Looking for an expert in importing products into Canada and knowing the various regulations and certifications needed for those products. Any takers?

Hello Aidan. I was recently featured on a panel at General Assembly for an audience looking to make a career shift towards product management. In 2014 I moved from a marketing / user engagement role at a software startup to product management. The transition is still fresh in my mind. Based on the experience on your LinkedIn profile, it seems like you would be well-equipped to make the switch. You have a technical background, experience with generating team outcomes and strategic direction. I think the challenge you face is not whether you have the right skills and resources, but rather how you would like to apply them. Product management is broad and so is your choice of employers. It would be great to jump on a call to get a better context of your situation so I can give you specific tips on how to put your best foot forward.

It depends on a lot of things. This is a pretty broad question with lots of pieces. Rob Walling has a great course on Udemy on The Startup's Guide to Virtual Assistants. The course costs $99 and it's more focused on VA work than straight dev / coding but it touches on both. I took it and it was worth every penny. https://www.udemy.com/startups-guide-hiring-virtual-assistant-va/

Your skills would be most useful if you were starting your own startup and needed to make an early prototype to show to investors or potential cofounder developers. Your experience in debugging, testing, and agile, could help you get a job as a product manager, and the fact that you have a background in some sort of 'coding' will help too. It's very unlikely that it would help you get an actual dev job though, since you wouldn't be able to translate your programs into actual code that could be taken over/continued by other devs. Even if the programs you mentioned do allow you to export as code, it's unlikely that it would be exported in a way that's very usable by other devs.

Don't Outsource. Period. While there are big drawbacks with outsourcing related to building internal expertise the real reason I would never outsource at your stage is the need for speed and flexibility. Per your description, you are an early stage start-up with a MVP that is gathering data. Congratulations as that is a big accomplishment! However, you inevitably have a ton to learn about what your prospective customers need most and what customers deserve your attention most. The means you will be tweaking your product constantly for the foreseeable future and having to submit ideas to an outsourced team, make sure they understand what you want, wait for the new feature to be scheduled, etc is just too slow and too expensive. You should have your developers literally sitting next to you and (if you have one besides yourself) your product person so you can quickly and constantly share information. Good luck! You are in for a fun ride...

I've used a ton of different plugins and services to create and sell online courses, and here's the best combination I've found: WordPress + Gumroad + ProductPress 1. WordPress: You'll use WordPress to host your course content. I typically put each lesson in a new Page. 2. Gumroad: Use Gumroad to sell your course, handle payments, and to communicate with your customers. 3. ProductPress: the ProductPress plugin will allow you to connect your WordPress site and Gumroad account together. As soon as someone buys your course on Gumroad, they'll automatically be emailed login information for your WordPress site. It's only $39 (one-time fee). More information here: http://productpress.me