Mailchimp Business Model: How Mailchimp Makes Money

After Intuit announced it was acquiring Mailchimp for $12 billion in September 2021, the deal sent shockwaves across the tech industry. But Salesforce had just acquired Slack a few months ago, in Dec 2020, for $27.7 billion, so Mailchimp's acquisition was by no means the largest SaaS acquisition in recent history.  Mailchimp's acquisition still became the talk of tech town because it was the largest acquisition for a non-VC-funded bootstrapped SaaS company until date. What added more credence to Mailchimp's self-funded, anti-VC approach was that the business generated a revenue of $750 million in 2020 and has been profitable throughout its entire lifespan. Aaron Levie, CEO of Box,...

‘Elements of Style’ Book Summary

Naval Ravikant once said, “I would rather read the best 100 books over and over again until I absorb them rather than read all the books.” When it comes to writing, 'Elements of Style' is widely regarded as one of the greatest books published on the craft of writing. It was named as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923 in Time Magazine's 'All-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books' list released in 2011. Even Stephen King, an acclaimed author, in his own book on writing; recommended every aspiring author to read 'Elements of...

Picsart Business Model: How Picsart Makes Money

In recent years, the photo and video app category has experienced runaway success, driven by the rise in consumer fascination to edit photos and videos. Photo and video apps made nearly $2billion in 2019, up from $240 million in 2016 at a compound annual growth rate of more than 100 percent. While Apps like YouTube & Tik Tok, and Twitch are a few winners anyone could guess, one app relatively lesser-known app that regularly features among the top 10 revenue makers in the photo and video app category is Picsart. In January 2020, Picsart stood fifth among the top revenue makers in...

Inshorts Business Model Case Study

By July 2015, almost two years into launch, Inshorts had achieved a milestone of 1M Android App Installs with a 4.5-star rating on Google Play Store, but the company was still not fretting over monetizing the product. Azhar Iqbal, CEO of Inshorts laid out the company’s strategy at a panel discussion in FICCI Frames 2016, “Inshorts currently does not make any money. We’re right now working only of venture capital money. There’s no particular revenue model. Right now, our main focus is trying to get eyeballs on Inshorts and make sure people read our summaries as they don’t have time.” So then how did Inshorts...

Figma Business Model: How Figma Makes Money

At the time Figma was started, in 2012, IBM employed one designer for every 72 engineers. By 2019, IBM had eight engineers to every designer, and the ratio went to 3:1 on mobile. And it wasn't just IBM that became more serious about design — the entire tech industry switched to the design-heavy product development approach. Atlassian went from 1 designer : 25 engineers in 2012 to 1 designer : 9 developers in 2017.  LinkedIn went from 1 designer : 11 engineers in 2012 to 1 designer : 8 developers in 2017.  Dropbox went from 1 designer : 10 engineers in 2012 to 1...

Lemonade Business Model Case Study

Companies can generally are categorized into two types: ones that look to make incremental advances in an existing industry to stay relevant in a constantly changing competitive landscape or look to turn entire industries on their head by leveraging innovation. Lemonade falls into the latter category. And the industry Lemonade is trying to disrupt is insurance. But before we get into how exactly Lemonade is different from legacy insurance players, we need to understand better how the insurance industry works. So, let's dive into it. From an insurer's point of view, insurance might be a vital tool to safeguard for rainy...

Year-Over-Year [ Definition, Example, Pros & Cons ]

Let's suppose that Company A reported revenue of $50000 in 2020 and $25000 in 2019.  To calculate year-on-year growth, one would have to use the following formula: In the case of 'Company A' example, we would substitute the following values in the formula: As per the calculation, Company A had a year-on-year growth of 100%. As you must have figured out by now, year-over-year analysis entails comparing the performance of one period with the same period. The period comparison made during the Year-over-Year analysis could be annual, quarterly, or monthly. In most cases, year-on-year analysis is used to assess the financial performance of...

Interest Coverage Ratio

The interest coverage ratio is a quantity that is used to evaluate the financial health of a company. It is calculated by dividing the earnings of a company (before interest and taxes) by the amount of interest the company is required to pay over a fixed time period. It can be calculated using the formula, text{Interest Coverage Ratio}= frac{text{Earnings before interest and taxes(EBIT)}}{text{Amount of interest to be paid by the company}} We can calculate the EBIT of a company by subtracting the expenditure of the company from the total revenue. The interest coverage ratio is also known as the Times Interest Earned ratio...

What are Barriers to Exit & Types of Barriers to Exit

Let's suppose that an airline has been incurring recurring losses and wants to shut shop to avoid further losses. However, the airline owes a considerable amount of debt to its investors, using whose money the airline purchased airplanes in the first place.  Scraping the airplanes would not give enough return on their original value. Another airline looking to amp up its fleet numbers would be ideal to buy the planes. But finding such a buyer when the struggling airline is looking to exit the business would be an uphill task. If the airline doesn't find a buyer, it would have...