Business Model Leverage

This is what I call the "Hub and Spoke" model — leverage a core subscription userbase and then upsell additional offerings to gain a larger share of wallet from your core customers. Until recently, this option seemed out of reach for most Consumer SaaS companies struggling to simply generate enough demand to support a single product at scale.

Secondly, your strengths to distribution increasingly get fragmented. So in the early days of streaming Spotify as the leader was the dominant platform, but we've seen not only other large leading streaming platforms develop and we can get into that dynamic because that's a very interesting part of the market as well, but we've now started to see d... See more

So let's use video because I just think it's a great example. If you think about music and how you consume music, you actually consume catalog product a lot. I certainly do. And I think most consumers do. Songs that I've listened to once, I will listen to again and again, and again, at some point. With video, that's less the case. Once I watch seas... See more

Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media). 

Because I'm going to have the hottest new songs. The problem is the consumer wants more than that. They want the old stuff to. So all of a sudden the power in that relationship moves from the distributor who can create new content and also has the consumer relationship to who owns the IP that the consumer wants, the IP that consumer wants a lot of ... See more

In more recent times, we’ve migrated from this homogenous SaaS world to a more complex world of hybrid businesses, which generate different types of revenue in their quest to build enduring value. This, of course, has played out in many industries beyond software. Costco, for example, was one of the OGs here with its membership subscription fee + i... See more

Leverage supply-side scale to open out asset-as-a-service to ecosystem partners