3 Best Practices 3 things you should avoid 3 trends

1. 3x3
Do's, Dont's & Trends
Online Business Models
Alexander Talmon & Tobias Günther
@talmon, @elaspix

2. Topics
● 3 Best practices (Do's)
● 3 Show stoppers (Dont's)
● 3 Trends
elaspix

3. Best practices 1
● Start with lowest costs and welcome the “Valley of Death”
● Use bootstrapping if you can afford it
● Valley of Death is the time span where you have no
income but 100% expensive product development
● Implement features only that your customers desire
● Shape and polish your product in near “stealth mode”
● Link: Entrepreneurs Overestimate Their Revenues By
Almost 400% (by Kimberly Weisul, May 2011)
elaspix

4. Best practices 2
● Focus on a product business but start as a service business
● Products mean scalability which means your business
model is worth the time you spent with creating it
● Start as service means you need to know what your
customers want (Hands on)
● Concentrate on the needs of your customers
● Link: What Should You Do with Your Crappy Little Services
Business? (by Mark Suster, April 2011)
http://www.harting-mitronics.ch/imperia/md/images/lg/hartingmitronics/anwendungen/sensorik/industrial_robots_700_500x374.jpg
elaspix

5. Best practises 3
● Offer the core of your product for free use
● The cheapest way of advertising if the world finds it
helpful
● Generates traffic which helps you with improvements
● Link:
● Simfy.de
● Spotify.de
http://www.gruenderszene.de/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Simfy-mit-10-Millionen-Finanzierung.jpg
elaspix

6. Show stopper 1
● Focus on the one market need, the one product
● Development takes a lot of time
● Build not more as the “minimum viable product” and go
testing
● Link: The remarkable power of FOCUS (by Radu Ticiu on
May, 2010)
http://christmasstockimages.com/free/backgrounds/slides/random_trees.jpg
elaspix

7. Show stopper 2
● Don't set on advertising as your only source of income
● The CTR is declining steadily (from 78% to 0.15%)
● Link: Average CTR for Banner Ads (by tomcat66_g500,
Sept, 2008)
elaspix

8. Show stopper 3
● Pitch customers, Vcs, business angels or partners using
market needs and customer desires but not with technical
features
● This is especially true for tech founders
● Link: Sell benefits, not features (by Yaro On March 2006)
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3015/2765083201_55a958db14.jpg
elaspix

9. Trends 1
● Mass customization and individualization
● Individual products, but industrialized
production
● Links
● www.yourvideocard.de
● www.spreadshirt.de
http://www.yourvideocard.de/produkte
elaspix

10. Trends 2
● Gamification & Joy of use
● Comfortable Consumption,Video usage increases
strongly
● Use new interfaces provided by Native Apps, find out
new ways of using technology (mobile) but be careful as
the diversity of devices & plattforms is growing
● No barriers (could mean no flash player?)
● Link Video-Shopping auf dem iPad (by Stephan Meixner,
April 2011) über die Videoaggregation-App ShowYou
elaspix

11. Trends 3
● Virtual Goods
● Sell products whose shipping costs are zero
● Be careful with duplication (limited number of copies)
● Track their movements so that they get an individual
history and “personality”
● Link: Spending Money on Nothing (by Holger Mohr
January, 2009)
http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/headline_-virtual-goods-company-vixim-google-docs-1.jpg
elaspix