Author Archive: Sangeet Paul Choudary
The Three Building Blocks of Platforms
Note: This post first appeared on Harvard Business Review. I am delighted to have coauthored this with Mark Bonchek. The framework presented in this piece is foundational to my work on Platform Thinking and will be referenced in some of the subsequent posts. We typically think of companies competing over products — the proverbial “build [...]
Platform Thinking: How to get startup ideas
How does one find new startup ideas? Every business is built around solving a customer pain. Solving a customer pain creates value which in turn, if successfully harnessed, can be monetized. Platforms, in particular, connect demand and supply to solve customer pain on both sides. Platform Thinking and Startup Ideas One of the patterns for [...]
A Platform Thinking approach to building a business
Every business is an engine. It needs to do a certain set of things repeatedly to create value. If you haven’t figured out that set of repeated operations, you probably haven’t created a scalable business yet. Ford needs to repeatedly assemble cars, Google needs to repeatedly run its crawler, Facebook needs to repeatedly get users [...]
Growth = Engagement: A product design principle you can’t ignore
Newly launched startups love to see their traffic and sign-up stats grow. Growth, after all, is opium for a startup fresh out of the door, and frequent refreshes of the sign-up logs are the happiest pastime for entrepreneurs. Startups often tend to think of growth and engagement as two unrelated divorced concepts. In reality, nothing [...]
Platform Thinking: A brief guide to leveraging networks for business
This article first appeared on TheNextWeb Online networks are becoming increasingly important in the context of business today. In this era of social participation, the consumer is no longer a passive recipient of goods and services but is actively involved in creating value. Online platforms, that allow external participants to co-create value, are rewriting the [...]
How to crack User Generated Content: A Presentation
Note: I’m embedding a presentation from a talk I recently gave on the topic of user contributions based largely on earlier posts on this blog. The presentation ended up on the #1 spot on Slideshare on the day it was uploaded: Platform businesses like YouTube, Quora, Flickr etc. have little value when users aren’t contributing. [...]
A Platform Thinking Approach To Problem Solving
Business is about solving customer problems. It’s been claimed that business is primarily about beating the competition or about maximizing shareholder returns but if the successes (and failures) of the past decade are anything to go by, the primary goal of business is solving customer problems. If you think about the approach that businesses take [...]
Reverse network effects: Why scale may be the biggest threat facing today’s social networks
Note: This article first appeared as a Guest Column on The Next Web. Network effects are the holy grail for Internet startups looking for venture-scale returns. On a platform with network effects, the value to a user increases as more users use it. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Skype and many others benefit from this dynamic. [...]
Does your startup have a wallet-acquisition strategy?
Every new business that is serious about getting traction needs to figure out a user acquisition strategy. In a similar way, every new business (in the consumer internet space) that is serious about monetization needs to figure our a Wallet-acquisition strategy. Wallet-Acquisition and Recurring Revenue Models Every business seeking a revenue model has at least [...]
How to get users to contribute on a creativity platform
Let’s loosely define creativity platforms as platforms that allow creators to express themselves, and possibly get an audience for their ‘creations’. YouTube, Dribbble, 500px, Instagram, Flickr… the list goes on. A platform without creators is a ghost town and there is little incentive for consumers to use it. Replicating the technology of YouTube is a [...]
Platform junkie, Singapore-based Early stage internet guy, Currently advisor to multiple platform startups.
This blog is about taking ventures from an idea to a business... and mitigating execution risk.
