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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
Read MoreHow 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
Read MoreOutcome 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
Read MoreSoftware Pricing Trends – How Vendors Can Capitalize on the Shift to New Revenue Models
Savvy vendors will adjust their pricing models to create a win-win scenario, where customers can see the value of software more closely reflected in their business processes and vendors can reduce their internal costs and realize more of their revenue from recurring payments.
Source: Software Pricing Trends – How Vendors Can Capitalize on the Shift to New Revenue Models | pwc
Read MoreTransformation with a capital T | McKinsey & Company
… imagine… You run a retail bank with a solid strategy, a strong brand, a well-positioned branch network, and a loyal customer base. But a growing and fast-moving ecosystem of fintech players—microloan sites, peer-to-peer lenders, algorithm-based financial advisers—is starting to nibble at your franchise. The board feels anxious about what no longer seems to be a marginal threat. It worries that management has grown complacent.
Source: Transformation with a capital T | McKinsey & Company
Read MoreAre You The Point Of Inflection?
Read MoreBarry 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.” …
Peer-to-peer Lending Loop returns to the market months after being sidelined by regulators | Financial Post
Read MorePastoll 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.”
In the age of disruption, complacency is an investor’s biggest enemy
The difference today is that it no longer takes 30 years for an innovation to become disruptive. Take for example the roll out of Airbnb and its impact on the hotel industry; Uber’s low-cost ride sharing, which will soon make city controlled high-cost taxis obsolete; Amazon’s online business, which is threatening higher cost big-box retailers such as Best Buy; and streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix, which are making CDs and DVDs a thing of the past.
Source: In the age of disruption, complacency is an investor’s biggest enemy
Read MoreSteve Blank – The 11 Bad Habits Killing Innovation in Your Company
Big companies have great execution habits to manage and improve successful business models and value propositions. But the habits that foster execution can easily kill new growth initiatives inside your company.
Source: Steve BlankThe 11 Bad Habits Killing Innovation in Your Company
Read MoreHow 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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