Day 250: Re-Imagining with Revenue Models

Photo by Ishon Studios on Unsplash

So you can come up with a creative way to solve a problem for clients or customers. But it’s not a business until it makes money (at least enough to sustain itself). Now what?

Today in Entrepreneurship for Lawyers, students reimagined their enterprise ideas around ten different revenue models:

Unit Sales Model: pay per unit

Adverstising Model: pay to advertise

Data Model: sell data

Intermediation Model: brokerage

Licensing Model: pay to use protected IP

Franchising Model: pay to use a name and business model

Professional Model: pay for services

Usage & Utilization Model: pay-as-you-go (e.g., daily rental)

Freemium Model: get the basic free, pay for the premium

Re-imagining with Revenue Models

Working through this exercise, students re-imagined not only their revenue stream but sometimes their business concept and their customers.

For example, a group working on a new way to deliver caffeine and nicotine in one product imagined shifting from a unit cost model (pay for the product) to an advertising model (other brands pay for advertising space inside the product lid).

A student working on a more sophisticated cost-of-claim model for insurance adjusters imagined developing the model and licensing it to other users.

Students working on a better gift-finding website explored shifting from an advertising model to a data model, selling its own traffic data to retailers to show what products are trending as gifts.

Students working on a smart snowblower imagined selling the units to larger customers like HOAs and renting units to individual homeowners on a per-day usage & utilization model.

Changing the Camera Angle

Thinking about different potential revenue models is one of my favorite exercises. Just by forcing yourself to change the camera angle, you can sometimes see a delivery solution that others missed. Especially by experimenting with models that are rarely associated with your business — for example, examing everything except the professional model for provision of legal services — can force you outside of boxes you didn’t know you were stuck in.