The Profit Prophet

What if I told you the left wing and the right wing are of the same bird?

In collaboration with Barry Thornton. In the Shared Economy two or more parties (or companies), each of which has a signifi cant part of what is needed to cause a transaction to occur, come together and pool their resources and in the processes also take part in the sharing the revenues of the transaction. In the “old sense” it is almost like a barter situation, but in the new sense it is more complicated. It is actually the thought of sharing the risk and sharing the rewards. A good example today would be something like a UBER , AirBnB , and Zipcar . UBER has become successful not by buying fleets of cars and hiring thousands of drivers, but instead sharing a know resource (car owners with free time), to solve an existing problem (getting someone without a car from point A to point B). UBER makes its money by offering a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that allows car owners to charge clients a fare for their rides, much the same as a taxi does. Unlike a taxi service,...

The new-new in fundraising is crowdsourcing, and what makes crowdsourcing so powerful is a concept known as the long tail. Traditionally, the concept of the “long tail” was used to describe the declining part of the product life cycle (see below). It is usually called “end of life” or declining phase. It might have been used to describe the portion of product distribution that represents a period in time when sales for less common products return a profit due to reduced marketing and distribution costs. That would make a “tail” a period of time when sales are made for goods not commonly sold as standard products. The period could be short or long. This term was hijacked by Chris Anderson in 2004 when he coined the term “long tail” to describe a phenomena where products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, but only if the store or distribution channel is la...