Business Models in the Internet Age

For the last six months I’ve been working my tail off trying to learn about Internet Marketing.

Just about everybody I’d talked to before left me with the feeling they didn’t understand what I was talking about.

Most of them claimed at least a passing knowledge of PPC and others even talked (vaguely) about blogging and inbound marketing.

But they didn’t bother to understand my problem.

We’re trying to innovate in every direction – the people we build software for, the software we build and how we build it, how we persuade people to use it and ultimately how we get to make money out of it.

They all wanted to shoe horn us into the CRM category and have us compete for PPC with salesforce and a bunch of other, old style, business models.

That wasn’t going to work for us.

Our business model is based on producing and marketing a category busting software as a service at the lowest possible cost, and finding ways to make money once we’ve done it.

If we can make it work we’ll completely change the way the software industry operates – not spending a fortune persuading people to pay money for it, but persuading them for nothing and making money because they use it.  A bit like Google with Search and Adwords, but without the advantages.

We developed a business process to suit our aims.

Instead of Market, Sell, Charge, Retain we chose Attract, Engage, Adopt, and Exploit.

Leaving Exploit aside (because we haven’t figured that out yet, we’re working on the Attract, Engage and Adopt flow.

Our miserly pilot of PPC was a complete disaster.  In some cases we were paying $200 for a registration from somebody who would never use the software.

That wasn’t going to work.

So we realized our critical measure would be Adoption and everything we did in the Attract and Engage phases had to be focused on supporting adoption.

From this it was easy to understand we needed to attract people with our ideas, not adverts.

That’s how we got to inbound marketing and it all makes sense.

This way we don’t have to compete in somebody else’s arbitrary category and against meaningless features.

Instead we can compete on the basis of our ideas, which levels the playing field.

I wouldn’t pretend to have figured out every angle but one thing is for sure.  All those businesses competing in the old way will run out of cash long before we do.

They might have the money, but we’ve got the ideas.

Strangely the more I understand about Internet Marketing the more I realize this has always been true.

If only I’d listened to the right people we’d have saved a lot of time and money.

Unfortunately I didn’t know how to find or recognize the right people back then

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Tagged as: Business, Cloud computing, Google, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Pay per click, Salesforce.com, Search engine optimization