Repeat
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 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.” …
Navigating Change
00:01 change it doesn’t call ahead it doesn’t
00:05 send a memo on how it plans to change
00:07 your business it comes out of nowhere
00:08 and leaves you in chaos but before its
00:12 arrival it sends millions of tiny
00:14 messages numbers trends data find the
00:19 clues see the patterns and change the
00:22 fortunes of your business
Source: Navigating Change
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
Read MoreSteve Blank – The Mission Model Canvas – An Adapted Business Model Canvas for Mission-Driven Organizations
Read MoreThe 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.)
Part I: Validate Your Business Model Start With a Business Model, Not a Business Plan – The Accelerators – WSJ
Read MoreA business model describes how your company creates, delivers and captures value. A business model is designed to change rapidly to reflect what you find outside the building in talking to customers. It’s dynamic and it reflects the iterative reality that startups face. Business models allow agile and opportunistic founders to keep score of the pivots in their search for a repeatable business model.
Remnant of my dot com days on a forgotten IBM server :-)
Before the average techie could spell VOIP (Voice-Over-Internet Protocol and VMs (Virtual Machines), we were delivering remote learning and over-the-shoulder workshops, by connecting standard browsers to remote desktops, connected to remote mid-range and mainframe IBM systems. Pretty impressive considering we did it all on dial-up connections!
Source: A forgotten IBM FTP Server
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