Non-Traditional Business Models

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Permalink Reply by Corey Reid on September 29, 2008 at 2:44pm

Well, I'm a big believer in the idea that if you provide value, and give people a way to pay for it, they will. At the same time, you can find multiple sources of revenue off the same 'value', as suggested over at 37 Signals: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1256-making-money-twice

There's sort of a distributed patronage model emerging in a number of marketplaces that I find very interesting, and hope to pursue in a way with an online product I'm working on.

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Permalink Reply by Paul Farnell on October 1, 2008 at 10:26am

Jay - that sounds very interesting. We're doing almost the exact reverse. We have a product called Fingerprint that people pay to use to collect data about their email marketing mailing lists. Now that we have a decent number of customers for it we're aggregating the data they've collected and are reproducing it as reports which we give away for free. The reports help build traffic to our site and set us up as a valuable resource for that kind of data - which in turn drives more people to sign up to get the specific data about their own readership.

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Permalink Reply by Jay Grieves on October 1, 2008 at 1:31pm

Thanks for the reply, I honor the place where my revenue yang and your revenue yin meet!

Paul Farnell said:

Jay - that sounds very interesting. We're doing almost the exact reverse. We have a product called Fingerprint that people pay to use to collect data about their email marketing mailing lists. Now that we have a decent number of customers for it we're aggregating the data they've collected and are reproducing it as reports which we give away for free. The reports help build traffic to our site and set us up as a valuable resource for that kind of data - which in turn drives more people to sign up to get the specific data about their own readership.

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Permalink Reply by Dave Bernard on October 7, 2008 at 1:23am

We've used "bartering" to leverage some of our customers' capabilities to advance our own goals. For example, we've built systems for a couple of companies in the technology marketing/sales arena; these folks have capabilities that we don't have, and can't afford (normally), but that we'd like to leverage.

We've arranged to "barter" our development and hosting offerings in exchange for them providing some of their own special help. Because our development is largely offshored, I can take advantage of wage arbitrage to make the deal even sweeter. For example, one of these customers is providing us with consulting and marketing valued at about $20K in exchange for a very reasonable number of development hours. Both parties gain a tremendous cost abatement on the respective services they are "buying."

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Permalink Reply by Steve Cholerton on October 11, 2008 at 10:08am

I have a product in the works which will be sold to the customers, badged for each one individually, and the license will allow them to give the product to their customers free of charge.

As a standard thing on all my products I give free licenses to educational and charity organisations - I don't think this counts as making money in any way though, traditional or not :-)

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