Revenue Streams

Marie Mansfield

A ‘startup’ is a company that is confused about – 1. What its product is. 2. Who its customers are. 3. How to make money.”— so says Dave McClure, 500Startups co-founder.

For the Big Data team this week has been all about our revenue streams and how to make money.

As we evolve our approach and learnings through our SME and customer interviews our main focus this week has been to identify the revenue streams for our data service.

This week has been the most complex and confusing as we tease out the value of our product and the potential customers who will be willing to pay for it. We are still at the early stages.

Based on our 30 + interviews so far we are now more aware that cost is the key driving factors for small business owners so our solution will need to be high value and at a price small businesses can afford and more importantly are willing to pay for.

To attract SME our starter service would be based on a freemium model offering SMEs targeted customer data relevant to their business. This would not yield any revenue but vital to launch our service and enable SMEs to try out our solution with no cost impact for them.

Our next level service would be a Premium service offering customised reports updated with latest data/insights for their business.-Market trends/Referral scheme based on a subscription model.

And finally a Concierge Service – with consultants to advise /help SMEs implement   recommendation based on the data /insights for their business.

We have now come to realise we need to extend our revenue streams beyond SMEs to find new potential review streams.

 As a team we will explore  third parties that would value market and trend reports on SME – Start-ups, Investors, Government Bodies.

We have not yet figured out how to test our new revenue streams and this will be the focus of the team over the next 2 weeks.

What we have learnt in the class this week.

This week it has been great to see all the other team projects come together and share their learnings at our Monday class. All teams seem to be experiencing the same challenges testing their Value proposition and assessing revenue streams. There is no  easy answer for any of the teams and will involve  many more targeted interviews and experiments with end customers, relevant SMEs and some guidance from start-ups who can share their experience and advice.

Role of the each of the team during the week.

With just 3 more weeks to the end of our project our team is getting clearer on each of our focus areas.

·         Widen our interview net beyond SMEs – look to mentors, start-ups and potential 3^rd parties to explore/test new revenue streams.

·         Complete 100 interviews with SMEs and consumers – each team member will focus on 20 interviews.

·         Weekly update of team blog – rotate weekly blog update.

·         1^st MVP Prototype

·         V1 Landing Page