other options.
Indeed, LinkedIn Jobs, SimplyHired, and Monster are major job aggregators that can be very effective when searching for developer jobs abroad if you use the appropriate keywords.
When searching on LinkedIn, for example, you should add “relocation,” “visa support,” or “visa sponsorship” into the keywords tab, and select the city/country/region that’s your choice for relocation. Of course, some searches can come back with opportunities not quite suited to your situation, but using relevant keywords does a good job of filtering them out.
The same method works for Indeed, Monster, and other similar aggregators. Include “relocation,” “visa sponsorship,” or “visa support” along with your job title (or other keywords) in your search.
Networking And Network News
Networking takes time but is a highly effective source of referral recommendations. Utilizing social networks (LinkedIn, GitHub, Twitter, and even Instagram) is a highly personal and effective way of making connections with hiring teams and business leaders worldwide.
But I also urge the eagle-eyed developer to look at the market and network leaders like Hacker News’ Ask HN: Who is hiring? and TechCrunch to see where the movers and shakers are in the tech world and where upticks in hiring are occurring. You can then use these media-led referrals to directly approach companies and hiring managers online, via social media channels, and through their own websites.
International Recruitment Agencies
For a complete end-to-end application handling service, specialist developer support is available for those looking for a little more hands-on guidance via international recruitment agencies.
Tech companies often outsource hiring international talent to recruitment agencies, so going through a recruitment agency can be very beneficial. In addition to helping you find the right position, a good recruiter can fill you in on all of the relevant information on a company, including company relocation policy, benefits, and more.
Boolean Search
The trick to finding unadvertised yet very alive jobs is by using a rarely-utilized search tool strategy called Boolean logic.
Boolean logic refers to an algebraic formula that creates a clear “true” or “false” value to a data type by using “operator” terms while searching for jobs. For job seekers, “data type” refers to a job vacancy query, and “operator” terms refer to the words used to search for the jobs!
It sounds complex (and the theory behind it is), but the search terms are super effective and simple to deploy. As Reed highlights in their piece on Boolean job searches, “You can use keyword searching almost everywhere, ranging from big search engines through to search functions within smaller sites.”
So, how does it work?
You add the relevant “operator” terms into your search platform or site that refer to specific jobs, skills, or criteria you’re looking for. It’s not as complex as it sounds!
These operator terms are the following:
AND: for job searches containing multiple keywords, for example, developer AND javascript AND python will guarantee search results with only those primary keywords as priority indexed terms.
OR: for job searches where one of several keywords are prioritized, but not all of them need to be. For example, web developer OR software developer will bring you back jobs with both web and software developer in the title or text, but no other jobs.
"" marks: used in searches for a particular phrase or term. For example, putting "mobile developer" into a job search will only bring back mobile rather than other developer roles.
*: for searches where you want to start with a certain term. For example, *Engineer will return all jobs that start with the term Engineer, such as Engineering Manager.
( ): when you want to group certain job criteria together. For example, software developer (startup and python) will only bring back specific jobs that fit the startup and tech stack mold you’re looking for.
Example:(site:https://jobs.lever.coOR site: https://apply.workable.com) (engineer OR developer) AND android AND (relocation assistance OR relocation support OR relocation package OR visa sponsorship OR visa support)
Ex-Amazoner Kip Brookbank has a great article on LinkedIn about using Boolean searches to source a job. Make sure to check it out!
Put It All Together
The end result of using all four strategies above is a highly targeted, specific, niche, and personal job search that utilizes the best of digital job searching tools and the international recruitment consultant market.
But above all else, the above four points should drive home the feeling that you can get the perfect international tech job with a bit of patience and consideration using these very effective, free tools at your disposal.
By using each specific search platform’s own location tools, you can narrow down the right sort of opportunities for you. Recruiters offer advice, targeted recruitment support, and hands-on help finding a role. Through networking, you can get job referrals. Finally, using Boolean search removes a lot of the stress of sifting through hundreds of jobs.
Your Primary Considerations When Looking For A Developer Job Abroad
Now you’ve got your resume sorted, and you’re utilizing a raft of different strategies to source your new developer role abroad. So what are your primary considerations beyond clicking the “apply” button?
My advice is to start by building an application strategy (or multiple strategies) that will handle the complexity of relocation and which will keep you focused on building a foundation of credible, flexible professionalism in the eyes of your new employer.
These strategies include some of the points raised above and further details on referral systems, social media approaches, and watching out for red flags!
Application Strategies
My top 5 applications strategies are:
Apply through specific job boards or aggregators. As mentioned above, utilize all digital options at your disposal.
Apply with information from company websites. Go directly to your chosen company or use Boolean search terms to shortlist your chosen jobs better.
Seek referrals. One of the most versatile and personal job search channels, referrals are found via your network and network news.
Contact your target companies’ HR departments through LinkedIn or email. Utilizing social media is no bad thing, and LinkedIn is your primary weapon.
Watch out for red flags. Get yourself savvy about what constitutes a poor job advert (Workable provides some eye-opening advice on bad job ads), and use Glassdoor and Blind to sift through companies with bad reviews. You might dodge a career bullet by doing so.
Interview Preparation
In my experience working with incredibly exacting tech talent, sometimes the basics of interview prep can get lost in the melting pot of assessment testing and high-value candidate handling.
There are some absolutely crucial dos and don’ts for getting a developer job abroad you must adhere to:
Do:
Learn about the company. Do your research, understand your employer’s journey, and get under the skin of their company’s purpose and mission.
Look up interview questions that the company may ask and consider your answers. Prepare for any and every question, from coding to critical thinking, from teamwork to timekeeping.
Prepare your own questions to ask to show your interest. Your research should guide the types of questions you want to ask your prospective new employer. This is your one chance to mine them for information!
Be on time.
A basic interview must is not be late.
Reiterate your desire to relocate and your plans to do so. Although I do go into more detail on this below, international employers will want to know how you plan to factor in a relocation into your application. Better to be prepared than caught out.
Don’t:
Criticize or otherwise speak poorly about former or current employers. It’s not a good look, shows a lack of professionalism, and will reflect poorly on your exit strategies.
Imply that your main interest in the job is relocation. Although relocation is important, it shouldn’t be the main reason for moving as it makes the job sound like a means to an end.
Say “I don’t know” during the interview. Contrary to popular belief, you are allowed to make mistakes in an interview. But rather than so you don’t know, say you’d be happy to provide an answer for it in a follow-up interview or post-interview as you don’t have the right information to hand or something to that effect. In short, indicate you may not know now, but you can find out easily.
Ask about salary, bonuses, and benefits during the interview. Interviews are designed to determine whether you have the character, skills, drive, and determination for a role. The salary and bonus conversation will come later. It’s not a conversation for now unless an interviewer asks you directly. My advice is to be prepared and know your worth!
Forget details on your resume. You will be asked about certain points on your resume, and your interview will ask you to elaborate on key points. You must know your resume back to front. If you don’t, you run the risk of looking half-prepared and out of your depth.
How To Negotiate A Job Offer And Navigate Discussions About Your Salary
Contract, salary, and compensation negotiation is a vital moment in your international developer job search. This discussion is not just about money alone; this is your opportunity to talk about everything from relocation packages to IP rights, expat taxes, and more.
First things first, do your research. Understand the expectations for tech talent in the market (and for the size of the company) you wish to relocate to, and formulate an idea of what you’d want from your pay packet commensurate with the situation of your ideal employer.
Be careful about offering salary expectations. The best way to approach a discussion around salary is to ask for an offer first rather than put in your expectations based on your research. See if the offer meets your idea of fair pay and relocation package (if offered).
Relocation packages Does your new employer help with relocation, and if so, by how much and at which stage?
Negotiate perks and benefits From subsidized travel to commute costs, your employer needs to put a whole package in writing.
Other negotiation considerations should be:
Factor in expat taxes: do you pay more tax while working abroad?
Discuss intellectual property rights: do you retain any IP in the course of product creation, or are there other options available?
Ensure agreement is enforceable: international employment contracts can be a foggy minefield to navigate through, so do your research regarding everything from employer’s rights to e-signing capability.
Relocation, Preparation, And Moving To Your New Developer Job
Relocation is a complex, emotional, and risky endeavor, and never one a developer should take lightly. I advise relocating developer talent to run through a pre-travel hitlist to guarantee smooth sailing:
Learn everything you can about your destination. The first thing you should do is deep-dive into the place you’re moving to, from intercity travel to the nuances of the local language. It’ll help reduce the culture shock of the first few weeks and months in a new place.
Visit your new location before your move. I appreciate international travel isn’t cheap, but if it’s possible to visit pre-move, you’ll benefit from a bit of a headstart with getting around and making some local connections. It’s also beneficial when it comes to meeting potential landlords, work colleagues, and so on.
Determine the cost of living in your new location. Cost of living fact-finding will be done around the negotiation stage. Still, it’s worthwhile understanding how far your salary will stretch and any nuances around pay and tax bandings, cost of living, rent, food, travel, and the like. That’s where websites like Numbeo come in handy.
Understand what’s included in your relocation package. This is vital. How much of your travel, accommodation, or relocation will be subsidized, if at all, by a new employer? This is a cornerstone of your financial planning arrangements.
Consider your family’s requirements in your planning. Finally, although it should never be far from your mind and it no doubt won’t be, your family is an important factor in your relocation. I urge you to include them as much as possible in the process and remember the emotional toll of moving away from home to a new country, as much as the physical and financial.
Finding a developer job abroad is a labor of love — one that has to take stock of everything from financial planning to tweaking and perfecting your resume for an international audience.
It takes a lot of preparation, but the results of a well-planned international job search are incredibly rewarding.
Moving abroad for work is one of the most rewarding and life-changing things you can do, especially if you’re a talented worker with an in-demand skill set like software development.
As both an entrepreneur and designer, I understand the ways startup founders think. Most of them start a project with visions of a perfect product in their head. However, in reality, a well-performing product will likely look way different than an initial concept. Instead of seeking perfection from the outset, beginning with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the smartest route to success. An MVP is a crucial part of the product design process and allows businesses to validate their idea at the minimum expense and time.
But while a lot of startups already know that an MVP is essential, a majority of the startups that I have mentored over the years have categorically encountered the same problem across all sectors of their process: an MVPs time to market. It simply takes too long for an idea to get into the hands of a consumer.
Because the truth is, if an MVP testing process takes longer than two weeks, you’re probably doing something wrong. From my experience, most startup product designers make these three common mistakes that lead to longer MVP testing times:
Using the wrong definition of a product value proposition;
Underestimating the risks in a design hypothesis;
Overloading the product with extra features.
Why are startups missing these important steps in the process? I believe there are some tendencies among startups to pursue goals that fundamentally and often accidentally create a blind spot for these common mistakes.
Measure And Lean Your MVP
In Eric Ries’s book The Lean Startup, his definition of the MVP states:
“The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”
— Eric Ries
When approaching a new idea, a startup founder might feel compelled to build upon the complexities of the function as a way of seeing their vision come to life rather than compose enough of the fundamental core components to create a hypothesis that they can then test. Ries differentiates between these approaches in his book when he discusses the process of measuring and leaning.
One of the major benefits of an MVP is lean production. It allows entrepreneurs and companies to produce a product that helps them prove their value proposition while also cutting costs. The clearer the theory, the stronger the MVP, and the more valuable information collected throughout the MVP process.
An MVP is not only designed to determine the viability of a product’s value proposition but also to test the product’s technical elements and target audiences. Even a simple MVP or acceptance testing that inquires whether the intended audience is interested in using the product in the first place could be more helpful to the progress of a startup’s journey to success than establishing the perfect product right away.
The answers that an MVP can prove may be as simple as the MVP itself but highly valuable when continuing down a startup path that includes high-risk and particular investors. In the most general sense, a product is viable when it successfully fulfills a need in the market. And as easy as it seems, the most challenging part of this simple question is determining what exactly is necessary and what is not, as the features that you deem important to your product are, in fact, important.
Discernment and clarity are not as easy as it seems, and a large part of being concise when approaching your MVP is keeping the time to market low. This is why I find the importance of testing your MVP within two weeks or less to be a crucial factor in achieving successful results. The key to a highly effective MVP is defining the problem as clearly and specifically as possible.
Renters Rewards: A Case Study
Before we dive into some tips, let’s first take a look at a case study that features a mobile app startup. This app is designed to help people find a property to rent while also providing them with opportunities to earn cashback.
In this example, a startup saw an opportunity to develop a platform that lets people search for a rental, pay for the application, sign a lease, and continue to pay rent on the property indefinitely — all from one place. To take this product to the next level, we had an idea to offer people who pay on time a 1% cashback match if they pay before their rent due date.
We wanted to test this hypothesis, so first, we had to develop our problem; in doing this, we could determine the approach and figure out a plan of action to receive valuable results in a couple of weeks. We decided that using the overarching idea of trying to test whether users would pay the rent early if they were offered a 1% cashback was not only too risky but a tough sell to landlords who could find it too costly upfront.
Instead, we thought of a way to apply a slightly incremental change to the user’s digital experience that could provide us with preliminary information as to whether or not the users would be interested in this opportunity. We sent out emails to 100 app users stating that if they paid their rent before the end of the month, we would credit $20 to their accounts.
The test was simple, concise, and succinct enough to give us quick and valuable feedback on our hypothesis, which then could set the app up for a border change to the platform and infrastructure. Over 80% of the app users who received the email opted for the $20 cashback and paid their rent early, determining that if the app were to implement this in a more grand scope, their success would likely be very high. In short, the incentive worked, and it was a quick and low-cost MVP that proved it.
Five Effective Strategies For Testing Your MVP
Now that you understand the importance of a short MVP time to market, we can explore some useful tips that will help you put forth the most successful product for your startup.
1. Properly Formulate A Product Value Proposition
The first and most important tip for any startup looking to test an MVP is to determine the most effective value proposition for your product. In regards to the aforementioned case study, we talked about how the value proposition began — as a 1% rewards incentive for app users. After understanding how the value prop would be most effectively tested — solidifying a quick and concise testing procedure — we came up with an MVP that highlighted only the most necessary measurable metrics.
By determining that the same hypothesis could be discovered by providing 100 users with a $20 incentive as by giving 1% cashback to all users across the platform, we were able to concur that the value proposition for this case study filled a market need.
2. Identify The Vital MVP Features And Avoid Any Extra
You might be noticing a pattern that keeping your MVP simple, clear, and to the point is very important to not only getting the most viable results from testing your MVP but getting you that information quickly. How do you hone in on that particular specificity that will move your MVP to a truly professional level? Start broad and then simplify. Don’t stop until you find the nucleus of the hypothesis that will help you determine the vital features of your product.
Sure the end goal is to have a wide range of features — all the bells and whistles — that give your product the star power to rise above its competitors. But in the MVP, those extra features are unnecessary and could hinder your goals if you left them in when establishing the MVP for your product.
For example, landing pages can be a great MVP when looking for information about a potential product. If a user finds their way to your site because the product is relevant to them, a landing page offers a simple breakdown of the product offers and goals, as well as a sign-up field where the inquirer can add their email to learn more. This can help you determine your target audience without having to invest in a spectrum of functional features. It can also clue you what kinds of buyers are interested in your product and provide information about needs and interests that you didn’t even consider.
Instead of throwing up a landing page that reads “website coming soon” or an overly detailed investigation of your potential product, consider using it as a tool to link the vital features of your product with your target audience. It’s a simple way to collect customer feedback and start a killer email list.
3. Detect The Risks In Your Assumption
There are many typical startup risks, and a lot of those flow down into the process of testing an MVP. Yet these risks are very important to take into consideration because if not, they could negatively impact the outcome of your MVP and cost you time and money. Here are a few that we have highlighted as the most significant risks to consider when testing your MVP:
Users might not recognize a product’s value For example, if you have added a crypto trading option to your product, your users might not recognise the value in the product because they are already committed to third-party platforms like Coinbase and Revolut.
Hard to acquire users If you don’t take into consideration the scope and breadth of your direct competition or inherently the market that you are pushing a product through, it is likely that you might not realise if your target audience is available or hard to acquire. Take, for instance, an app in Europe that helps you find a healthcare provider in your area. But it turns out that most major cities have one of their own, and they have more advanced knowledge and access to the target audience than you do. This means while your idea might be good, you will have an incredibly hard time converting users to your platform. But using these risks to help you determine your hypothesis and strengthen your MVP is the key to unlocking your product’s potential.
Difficult to scale the product When conceptualizing your product, while you want to narrow in on an MVP that uses minimal product but provides maximum learning, the same isn’t so for understanding the scope of your product idea. Suppose you are setting up a moving company, and once your app receives over 100 requests, it cannot handle any more inquiries. In that case, you have a major salability issue that will never allow your product to meet its full potential.
Revenue-generation problem This is a tough risk to understand while you are in the testing phases of your MVP and your startup. All projects of this nature are inherently risky and don’t often produce early financial results that put you in the green. But when you are looking at the cost-benefit analysis and going over P&L statements from the first waves of use of your product, there should be a lot of green flags that point to profit. If your product P&L sees nothing but red, it might be time to reevaluate your goals.
4. Pick The One Risk You’re Most Likely To Face And Work It Out
Pick the one risk that is most likely to align with your MVP and take the time to work through it. Consider it alongside your value proposition and develop a product increment that will take you from hypothesis to MVP in a concise and effective way. Apply the lean approach to ensure you are not over-focusing on unnecessary features and push your MVP into the hands of customers quickly.
As in the renters rewards example, it didn’t make sense to take the time to update the app with a new interface or add extra features. Instead, the test was as simple and quick as setting up an email system, and the highest identified risk was easily mitigated by eliminating the need for extra costs or unavailable users. The results were simple but extremely viable, and the MVP time to market was less than two weeks.
5. Test Product Branding
Testing is awesome and essential! But testing features isn’t the only way to effectively test your product and receive useful information. Branding is becoming increasingly important, as most consumers like to be emotionally tied to a product. That emotional element can often be the determining factor of success against a product’s competitors. If your startup is interested in rebranding or gaining more perspective on how their audience connects with their brand storytelling, using MVP testing is a great way to discover valuable data that can inform new and impactful brand strategies.
When it comes to branding, we want to assess the user-feedback-related risk of a negative perception of the brand. You could easily drive new branding with limited updates to the logo, landing page, and app images, while it is probably best to hold off on any hard investments like merch, billboards, and deck templates until the new strategy is proven.
Two things come into play when determining what types of branding elements to test:
Is it easy to produce/costly?
Is it crucial?
User experience is becoming the number one factor in branding that determines a wide range of benefits for the product. Pay attention to colors, tone of voice, icons, illustrations, and landings — these are 99% of the things your users will see all the time. These are easy to create and are a touchpoint during every client experience. It is safe to say that these key branding elements play a decisive part in your update.
How Best To Test Your MVP: The Bottomline
There is any number of combinations of techniques and strategies that will work best for you and your startup based on the type of MVP you have and the best ways for you to test it. Deciding which ways are best for you, my advice is to start small and grow. It is easier to manage the testing of a hypothesis on a simple email blast or landing page brief than with a whole app features update that affects thousands of users.
You can always grow and scale your MVP strategy as you gain more insight into your product. There will be many chances to apply MVP testing while you make your way through your startup roadmap.
The only thing that matters is that you should approach the MVP test as a way of providing you verifiable insights on whether your final product will have a fair, if not successful, share of the market after it finally launches.
How familiar is this scenario: A team employs modern decision-making methods and performs all design-thinking rituals, but the result remains guesswork. Or this: Soon after having prioritized all features, the key stakeholders change their mind and you have to plan everything again. Both situations have happened to my team and my colleagues quite a few times.
Feature prioritization succeeds or fails because of one tiny thing, and I won’t keep you in suspense until the end of this article to find out. The key factor is selection criteria. But first things first. Let’s see what can go wrong, and then we’ll talk about ways to mitigate those risks.
Flaws of Popular Prioritization Methods
Challenge 1: Non-Experts and Experts Have the Same Voting Power
Product teams strive to make the right trade-offs and marry an infinite number of options with limited resources. Typically, a decision appears as a result of collaborative activities, such as dot voting, the value-versus-feasibility canvas, MoSCoW, the Kano model, etc.
While these techniques were invented by different people, they essentially work the same way: Team members put sticky notes with all feature ideas on a board, and then they shortlist the most promising ones. Either participants rate the ideas with marks or votes or they arrange them along the axes according to how feasible, desirable, or innovative each feature is.
Such a manifestation of democracy works great when you involve experts — people who know the topic inside out or who, as Danish physicist Niels Bohr puts it, “have made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” When everyone on a team is an expert, then the distribution of votes will indicate the best ideas.
But let’s be honest: Workshops often have a flavor of office politics. For example, a workshop might involve high-power stakeholders with low interest in what you are building, or you might have to invite non-essential specialists who lose motivation and affect the work of the whole team. That’s why it becomes so easy to end up with only two or three people in the room who can make informed decisions.
In real life, “popular” doesn’t equal “the best”. And as a facilitator, you’re eager to bring the strongest opinions to light, which becomes problematic when an expert’s voice weighs the same as a non-expert’s.
Challenge 2: People Don’t Decide Rationally by Default
Even if you involve experts, they could represent diverse areas and domains; thus, they’ll make choices differently. Besides, rational thinking is not the default mode, even for knowledgeable and skilled people.
Humans have to cope with many concurrent thinking processes and are exposed to over 180 cognitive biases. The priming effect is an example: What happens to a person right before a workshop will affect their behavior during the workshop. So, how do you ensure that expertise — not personal preference or emotion — drives feature prioritization?
It’s almost impossible to guess the reasoning behind each choice afterwards — unless you somehow support rational thinking in advance.
Business is not all fun and games: Teams have to make hard decisions based on data and leave their whims, tastes, and prejudices at the door. As a facilitator, you certainly don’t want to make a business decision based on what stakeholders like or how they feel at the moment, do you? But in many exercises, “I love this idea” turns out to be no less trusted than “This will help our company grow.”
Challenge 3: Measurement Units Are Open to Interpretation
Another trap in prioritization activities is the measurement system, such as:
numeric marks (from 1 to 5, the Fibonacci scale, etc.);
symbols (dots, stars, smileys, etc.);
metaphors (for example, pebble, rock, boulder);
t-shirt sizing (S, M, L, XL);
the position of an item on the horizontal or vertical axis of a canvas.
Getting a certain number of votes or special measurement units is intended to balance opinions during a prioritization exercise. But they don’t take into account how differently people perceive reality, not to mention cultural differences on global teams. An aspect that is critical to one person might be insignificant to another.
For example, if I hear “good” instead of “awesome” or “fantastic” from a US client, I know I’m in trouble. It means they aren’t quite satisfied. But “good” is a common expression of praise in Europe. The same goes for votes: An S-size task will mean one thing to an in-house senior back-end developer and another thing to a marketing consultant.
Moreover, many people are now Design Thinking-savvy and Agile-savvy and can subconsciously manipulate votes or intentionally exploit the vagueness of a measurement system to push their own ideas.
If an argument between team members gets out of hand, you’ll spend a lot of time in vain and won’t reach consensus on time. Or worse, the debate will end up in forced agreement of the idea advocated by the most influential stakeholder in the room. So, how can we handle prioritization better?
Overcoming Prioritization Bias
Method 1: Annotated Marks
In one of my projects, we were designing a complex solution that involved technology, business processes, and the expertise of hundreds of people worldwide. Therefore, we couldn’t narrowly define the expected value of features (like user satisfaction or usability) because it wasn’t solely about end users or interfaces.
Our team identified five stakeholder types who would benefit from the solution, and we came up with a descriptive scale to evaluate features. It took into account both stakeholder coverage and the significance of tasks that the solution could potentially help them with.
Of course, we could have used a simple scale of 1 to 5, where 1 represented the lowest value and 5 the highest. But it wouldn’t have given us clarity on what each feature’s value means in reality. Besides, evaluating items in a vacuum is always challenging. “Low” related to what? “Medium” compared to what? Such questions will undoubtedly arise.
Another example from the same project: an effort estimation scale. Again, we decided to add real-life descriptions. Instead of the abstract “low”, “medium”, and “high”, we gave marks according to how much workforce and money should be involved in the feature’s implementation. We knew that the factor that would largely determine the level of effort required was whether we could do it ourselves or do it only together with a third party.
As a result, numbers gained meaning.
Later, we created a nerdy table that combined multiple characteristics. This helped us to check whether a feature had well-balanced feasibility, desirability, and profitability — simply put, whether it could be done, would be desired by customers, and would make money for the business.
Depending on your project, the criteria can vary. One project might call for you to evaluate revenue potential and implementation effort, whereas in another you might have to focus heavily on ease of adoption, expected deployment effort, and estimated cost of maintenance. In any case, the method remains the same: First, define essential criteria, then build a meaningful scale, and, finally, evaluate.
How to build such a scale? Start from the extremes — the minimal and maximal marks. What does 1 (or 0) mean? What does 5, 10, or whatever the maximum is mean?
When the minimal and maximal marks are defined (1 and 5 in the example above), you can write a description for the middle mark (3) and then for the remaining marks (2 and 4). Such an approach helps to maintain more or less equal increments between the mark definitions.
In a Nutshell
Method Add real-life descriptions to abstract numeric marks.
Strengths Clarity in selection criteria makes for easier agreement, less subjectivity, and less time spent on discussions.
Limitations Developing a meaningful scale needs time; such a scale is contextual and might not be reused for another project.
Method 2: Descriptive Canvas
This technique is a logical continuation of the previous one but adapted for use on a canvas. Unlike ranking in a table, a canvas offers more flexible representation and more distinct winners. However, with vague criteria, you run the risk of destroying the whole exercise.
The main problem with low-to-high scales is their categorical nature. No author of an idea will ever admit it is of low value. They’ll stand their ground persuading team members to put the sticky note anywhere but in the “low-low” zone. Alternatively, you might discover that all of the “outsider” ideas just belong to less powerful stakeholders.
Minimize subjectivity by using concrete descriptions, which participants can match with what they’ve experienced in previous projects. “Difficult” could mean anything, but “Needs external expertise and resources” gives a better impression of the difficulty. The same goes for the expected value: “Solves a proven critical pain” serves as a filter that won’t let people push forward ideas not backed up by any evidence — be it user research, customer support tickets, or market analysis.
This method streamlines prioritization but at the cost of some time spent on preparing the scale, particularly on formulating concise section names.
When you work with such a canvas, beware of traffic-light color-coding. It might be a decent choice for the final output presentation, but in the workshop, it will increase bias and make people unwilling to let their votes end up in the red area.
In a Nutshell
Method Add real-life descriptions to the axes of a canvas.
Strengths Clarity in mapping criteria makes for easier agreement, less subjectivity, and less time spent on discussions.
Limitations The canvas works best with three sections on each axis; scales are contextual and might not be reused in another project.
Method 3: Diversified Votes
Voting is a quick-and-dirty way to reach consensus. With anonymity, all votes are accepted and have equal weight. Voting empowers humble stakeholders and lowers hierarchical barriers. However, it also obscures the reason behind each individual choice. And the biggest challenge is that participants need to somehow weigh all possible criteria at once and choose quickly (and, hopefully, wisely).
I’ve included classic dot voting in many planning sessions with clients, and often it yielded decisions that we would completely change later. Naturally, I wanted to avoid double work. So, during one of the sessions, we tried an enhanced version and assigned specific colors to people with different expertise — green for the “keepers” of the customer’s voice, blue for people with financial thinking, and red for technical specialists who can evaluate feasibility.
First of all, this approach gave us a sense of what people might have thought about while making a choice. Secondly, we narrowed down the list of feature winners. Only a few sticky notes gained votes from all three colors and were recognized as profitable, feasible, and valuable to customers simultaneously.
This approach enabled us to focus on the best features and not be distracted by one-sidedly promising items. With classic voting, we usually had five to seven finalists. And diversified voting revealed only two or three top ideas that matched all of the criteria.
In a Nutshell
Idea Give people with different expertise dots of different colors.
Strengths It narrows down the number of final ideas; it takes into account both the number of votes and the balance of various benefits; and it remains a quick and simple exercise.
Limitations It still doesn’t fully eliminate subjectivity.
One More Thing: Language!
There is one utterance that can ruin prioritization: “Vote for the features you like the most”, or a variation, “Now choose your favorite ideas.” These words open the gates of the Hell of Subjectivity, and they grant your team an official invitation to fantasize and speculate.
Not Recommended
“Stick the dots on the features you like the most.”
“Now, please vote for the best features.”
“Choose the most valuable features and vote for them.”
“What are your favorite ideas on the whiteboard?”
Instead of giving these unhelpful instructions, put people in a rational mood and help them listen to their inner voice of reason.
Recommended
“Based on your knowledge and on precedents from your practice, which of the feature ideas would pay off the soonest?”
“Please recall a recent development project — specifically, how long it took and what slowed or blocked the work. Now, which of the feature ideas on the board would be easiest to implement?”
“In a minute, we’ll vote on the expected value for customers. Let’s recall what they complained about in support tickets, what they requested in interviews, and what they used the most according to our analytics. So, which of the features presented on the whiteboard address the most critical needs?”
“Recall your conversations with end users and recent user-research results. Which features address their most acute pains?”
Summary and Miro Templates
Subjectivity is a part of human nature. We inevitably make emotional decisions, but there are ways to make a choice a little less biased. Facilitators have no control over what is happening in experts’ minds, but we can try to put team members in the right decision-making mood. I recommend two fundamental things to streamline decision-making:
Announce, repeat, and embed meaningful selection or voting criteria into your decision-making process.
Push people to think about their relevant professional experience and data from prior research, rather than their own preference.
Teleroute, a provider of freight exchanges in Europe, in its objective to continue responding to the needs of its growing number of customers, launched two major improvements to its current offering: an advanced API interface and a new version of its mobile application. Both are focused on closing a transport deal and finding new business partners more efficiently.
Pelican AI, a global provider of AI-powered payments and financial crime compliance solutions for banks and corporates, has announced that the Pelican API Interoperability Hub now offers open API connections to 2,187 banks across Europe.
Is looking for the best WordPress hosting in Europe any different from looking for the best WordPress hosting overall? Let’s find out. Luckily, there are numerous WordPress hosting providers that boast European data centers, and other top features that will enable you to seamlessly run your WordPress website within Europe.
As a European, I regularly hear debates and discussions on cloud sovereignty, that having a European competitor to AWS would be essential. What if the real problem was, in fact, simply a legal one?
Consider a European cloud provider for data sovereignty
I'm sitting in my friend's living room. He's sitting cross-legged in white linen pants, with his hands casually placed on his knees, nodding gently. His guests are part of a fairly successful pop band, and they're recounting their adventures from their latest tour around Europe and Asia in a sailboat, magic tiny-home-schoolbus, or some hip mode of transportation. I noticed the only quiet guy there. The only thing I know about him is that he's supposed to be a music production wizard. He's typing away furiously, concentrated on his screen. I ask him what he's doing, and he gently replies, "I'm creating a Python script to execute an automated bitcoin trading strategy." I have no idea whether his bot yielded a good return or whether he even finished it. However, actually hearing that string of buzzwords out loud and watching those words casually leave his lips left an impression on me — I too must play that game one day. Well, here I am.
InfluxDB as a Learning Tool to Develop a Trading Strategy
I stumbled across Alpaca, the commission-free REST API stock brokerage. It's pretty cool. You have the option of paper trading or live trading. Plus, the documentation comes with example algorithms and instructions for how to deploy on Heroku so you can actually implement your trading commission free.
DevSecOps is the principle that all technology teams have accountability for cybersecurity in an organization—ownership is not solely at the door of the security professionals and teams. The idea that cybersecurity is everyone’s job has come about partly because cybersecurity skills are constrained—within the market as a whole and within an organization specifically. A recent report from (ISC)2 claims there is a global cybersecurity staffing shortage of three million and that this is increasing. This is certainly my own experience with the organizations I work with in Europe and the Middle East.
I had the opportunity to attend Percona Live in Austin, Texas between May 28 and May 30 along with more than 700 attendees. This was at least the 20th Percona Live event over the past 10+ years held in the U.S. and Europe. Percona Live 2019 Europe will be in Amsterdam September 30 to October 2.
Spread The Love! Inspiring Wallpapers For February 2019
Spread The Love! Inspiring Wallpapers For February 2019
Cosima Mielke
As designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration, and, well, sometimes the best inspiration lies right in front of us. With that in mind, we embarked on our wallpapers creativity mission more than nine years ago. The idea: to provide you with unique and inspiring desktop wallpapers each month anew. Wallpapers created by the community for the community.
We are very thankful to all artists and designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing to this challenge, who tickle their creativity to keep the steady stream of wallpapers flowing. This post features their artworks for February 2019. All wallpapers come in two versions — with and without a calendar — and can be downloaded for free. At the end of this post, we also collected some wallpaper favorites from past February editions for you. After all, some things are just too good to be forgotten, right?
Please note that:
All images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper,
You can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our Desktop Wallpaper Calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?
“February is a month focused on romance and as a southerner, I can’t think of a more romantic way to spend a day than strolling the historic moss-draped streets of Savannah, GA. Spending time sitting on a bench on one of the many beautiful squares, holding hands and people watching as you sip a cappuccino.” — Designed by Heather Ozee Designs from the United States.
“We’re celebrating Valentine’s Day with our February wallpaper. Whatever Valentine’s Day means to you we’re on board, love, relationships or the best of friends. It’s something to be celebrated!” — Designed by Focus from the United Kingdom.
“Frosts in Russia are very severe. Walking through the Park, I found these branches at the top and decided to capture the moment.” — Designed by Nikolay Belikov from Russia.
“We all feel it, even if we cannot define it. But, who needs a definition anyway? When you sense it in your gut and feel like standing on the top of the world. Happy. From the bottom of your heart. ‘Where there is love, there is life,’ said Mahatma Gandhi. And we couldn't agree more. May the love be with you. Always.” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.
“As it’s February, we just thought of celebrating Valentine month. Let the love between nature and human being prosper. These days we are forgetting to take care of our nature. So it’s a kind of gentle reminder for all of us.” — Designed by Sweans Technologies from London.
“Always good to have an umbrella, on rainy or sunny days! On the 10th of February we celebrate the umbrellas.” — Designed by Melissa Bogemans from Belgium.
“I want to emphasize February 14th because it’s Valentine’s Day. I thought it would be fun to use two cats that are in love watching the sunset in the park. I have tried to use as many warm and loving colors as possible, such as red, rose, orange and purple.” — Designed by Vince Teckmans from Belgium.
“Music is an important element in our everyday lives. It connects people all over the world, regardless of culture, religion etc.” — Designed by Ilke Cauwenbergh from Belgium.
No matter if it’s a brave icebreaker that confronts even the most adverse weather conditions, a piece of design wisdom, or a pun — a lot of things have inspired our artists to design a February wallpaper in the past few years. Below you’ll find a little best-of. Please note that these wallpapers don’t come with a calendar.
“I was doodling pictures of my cat one day and decided I could turn it into a fun wallpaper – because a cold, winter night in February is the perfect time for staying in and cuddling with your cat, your significant other, or both!” — Designed by Angelia DiAntonio from Ohio, USA.
“This minimalistic love logo is designed from geometric shapes, where the heart represents the letter ‘O’ and love. The anchor represents the letter ‘V’ very delicately and stylish and it symbolizes your wanderlust. The anchor is a symbol of adventure and travels.” — Designed by Antun Hirsman from Croatia.
“Danube is Europe’s second largest river, connecting 10 different countries. In these cold days, when ice paralyzes rivers and closes waterways, a small but brave icebreaker called Greben (Serbian word for ‘reef’) seems stronger than winter. It cuts through the ice on Đerdap gorge (Iron Gate) – the longest and biggest gorge in Europe – thus helping the production of electricity in the power plant. This is our way to give thanks to Greben!” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.
“I live in Madison, WI USA, which is famous for its breweries. Wisconsin even named their baseball team “The Brewers.” If you like beer, brats, and lots of cheese, it’s the place for you!” — Designed by Danny Gugger from the United States.
“Although I love winter (mostly because of the fun winter sports), there are other great activities ahead. February, the last winter month, this year is even one day longer. But I don’t mind. Thanks, winter, and see you next year!” — Designed by Igor Izhik from Canada.
“The simplicity seen in the work of Dieter Rams which has ensured his designs from the 50s and 60s still hold a strong appeal.” — Designed by Vinu Chaitanya from India.
“I am a true believer that out there in this world there is another person who is just like us, the problem is to find her/him.” — Designed by Maria Keller from Mexico.
“My inspiration came mostly from ‘The Greay from’. It’s about a dog and an astronaut exploring a strange new world.” — Designed by Lars Pauwels from Belgium.
Please note that we respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. This is why we give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works. This is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves.
Thank you to all designers for their participation. Join in next month!
Countries across Europe have been seeking more tax revenue from US tech companies such as Google and Apple. Google and Apple have so far agreed to pay several hundred million dollars to the UK and Italy, with more such agreements likely to follow. Now, Russia is trying to get in on the action….
) – without draining your bank account, or losing your sanity.
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