Interesting to see Substack, Teachable (or Didactic from @wes_kao@gaganbiyani where @Lennysan is offering this cohort-based course) as the initial tiles of a larger revenue jigsaw (puzzle).
The core theme is of course @kevin2kelly's famous making a living of your 1,000 or (more) true fans. All of these (Substack, Teachable, Patreon, BuyMeaCoffee etc.) can be seen as ways to enable different route of making a living via your 1k fans
Before the internet, you had to go through gatekeepers (editors, music co CEOs etc) to reach your fans.
Then, in the first phase of the internet you had marketplaces (Skillshare, Udemy, itunes) where you dont have emails or even direct connects with your fans.
Now the rise of tool apps (essentially business in a box apps), where for a fee (10% in substack’s case) they help you set up and run different revenue-generating models.
Publishing - Substack
Education - Teachable, Didactic (Bitclass in India)
Consulting - Clarity, PickMyBrain
Essentially what these tool apps are doing is helping me run 1-person businesses effectively. But why stop here?
Why cant a creator / microinfluencer run other ventures?
e.g., ecommerce - what if an influencer could curate her storefront - say her fave products that her fans could buy & get her affiliate rev
e.g., uk.bookshop.org/shop/peterfran…
There is a startup waiting to do this at scale, i.e., help any influencer set up their storefront easily, and market the offering.
If you are building one and are in India then DM me.
Another variant: a popular model is collaborations where an influencer collaborates with a brand - this is popular in the beauty space. But now as @MrBeastYT Burger shows, you can also create a brand in a new category.
There is a slot for a startup that makes it easypeasy for influencers to connect w manufacturers to build a product, and w distributors to reach it to consumers. Happy to chat if anyone is building this.
Imagine a @sejalkumar1195 lipstick manufactured by the same co which does for @trySUGAR@letspurplle & shipped by Shadowfax / ExpressBees….(the key Q here is inventory risk; so my guess is this will first be popular in made per order categories)
What else?
Fintech - capital to invest in influencer's fans / friends / colleagues - today’s Operator VC models via Rolling Funds is exactly that but in the coming years we will see more and more democratization.
5+ yrs from now, a smart PM or CXO (or founders) in a Series B co with a decent social brand will easily get $200k to invest in hot startups (scout and bring it to VC funds).
Will think of more streams, but the key theme is startups emerging to help influencers run 1-person companies to generate newer revenue streams, with all of the physical work outsourced and disintermediated. The influencer provides access / brand, content, curation etc.
A term I am thinking of for these is revenualization startups, i.e., startups enabling influencers / creators to tap revenues from diverse plural streams - membership (patreon), writing (substack), consulting (pickmybrain), edu (teachable, cbcs), storefronts / ecommerce etc.
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Understanding startups (or scaling startups), metrics & valuations
or
how not to be misled by analog metrics when you run digital scalable ventures.
1st a key clarification: there are many kinds of startups - at one extreme, think of a SaaS venture aimed at getting 1m+ developers to swipe their cards, aiming to be a $1b rev biz in 5+ yrs; at other a local restaurant or a pet salon with no rev goals. In middle varying combos.
VCs invest exclusively in the 1st kind of startups - businesses that grow big very fast (or scale) - typically tech or tech-led (incl software, hardware, biotech) ventures. Tech allows you to serve or acquire next customer at low to zero cost. This is an important criterion.
On my new post. This is a massive ~7k words piece!
I write abt the 'Indus Valley' playbook. Indus Valley is tour desi startup ecosystem, and the Indus Valley playbook is the hacks, biz models & approaches needed to win in this unique ecosystem.
Psychological moonshots (as opposed to regular engineering-led moonshots).
Great Q fm Rory - are we in startupland predisposed to more expensive engineering moonshots?
How reframing a negative as a feature, basis our understanding of human psychology, helps. A faster ship would have been harder to pull off & would have still meant slower speed vs an airplane. Instead they focused on slowness and the romance of sea travel.
Worth noting that when Softbank acquired ARM in ‘16, both NVidia and ARM had similar market cap - in the early $30bns. Now Nvidia is at $300b and ARM is being acquired for $40b!
Nvidia has perhaps been amongst the biggest beneficiaries of rise of ML, self-driving cars, gaming where their GPUs have come in handy. As the need for compute power grew Nvidia found itself on the right side of ML tailwinds.
Whereas ARM, a virtual monopoly has languished.
2/7
Sure, there have been perhaps management issues at ARM etc. And the comparison isn't exactly like to like. But if there is a takeaway here, it is that riding tailwinds is perhaps far more important than having moats.
3/7
2/17
It is common to use IIT/IIM as a shorthand to refer to elite colleges in India. Sometimes IIT/IIM/BITS or IIT/NIT/IIMs and so on.
We lack a moniker like the U.S.'s Ivy or France's Grande Ecoles.
So I created one.
3/17
We can look at any top tier college in India, from the IITs to Xaviers / Ashoka, and you will see that they tick these 4 boxes – selectivity in intake, all India (national) intake, presence in a metro or residential nature, and English-fluency.