Exploring Business Models for Your Startup?

If you’re not earning, this week’s podcast is for you. It’s no frills, just a quick 30 minutes of deep-dives into revenue models for your startup. Enjoy!

A few highlights

1. Advertising and affiliate programmes need SCALE
   No really, low RPM (revenue per 1000 views) means you need eyeballs in the millions to generate even a modest income, which begs the question if SA even has the volume to support a lot of CPM (cost per 1000) based businesses. A notable alternative, though, is looking into hyper-niche segments that are more valuable and justify a higher CPM.
   
   Much the same with affiliate marketing, which can work but at specific stages of your startup lifecycle.
   
2. E-Commerce/Marketplace needs a SMART approach
   A popular and relatively easy space to get started in, but pretty hard to perfect at scale, since you have to work on low margins and constantly leverage tech to expand and capture new markets. That said, there are some significant opportunities in the B2B e-commerce space.

3. SaaS is all about nailing METRICS
4. Synonymous with tech, Software as a Service (SaaS) can be extremely rewarding, but requires a lot of investment and scale to reach profitability. And success in this space hinges on striking the perfect balance between your acquisition cost (CAC) and the money you make from each customer over a period of time (LTV), and how fast you can get to that tipping point where one outweighs the other enough to become profitable.
   
   Also worth checking out is this discussion around another of tech’s fave approaches: "I just literally can't think of a local example of where the freemium model has worked."
   
   Plus: Way more insights in the podcast itself…

Like our podcast? Remember to subscribe and never miss an episode.