Introduction

Imagine you are in front of a fintech of online payment, like Paypal (or in Latin America: Mercado Pago), probable you face the issue of helping your customers with the integration of your product. In this article, we’ll give you a summary of what you need to succeed on this tricky task.

I based this article on my experience working on the team of TodoPago and Decidir and doing integrations with Payu, MercadoPago, and Ingenico.

What do I need?

First of all, you need an API. If you have not got this, you should start designing it, after having a first productive version you can continue with the next steps.

The next step is to have a team that takes care of your customers and their integrations of them. Don’t forget to have a team helping you with the API.

What‘ll the Integration Team do?

They should develop plugins for several e-commerce platforms, like Magento, Prestashop, Woocommerce, Vitex, Shopify, and TiendaNube (in Latin America) among others. Those plugins help a lot of your customers save time, money, and effort because they‘ll don’t need to develop an integration from scratch, they‘ll use your plugins. That’ll give you more users!

The Integration Team can help you as well to develop SDKs, there are libraries that you can use on your plugins and you can offer them to your users as well, with this you‘ll help them to integrate to your product easily.

Support

You need a support team for the integrations, plugins, and SDKs, to help your users to solve common problems with this technology. You can give this task to the Integration Team or add some people for the support of general and common issues.

How to maintain the quality and so few issues?

You do make tests (at least integration tests if you have a few resources).

How to improve?

You can add SDKs for more technologies, and more CMSs plugins.

If you add good documentation of your API, SDKs, and plugins you’ll help a lot of your developers and your customer’s programmers.

I’m watching again “Into the Wild” (2007). The first time I did it by recommendation from Carlos Blanco (a Spanish entrepreneur).

I’m in those situations in which my mindset changed after the first time I watched it. So, my opinion about the movie is 100% different. Now I know I’m watching social engineer stuff: the main character is a guy who hates society and the movie message is: “Civilization is bad, your family is bad, don’t trust in them”.

So… Who should be trusted?

Hey! Do you figure out that you can’t do more tasks? Are you thinking of taking more customers/projects but you can’t because you are full of work? Do you need to fix some issues that you don’t know how to do it?

Check out this article, it was created with a person like you in mind.

Common issues

When you don’t delegate the tasks in a proper way you usually have a lot of issues: tasks done in a way that you didn’t want, poor quality, incomplete projects, ghost contractors, unnecessary costs, etc.

Let’s check out the first one: tasks are done in a different way than you want. It’s really common that the contractors do the task in their way because they are people and they like to do whatever they want, in the deep of their souls they hate receiving orders from another person. Because of that, you need to explain really well the task, if you can give some examples of a correct work and an incorrect one it can help a lot. But the common issue occurs when you think that you give “the best explanation in the whole world” and they fail. This is not your fault, it is more common than you think. Use this bad experience to teach, use this mistake as an example for that contractor or for the next.

A mistake is not a total failure without a solution. Everything has a solution. If a contractor fails, it’s an opportunity to learn, not to get mad or angry.

Common mistakes

The most common mistake is to think that the contractor makes mistakes on purpose. Most professionals want to do the job in the best way, they want to be productive and make you happy with their job, and they want to have a good experience.

You need to have this mindset. With this, you will have really good solutions to help them to do the best job.

Another common mistake is to “fire” or “change” the contractor. If you change a person that really can do the job and he did a lot of mistakes, he is a professional with a lot of experience in your project, so if you fire him you will lose that knowledge, that is learning. If you fire a person you should be 100% sure the person is the problem and he has not got any solution, and you have tried everything you can.

Common solutions

Save photos, videos, or whatever you have about the contractor’s work, to have documentation about common mistakes, and create from the first moment a simple “manual” of the position. Just add their examples and an introduction to the job. It can help a lot with the new ones.

Give a mission: when fair soldiers don’t have any communication with their leaders, they need to act fast, without errors, without asking their mates, so the General give them a general instruction (eg: “check out if there are spies in that hill” or “rescue all the kids from that school full of terrorists”), with this the General forget about having hundreds of questions from their soldiers and they don’t get stuck when they have a “surprise” or something unplanned.

The correct Mindset

I told you before is that a correct mindset is to think that they want to do a good job. You can add this: you should be a teacher and be “the king of the patience” because you will need it.

Dealing with people could be really stressful, and you should be prepared, so, you need to “save energy” and don’t waste 100% of it on another task.

Conclusion

Tasks delegation is really a psychological task: you need tons of patience and teaching skills. It can be really frustrating at the beginning, but these are the first steps to having a successful project.

How to deal with contractors?

It is really common to deal with contractors in all the different companies in which you’ll work.

Today I want to talk about a specific case. I didn’t think of a name for it, but we can call it “those 2 contractors never will get along well”. I like to talk about this during professional situations, but it can take place during other moments of your life (eg: friendship).

Hey Marcos! What are you talking about? Are you crazy?

Are you saying that 2 contractors can’t be team players? Can’t I have a team with 2 contractors? Our teams are dead?

No, no, no! You didn’t finish reading the article! Please don’t come up with imaginary conclusions.

Then, Marcos, when I shouldn’t introduce 2 contractors?

In my experience I came about with the following situations in which 2 contractors won’t work in a real team:

-When both do the same task in different companies that are competitors because they‘ll try to “sell” more services to you (the client)

-When you have a contractor and you hire another one to take its place and the first one doesn’t want to be replaced

-When both have got the same personality

-When one of them has got a conflicting interest

-When the position needs an individual attitude and the workflow can’t be split into two parts

Why I shouldn’t follow up on the trends?

Working in a profession that is the last trend in the market could sound fantastic: everybody looks up to you and your friends ask around about how is been the new “master of the universe”.

But choosing your career is a very important decision. You need to think in long term and working in the last trend only can be a good choice if you do it in a short term.

My point is that when the trend picks up another career and the market removes all the companies that work on that, your job will die out.

But if the trend created a new industry maybe it will not disappear, probably you will have thousands or maybe millions of people competing with you and what is it means? Over offer.

How can I outlive in an industry that has much more competitors than before?

Perhaps you started out your career a lot of time ago and today it turns into a trend. There are a few tips to be competitive:

-Don’t bid the same value purpose as everybody, try to differentiate (eg: your experience, specialization in technology, or an industry)

-Don’t be a commodity: when you started to feel that you are selling cheap services, it is time to apply the previous tip

-You can create your own company: having your own business gives you a lot more flexibility and you can pass out to another industry when you feel that the first one is not more profitable.

-Turns yourself into a consultor: if you have got a lot of experience in an industry, a product, or a technology you can start giving out advice to other people, or companies.

What do I need to know if I haven’t chosen my career?

Try to don’t pick up a mature industry, it is full of competitors with experience and all the customers will choose them because they have got tens of years in the market.

This doesn’t count if you have got a disruptive idea to reinvent the market, I mean, if you apply the technique of the “blue ocean”, don’t listen to me. But recall that if you will move into the “red ocean” you will not have real success.

The other good possibility is to start in a new industry that has got a few developments.

Conclusion

Following up the trend could be a good idea if you have got strategic thinking that it will have over demand of companies. But you have in mind that if you don’t do it, you will be using a long-term strategy in a short-term career.

Personal investments are a difficult subject full of myths and disinformation. In this article, we will figure the difficult subjects out and explain them in easy words.

How to start?

First, you need to be educated. Choose some easy books from the library and learn about the different markets: stocks, bonds, cryptocurrencies, commodities, etc.

Don’t start with the difficult subjects. First, choose one with a general explanation about investments. Try to understand the general aspects before having a deep knowledge of a specific market.

What market should I choose?

You need to choose a market to invest in. Your choice depends on the type of investor that you are. If you are a conservative one you can choose commodities or bonds, otherwise, if you are a risky person you can choose cryptocurrencies.

I can choose more of one? Yes, and it is a recommendation. For example, if you are a conservative one, you can ponderate your risky investments at 10% or 5% of all your capital in a risky market (for example stocks or cryptocurrencies), and put 90% in a conservative one (eg. bonds).

Psychological part

You need to relax and enjoy your investment. It is not a good deal if you are nervous or anxious about your winning and losses. Therefore is important: the ponderings that you use for risky trades and use them to be exposed to the risk in a proportion that you feel comfortable.