Business Models

"I have never seen viral enterprise app takeoff like this before — all word of mouth," tweeted March Andresson in February 2014, six months after Slack launched in preview mode in August 2013. The tweet accompanied a slide from Slack's investor update deck. Slack is an embodiment of Silicon Valley's dream growth trajectory. On the first day of its preview launch itself, 8000 people requested an invitation to try out Slack. Two weeks later, the number had more than doubled to 15000.  In Feb 2014, when Slack dropped the preview and launched officially, around 16000 users were using the service daily. By the end...

Discord is a classic example of building a product to cater to a specific audience segment, only to find out other audiences you weren't initially targeting, finding value in your product, and using it. And so much so that, five years later, after its launch in early 2015, the discord team let go of its original identity, deciding to embrace the direction they were pulled into by users. Jason Citron & Stan Vishnevskiy, gamers themselves, originally built Discord for gamers. A typical user would be someone who played video games a lot, and while they were at it, used Discord to talk to...

"Product Hunt surfaces the best new products, every day. It's a place for product-loving enthusiasts to share and geek out about the latest mobile apps, websites, hardware projects, and tech creations" If you work in technology and don't keep a daily tab of Product Hunt, one could argue that you're missing out on relevant insider information.  In some ways, Product Hunt is like Techcrunch, except it surfaces new tech products instead of new tech stories.  Tech enthusiasts use it to stay in the know. Emerging startups list themselves to get in front of the people that matter. Investors use it to scour investment...

On February 2017; Netflix, Spotify, Pinterest, Reddit, Pinterest, Dropbox, Tinder and thousands of other websites were down for 4 hours, including the site (downdetector.com) that reports outages.  Some thought the whole internet was down, but it wasn’t.  An Amazon Web Services outage had made thousands of websites inaccessible, bringing to light how much of the internet is powered by Amazon. In 2017, AWS accounted for 49.4% of the total IaaS market share. The next three top IaaS service providers -- Microsoft, Alibaba & Google made up for 21.3 % of the market, less than half of the market share of AWS. One of the reasons why Amazon...

According to the Gartner report, the worldwide public cloud service is expected to make an astronomical $266.4 billion in 2020, with SaaS-based businesses forecasted to make $116 billion, accounting for 43.54% of the cloud market. Broadly speaking, cloud-based services can be divided into three categories: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) & and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). But today, we will specifically be talking about SaaS businesses -- covering how they work, the metrics used to evaluate them and have a brief look at some notable SaaS companies And by the way, if you're unaware, the cloud is just...

Twitter rose from the ashes of a failed startup called Odeo to go on to become the #1 platform for discovery and become widely recognized as the SMS of the Internet with 300 million monthly active users as of 2019. However, Twitter has had quite a controversial start with the real history of Twitter having a fourth co-founder who was fired and not given the credit he deserves, as per the story revealed by Business Insider. Let’s probe into Twitter’s true founding history first and then examine how it makes money. Twitter’s Founding Story Before Twitter was born, Evan Williams, one of its founders was flush with money...

With its mission to help bring creative projects to life, Kickstarter helps finance creativity and innovation not just for art world elites but also for people that do not have a creative background, facilitating projects in various categories such as Art, Design, Journalism, Photography, and Theater. Every Kickstarter project has a clear goal such as making an album or a book and the project creator keeps 100% ownership of their work. Since its launch in 2009, 18 million people have pledged over $4.9 billion to fund more than 180,000 Kickstarter projects. But how exactly does Kickstarter work and make money?  Let's find out, but...

If we were to ask a random group of people to list down the search engines that they’ve used, most would say Google. A few of them, particularly millennials, might even say Bing or Yahoo.  And that’s because Google has had more than 90% market share among search engines for almost two decades now. Even in Dec 2009, when Christian Kroll, founder of Ecosia decided to launch the eco-friendly search engine, Google had more than 90% market share.  So why did he even bother starting another search engine? Well, his desire to build a business that would have a positive social impact on the...

In 2018, US consumers spent more money on Airbnb than they did on the hotel industry giant Hilton and its subsidiary brands, according to a report by second measure, a company that analyses anonymized debit and credit card purchases. The only company to have made more revenue than Airbnb was Mariott, the world’s largest hotel company, which saw a steep rise in revenue after acquiring Starwood Hotel in 2016.  Source: Second Measure In terms of consumer lodging US market share, Airbnb owns 20 percent of the market, which in itself is huge considering Airbnb is an upstart relative to the established hotel brand...

The earliest medium of spreading news & information at a massive scale was the printed newspaper, which was first published weekly in Germany from 1609. In their early days, newspapers were expensive because they were sold directly to consumers -- without ad-based models to support them.  All that changed in 1833 when a news publisher named Benjamin Day invented the now ubiquitous advertising supported publishing model, changing the economics of the newspaper business, for better or for worse. A newspaper that cost 6 cents per issue, an expensive price at the time, now sold for a penny per issue, supported by the advertising...