Business Model Alchemist Business Model Alchemist Blog Business Model Alchemist January 29, 2014. Eliminate any of the elements of the Business Model Canvas and you lose. A nice, free online tool for Business Model Generation :-) build your own business model canvas online. Build your own Business Model Canvas online. Lean Canvas Lean Academy Blog Create Free Account Sign In Spend More Time Building Versus Planning. Business Model Alchemist. Ultimately, customers are the only relevant judges of your business model. However, even before you test your model in the market, you can assess its design with 7 questions that go well beyond the conventional focus on products and market segments. First things first. In order to assess your business model you should sketch it out on the Business Model Canvas outlined in the video below. If you want to know more about the Canvas and how to use it you can read Business Model Generation of which 7. Assessing the basics. Every business model has a product and/or service at its center that focuses on a customer. I call this the Value Proposition. So before even turning to your business model as a whole, you need to ask yourself some basic questions related to your Value Proposition and the Customer Segments that you are targeting. For example, if a user of a search engine is trying to find and purchase the latest Nike running shoe, the measure of success will be how well the search engine helps the user get this job done. This will give you the market size.
However, even the greatest products are having an increasingly hard time to achieve a long- term competitive advantage. That is the reason why you need to shift your focus away from a pure product/market segment oriented approach towards a more holistic business model approach. Below are eight questions to assess your business model design. Rank your business model. How much do switching costs prevent your customers from churning? The time, effort, or budget a customer has to spend to switch from one product or service provider to another is called . The higher the switching costs, the likelier a customer is to stick to one provider rather than to leave for the products or services of a competitor. A great example of designing switching costs into a business model is Apple. Do you remember how Steve Jobs heralded his new product with the catchphrase ? Well, that was more than a product innovation focusing on storage. It was a business model strategy to get customers to copy all their music into i. Tunes and their i. Pod, which would make it more difficult for them to switch to competing digital music players. In a time when little more than brand preferences were preventing people from switching from one player to another this was a smart move and laid the foundation for Apple. How scalable is your business model? Scalability describes how easy it is to expand a business model without equally increasing its cost base. Of course software- and Web- based business models are naturally more scalable than those based on bricks and mortar, but even among digital business models there are large differences. An impressive example of scalability is Facebook. With only a couple of thousand of engineers they create value for hundreds of millions of users. Only few other companies in the world have such a ratio of users per employee. A company that has pushed the limits even further is the social gaming company Zynga. By building games like Farmville or Cityville on the back Facebook, the world. Their customer relationship collapsed under the weight of large numbers, when they were signing up ten thousands of users per day. They quickly had to adapt their business model to become more scalable. Does your business model produce recurring revenues? Recurring revenues are best explained through a simple example. When a newspaper earns revenues from the sales at a newsstand they are transactional, while revenues from a subscription are recurring. Firstly, the costs of sales incur only once for repetitive revenues. Secondly, with recurring revenues you have a better idea of how much you will earn in the future. A nice example of recurring revenues is Redhat, which provides open source software and support to enterprises based on a continuous subscription basis. In this model clients don. In the world of Software as a Service (Saas) these types of subscriptions are now the norm. This contrasts with Microsoft, which sells most of its software in the form of licenses for every major release. However, there is another aspect to recurring revenues, which are additional revenues generated from an initial sales. For example, when you buy a printer, you continue to spend on cartridges, or when you buy a game console, you. Or have a look at Apple. While they still earn most of their revenues from hardware sales, the recurring revenues from content and apps is steadily growing. Do you earn before you spend? This one goes without saying. The more you can earn before spending, the better. Dell pioneered this model in the computer hardware manufacturing industry. By assembling on order after selling directly they managed to escape the terrible inventory depreciation costs of the hardware industry. Results showed how powerful it is to earn before spending. How much do you get others to do the work? This is probably one of the least publicized weapons of mass destruction in business model design. What could be more powerful than getting others to do the work while you earn the money? In the bricks and mortar world IKEA gets us to assemble the furniture we buy from them. On the web Facebook gets us to post photos, create and participate in conversations, and . They earn the sky- high valuations of their shares. Previously mentioned Redhat crafted another smart business model based on other people. Their entire business model is built on top of software developed by the open source software development community. This allowed them to substantially reduce their development costs and compete head- on with larger companies like Microsoft. A more malicious business model in which others do the work is the one practiced by so- called patent trolls. In this model patents are purchased with the sole intention of suing successful companies to extract payments from them. Does your business model provide built- in protection from competition? A great business model can provide you with a longer- term protection from competition than just a great product. Apple. Is your business model based on a game changing cost structure? Cutting costs is a long practiced sport in business. Some business models, however, go beyond cost cutting by creating value based on a totally different cost structure. Skype, for example, provides calls and communication almost like a conventional telecom company, but for free or for a very low cost. They can do this because their business model has a very different cost structure. By buying in network capacity on a variable cost basis from a consortium around network equipment manufacturer Ericsson and IBM, they can now offer among the lowest prices for mobile telephony globally. Redhat, which was mentioned previously, also built its business model on a game changing cost structure: by smartly building its own model on top of other people. Some might even succeed in the market without scoring well at all. However, by asking yourself these questions and by scoring well on at least some of them you are very likely to substantially increase the long- term competitive advantage of your business. Now all you need to do is test your business model with the real judge: the market. The best way to do that is by turning to Steve Blank's Customer Development process, which fits perfectly with the Business Model Canvas. Some more info on my workshops, speaking, and projects. PS: I will be running a series of workshops you might be interested in. Sign- up or pre- sign- up here. In Paris (French: Sept 2. Boston (Oct 2. 7/2. Munich (German: Nov 2. PS2: These days are your last chance to get your name into a book project that I'm involved in: Business Model You. Check it out here. PS3: I wrote this post as a guest post for the Business of Software conference where I'll be speaking in October. Business Model Fiddle.
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