From two-sided-marketplaces to on-demand models, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about how subscriptions work
Launching a subscription-based product or service sounds so easy. It’s like instant Monthly Recurring Revenue, just add subscribers.
There’s a problem with subscription pricing models though. A lot of problems, actually.
It’s no secret that consumers are rapidly adopting subscriber models for products and services they used to request on demand. These days, Amazon will sell you a subscription to your coffee pods at a discount to full price. Or you can drive the Porsche of your choice for just $3,100 a month.
On the startup side, service subscription companies are springing up everywhere, sometimes under the two-sided marketplace model, other times as an alternative to traditional service offerings with a no-frills approach to offset the cost and increase the demand. …
Save the big announcements for big deals
If you want to give your new business a decent shot at success, you need to build traction — clear, measurable evidence that people are interested in what your company is offering. And that won’t happen on Day One.
So why do startups make big, splashy announcements the day they launch? Because that’s the way it’s been done for ages. But that strategy can actually do more harm than good.
When no one knows who you are or what you do, you need to buck conventional wisdom and launch quietly, without fanfare. It took me almost 20 years and a dozen startups to figure out that my launch problem wasn’t that I was doing publicity wrong; my launch problem was I shouldn’t have been doing publicity at all. …
Five ways to validate your product idea without resorting to a fake website
Let’s clear up a big misconception about visionaries and their killer product ideas.
Entrepreneurs and CEOs have vision, sure, but it’s not the kind of vision that sees into the future and gets an exclusive sneak preview of the next big thing.
Those ideas need validation.
There’s an old saying about how overnight successes usually take years. On the flip side, every bet that is made on the sheer gut instinct of a product idea is just that — a bet. …
