Tag Archives: business models

Defining RoDA: Return on #Digital Assets

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How do we measure the Return on Investment for digital assets? It’s a question that is starting to challenge digital marketers and IT managers alike, but there don’t appear to be too many guidelines. Whether your social media campaign is being expensed as direct marketing costs, or your hardware upgrade is being capitalised, how do you work out the #RoDA?

In most businesses, measuring the expected RoI of plant or equipment is usually quite easy: it’s normally a financial calculation that takes the initial acquisition price, amortized over the useful life of the asset, and then forecasts the “yield” in definable terms such as manufacturing output or capacity utilisation.

However, when we look at digital assets, many of those traditional calculations won’t apply, either because the usage value is harder to define, or the benchmarks have not been established. Also, while hardware costs may be easy to capture, how are digital assets such as websites, social media accounts, software (proprietary and 3rd party) and domain names being reported in the P&L, cash-flow analysis and balance sheet?

Sure, most hardware (servers, PCs and physical networks) can be treated as capex (e.g., if the purchase price is more than $1,000 and the useful life is 2-5 years). But how do you make sure you are getting value for money – is it based on some sort of productivity analysis, or is it simply treated as fixed overhead – regardless of your turnover or operating costs?

As we move to cloud hosting and #BYOD, many of these assets utilised in the course of doing business won’t actually appear on the company balance sheet. Yet they will have some sort of impact on the operating costs. Most software is sold under a licensing model, where the customer does not actually own the asset. (But, if the international accounting standards change the treatment of operating leases longer than 12 months, that 2-year cloud hosting fee might just became a balance sheet item.)

I was once involved in the acquisition of a publishing business that was converting legacy print products to digital content. Not only did they capitalise (and amortize) the servers and the conversion software, they also capitalised the data entry costs (using freelance editors) to avoid the expense hitting the P&L. Nowadays, that’s a bit like putting the HTML coding team on the balance sheet and not the payroll…

In some cases, the costs associated with maintaining an e-commerce website or registering a URL, will remain as overhead or operating expenses. But over time, businesses will want to have a better understanding of their RoI for different online sales and digital marketing channels, especially if they have been investing considerably in their design, build and maintenance. Measuring online visitor data, customer conversion rates and average yield per sale, etc. are becoming established metrics for many B2C sites. Having a good grasp of your #RoDA may just give you a competitive edge, or at least provide a benchmark on effective marketing costs.

 

Stripe’s John Collison: “Better to be #disruptive than incumbent”

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In a Melbourne fireside chat with Paul Bassat (hosted by NAB and Startup Victoria) Stripe‘s co-founder and President, John Collison offered the insight that “it’s better to be disruptive than incumbent”.

Incumbency comes with all the baggage of legacy data, semi-redundant systems, siloed business operations, and customers with long memories.

Whereas, a nimble and agile startup like Stripe can cut out inefficient and lazy business processes – especially in areas like online and mobile payment systems. And in doing so, a disruptive service can make us think, “how did we ever manage before this was invented?”

Collison was careful, though, to point out that Stripe is working with the banks, not against them, in case anyone thought his company has designs on becoming a fully fledged financial institution. “We simply want to make the payments business more efficient.”

Stripe’s approach is to leverage engineering skills and solutions “to fix first world and middle class problems”. Precisely so – why would you want to undermine the system (payments and transfers between banks and their customers) that gives rise to your very existence?

Collison also reflected that never before has it been possible for such a small number of people to create such enormous value, very quickly – citing the fact that WhatsApp had a mere 55 employees when it was acquired by Facebook earlier this year for $19bn. (Stripe itself, founded in 2010, had about 100 employees when it was valued at $1.75bn around the same time.)

While WhatsApp does not yet generate revenue, its valuation as a disruptive IM platform is largely based on a notional value per user, and what that may represent in terms of data from customer analytics or premium pricing for add-on services.

But you don’t even need to be a startup business to disrupt an existing market, as the music industry continues to discover to its cost – you simply need to be part of the demographic that is used to “free” stuff, has no real concept or appreciation for IP, refuses to pay for anything on the internet, and develops brand loyalty based on likes, shares and number of views. Even Stripe would be out of business if everyone switched to peer-to-peer money transfers without wanting to pay commissions or transaction fees.

 

 

 

 

Oxygen Ventures brings some fresh air to Australia’s #Startup Community

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Last week, Larry Kestelman’s new investment vehicle, Oxygen Ventures gave 5 local startups the opportunity to bid for a share of A$5 million in funding at the inaugural Big Pitch night in Melbourne (#thebigpitchAUS).

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The Judges at the Big Pitch

 

The #Startup Contenders

Drawn from over 300 applicants, the hopeful candidates (in alphabetical order) were:

Bluesky  Shopping portal for leading fashion and lifestyle brands.

ECAL On-line event and brand marketing calendar launched by E-DIARY.

etaskr Enterprise productivity solution that allows employees to ‘bid’ for in-house projects based on their expertise.

KartSim New go-kart game for PCs, from developer Black Delta.

WeTeachMe Booking platform for short-courses and special interest classes.

After each contestant made a short presentation, they were questioned by a panel of judges, comprising CEOs, entrepreneurs, corporate advisers and business development experts from a range of well-known organizations. Most of the questions related to the startups’ revenue projections, funding requirements and growth opportunities – but some were grilled in more detail about their business models and financial performance to date.

How did the participants fare on the night?

The Joint Winners were ECAL and WeTeachMe – with the People’s Choice Award (based on audience votes) going to KartSim.

My sense is that ECAL came out on top (with A$2.5m of funding) on account of their early success in signing up a number of high-profile sporting franchises in the USA and Australia, demonstrating their growth potential – otherwise with 1 million users, but only $440,000 in revenues, you’d have to think the business model would struggle.

WeTeachMe was successful in attracting A$2m in funding because the business model is simple, it falls into the growth category of lifelong learning, and the platform had already achieved significant productivity gains for its commercial clients. Plus it has the potential to scale up and go international.

With KartSim, I admit I have no interest in computer games, but it would seem to me that with a headful of (virtual) Steam behind it, the developers might be better off tapping into crowdfunding opportunities, as the early interest suggests ready and eager buyers out there, enabling a successful commercial launch without giving up any of the equity.

Feedback from the panel on Bluesky suggested that despite offering a ‘one-stop-shop’ for consumers, the margins generated from the sales commission model would be insufficient to cover fulfilment costs (so it would only ever be a transactional purchasing platform); nor would the retailer aggregation model ever be allowed to encroach on brand or retailer loyalty schemes, thereby limiting the options to develop added-value services for customers.

As for etaskr (which I have featured before), it is still one of the few B2B startups that I have seen, which may make it appear less attractive to potential investors, since there seems to be some wariness around anything that is not consumer-focussed, or that does not play in a 2-sided market. Personally, I think this type of productivity tool is just the sort of tech startup that we need as it taps into the technological, organisational and demographic changes facing the modern workplace, and current attitudes towards job structures, collaboration and employee engagement and retention.

Footnote: What is ‘Disruptive’?


Interestingly, one of the Big Pitch sponsors was Uber (current darling of the startup community – if not of taxi drivers) which has been making presentations around town on what it takes to market a disruptive startup.

For me, there are three key attributes to a #disruptive startup:

  • Technology
  • Business model
  • Market engagement

A business like Uber ticks all three boxes – its proprietary technology comes in the form of the algorithms that track things like customer usage and vehicle capacity (not so much the apps which are similar to other peer-to-peer and #sharedeconomy solutions); the business model is rather like a network of city franchises (a common global platform with local autonomy); and the disruptive market entry strategy is designed to by-pass highly regulated industry structures – although Uber also likes to stress that it is working with taxi regulators.

Of the five startups that competed at the Big Pitch, only etaskr brings an element of disruption, because it is using a technology solution to challenge traditional notions of what a job is, and allows companies to tap into in-house resources that they might not otherwise be aware of. KartSim has some proprietary programming, but at the end of the day is just another computer game. WeTeachMe and Bluesky are trying to bring operational efficiencies to disparate markets, but they are both broker-aggregators, and don’t appear to have proprietary technology or unique business models. And ECAL is a neat content management solution to a problem that companies have been aiming to solve in other sectors – such as travel, education and health services – although it is not trying to break the existing market nexus between suppliers and customers.

But full marks to Oxygen Ventures, its partners, sponsors and the participants themselves for bringing a fresh perspective to the startup pitch night experience.

Tools vs Solutions: When does our core offering need to change?

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As regular readers of this blog will be aware, recent posts have focussed on digital – content, products, pricing etc.

I’ve also been immersing myself in the digital design process (next step: learn code?) and earlier this month I attended a workshop by a leading digital design studio. While most of the session was devoted to their own particular design methodology (basically, UCD with some fancy footwork) it also revealed that in developing tools to help customers undertake their own design projects, they have become a subscription software business. No doubt, they will continue as a design consultancy, but clearly the core offering is changing.

This shift echoes an analysis of McKinsey Solutions by the Harvard Business Review in late 2013. Basically, it suggested that rather than providing an all-in-one solution (based on black box consulting methodologies and processes), consulting firms are having to unbundle their offering, allowing them to remain relevant and move to more defendable positions in the value chain. In the case of McKinsey Solutions, embedding analytical tools at client sites is a cost-effective way of delivering services, while gaining insights on their customer needs, which in turn allows them to develop enhanced tools.

So it raises the question: Do consultants need to re-think their offering – rather than being solutions providers, should they focus on being enablers? This may seem overly disruptive (and potentially disenfranchising) for the consulting industry; but in the long run it should mean clients become more reliant on value-added solutions that deploy tools that they know, understand and trust (and can use for themselves). It should also mean that clients will want to retain access to these tools as they evolve, because they will be more invested in their development and use.