1. Know the advantages and constraints of your business model.

Knowing these two things allows you to then focus on properly leveraging your advantages while planning ways to minimize the impact of your constraints.

For example: It’s not uncommon for a company to be utilizing an employment model that is lands their business near universities in an effort to get new, fresh talent on the cheap. It’s a smart way to keep certain overhead costs low. The downside of that, however, is that if you’re staying true to your business model, there is going to be star talent that slips through your fingers. But understanding that as a constraint of your model means you can plan effective ways to get to the talent as they’re becoming talent.

2. Manage your casfhlow (know your revenue model).

Part of understanding your business model is understanding how your cash flow works. If your business isn’t based on recurring revenues, then you need to develop a sales cycle and process that ensures you have consistent cash flow (IE: Apple makes its products obsolete at least yearly). If you do have a company that is based on recurring revenues, you need to make sure you know all the factors that play into the length of the contract and what your average contact length is. Which leads me to my next point.

3. Be driven by your data.

While not the case for every business, those that are driven by their data are those that have a high probability of success. Sales data ought to be your indicator of the necessity for new hires and on important lead generation times.

With data like the average length you have a customer, or the customer average value, you can work to predict scenarios that help determine whether you need to spend an extra amount of time generating leads for the contract expiration month, or whether you can reduce the overall cost of your product to bring in more sales because you know the average worth of your customers.

Obviously these are just a few of the many steps  around business models and business. Do you have anything to add to my list above?

Edit: Good gracious. Apologies on the spelling/grammar mistakes. I ended up re-writing this and apparently remnants from the initial version still made it in!

Development

• Must read and sobering post on apple app store development and revenue models.
• iPhone app dev costs can be anywhere from $20,000 – 150,000 according to Forrester research
• NimbleKit: #iPhone native app development using Html and JavaScript (as opposed to ObjectiveC).

Market Place

• The average shelf life of an iphone app is 30 days.
• Reports show that apple’s app store apps may actually be getting cheaper.
• iPhone possibly the best platform for mobile ads?
• A closer look at the iphone app store revenue numbers, and potential app developer revenues
• How much can you really make from free iphone apps?

If you have any addition links or info that would be of benefit, feel free to tweet me, leave a comment, or e-mail me!

I’ve thought (and said) for a while now that Apple (chronologically) took after Facebook’s Application Platform when they released their iPhone App Store. The difference between the two ecosystems (as both are walled gardens) was that Apple made their platform a lot better. How? Think about the main difference- they monetized theirs (something Facebook still has issues with).

What’s interesting, though, is that a company finally came out with a means for developers to monetize their applications. The company is called Zuora, and they’re coining this method of monetizing the apps on social networks as Z-Commerce.

Honestly, while a bit corny, coining the term Z-Commerce is a great marketing move, especially if they can really establish themselves as a player (guarantee more will follow) because I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this coming down the line as social networks continue to evolve (more established methods of revenue is a testament to the evolution).

Valve’s Steam. They did a fantastic job of this, to the same level of Apple’s AppStore + iPhone combo. If you’re not familair with Steam, it’s an application that you download that allows you to download games to your computer. But Valve took it a step further by creating a software development kit that developers can use to build new games. This sets them up so not only are they providing the tool to create the games, but they’re providing the platform for the distribution of these games. Great stuff.

A company called Viximo is taking a page out of Apple’s book, and is using the ecosystem concept and taking it to a micro level. What they’re doing is building an iPhone application that is more simple  to develop for than the Objective-C language required for the iPhone. More than that, the only way you can add these new applications is if you have Viximo’s application to begin with. This means they’ll need to setup a micro-payment system, thus making it effectively a clone of Apple’s system. Clone or not, not a bad idea.

Edit: As per Dan’s comment below, they may already have the payment system ready. If so, that’s great, as those can be a bit messy : )

I think part of the reason for the misconstrued direction of innovation is because often times people don’t have a solid criteria for what constitutes innovation. If I made a wireless Christmas tree, that’s not innovative (though wireless Christmas lights might be…), it’s just an incremental change. It’s just making a better widget.

To me, the best criteria for innovation is a product’s potential not just for success, but to move beyond being a market grower, and become a market creator. If your product causes new businesses that otherwise couldn’t have existed before to now enter into the market, that is an innovative product.

eBay, for example, was an innovative idea. Their website wasn’t just a market grower, but a market creator. Their site allows millions of people to suddenly become a business and doesn’t just give them the ability to sell things online, but an audience to sell them to. eBay also caused the blossoming of books upon books about how to make money on eBay, and even consultants or lessons on the matter- jobs that otherwise wouldn’t have existed.

The iPhone’s AppStore is another good example of an innovative product (or in this case platform) that didn’t just grow the cell phone market, but created an entirely new market. In the AppStore’s case, it created a number of new software businesses, and as developers continue to harness and push the potential of the innovative device, I am sure we will begin to see even more businesses grow out of this new market.

None of this is to say that building a business off of incremental changes won’t lead to having a successful business. On the contrary, comparing the potential risk of innovation based on my criteria to approaching product development through incremental change, the ROI based on the risk is in favor of incremental change (according to Winning At New Products: Stage-Gate). Let’s just be sure not to call it innovation.

Fundamentally what it comes down to is what kind of change do you want to be a part of, and what kind of change do we want to encourage? Are you interested in making a better widget? Or are you interested in starting a company that will create a new foundation for other companies to build upon- because that’s innovation.

All through my academic career I was working toward “balance.” The balance between teaching myself everything I wanted to know, learning about businesses, helping small businesses, and doing well in school, receiving the education others deemed entirely necessary. I aimed for a balanced life where I juggled school, life, relationships, hobbies, friends, outside projects and more.

As I look toward graduation in one week, I get to ask myself a new question. A question I probably should have asked myself long ago. What kind of balance do I want? Then I would have realized my answer is “I don’t.”

I don’t want balance, not right now. I want to be engrossed with making a change. I want to be an integral part of a company’s fruition. I want to work side by side with people who despise balance, love knowledge, and want to make dreams happen. A lot of people may not get this. But one type will. Entrepreneurs.

Where does your balance lie?

I called it WebBrayn, they call it WebMynd (still can’t get over the name similarity). I almost created WebBrayn about 2-3 months before I posted the idea (back in April of ’07) after being sad because of a lack of resources (and time). The idea was quite simple, Google Searches all the web where WebBrayn searches where you’ve been on the web (with the ability to filter, share, etc). I’d estimate that for the amount of time people search for something online, at least 25% of the time it’s for something they’ve already found, been to, or read. This made WebBrayn a no brainer (no pun intended). Obviously the people at WebMynd agreed.

Keep in mind, I am not saying at all that the people at WebMynd stole my idea (even if the name and cocnepts are markedly similar). I wish those guys the best of luck. I think they’ve got something great started and they have good times ahead.

Here’s to letting go! Go use WebMynd!

p.s. I knew I should have bought those domains ;-)

As most ingrained things go, their true value, while understood, can sometimes begin to fade (like your mom telling you to look both ways before crossing the street… or maybe a better example, companies who probably said they would never be part of the status quo, but did). That is why I love to hear from successful entrepreneurs because it seems each time I get to speak with one, some new part of business becomes very real.

In this case, the importance of analyzing customer demand in the marketplace was made distinctively important (and impressive) by the founders of Southport Boat Works. This past Monday, those of us in the managing emerging venture class received the luxury of a tour and a fair amount of personal time with the founders of Southport Boat Works (as well as a large dose of fiber glass particles, yum). During this time they outlined how they found this niche market… and its demand. The way they went about it and explained it literally gave me that feeling when you find out about Tyler at end of Fight Club and think “Whoa.”

And that’s where it should start. That’s how defined it ought to be. Niche internet marketing is built around traffic, products around buyers, and so on and so forth. It’s easy to get caught up in a sexy idea. But it needs to be built around knowing how many buyers or how much traffic will come. That’s where your success starts.

To take a semi-optimistic side (which I realize is an odd and surprising turn given the course of the initial cynicism of the first article, but hey, I like surprises, hopefully you do, too!), the size of the online advertising pie is quite large which means even given the data below, you may still make some cash. It just may not be a lot.

clipped from investordailynews.org The top 50 Web sites accounted for more than 90% of the revenue from online advertising spending in the first half of the year, and the top 10 sites accounted for 70%, according to the IAB/PwC data.