During my career – including the past 3 years focused on startups – I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting over 300 startups, as well as hearing presentations from many more. And I never cease to be impressed by the innovative ideas out there. But, there is one challenge that very few address: monetization.
As a rough estimate, I’d say that 99% of all monetization models I saw so far are not innovative at all. In the contrary they are all very ‘1.0’ – such as licensing modes, freemium/premium or depending on subscriptions, and advertising.
Luckily I also talk to the 1% and there is great upside potential for the startups who extend their innovation to monetization. I’m not going to give away the brilliant innovative ideas of the guys and girls but here’s one example: the traffic to your product or service might make interesting business intelligence for other companies to make a heatmap of usage of products, services, interest, etc. (and no, not selling your user database of course!). I could tell you about others, but I don’t want to give away other people’s secrets!
I hope you get what I’m trying to say here and I challenge you to go and think out of the box on monetization of your new business and try to find innovative ways to get that revenue coming in. For example, take your kids for a walk, start brainstorming with them. . Or invite a bunch of creative friends, give them a few beers and pick their brains. I’m pretty sure you’ll get great ideas and directions you never thought of before that might actually work!
During my career – including the past 3 years focused on startups – I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting over 300 startups, as well as hearing presentations from many more. And I never cease to be impressed by the innovative ideas out there. But, there is one challenge that very few address: monetization.
As a rough estimate, I’d say that 99% of all monetization models I saw so far are not innovative at all. In the contrary they are all very ‘1.0’ – such as licensing modes, freemium/premium or depending on subscriptions, and advertising.
Luckily I also talk to the 1% and there is great upside potential for the startups who extend their innovation to monetization. I’m not going to give away the brilliant innovative ideas of the guys and girls but here’s one example: the traffic to your product or service might make interesting business intelligence for other companies to make a heatmap of usage of products, services, interest, etc. (and no, not selling your user database of course!). I could tell you about others, but I don’t want to give away other people’s secrets!
I hope you get what I’m trying to say here and I challenge you to go and think out of the box on monetization of your new business and try to find innovative ways to get that revenue coming in. For example, take your kids for a walk, start brainstorming with them. . Or invite a bunch of creative friends, give them a few beers and pick their brains. I’m pretty sure you’ll get great ideas and directions you never thought of before that might actually work!
Thoughts? Feedback? Bring it on!
–mark