1 Introduction
Advantages | 1. Reducing time and cost for startup testing (74%) 2. Aligning business idea to customer needs (68%) 3. Verifying and pivoting all business model parameters (52%) 4. Receiving rounds of financing (39%) |
Disadvantages | 1. Defining and designing MVPs (82%) 2. Identifying and engaging early evangelists and trial users (69%) 3. Defining testing priorities and designing tests (52%) 4. Missing other market opportunities and threats (39%) 5. Obtaining information about the startup sources of advantage (36%) |
2 (Theoretical) Background
2.1 Digital Business Models
Business model category | Business model types | Examples |
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Content compilation of content, depiction and provision of content on domestic platform | e-information | wsj.com, handelsblatt.com, Wikipedia |
e-entertainment | partypoker.com, Spotify, WoW | |
e-education | udacity, udemy, coursera | |
e-infotainment | nba.com, sport1.de | |
Commerce Initiation and/or settlement of business transactions | e-attraction | AdSense, Shopping.com |
e-bargaining/negotiation | eBay, Groupon | |
e-transaction | Paypal, Klarna, Bitcoin | |
e-tailing | Amazon, Expedia, book a tiger, zappos.com | |
Context Classification and systematization of information available on the Internet | Search engines | Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Indeed.com |
Web directories | Yahoo.com, | |
Book-marking | Citeulike.org | |
Connection Creation of the possibility to exchange information in networks | Intraconnection (Community) | Facebook, Snapchat, Skype, Flickr, Yelp, Gmail, Dropbox |
Interconnection | earthlink.net, sonic.net, att.com, t-mobile.com |
2.2 Development Processes of Digital Business Models
3 Conceptual Model/Empirical Insights
3.1 Venture Pyramid to Iteratively Develop Digital Business Models
3.2 Identifying Minimum Viable Products for Digital Business Models
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The single feature MVP focuses on the development and implementation of the most important feature of a particular product. A very prominent example is Google’s search engine. Google started with a performing search engine to find manually listed Web sites.
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Developing a concierge MVP means being in contact with the end-user. The founding team is personally involved in delivering value to the customer. Airbnb is an often-cited example of this experiment. The owners identified that design conference visitors in San Francisco were not able to book a hotel. As a consequence, the founders offered three airbeds and breakfast in their flat.
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The Wizard-of-Oz MVP tricks the user as the user experiences the product or service with full functions and as completely automated, but the startup mocks the process in the back. Zappos is one startup that had to validate that people were willing to buy shoes online. The front end illustrated a fully automated process, but in the back, everything was operated by humans.
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Groupon is one startup that used a piecemeal MVP to validate the continuous demand of users. A piecemeal MVP means that the initial version of a product is developed on standardized components.
Single feature MVP | Piecemeal MVP | Concierge MVP | Wizard of Oz MVP | |
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Content (Compilation of content, depiction and provision of content on domestic platform) | Duolingo initially offered programmes only for Spanish and German Source | Spotify leveraged pirate Bay technology to build the first version of the service Source | Twitch initially started as Justin. TV where the founder Justin streamed his life and soon developed a platform for others to stream. Source | The early stage startup winstate.io automatically generates content for customer to become thought leaders in their domain. In its early days, the content was generated by hired bloggers Source Own interview |
Commerce (Initiation and/or settlement of business transactions} | In its early days, Amazon listed only books as products to purchase Source | The startup Kawaloo launched their platform for storage capacity with existing components (e.g. WordPress) Source Own interview | Amical.io/assistant created a personalized career advice Source Own interview | Zappos initiated created its shoe shopping experience based on a manual process in the backend Source |
Context (Classification and systematization of information available on the Internet) | Google started with the single feature of searching the web. Websites needed to be added manually and there was no AdWords in place Source | Yahoo initiated its development with a curated list of links Source | Craigslist was developed as Concierge MVP by its founder Craig Newmark. Most of the early postings were generated by the founder himself Source Hanson (2016), The Social Media Revolution | Google Adword Express seemed to be fully automated from the beginning, but was operated by a backend of students in the early days to create copy Source |
Connection (Creation of the possibility to exchange information in networks) | Snapchat had initially only the feature to share a foto for a couple of seconds Source | No example identified | Zapier founder, Wade Foster, initially contacted users of various forums to get insights on potential integrations and started building these integrations after the personal connection Source | No example identified |