Choosing Revenue Streams For Your Minimum Viable Product

Busting myths around revenue strategy

Joe Procopio
6 min readNov 21, 2019

--

Let’s clear up a common revenue misconception right away. Choosing a revenue stream and settling on pricing are two completely different exercises. The latter is what our customers are going to pay. The former, and what I want to talk about in this post, is what our customers are paying for.

Critical mistakes happen when we entrepreneurs confuse these two processes, or worst of all, use one to provide rationale for the other. For example: “My revenue stream is advertising, therefore the price of my product will be free.”

The arc of figuring out one or more revenue streams starts early, during the MVP phase. The decision includes determining justification of the charge, defining the value of the product or the service, and selecting the delivery mechanism. Actually, it includes a ton of other stuff, but these are the big three we have to nail.

How do we do that? Even though every business is unique, revenue streams usually aren’t. And they almost always start with the same question.

“Who is going to pay for this?”

The Myth of Advertising as a Plug-In Revenue Stream

--

--

Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. AI pioneer. Technologist. Innovator. Humanist. Write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More about me at joeprocopio.com