Gennaro Cuofano's Blog, page 238

What Is Brand Value And Does It Matter?

If you speak to an accountant about brand value, he’ll call it “goodwill.” Indeed, in the accounting world, goodwill is a sort of left over. A sum of money accountants can’t explain by matching existing assets with respective accounts, so they’ll lump it up under the umbrella of goodwill.

Goodwill usually arises when a company gets acquired with a plus, which can’t be explained in any other way.

However, if you ask a marketer what’s the brand, she/he’ll tell you “that’s everything!” It’s not like the marketer is trying to emphasize, quite the opposite. All the marketer does is about creating a brand, making a brand unique, making a brand “valuable.” They will ask for a marketing budget based on that brand.

Yet, when you ask the marketer, how much is our brand worth? The marketer will probably have a stunned face, almost like you were asking to put a dollar value on the Monalisa.

Between those two positions, there is a third one, which is that of brand valuation. More than science this is an art, which is in infancy. The attempt is to put a dollar value on a brand so that marketers can’t say a brand is worth like the Monalisa and entrepreneurs are finally happy to tell their accountants a brand is much more than just goodwill.

Understanding the difference between Brand Equity and Brand Value

First, you need to understand the difference between brand equity and brand value.

Brand equity refers to the importance of a brand for customers, while the brand value is the financial strength and significance of that brand. Both brand equity and brand value are estimates of how much a brand might be worth in the marketplace.

Therefore, brand value is primarily a financial estimate. Brand equity is a more holistic measure which comprises:

Brand Loyalty
Brand Visibility
Brand Associations

Inside brand value

A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.

If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer. 

This is a great definition given by Seth Godin in 2009. And he continued:

A brand’s value is merely the sum total of how much extra people will pay, or how often they choose, the expectations, memories, stories and relationships of one brand over the alternatives.

While this definition is the best I could find. Putting a dollar sign on memories and stories is tough. Thus, brand valuation as a financial methodology has a more quantitative approach. That doesn’t necessarily mean a better approach.

A few argue that the things that can be measured might be those that count the least. Yet as we start measuring them, they become part of our conscious understanding of the world, which makes our world a set of metrics. This, in turn, makes us measure for things that don’t matter.

Indeed, even though brand valuation starts from a compelling need to assess a brand quantitatively to explaining how valuable is a company in the marketplace. It might also end up simplifying too much a brand. For that matter, it is critical to understand that a brand valuation is just an estimate. Thus, a reference number, not something to take as the absolute value of your brand.

At least tracking a brand value has multiple benefits:

Justifying marketing expenditures and activities based on a “clearer” ROI
Tracking the growth trajectory of a brand
Being able to communicate more clearly the value of the brand to stakeholders (potential investors, shareholders and potential partners)

But it might also lead to side effects:

Measuring the wrong metrics for a company’s brand success
Removing the focus from customers and placing it too much on metrics that don’t really impact the business

Having said that, let’s see the methodologies available.

The approaches and methodologies used to compute a brand value

There are several methodologies available to compute brand value:

Brand Equity Ten: things like Differentiation, Satisfaction or Loyalty, Perceived Quality, Leadership or Popularity, Perceived Value, Brand Personality, Organizational Associations, Brand Awareness, Market Share, and Market Price and Distribution Coverage 
Brand Equity Index: it takes into account three main aspects of Effective Market Share, Relative Price, and Durability
BrandAsset Valuator: it accounts for Differentiation, Relevance, Esteem, Knowledge
Brand Valuation Model: also based on a few key financial metrics and other parameters to assess the value of a brand
Brand Contribution to Market Cap Method: given by the asset value of the brand as a component of the company’s market valuation

Those are the leading brand valuation methodologies. Each of those takes into account a different perspective and makes an assumption about what a brand is made of. Thus, each of those approaches has its limitations.

Other resources: 

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
How to Build a Great Business Plan According to Peter Thiel
What Is The Most Profitable Business Model?
How To Create A Business Model
What Is Business Model Innovation And Why It Matters
What Is Blitzscaling And Why It Matters
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business

Case studies:

The Power of Google Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does Google Make Money? It’s Not Just Advertising!
How Does DuckDuckGo Make Money? DuckDuckGo Business Model Explained
How Amazon Makes Money: Amazon Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does Netflix Make Money? Netflix Business Model Explained
How Does Spotify Make Money? Spotify Business Model In A Nutshell
The Trillion Dollar Company: Apple Business Model In A Nutshell
DuckDuckGo: The [Former] Solopreneur That Is Beating Google at Its Game

The post What Is Brand Value And Does It Matter? appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

AI Economy: How Do You Make Money With Machine Learning?

The AI Ecosystem has generated a multi-billion dollar industry, and it all starts from data. Going upward in the value chain there are the Chips (GPUs) that allow the physical storing of Big Data (a dominant player is NVIDIA). 

That Big Data will need to be stored on platforms and infrastructures that SMEs can’t afford. That is where players like Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure come into rescue. 

At large scale, a few corporations control the Enterprise AI market; while nations like China, USA, Japan, Germany, UK, and France have widely bet on it!

Understanding the AI ecosystem

Beyond all the buzz and hype that comes with new words that enter the mainstream, AI is another of those disciplines that have become critical in today’s economic landscape.

Far from being at an embryonic stage, the AI Ecosystem has become a multi-billion dollars enterprise, led by tech giants that go from IBM to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and many others.

That doesn’t mean there is no opportunity for new entrants. Quite the opposite.

The AI ecosystem revolves around a few key elements, that can also be thought of as the “Toolbox for AI:”

Data or Big Data
Infrastructure
Algorithms 

Let’s look more in-depth, into each of those key elements for an AI ecosystem. But before diving into it, we need to understand who and how is making money with AI.

Who is making money with AI?

As Siraj Raval points out, billions of dollars have been invested in the AI ecosystem, especially by large tech companies. This is a piece of good news, as those tech companies have created an ecosystem, which is out there, ready to be understood so that you can build your own company out of it.

Indeed, understanding how this ecosystem works is the first step toward making money out of it.

And it all starts with data!

It all starts with data

Keep in mind that the whole point of AI is to handle and actually being able to do something useful with a massive amount of data.

In short, even though we like to talk about AI and machine learning, as they are technologies on their own sake. In reality, the foundation of those technologies is data.

A curated data pipeline is the foundation for an AI ecosystem to work in the first place. Companies like Google, Wolfram Alpha, Amazon, and many others, spend billions on maintaining and curating its data. If at all, we can argue that for companies like Google, Data is its main asset.

As already explained in the Blockchain Economy, in today’s economic world, built on digitalization, the rule is to keep that data proprietary. That made sense, as this data is what gets eventually monetized with several strategies.

Related: Blockchain Economics 101: The Theories Of Value In A World Driven By The Blockchain

Let’s a couple of opposite examples of how data gets monetized:

Google data-freemium strategy: Google uses its proprietary data (collected by billion of users’ searches each day) to sell advertising
Apple data-reversed-razor strategy: iPhones know a great deal about you, but Apple doesn’t share that data with marketers. Instead, it monetizes it by selling expensive devices (iPhone is the primary one)

When Data reaches a critical mass, we can call it Big Data. There is no single definition of Big Data, and it might actually vary throughout the years.

Given that the more the AI industry grows the cheaper data collection and processing will become. Which, in turn, will allow the management of a larger and larger amount of data.

For the sake of this discussion, and as of the time of this writing, a petabyte is understood as the first unit of Big Data:

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Source: searchstorage.techtarget.com

Chips: from CPU to GPU

In the past, you could handle computational tasks with simple CPU. Until computers had to process a more substantial amount of data. This is where GPU came to rescue.

A GPU or graphics processing unit is an electronic circuit able to manipulate a massive amount of data. Opposite to the traditional CPU, a GPU can process large blocks of data in parallel, which makes it quite suited for AI systems.

In this pace, NVIDIA is the critical player. As pointed out on its Annual Report for 2018:

Starting with a focus on PC graphics, NVIDIA invented the graphics processing unit, or GPU, to solve some of the most complex problems in computer science. We have extended our focus in recent years to the revolutionary field of artificial intelligence, or AI. Fueled by the sustained demand for better 3D graphics and the scale of the gaming market, NVIDIA has evolved the GPU into a computer brain at the intersection of virtual reality, or VR, high performance computing, or HPC, and AI.

And it continued:

Its parallel processing capabilities, supported by up to thousands of computing cores, are essential to running deep learning algorithms. This form of AI, in which software writes itself by learning from data, can serve as the brain of computers, robots and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world.

As of January 2018, NVIDIA recorded almost ten billion in revenues, and over eight billion came from the sales of GPU alone!

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Large tech companies, like IBM and Google, have been investing massive resources to get their GPU chips to process Big Data.

Algorithms and infrastructures: the Amazon/Google/Microsoft cloud war

To store a massive amount of data you need an infrastructure, that if you are small, but also medium business is tough to build.

Therefore, you’ll need a third party able to store that data for you. This has led to the cloud war between Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are the dominant players.

Google, in particular, is using a smart business strategy, which in a way represents the way Google does it. Indeed, if you’re in programming, or operate in the machine learning field, you’re aware of Tensorflow, an open-source machine learning library.

Google leverages on the open-source model as it allows anyone to use this library, which makes it better over-time. 

But it also makes for the need for the larger and larger amount of data to be stored. And guess what, Google has a product for that: Google Cloud Platform. 

Therefore, if you’re a programmer using Tensorflow, and you need a platform to store that data, chances are you’ll use Google Cloud infrastructure.

Enterprise, corporates, and nations

Both the enterprise and corporates AI industries are dominated by huge players that over the years have built massive infrastructure for large enterprise clients (take Salesforce and Oracle in the customer management industry).

At the same time, nations are investing in AI to generate long-lasting economic growth. China, USA, Japan, France, UK, and Germany are all investing in AI.

Let’s look at how, you can make money, instead, with AI.

How do you make money with AI?

As Kevin Kelly mentioned, in his book “The Inevitable:” 

The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. Find something that can be made better by adding online smartness to it. 

Siraj Raval mentions seven ways to make money with AI:

Start a Startup
Contract Work 
Job or Internship
Write a Book
Educational Content
Automated Trading Bot
Competitions

You can watch the whole video below:

Other resources: 

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
How to Build a Great Business Plan According to Peter Thiel
What Is The Most Profitable Business Model?
How To Create A Business Model
What Is Business Model Innovation And Why It Matters
What Is Blitzscaling And Why It Matters
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business

Case studies:

The Power of Google Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does Google Make Money? It’s Not Just Advertising!
How Does DuckDuckGo Make Money? DuckDuckGo Business Model Explained
How Amazon Makes Money: Amazon Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does Netflix Make Money? Netflix Business Model Explained
How Does Spotify Make Money? Spotify Business Model In A Nutshell
The Trillion Dollar Company: Apple Business Model In A Nutshell
DuckDuckGo: The [Former] Solopreneur That Is Beating Google at Its Game

The post AI Economy: How Do You Make Money With Machine Learning? appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

What Is A Decacorn? The Era Of Decacorn Companies

A Decacorn is a company valued at over $10 billion. The top ten Decacorn Companies as of January 2019, comprise Bytedance, Uber, Didi Chuxing, WeWork, Lu.com, Airbnb, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, Stripe and JUUL Labs.

With the rise of consumer technologies able to have worldwide traction, unicorns seem to be no longer the rule. In other words, a decade ago a billion dollar valuation was a strong position to be which allowed the company in that position to create a long-lasting advantage.

However, as of now 2019, this paradigm seems to have shifted toward Decacorn Companies, those that managed to reach over a ten billion dollar valuation!

Those Decacorns operate in the following industries:

Digital Media/ AI
On-Demand
Facilities
Fintech
eCommerce/Marketplace
Other Transportation
Big Data
Consumer Electronics
Gaming
Social
Blockchain
Biotechnology
Computer Hardware & Services
Internet Software & Services
Hardware

You can appreciate the business models used by Decacorn Companies in 2019 in the table below:

CountryCompanyValuation in $B Business Model Label
ChinaToutiao (Bytedance)$75digital short-video format model powered by AIUnited StatesUber$72ride-sharing on-demand marketplace modelChinaDidi Chuxing$56digital media on-demand marketplace modelUnited StatesWeWork$47WeWork business model: office space sharing/real-estate-as-a-service modelChinaLu.com$38online finance marketplace modelUnited StatesAirbnb$29.30e-commerce/on-demand home-sharing marketplace modelUnited StatesSpaceX$21.50space transportation modelUnited StatesPalantir Technologies$20big data-based enterprise SaaS modelUnited StatesStripe$20payment marketplace modelUnited StatesJUUL Labs$15consumer electronics modelUnited StatesEpic Games$15digital games marketplace modelUnited StatesPinterest$12.30digital advertising modelChinaBitmain Technologies$12crypto mining blockchain-based modelUnited StatesSamumed$12biotech-based modelUnited StatesLyft$11.50ride-sharing on-demand marketplace modelSingaporeGrabTaxi$11ride-sharing on-demand marketplace modelUnited KingdomGlobal Switch$11.08multi-tenanted data centers-as-a-service modelUnited StatesInfor$10cloud-based enterprise SaaS modelChinaDJI Innovations$10drones products-based modelIndiaOne97 Communications (operates Paytm)$10marketplace and virtual bank model

If you download the data reference back at FourWeekMBA.com and CB Insights

Who do you think will be the next Decacorn? 

Read next:  What Is A Unicorn Company? The Top 25+ Unicorns Business Models For 2019

Other resources: 

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
How to Build a Great Business Plan According to Peter Thiel
What Is The Most Profitable Business Model?
How To Create A Business Model
What Is Business Model Innovation And Why It Matters
What Is Blitzscaling And Why It Matters
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business

Case studies:

The Power of Google Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does Google Make Money? It’s Not Just Advertising!
How Does DuckDuckGo Make Money? DuckDuckGo Business Model Explained
How Amazon Makes Money: Amazon Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does Netflix Make Money? Netflix Business Model Explained
How Does Spotify Make Money? Spotify Business Model In A Nutshell
The Trillion Dollar Company: Apple Business Model In A Nutshell
DuckDuckGo: The [Former] Solopreneur That Is Beating Google at Its Game

The post What Is A Decacorn? The Era Of Decacorn Companies appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

Lessons Of Business Model Design By Walt Disney

I was reading an article about Business Model Scalability by Felix Hoffman, CEO of BMI Lab, with whom FourWeekMBA put together a list of business model patterns mostly used in business model innovation, and I stumbled upon an image from the Disney Archives that left me speechless:

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1957 Walt Disney Productions Archive

This is a pure business model design in action. Back in 1957, Walt Disney had clear in mind how his business looked like at a higher level. He understood how each piece fit well together.

While Disney business model has changed substantially over the years, this design would remain its core business model for decades to come. This draw by Walt Disney was the engine of its business and – I argue – the most critical inheritance he has left as a businessman.

I’ve been looking at it for hours, and there are a few key elements to notice.

At the center of the business, there were the theatrical films, where it all started. The Studios was the place where creative talent could be sourced and where original content could be created. This content would spur everything else.

From Music, TV, Publications, Merchandise and where the success of Amusement Parks would depend on.

This model, a flywheel made each piece fit into each other and reinforce each other. Indeed, as you can see from Walt Disney draw, TV would plug movies into the studios. At the same time, the studios would feed films through TV, which would pay them off via commercials.

At the same time, the Studios also provided “interchange of stars” to TV, which in turn made it more valuable. The TV side of the business would then be used to record materials and to publicize music products.

The Music side would “keep films in mind when they were out of circulation.” Studios fed tunes and talents to the Music side of the business.

Other sides of the business also plugged movies into the Studios, while the Studios allowed the publications of books and comic books and allowed the publications of the Walt Disney Magazine.

Other parts, like Disneyland, which might have seemed at first sight disconnected to other parts of the business, were a crucial element in Disney’s flywheel success. Indeed, the Studios plugged parks, rides and creative ideas.

At the same time Disneyland could provide ideas to the Music side of the business for new albums, source of articles for the magazine and have a tight interaction with the Merchandise Licensing business.

This holistic approach is at the core of business modeling. I believe that each business person trying to build a great business should have in mind a clear design and vision, of how the flywheel framework makes the business sustainable in the long run.

It doesn’t matter what methodology – if any – you’re using. What is your vision for your business? Do you have one? If not what is missing? How is each part fitting into each other? How they help each other grow? Is the process scalable?

Asking those questions might allow you to find the proper answers to build a lasting and sustainable business model.

Other resources: 

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
How to Build a Great Business Plan According to Peter Thiel
What Is The Most Profitable Business Model?
How To Create A Business Model
What Is Business Model Innovation And Why It Matters
What Is Blitzscaling And Why It Matters
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business

Case studies:

The Power of Google Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does Google Make Money? It’s Not Just Advertising!
How Does DuckDuckGo Make Money? DuckDuckGo Business Model Explained
How Amazon Makes Money: Amazon Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does Netflix Make Money? Netflix Business Model Explained
How Does Spotify Make Money? Spotify Business Model In A Nutshell
The Trillion Dollar Company: Apple Business Model In A Nutshell
DuckDuckGo: The [Former] Solopreneur That Is Beating Google at Its Game

The post Lessons Of Business Model Design By Walt Disney appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

How The Click Economy Is Evolving Based On Google’s CTRs

The whole web economy has been based for over two decades on the ability of people to click from one page to the next. The hyperlink, or what we today call simply links, are the things that connect pages around the web.

When Google took over the web, it managed to make any page on the visible internet clickable through its search results pages. There were two critical ingredients for Google’s search results success:

Google introduced a quality score on paid listings, thus requiring text-based ads to be relevant
Google also allowed publishers that offered relevant organic content to be featured on its search results pages, without spending a dime. Good content was enough

As we’re moving toward more advanced search features, and Google is evolving more and more into a media platform. There is the third component that is prevailing, and that is throwing off publishers: no-click searches.

Inside no-click searches

At a fundamental level, a no-click search is a search that starts on Google and ends on Google. Some of those searches make sense, as the intent of the user might be very simple. For instance, if I look for “weather in Rome” this is what I get:

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Why would I want anything else? This makes sense, and I don’t think there is any publisher can be against it. Of course, weather websites that once received millions of hits are gone.

Yet, there is another worrying side of Google no-click searches:

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Google has rolled out advanced functionalities, such as featured snippets that in some instances can eat the whole user intent.

Thus, they allow someone to be satisfied enough with the information found on Google search results pages, without ever visiting one of the websites featured on them.

After reading the article from Rand Fishkin “Google’s European Monopoly (& Shrinking Click-Through Opportunities” there are a few considerations to make.

For how much we all love to think we have an alternative to Google, and for how much in Europe we talk about Google dominance, in reality, the data collected by Jumpshot and offered to SparkToro gives us a clear view:

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Europe is as much, if not more, reliant on Google than the US.

Another interesting aspect is how click-through rates (the percentage of people clicking through links provided by Google on its search results pages) is shrinking massively on mobile devices:

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Source: Google’s European Monopoly (& Shrinking Click-Through Opportunities)

As the graphic above shows, both in Europe and US, organic opportunities, or the ability to be featured on Google’s search results pages without paying shrank from 45% to 36.7% in Europe and UK and from 40.1% to 29.7% in the US!

At the same time, paid click-through rates have more than doubled in both Europe and UK (from 4% to 8.8%) and the US (from 3.9% to 8.9%).

Inside the psychology of your users: user intent and why it matters

For that matter, you have to have clear in mind who’s that you’re talking to. What do they want? What are their preferences? Why are they searching for specific keywords? What drives them?

Once you understand that, you can have a deep understanding of how each Google’s query can help or break your business. Each time spent on optimizing for queries that won’t bring you a clear ROI will be wasted.

How do you gain access to users intents? Analyze your traffic. Where is it coming from? Talk to your people.

Who are they? Why are they reading your blog, media outlet and not going anywhere else? If you have a store, or offer a product/service, access to your clients’ logs and interactions and look at what they’re telling you.

You have plenty of information about them, but you’ll need to listen carefully if you want to avoid to be eaten up by Google. What’s next?

What can you do to survive and thrive in a no-click search economy?

As a publisher, you’ll need to be way more careful about your organic strategy. You’ll need to understand more and more the intents behind each query. For instance, if I ask questions like ”

Brand, brand, brand! If people in your industry have your brand on top of their mind, they won’t need a search engine; they’ll type your name and seek your information. In that respect, people searching for your brand via Google are signaling Google that your site is relevant. That is a powerful signal for Google to bring you more organic traffic over time
Content quality: good content isn’t enough anymore. Either you become a trusted source of content for your audience, or chances are you will be gone soon
Authoritativeness of the platform and the authors: as Google has rolled out in 2018 some algorithms change some of those might have to do with the authoritativeness of the platform and authors writing on it
Build a network: a network is a crucial element that can help you push your content out when Google won’t be helping you anymore
Nurture your audience: your audience can tell you fundamental truths about your business that you might have missed all along. Talk to them. Invite them to write to you and listen to why they do like reading your content
Diversify your traffic sources: other areas, such as social media and email marketing can be critical to diversify your content. You don’t have to have other dozens of traffic sources or go blindly in all directions. You can pick another area where you feel confident. For instance, I like email marketing, because it allows to build a more personal relationship with a large number of people and I’m going all in with it!
Do it differently! Don’t follow what others are doing in your industry. Get inspiration from other successful people and businesses in other sectors and apply back to yours! At the same time develop your uniqueness. What is that makes you unique in the marketplace? What is your value proposition? What’s your business model?

Other resources:

What is SEO Hacking? How to Steal Featured Snippets with These SEO Hacks
SEO Guide: How To Grow Your Blog With SEO
What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
How to Build a Great Business Plan According to Peter Thiel
What Is The Most Profitable Business Model?
How To Create A Business Model
What Is Business Model Innovation And Why It Matters
What Is Blitzscaling And Why It Matters
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business

The post How The Click Economy Is Evolving Based On Google’s CTRs appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

What Is A Business Engineer? The Rise Of Business Engineering

A Business Engineer is a hybrid between a business administration and technology expert, a person with the business acumen and engineering abilities to understand a complex organization and devise solutions and work as a liaison between commercial and technical teams.

A glance at the Business Engineering world

At its core, a business engineer is a hybrid between a business person and an engineer. The business engineer is someone with the understanding of how the business world works ad macro level, combined with how organisms function at a micro level, that can architecture solutions based on several key elements.

As pointed out in Osterle, H. (1995), Business in the Information Age: 

The business engineering concept enables the transformation of enterprises from the industrial age into the information age by means of procedure models, methods, and tools

Some of the key elements comprising business engineering require a deep understanding of several disciplines and areas:

Business model
Business processes
Organizational structure
Digitalization
Information process and technologies
The interaction between people and technologies within organizations

In one of its vacancies for Business Intelligence Engineer Amazon defines it as someone that can help “improve and define the best way of doing things throughout the company using the power of your analysis, technical skills, and business acumen.”

While this particular role is focused on improving internal processes to “identify opportunities to improve and optimize ship costs.” 

As pointed out by Amazon “the successful candidate will be able to retrieve, integrate, visualize and present critical data in a format that is immediately useful to improve the business decision-making process.”

A discipline between business administration and technology

Business engineering is a discipline in between business administration and technology. As more and more organizations are innovated by combining technological product and processes with remixing old and new business model patterns, it becomes critical to understand and drive those processes.

A business engineer is a manager that can guide companies through hard decisions by looking at quantitative data, navigating ambiguity and reducing the noise where needed. Some of the disciplines part of business engineering are:

Management science
Business administration
Law and economics
Technology and engineering

A business engineer is a hybrid between a commercial and technical role. It can work as a liaison between commercial and technical teams to device complex solutions to its organizations or other companies for which the business engineer partners with.

What tasks a business engineer performs?

Some of the job descriptions from Indeed and LinkedIn say:

Developing sales and service with regional and global accounts, supporting Account Managers and business development. Driving sales-related activities, implementing customer projects such as product and prototype selections, costing, pricing, quotations, preparation for serial production, and logistics setups.

For instance, among the task required:

Interacting with customers and consulting with Account Managers providing technical and commercial support
Applying financial analysis to evaluate business opportunities
Coordinating and driving customer-related and internal projects and activities
Supporting and training the organization in technical, commercial and market-oriented tasks
Handling claims with internal partners and managing quality control

On a position for Business Intelligence Engineer Amazon points out:

Design, develop and maintain scaled, automated, user-friendly systems, reports, dashboards, etc. that will support business needs
Partner with operations/business teams to consult, develop and implement KPI’s, automated reporting/process solutions and data infrastructure improvements to meet business needs
Apply deep analytic and business intelligence skill to extract meaningful insight and learning from large and complicated data sets
Serve as liaison between the Business and technical teams to achieve the goal of providing actionable insights into current business performance, and ad hoc investigations into future improvements or innovations. This will require data gathering and manipulation, synthesis and modeling, problem-solving, and communication of insights and recommendations

What kind of background, education, and experience do you need to become a business engineer?

For some of the open vacancies for Business Engineer, the required background is:

Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical or Chemical Engineering or comparable technical field.
Preferably up to 3 years’ experience in technical sales and knowledge of heat transfer and thermodynamics
Advanced Microsoft Office with an understanding of calculation tools.
Experience of CRM/ERP systems is an advantage

Skills:

Enjoy working in an international environment
Proactive, positive, and target-oriented team player with a keen interest in technical and commercial matters
Very strongly customer-oriented
Strong networker with good interpersonal skills and the ability to cooperate and communicate with many different layers and cultures

Those, of course, are just some of the skills required. Those will widely vary from organization to organization.

How much does a business engineer make?

According to PayScale, the average yearly pay for a Business Engineer is $67,429. The total pay goes from $35,479 – $83,845 based on salary and bonus. 

By running a search on Glassdoor for Business Engineer, the average salary can go from $64k per year for smaller organizations to senior Business Intelligence Engineer at eBay and Facebook, for $117k and $140k of yearly base salary respectively.

Do you want to become a business engineer? Start from the resources below:

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
How to Build a Great Business Plan According to Peter Thiel
What Is The Most Profitable Business Model?
How To Create A Business Model
What Is Business Model Innovation And Why It Matters
What Is Blitzscaling And Why It Matters
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business

Case studies:

What Is the Receivables Turnover Ratio? How Amazon Receivables Management Helps Its Explosive Growth
Amazon Case Study: Why from Product to Subscription You Need to “Swallow the Fish”
What Is Cash Conversion Cycle? Amazon Cash Machine Business Model Explained
Why Is AWS so Important for Amazon Future Business Growth?

The post What Is A Business Engineer? The Rise Of Business Engineering appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

What Is Scrum? The Agile Framework For An Effective Startup Process

Scrum is a methodology co-created by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland for effective team collaboration on complex products.

Scrum was primarily thought for software development projects with the goal of delivering new software capability every 2-4 weeks. It is a sub-group of agile. In fact, while agile is a set of principles that drive the activities in software development.

Scrum is a methodology that applies those principles to make software development faster and more productive. However, Scrum has also become a methodology for project management in the startup world.

Trust the process

When Jared Dunn (the character in Silicon Valley Series) in the vest of business developer convinces Pied Piper’s founder, Richard Hendricks to use the Scrum methodology, Richard was a skeptic.

Why would a group of smart software engineers fall into a management strategy? Well, it turned out he was wrong. In fact, Scrum is a process envisioned to make software development lighter, faster and more suited to customers need.

The method is now also used by startups for project management. Yet in reality, Scrum was a methodology born from the Agile Manifesto a set of principles put together in 2001 by software development experts.

Heavyweight vs.lightweight software development

The agile manifesto started out as a movement that wanted to challenge the assumption of the so-called heavyweight methods for software development that were based on more sophisticated and regulated approaches.

In fact, Scrum evolved as a lightweight software development method. The main difference between heavyweight vs. lightweight is fundamental. In fact, heavyweight software development methodologies, which prevailed a few decades back, consisted of many rules and protocols to follow.

Instead, a lightweight methodology is based on a few basic guiding principles. And it all started with the agile manifesto.

Agile manifesto: the guiding principles of Scrum methodology

In 2001, a group of seventeen software developers met to discuss these lightweight development methods, with the aim of challenging the old assumption of heavyweight software development.

They forged “The Agile Alliance,” as a group of independent thinkers about software development, which agreed on the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

Together they published the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. It comprises twelve guiding principles from which many applications (comprising Scrum) were born.

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through the early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
Working software is the primary measure of progress.
Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Some of those principles might be given for granted today yet they were not at all back in 2001. This manifesto represents the founding document for the Scrum methodology.

What are the benefits of using Scrum?

The benefits of using Scrum can be linked to the advantage of using an agile development methodology. Organizations that have adopted agile Scrum should experience:

Happier customers due to more responsive to development requests by the software development company
Higher returns are given by the ability of the software developer to focus on high-impacting features
Better organization of work based on the team’s ability to work together
Reduced time to market due to the more efficient organization

The Scrum elements

The Scrum methodology comprises three main components and a set of rules.

The Scrum Team

Within the team, there are three primary roles. It is important to remark that there is no hierarchy in the Scrum methodology. But each of the team members will be accountable for a specific part of the project.

The Product Owner: this person is primarily accountable for managing the completed increments of work.
The ScrumMaster: this person does anything possible to help the team perform at the highest level.
The Development Team: There are no titles in the Development Team. The main aim is to break down the product into items that can be incrementally implemented

Scrum Events (so-called Ceremonies)

The Sprint:  2-4 weeks period in which a specific part of the work is completed
Sprint Planning: those are meetings to assess which part of the product can be completed
The Daily Stand-up:  it is a short meeting of no more than 15 minutes to evaluate the progress of the project
The Sprint Review: a demonstration to present the work completed during the sprint
The Retrospective:  final team meeting to assess what worked and what didn’t to improve the process

Scrum Artifacts

Product Backlog: outlines every requirement for a system, project or product. It can be a to-do list consisting of work items
Sprint Backlog: list of items to be completed during the sprint
Increment: is the list of items completed after the last software release

Scrum Rules

The team will define those rules according to the organization values and expectations. Thus there isn’t a simple set of rules to follow.

Scrum guide

You can start right now to learn everything you need to know about Scrum from the official Scrum online guide.

Key takeaways

The Scrum methodology is based on the Agile Manifesto created in 2001. It is a project management process which primary aim is to make complex product development more effective.

This methodology that has mainly been used for software development can be applied to startup project management processes. The important aspect of Scrum is that there are not hierarchical structures or roles.

Handpicked related content

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know

What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained

What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained

Handpicked business models:

How Does PayPal Make Money? The PayPal Mafia Business Model Explained
How Does WhatsApp Make Money? WhatsApp Business Model Explained
How Does Google Make Money? It’s Not Just Advertising! 
How Does Facebook Make Money? Facebook Hidden Revenue Business Model Explained
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business
The Google of China: Baidu Business Model In A Nutshell
Accenture Business Model In A Nutshell 
Salesforce: The Multi-Billion Dollar Subscription-Based CRM
How Does Twitter Make Money? Twitter Business Model In A Nutshell
How Does DuckDuckGo Make Money? DuckDuckGo Business Model Explained
How Amazon Makes Money: Amazon Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does Netflix Make Money? Netflix Business Model Explained

 

The post What Is Scrum? The Agile Framework For An Effective Startup Process appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

What Is A Phoenix Company?

A Phoenix company is an organization that managed to survive and it thrived for over two hundred years. Opposite to the concept of Unicorn, a company that managed to overgrow and gain traction to become valuable in the short-term. A Phoenix Company is all about the long-term.

Unicorn Company vs. Phoenix Company

In the last decade, Unicorn Companies have become the most admired in the world. Those companies are the ones that experienced massive growth and potential to reach billion-dollar marks.

While Unicorn Companies and Startups do capture most of the media attention. There is another kind of company that a few know about. Those are companies that have managed to live for more than two centuries.

In a tech world that prioritizes growth over anything else, there isn’t yet a company that can be classified as a Phoenix.

First, because Silicon Valley is a phenomenon, which is relatively young. Fred Terman, considered “the Father of Silicon Valley” died in 1982. And the birth of the Silicon Valley phenomenon can be dated to the 1940s and 1950s. When Terman, as dean of engineering at Stanford encouraged young students also to pursue their own companies.

Second, companies coming out from innovative business models, that pursue growth over else, might be able to create initial traction and advantage, but over time they are not able to deliver consistent results. For instance, companies like Google and Amazon that came out from the ashes of the dot-com bubble also became the most promising companies.

Third, Unicorn Companies become often a good prey for larger organizations, that have the liquidity to buy them up. Therefore, before a Unicorn might get listed via an IPO and become too expensive, large organizations might buy them up for a relatively low price.

Thus, a Unicorn Company has mastered the short-term game. It has managed to understand how to gain traction so quickly, to become among the most valuable companies in the world. However, Unicorn Companies might either go bust or become part of larger organizations. And only a few might thrive in the long-run.

A Phoenix instead has mastered the long-term game. It might not have become a billion dollar company. Or even if it did it managed to survive many transitions, generations, and eras.

Related: What Is A Unicorn Company? The Top 25+ Unicorns Business Models For 2019

A glance at the Phoenix landscape

Phoenix companies are gems. And according to Wikipedia, there are based on a report published by the Bank of Korea in 2008 on 41 countries “there were 5,586 companies older than 200 years. Of these, 3,146 are in Japan, 837 in Germany, 222 in the Netherlands, and 196 in France.“

Until recently (2006) the oldest company alive was Kongo Gumi, a construction company headquartered in Osaka, Japan. The company was absorbed in 2006, as part of another company called Takamatsu Kensetsu. 

This means the company managed to live for over 1,400 years. The key, in this case, seems to be the family tradition, passed down from generation to generation since its founders. 

These construction techniques leveraged on these traditional tools and techniques to build and maintain and repair Buddhist temples.

While I didn’t find any scientific research that could point out what made those companies so everlasting, some of them seem to be family businesses. Yet the point of this article is the long-term focus.

How a bunch of new companies managed to survive for centuries and be passed on from generation to generation. In a world driven by companies that try to dominate the market at full speed.

I thought it might make sense to stop for a second to look at those companies and think how entrepreneurship means also thinking in terms of generations.

Data for the list included in the infographic: The Oldest Companies Still Operating Today

Statistics about oldest companies by country: Wikipedia

Statistics about over two hundred years old companies in Italy: IlSole24Ore

Resources for your business:

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
How to Write a One-Page Business Plan
How to Build a Great Business Plan According to Peter Thiel
What Is The Most Profitable Business Model?
The Era Of Paywalls: How To Build A Subscription Business For Your Media Outlet
How To Create A Business Model
What Is Business Model Innovation And Why It Matters
What Is Blitzscaling And Why It Matters
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business

The post What Is A Phoenix Company? appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

The 60 Patterns To Use For Business Model Generation [Infographic]

In this article, we cover the Business Model Navigator Methodology, which in my opinion is among the most effective ways to craft a business model. The BMI Lab gave us the opportunity to feature all the Business Model Navigator Patterns identified by the research of Oliver Gassmann, Karolin Frankenberger, and Michaela Csik.

All the materials and resources suggested are not linked to affiliations. I don’t earn anything from those suggestions, and I decided to feature the Business Model Navigator Methodology because I think it is an extremely valuable framework for anyone interested in business modeling.

Related: What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know

Why is business modeling such a hot topic?

Business modeling has become a critical topic which rose of interest in the late 90s, until it became ubiquitous, after the rise of digital businesses and the dot-com era:

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How the terms “business model” and “business models” grew exponentially after the 1990s

The reason business modeling has become such a popular topic is that with the rise of tech companies and digitalization, a competitive advantage isn’t captured anymore with product and processes.

Instead, the ability to assemble a unique business model has become a key element.

In this article, we’ll take into account the Business Model Navigator methodology developed by Oliver Gassmann, Karolin Frankenberger, and Michaela Csik.

Indeed as explained in “What is a business model?” there is a single way to assess, understand and describe a business. There are several methodologies, each with a set of assumptions about the critical components of any business. Among those on FourWeekMBA, we covered:

Business Model Canvas
Lean Startup Canvas
Value Proposition Canvas
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas
Growth Hacking Canvas

Each of those tools is quite useful from several standpoints. For instance, a business model canvas is an excellent place to start to have a complete framework of any business by looking at components such as key customers, partners, channels, and so on.

The lean startup canvas is a variation of business model canvas, based on the concept of lean startup and it is a good starting point for smaller businesses and startups.

Instead, a framework and tool like Blitzscaling canvas (I created this canvas by starting from the Blitzscaling book) is an excellent place to start if you need to assess whether your company or startup has all the key ingredients to scale up.

We’ll focus now on the business model navigator, which I found among the most effective tools to dissect any business, given its simplicity and effectiveness.

What’s a business model according to the Business Model Navigator Methodology?

What is precisely a business model? There isn’t a single definition of business modeling.

As pointed out by Oliver Gassmann, Karolin Frankenberger, Michaela Csik in The St. Gallen Business Model Navigator:

The business model can be defined as a unit of analysis to describe how the business of a firm works

In short, a business model is how the different bits and pieces of a company come together to form a whole, a sort of organism, which grows, survive and thrive in the marketplace.

Therefore, as defined in the book Business Model Navigator “a business model provides a holistic picture of how a company creates and capture value.”

The Business Model Navigator Methodology

The Business Model Navigator Methodology uses a simple framework to dissect a business model which looks at who, what, how and why of a business.

Those four dimensions allow you to map any company’s business model by having a complete picture of its engine. For instance:

The Who focuses on understanding the target customer.

The What helps to map the value proposition or the products and services offered and how they compel your target customers

The How defines the value chain or the set of activities the company undertakes to execute the value proposition

And the Why is about financial viability and how the company can balance between cost structure and revenue generation to achieve profitability

What is a business model pattern?

A business model pattern is a blueprint to creating new ideas and achieve business model innovation as a mean to create a lasting competitive advantage.

The BMI Lab gave us the opportunity to feature all the 60 Business Model Navigator Patterns identified by the research of Oliver Gassmann, Karolin Frankenberger, and Michaela Csik:

ADD-ON
AFFILIATION
AIKIDO
AUCTION
BARTER
CASH MACHINE
CROSS SELLING
CROWDFUNDING
CROWDSOURCING
CUSTOMER LOYALTY
DIGITIZATION
DIRECT SELLING
E-COMMERCE
EXPERIENCE SELLING
FLAT RATE
FRACTIONAL OWNERSHIP
FRANCHISING
FREEMIUM
FROM PUSH-TO-PULL
GUARANTEED AVAILABILITY
HIDDEN REVENUE
INGREDIENT BRANDING
INTEGRATOR
LAYER PLAYER
LEVERAGE CUSTOMER DATA
LICENSE
LOCK-IN
LONG TAIL
MAKE MORE OF IT
MASS CUSTOMIZATION
NO FRILLS
OPEN BUSINESS MODEL
OPEN SOURCE
ORCHESTRATOR
PAY PER USE
PAY WHAT YOU WANT
PEER-TO-PEER
PERFORMANCE-BASED CONTRACTING
RAZOR AND BLADE
RENT INSTEAD OF BUY
REVENUE SHARING
REVERSE ENGINEERING
REVERSE INNOVATION
ROBINHOOD
SELF-SERVICE
SHOP-IN SHOP
SOLUTION PROVIDER
SUBSCRIPTION
SUPERMARKET
TARGET THE POOR
TRASH-TO CASH
TWO-SIDED MARKET
ULTIMATE LUXURY
USER DESIGNED
WHITE LABEL
SENSOR AS A SERVICE
VIRTUALIZATION
OBJECT SELF-SERVICE
OBJECT AS POINT OF SALE
PROSUMER

Key takeaway

A business model is a holistic picture of a business and how its bits and pieces come together to form a whole, that becomes a financially viable organization able to serve a target audience, through a value proposition executed via a value chain. While there are several tools, frameworks and methodologies to assess a business model, the Business Model Navigation Methodology by Oliver Gassmann, Karolin Frankenberger, and Michaela Csik from BMI Lab is – in my opinion – among the most valuable methodologies to assess any business model.

One common denominator is innovation and how business modeling can help you build a lasting competitive advantage for our business!

Suggested reading: The Business Model Navigator

I suggest you read the book if you want to have a deep understanding of the topic and the framework we discussed:

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Resources for your business:

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
How to Write a One-Page Business Plan
What Is Business Development? The Complete Guide To Business Development

Handpicked popular case studies from the site: 

The Power of Google Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does Google Make Money? It’s Not Just Advertising!
How Does DuckDuckGo Make Money? DuckDuckGo Business Model Explained
How Amazon Makes Money: Amazon Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does Netflix Make Money? Netflix Business Model Explained
How Does Spotify Make Money? Spotify Business Model In A Nutshell
The Trillion Dollar Company: Apple Business Model In A Nutshell
DuckDuckGo: The [Former] Solopreneur That Is Beating Google at Its Game

 

The post The 60 Patterns To Use For Business Model Generation [Infographic] appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

What Is A Unicorn Company? The Top 25+ Unicorns Business Models For 2019

A Startup Unicorn is a company which has passed the billion dollars mark of valuation. Based on CB Insights research on Startup Unicorns. Variants of Unicorns include a Decacorn, made of companies valued at over $10 billion. And a Hectocorn, made of companies valued at over $100 billion. 

The top ten Startup Unicorns as of January 2019, comprise Bytedance, Uber, Didi Chuxing, WeWork, Lu.com, Airbnb, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, Stripe and JUUL Labs. The US remains the country with the highest numbers of Unicorns, followed by China. The top five industries for Startup Unicorns comprise Fintech, Internet Software, and Services, E-commerce/marketplace, On-demand, Healthcare.

The methodology used for the FourWeekMBA Unicorns Business Models Map

Classifying a business model isn’t a simple task, a business model is made of many moving parts. And creating a representation of a company on a single characteristic or feature is too reductive.

There are several approaches to define a business model. Each aims at understanding how a company works, and how its engine moves. That engine is made of things like key partners, resources, processes and how a company makes money.

Those approaches start from assumptions about what a company is and what aspects to focus on. Therefore, any attempt at classifying business model might never be complete enough.

For the sake of this article, I’ll put a label on each business model, by picking what I think is the most qualifying ingredient for the organization in the current moment. The aim is to provide you with as many business insights or at least stimulate your curiosity about these organizations.

As any labeling system, it has many limitations. Just like putting a label on a person is reductive, putting one on a complex organization is even more simplifying.

It is important to remark that this is not a science. A business strategy itself is made of assumptions about how the world works. In my opinion, the role of the entrepreneur is to test those assumptions in the real world as quickly as possible. When those assumptions turn out to be wrong, we’ll call them “failures.”

Yet in reality, those are feedbacks about the world at that moment. For instance, an idea might be too early for the world to accept, and an entrepreneur which is trying to push it to the market will fail.

It is important to notice that complex organization (think of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) don’t rely on a single business model pattern, but have combined them to create a unique organization that can capture a long-term competitive advantage.

For instance, Amazon runs on several models, from a subscription-based, to cloud as a service, to an online store, third-party stores and more.

While this is true for larger organizations, consolidated over the years; for smaller organizations, or unicorn startups a simpler business model allows them to scale up to a billion dollar valuation.

I did my best to put the right label on each of the Unicorns, part of the FourWeekMBA Unicorns Business Models for 2019. This label comprises the main feature of that company from both product and monetization standpoint.

The Unicorns come from a list of 311 companies by CB Insights.

I hope you enjoy and get as many insights from it!

The FourWeekMBA Unicorns Business Models For 2019

Toutiao (Bytedance) business model : digital short-video format model powered by AI
Uber business model : ride-sharing on-demand marketplace model
Didi Chuxing business model: digital media on-demand marketplace model
WeWork business model: office space sharing/real-estate-as-a-service model
Lu.com business model: online finance marketplace model
Airbnb : e-commerce/on-demand home-sharing marketplace model
SpaceX business model: space transportation model
Palantir Technologies business model: big data-based enterprise SaaS model
Stripe business model:  payment marketplace model
JUUL Labs business model: consumer electronics model
Epic Games business model: digital games marketplace model
Pinterest business model: digital advertising model
Bitmain Technologies business model: crypto mining blockchain-based model
Samumed business model: biotech-based model
Lyft business model: ride-sharing on-demand marketplace model
GrabTaxi business model: ride-sharing on-demand marketplace model
Global Switch business model: multi-tenanted data centers-as-a-service model
Infor business model: cloud-based enterprise SaaS model 
DJI Innovations business model: drones products-based model
One97 Communications (operates Paytm) business model: marketplace and virtual bank model
Coupang business model: mobile-based eCommerce/Marketplace for consumer products 
Coinbase business model: digital currency exchange marketplace model
Instacart business model: on-demand grocery delivery services and marketplace model
Slack Technologies business model: team-communication-as-a-service freemium model
Snapdeal business model: daily-deal e-commerce/marketplace model
Roivant Sciences business model: biotech in-license drugs and development model

Other 60 business model patterns FourWeekMBA has put together in partnership with BMI Lab:

Other resources for your business:

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
How to Write a One-Page Business Plan
How to Build a Great Business Plan According to Peter Thiel
What Is The Most Profitable Business Model?
The Era Of Paywalls: How To Build A Subscription Business For Your Media Outlet
How To Create A Business Model
What Is Business Model Innovation And Why It Matters
What Is Blitzscaling And Why It Matters
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business

The post What Is A Unicorn Company? The Top 25+ Unicorns Business Models For 2019 appeared first on FourWeekMBA.