Marketplace businesses are notoriously difficult to get off the ground. When you have a two sided marketplace, it can feel like you are in a chicken and egg situation. Without buyers, you can’t attract sellers and without sellers it’s almost impossible to attract buyers. However if you can engineer your way to a flourishing two [...]
Two side marketplace businesses are possibly one of the holy grails of online business models. In a two sided marketplace, buyers and sellers conduct transactions through a centralised platform. Both sides of the marketplace are self organised and so, the platform owner is able to take a transactional “rake”. These types of businesses are extremely [...]
It was just a couple of years ago that Groupon was hailed as the hot new online company with a seemingly genius new business model. Groupon would drive traffic to physical businesses across the world without ever having to deal with inventory. The world was so enamoured that Google tried to buy the company for [...]
One of the big problems I see when people launch new online products is they haven’t done the groundwork prior to launch. Even worse, you will often see people ship a new product out of the blue because they have been too scared to reveal anything before everything has been polished. In order to create [...]
Customer Acquisition for online products can often mean excruciating slow progress as you experiment to find the path of repeatable growth. It will often feel like you are talking to an empty room, treading water or that you just can’t find that opportunity to connect with your target audience. There is a wealth of data [...]
An important part of building a successful website is using analytics to see what is working and what can be improved. Making websites is all about proving or disproving assumptions through iterative testing and improvement. When you first build a website, you will be making many assumptions on how your website will be structured, your [...]
Testimonial pages can often make or break a sale during the online transaction process. When done right, they offer reassurance, trust and integrity. When they are done wrong, they are sleazy and make the company seem untrustworthy. Doing testimonials right naturally involves some level of investment, without any guaranteed results. It’s easy to slap together [...]
When launching a new product on the Internet, it’s important to quickly determine how traffic will find you and convert into paying customers. Ideally, your first working version should be a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that can be used to test out the idea and see if there is any traction for the concept. Understanding [...]
One of the great new opportunities of the Internet is the collective power of networks and marketplaces. Since almost from the dawn of the consumer Internet, people from around the world have been coming together and creating networks of shared interests online. One of the most powerful business opportunities on the Internet is to become [...]
Last week I talked about pre-qualifying your traffic for better conversion rates. By introducing the benefits of your product to your target audience before they reach your website, you can create a more compelling and higher converting landing page. An interesting alternative to pre-qualifying your traffic is the Product Qualified Lead. This is where your [...]
