Consumer goods

SHARE

A Dutch farmer took a different approach for selling his vegetables with his concept EtenPerMeter.nl (Dutch) (English). He tries to sell his commodities (because that is what potatoes are) as an experience. You as a consumer come over the farmer and for one day you may feel what it’s like to dig in the mud, looking for your potatoes and onions. At least that is the positive feeling he tries to sell. Back to nature! You then pay for your vegetables per meter you’ve worked. (€ 0,75/mtr). Since you do all the work, you pay significantly less than in a normal store.
Although the transaction here is rather straight forward, the approach is quite innovative. In a normal situation where commodities are being sold as an experience it is by creating an exceptional good service around it. Think of selling coffee in such a pleasant environment as Starbucks. The creating of such a warm atmosphere with all the branding and so on, is more expensive for a company. To earn back all this efforts, Starbucks asks significantly more for his coffee. And if you do it right you can ask even more what leads to large profits margins. This Dutch farmer did manage to take away a service and sell that as an experience. He enlarged his profit margins, not by first making more costs, but by cutting down on labor expenses. As for now, Etenpermeter seems to be a big success.

Internet & media

SHARE

Quirky, the social product development community, has a very intriguing multi-level business model that shows other web 2.0 projects that money making from day one is possible. Product developers all over the world can submit their ideas to the Quirky platform. Since the posting of these ideas will cost a designer 99 dollar, a first qualitative filtering will be made upfront. The Quirky team itself makes the final selection of which product idea will be produced and sold on the website but they make use the inputs of their online community to support their decision. These users give design advice on the product idea, the brand name, packaging and so on and will receive a small percentage of the 30% profit generated by that specific product idea. Of course also the actual designer of the product will get a share of this profit once the product has made actual sales. To lower the risk, Quirky will only start to produce and sell a product in their webshop once 500 people made a pre-sale of it. If the product idea never reaches this level, the designer will at least receive the marketing data gained of the platform. 99 dollar for these brief insights is still a fair price. Next to the submission fees of all the designers Quirky will gain of course a lot of money out of their webshop , once it will be running at full force. Quirky floats on top of several trends and manages to offer value for all the stakeholders involved. Design influencers win, product designers win and so does Quirky. Where other crowdsourcing plaftorms struggle to find a good balance between trading social currency (influence, exposure, reputation,…) next the ‘normal’ currency (dollars), it seems Quirky got it right. Selling user generated content is not new but this unique approach seems to have enough potential to grow large. Although this sounds promising, Quirky should be aware not to burn their money too fast since they are giving away a few dollars to those who talk about them(*) and to those who fill in a small survey. They do need of course a large community to gain momentum but the investment in new members by offering them 20 dollar (**) is maybe not that sustainable.

(*) Since we’re testing out the service as well, the quirky link in this article has a ‘referral’-identifier attached to it.
(**) You first need to submit a 1 minute survey

Consumer goods

SHARE

“What would make your Starbucks experience perfect?” On MyStarbucksIdea.com people can post their ideas and see how Starbucks puts those ideas to work. Ideas range from Birthday drinks, a punch card system, locally baked goods to Coffee ice cubes. On top of being a simple Suggestion Box 2.0, the community can vote to select the best ideas. Or as the company puts it: “Together, we will shape the future of Starbucks.”

Corporate crowdsourcing of product and service ideas is not unique, as Dell’s IdeaStorm, Innovate with Kraft and a list of other examples illustrate. While My Starbucks Idea is fully company branded (powered by the Force.com platform of Salesforce), other companies opt for a specific idea challenge on intermediary platforms like Fellowforce.com, Atizo, IdeaConnection, InnovationExchange, or IdeaMagnet. In contrast to challenges on those platforms, My Starbucks Idea does not reward customers for their ideas. Apparently the experience Starbucks offers its customers is strong enough for people to want to contribute by offering free product ideas. Underlining again the importance for companies to create unique experiences, it sparks the question whether it will be sustainable to ask for free advice. Would you be able to gather free contribution and involvement from your customers?

Internet & media

SHARE

Get paid to tweet! Yesterday Super Chirp was launched as a tool for twitter users to get paid for their content stream. The application allows twitter users to send direct messages to people who pay to subscribe. Adding new vocabulary, a ‘chirp’ is a direct message sent via twitter to a paying subscriber. Any twitter user can sign up for Super Chirp with his or her existing twitter account (unlike twitpub), and set a monthly price between $0.99 and $9.99. Subscribers pay the small monthly fee for a stream of information. Super Chirp keeps a cut of 30%, leaving 70% for the publisher.

We have touched upon twitter’s monetization before with 77 Ways Twitter Could Make Money. Super Chirp illustrates how 3th party apps are monetizing twitter’s free service by offering paid premiums. Why does twitter refuse to enter the arena? From a user perspective, Super Chirp is another new tool for ‘prosumers’ and organizations to earn money. Think of celebrities (f.e. Britney Spears), stock tips, “the funniest guy on twitter”, horoscopes, charity, authority bloggers, early info… Do you have something unique to sell in small messages?

Internet & media

SHARE

Hollrr.com is a very interesting business concept and that for many reasons. First of all, Hollrr gives regular consumers more tools and power in the business ecosystem. Secondly, it sets a perfect example how businesses are evolving when embracing new currency transactions as descibed in our 10 building blocks model. The most important transaction in their system is ‘reputation for exposure’. Below you see a visual mapping of Hollrr’s 4-player business model. Like always we show only the most relevant transactions and players. This allows us to better compare and transfer business concepts.

How does Hollrr.com work?

This is how hollrr.com tries to give more power to the consumer: Early-adopters try to spot new products and they will actively spread the word about their ‘discovery’. By using trackable widgets, tweets and blogpost they will notify their tribe. A consumer becomes thereby an influencer. This the exposure aspect we talked about.

When later on the product becomes a success, the tribe around that person will recognize that person as the one that was able to spot the product early stage. When someone becomes an expert in discovering potential successful products, they will earn the respect of their tribe. This is the reputation part of the transaction.

But Hollr.com goes one step further. Once the spotted product has become a success, they will reward the whole tribe that spotted and supported the product. The earlier a person talked about the product, the more money they will receive.

But how do they make money?

But who’s bringing in the money to pay those early-adopters and influencers. Hollrr.com gives one solution on their website. Product owners (companies) can add their products to the database of hollrr and pre-pay for clicks, or somehow they can join an affiliate program. But no further details are given so that leaves me with the following problem.

A small starting company that developed a new product, often doesn’t have the resources to pay services like hollrr for pre-paid clicks. However it will be that kind of products that will be the most interesting to the user base of hollr.com. Everybody there wants to be one of the first to support a new interesting product, but when no money can be earned with that hollrr will need another revenue stream.

So my question to Hollrr: How are you going to make money?

Banking & professional services, Internet & media

SHARE

Today, European internet entrepreneurs, investors and bloggers gathered on the Plugg 2009 conference to look at the ‘new web’ and its future. One of the key elements on Plugg is the Start-ups Rally, a pitching competition where 20 start-ups present their business to the audience and a challenging jury of investors and thought leaders. Let’s have a look at the business model of the 2 winners!

Mendeley.com: Last.fm for research

The overall winner was Mendeley.com (congratulations!). Mendeley positions itself as a “Last.fm for research”. They offer a free social application for managing and sharing research papers, in combination with a web 2.0 site for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. Mendeley is a typical example of a free business model (subcategory: Freemium). When you sign up, the social app and service are completely free. While the existing features will always remain free, Mendeley plans to introduce new features in the future and make them available to premium users for a fee. Conclusion… Free + Premium = Freemium business model.

Myngle.com: The new way to learn languages

The crowds’ favorite at Plugg 2009 was the new study platform Myngle.com. This online platform offers a relative new way to learn languages by bringing together teachers and students from all over the world. Looking in our database of business models, you see that Myngle relies on a typical Broker model similar to eBay or Zopa: bringing a traditional business to the online mass market. The students pay a fixed price per lesson to a teacher. Myngle charges 18% commission on the transactions.

As such, Myngle brings a successful, existing online business model into a new market. Other start-ups like LiveMocha and Linkua offer similar services, but Myngle differentiates itself by asking students to pay 300-400 EUR upfront for lessons to ensure continuity of taking lessons (not stop after 1 lesson). Myngle has a revenue stream of 20,000 EUR per month growing steadily.