Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing Business Models

Here's a summary of KickStarter's business model:  (please help me update the model by adding comments.)

Sources

http://www.businessinsider.com/kickstarter-funding-2011-3

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/technology/start-ups/25kick.html?em

http://www.wired.com/magazine/tag/kickstarter/

http://blogs.forbes.com/venessamiemis/2011/03/31/could-affiliate-crowdfunding-be-an-alternative-model-for-online-advertising/

Idea Generation

Athenz makes it easy to generate ideas that help you to move your business forward.  We use a question and answer format.  I this case the question is "Usability Strategies" Your team can contribute answers and discuss them.

You can enter ideas as quickly as you can type them.

Understand Your Customer and Create Innovative Solutions

Prototype your startup

A designer’s job is to extend the boundaries of thought, to generate new options, and ultimately, to create value for users. This requires the ability to imagine “that which does not exist.” We are convinced that the tools and attitude of the design profession are prerequisites for success in the business model generation.

-- Alex Osterwalder, Business Model Generation

Athenz gives you a business model prototyping tool that allows you to quickly create multiple business model prototypes by mixing together customers, features, sales strategies, etc.

Prototypes give you a high level picture of your business which you can review, share, and update as you progress. That’s a nicety. The real benefit of prototyping is in the activity itself--in the visualization and composition of multiple models which provide a tangible way of exploring business opportunities.

What if I combine this customer segment with these features with these marketing strategies? With these revenue strategies?  With these partner relationships?

The more combinations your explore, the more likely that you will hit upon a profitable business model.

Write down your hypotheses

Novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong. -- Thomas Kuhn

Once you’ve tentatively decided on a business model prototype, the next step is to turn your high level picture into a set of clearly defined hypotheses. This step has two benefits. Getting clear on your hypotheses can uncover flaws and inconsistencies that you need to address. Second, your hypotheses are the basis for product development and customer development.

Connected to each component in your business model prototype is a set of carefully designed follow-up questions that help you articulate your hypotheses.. For example, if you stated in the prototype that your customer is “young urban women,” we ask you questions like “What is this customer’s level of need?” and “What is this customer’s recognition level of their need?” These are the kinds of questions that a business consultant or potential investor would ask. Its important for you to answer them in the beginning of your process.

Your entire team can comment and review the answers.

Learn From Customers

The facts live outside the building. -- Steve Blank

The biggest risk for your startup is that your customer won’t believe that your product is worth their time or money. The best way to address this risk is through a process known as customer development: a process whereby you continuously interact with and learn from customers and subsequently update your business model and product based on what you learn.

There are many techniques and methods for learning from customers: intimate one-to-one interviews, ethnographic studies, at-a-distance surveys, presentations, demos and prototypes, a release of a minimum viable product, online advertising to test language and ideas, etc.

The athenz experiment journal is a flexible tool that supports learning from customers.










Here’s what you can do:

• Schedule experiments (any kind of customer interaction)
• Describe the purpose of the experiment
• Record results and conclusions
• Your team can read and discuss the results with you
• Manage a large volume of experiments by many team members

The journal becomes a record and repository of everything you’re learning from your customers and other industry players--subtle observations that will later prove important and validations and falsifications of your hypotheses.

Brainstorm Ideas

The best way to have good ideas is to have a lot of them. -- Linus Pauling

Customers are the original source and final judge of your business model. But the vision and the plan and the solution to the customer’s problem are created, forged, synthesized by the entrepreneur.

Creativity is essential and brainstorming (ideation, the generation of lots of ideas) is a primary tool. Imagine participating in a long brainstorming session. Divide the session into thirds. All the unoriginal everyone-has-thought-of-them-before ideas pour out in the first third. Innovative ideas arrive fashionably late in the third third. You need to get into the third third.

Athenz is a Q&A technology that represents your business model as a set of answers to questions like who is the customer?, what is the problem? etc. You can brainstorm answers to all of these questions. And then your and your team can discuss and choose the winners.

(Answers function as reusable components that you can plug into multiple business model prototypes.)

Here’s how it works:

• Anyone on your team can create questions and submit answers.
• Everyone can comment and review answers. Reviews are averaged to create a team score.
• The owner of the question or project owner can choose to adopt, reject or defer questions.

Entrepreneurs are busy people who like lists because of their simplicity. With athenz its easy to create shared lists of whatever is important: lists of customer types, marketing strategies, sales strategies, features, competitive strategies, competitors, usability strategies, etc.

Your question can be business critical or something that is only important this week.

Your lists might contain hundreds of items that are be the result of your entire team’s brainstorming effort. Athens provides tools for sorting and searching your answers to manage these large lists.

Athenz Q&A is an ideation tool to help you discover the breakthrough solution that will thrill your customer and give you an advantage over the competition

Groupon Business Model

The following is an example of a business model developed with the Athenz Business Model Prototyper:

Benefits of Athenz

Challenge	Athenz Solution
Understand the customer and test your entire business model with customers and other industry players.	Schedule, manage, and record customer-oriented experiments such as interviews, surveys, advertising campaigns, etc. A team calendar of experiments.  An easy way to record results and have the whole team view and discuss. Build lists of contacts.  Record conversations.
Develop a complete and valid business model	Rapidly generate and evaluate families of business models.  Discuss models with your team.
Create a breakthrough solution	Use a question and answer approach to explore and test ideas. Work with hundreds of ideas.  Discuss them with your team and choose the best.
Work productively with a good team	Invite collaborators to join your project and contribute.  Assign permissions based on roles (owner, member, viewer)
Use a good process	When you create a project, you’re provided with a set of carefully developed questions with associated followup questions that help you to articulate your business model.

Create and Schedule Experiments

An experiment is an activity that is engaged in to test or discover your business model.  Experiments are directed toward those outside your organization:  potential customers, industry influencers, press, competitors, people in related markets, etc.

Athenz provides a simple and flexible way to manage your team's experiments on a calandar and journalize and discuss what learned and what you infer about the quality of your business model.

Create an Experiment

Log Results and Conclusions, Discuss with Team

Athenz provides a simple way to for your entire team to record your learning experiences as you develop and test your business model.

Your Business Model as Answers to Key Questions

Athenz represents your business model in terms of answers to key questions like the following:

• What in the problem?
• Who is the customer?
• What are the marketing channels?
• What are the core features?

(When you create a new project, these questions are part of the project template.)

Through Q&A, you can capture and document your business model.  But more importantly, we provide  the tools to discover and create new business possibilities and to develop and evaluate them.  In other words, Athenz uses Q&A to help you think.

Here are the core features of Q&A:

• Brainstorm answers with your team
• Rank, status-track and select answers
• Develop your answers using follow-up questions
• Discuss and take notes
• Add your own questions or modify existing questions

Brainstorm Answers

Athenz lets you generate lots of ideas for different parts of your business model.  Quickly build up lists of potential customer segments, features, solutions, marketing strategies, etc.  Your entire team can contribute ideas across the entire business model.

Simply type in an answer in the name field and hit the enter key.  In brainstorming, you list your ideas without filtering them by criteria such as redundancy, unrealistic, irrelevant, etc.

Later you can bury the answer.  Simply roll over the row and click the bury link which hides the answer on a secondary list.  You can restore the answer at any point.

Answer follow-up questions to develop your answers

The questions in your business model have a set of associated follow-up questions that guide you to exploring and developing the answers.  Follow-up questions have multiple purposes.  They can help you to quickly see flaws or weak spots in your idea.  They provide guidance and structure to your thinking process.  They also help you to relate and connect different parts of your model.

Rank, status-track, and select answers

You need to explore a lot of ideas in order to create that one great idea.  We provide you with multiple tools to manage and track the idea set.

• Select an answer.  Now it's part of your business model.
• Track the status of an answer from created to defined to qualified (some evidence to support it), and finally to either validated (strong evidence) or falsified.
• Rank answers

Only the project owner or the question owner (the person who created the question) can change the selection, status, and rank properties of an answer.

Discuss Answers and Take Notes

You can discuss and debate answers with your team.  You can also log notes using the commenting feature.

Add your own questions, Modify the initial questions

You start with a small set of key questions.  You can add additional questions and add, edit, and remove follow-up questions.