Lessons Learned Building A Productized Service – Smashing Magazine

It’s Not SaaS: It’s A Productized Service
I started out with the goal of building SaaS. But as it evolved, I learned that the value was not so much in the software part, but rather in the service. A more accurate way to describe the business today would be a productized service.
It’s largely built around manual processes. We personally talk to and follow up with every visitor who requests a consultation. We then manually set up every new customer’s website, input all of their content and make customizations. We even offer “done for you” ongoing support.

Source: Lessons Learned Building A Productized Service – Smashing Magazine

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How to ‘Productize’ Your Service Business Offerings

If you own or lead a professional services company, you understand the unique challenges you face in not offering a tangible product. Even if your business is thriving, you still only have so much time to exchange for money. Try as you might to maximize price or delivery and allow yourself a comfortable margin, you will still reach a natural ceiling.

This was the day things shifted from: “I know this and therefore others will pay me to do that for them,” to “I want to learn everything about marketing. Quantify and organize it, and then bring it to market in a highly repeatable manner.”

Source: How to ‘Productize’ Your Service Business Offerings

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Outcome based pricing Exploring an ‘everything as a service’ model

Pricing based on customer outcomes has the potential to turn the buyer/seller relationship into more of a partnership, because both sides are working toward common objectives. The seller is motivated to drive efficiency and positive outcomes – because the more successful the customer is, the more revenue it generates.

Source: Outcome based pricing Exploring an ‘everything as a service’ model | pwc

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Are You The Point Of Inflection?

Barry McCarthy, Netflix’s former chief financial officer, said in an interview with the Unofficial Stanford blog in 2008, “I remembered getting on a plane, I think sometime in 2000, with Reed [Hastings] and [Netflix co-founder] Marc Randolph and flying down to Dallas, Texas and meeting with John Antioco. Reed had the chutzpah to propose to them that we run their brand online and that they run [our] brand in the stores and they just about laughed us out of their office. At least initially, they thought we were a very small niche business. Gradually over time, as we grew our market, his thinking evolved but initially they ignored us and that was much to our advantage.” …

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Peer-to-peer Lending Loop returns to the market months after being sidelined by regulators | Financial Post

Pastoll said technology and automation are being employed to keep the process from getting too expensive or bogged down with paperwork.

“We’ve created a novel structure that actually allows this business model to operate… It’s still as frictionless as possible,” he said. “A lot of what we’ve been working on is still making sure the process is streamlined and efficient.”

Source: Peer-to-peer Lending Loop returns to the market months after being sidelined by regulators | Financial Post

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How to build a future-proof business: 4 real-world applications of cognitive solutions – IBM Watson

Our current IT systems are being rapidly replaced by cognitive systems that continuously understand, reason and learn like humans do. Unlike older, programmable systems, a cognitive system can ingest and understand large amounts of data, in all its forms (including unstructured). A cognitive system learns from all the data it reads, and from each interaction with the experts and users that train it. It learns from both successes and failures, and it never stops learning.

Source: How to build a future-proof business: 4 real-world applications of cognitive solutions – IBM Watson

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Disrupting Industries With Cognitive Computing

With cognitive computing, we are now able to unlock the value in ALL the data — from internal, external and even publicly available sources — available to a business. Much of this data was previously inaccessible as it existed in was unstructured (documents, emails, social media posts and images etc.), or was dispersed among any many systems and silos. Hear how two companies are already using cognitive computing to disrupt their industries:

Source: Disrupting Industries With Cognitive Computing

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Steve Blank – The Mission Model Canvas – An Adapted Business Model Canvas for Mission-Driven Organizations

The Business Model Canvas has served all of us well in thinking about building businesses – and therein lies the problem. In a business the aim is to earn more money than you spend. What if you’re a government or a military organization or part of the intelligence community? In these cases you don’t earn money, but you mobilize resources and a budget to solve a particular problem and create value for a set of beneficiaries (customers, support organizations, warfighters, Congress, the country, etc.)

Source: Steve BlankThe Mission Model Canvas – An Adapted Business Model Canvas for Mission-Driven Organizations

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Digital Transformation Going Mainstream in 2016, IDC Predicts – The New York Times

Many of these companies, according to IDC, are not moving fast enough. It predicts that a third of the top 20 companies in every industry will be “disrupted” over the next three years, meaning their revenue, profits and market position will deteriorate — not that they will go out of business.

Source: Digital Transformation Going Mainstream in 2016, IDC Predicts – The New York Times

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