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ProtonMail Busines Model: How ProtonMail Makes Money

Around 4 billion people were using one or another email service in 2020. And approximately 306 billion emails were sent and received every day worldwide.  One reason why email usage is so widespread worldwide is that it is, for the most part, free. And second, there's no shortage of free email services — Gmail, Outlook & Yahoo Mail are popular examples. Despite this, more than 50 million people worldwide are now using a lesser-known email service called ProtonMail, which started in 2014.  The small yet substantial rise in popularity of the relatively new ProtonMail begs the question of why anyone would switch from...

Nykaa Business Model: How Nykaa Makes Money

The year is 2012. It's been five years since Flipkart started operations in India. Amazon is a year away from entering the Indian market. Internet adoption is happening at a crazy place.  In the same year(2012), Nykaa starts as a niche online retailer focused on beauty products. Today, Nykaa's website gets around 12 million monthly average website visits. To add to its success in the digital world, Nykaa also runs 84 offline stores across 40 cities.  In around a decade since its founding, Nykaa has become synonymous with beauty shopping in India, pushing forward the growth of the beauty industry in the country....

Rebel Foods Business Model: How Rebel Foods Makes Money

In his book Zero to One, Peter Theil, previously co-founder of Paypal and venture capitalist, argued that the inherently hyper-competitive nature of restaurants makes them a mediocre business.  Here’s what he wrote in Zero to One: “Suppose you want to start a restaurant that serves British food in Palo Alto. “No one else is doing it,” you might reason. “We’ll own the entire market.” But that’s only true if the relevant market is the market for British food specifically. What if the actual market is the Palo Alto restaurant market in general? And what if all the restaurants in nearby towns are...

Fiverr Business Model: How Fiverr Makes Money

The expected value of the global gig economy, which is a term used to classify independent contractors/freelancers, is projected to be $455 Billion by 2023.  In 2018, the global gig economy generated $204B in Gross Volume — with transportation-based services comprising 58% of the value, the asset-sharing sector capturing 30% & the remaining 12% being distributed among professional services & HGIM (Handmade Goods, Household & Miscellaneous Services) Fiverr, which falls under the professional services category of the gig economy, is a two-sided digital marketplace that connects people who are interested in doing gig work (sellers) to people who want to get gig...

GoFundMe Business Model: How GoFundMe Makes Money

The first noteworthy instance of crowdfunding on the internet occurred in 1997 when fans of the British rock band Marillion raised US$60,000 to fund an entire U.S. tour. Crowdfunding, as a concept, had existed before, but the advent and the subsequent popularization of the internet helped it reach an unprecedented number of people.  It would still take more than a decade since 1997's Marillion crowdfunding campaign for the birth of crowdfunding companies like GoFundMe & Kickstarter, both of which are now giants in the crowdfunding space. With time, the causes for which people raised money using the internet also diversified. Today, we see crowdfunding initiatives...

Fortnite Business Model: How Fortnite Makes Money

In the year 2020, Fortnite made a whopping $5.1 billion in revenue. Despite that, Fortnite accounted only for 4.02% of the gaming industry's 2020 annual global revenue, which stood at $126.6 billion. Many among us might not realize this, but the gaming industry has grown to become the largest subset of the entertainment industry.  Even bigger than the movie & music industry, both of which made $23 billion & 12 billion respectively in 2020. Around 78% of the total gaming industry revenue in 2020 was attributed to the free-to-play business model — which is also employed by Fortnite.  In this blog, we will dig deeper into Fortnite — running...

Droom Business Model: How Droom Makes Money

When Droom started in 2014, the used vehicle market was already a competitive space with specialists like CarTrade, Carwale, Cardekho, Zigwheel, and generalists like Quikr and OLX. Because the market was already crowded, one would assume that entering the space would be an unwise undertaking. But Sandeep Aggarwal, founder of Droom, saw the existence of competitors as validation of his thesis of starting a used car marketplace. On the back of the successful execution of his idea, Sandeep proved that he was right. Today, Droom features among the top 5 players in revenue in the used car market, making...

Honey Business Model: How Honey Makes Money

In 2012, the same year, when Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion, Honey, which was acquired for $4 billion by Paypal in 2019, launched as a Chrome browser extension. Generally, browser extensions function as a growth channel for an existing product made by the developers of the products themselves or as 2nd order inventions made on top of existing products, made by enthusiastic users. Amazon's official Kindle extension is an example of the former, and Send to Kindle, an unofficial extension made by a third-party organization, is an example of the latter.  Browser extensions are rarely considered an individual business or the primary means to grow...

Zerodha Business Model: How Zerodha Makes Money

In 2019, just nine years after Zerodha started, the company became the largest stockbroker in India. And this is despite the stockbroking market already having older & entrenched incumbents like ICICI Securities, HDFC Securities, Sharekhan & Motilal Oswal. What makes this achievement even more remarkable is Zerodha is a bootstrapped company, meaning it has not raised a single penny from investors.  During a time where Indian startups raised a record $38 billion in a year & valuations are soaring regardless of the reality that many of these startups are incurring huge losses without an obvious roadmap of achieving profitability, Zerodha shines...

Pinterest Business Model: How Pinterest Makes Money

Pinterest is not what most people think it is. Most people classify Pinterest to be a social media platform, but unlike social media platforms where user behaviour leans towards sharing personal updates and learning about the personal updates of friends and family, Pinterest is a visual discovery platform where people go to discover new ideas and seek inspiration. In its S1 document, Pinterest described how visual search differs from traditional text-based search, “Search helps people find a discrete piece of information quickly, but it isn’t an adequate tool if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, you can’t describe it...