Strategy, strategy, strategy
Without a strategy you won't know where to go, so start with that. Per definition it is the answer to the three following questions:
- What value are you going to deliver?
- To what customers?
- And how are you going to be different?
Value: Not only should it be high, but preferably obvious and easy to recognise. This part is highly important for the next step when the business model is created as the value will tell you what object is the core object that has to travel through the value creation chain.
Customer: We like to split the potential customers into two groups: The non-paying user and the paying non-user where your product development has to focus on the first, while sales must focus on the second. Examples: Normal Facebook users or office workers are non-paying users (actually, they can be seen as the product), while the advertisers at Facebook or management at offices are mostly paying non-user willing to pay because the first group is there.
Being different: Really different please. Somewhat cheaper product is not different except if it's a common commodity like gasoline. Different is different every time too.
Barely Repeatable Processes (BRPs)
A process is a set of tasks and decisions that is part of the daily work of getting the job done. If you work in the average office, you deal with processes on a daily basis.
Production and some business processes (claims, HR) are Easily Repeatable (ERP) while most are Barely Repeatable, unpredictable.
Only 30% of the world wide value creation happens in ERPs while about 64% happens in BRPs.
The BRPs are currently all manual so you spend about 2/3rds of your time moving the flow forward in meetings, writing reports, doing budgets, handling business rules manually and more.
Thingamy is the only system today that can automate the BRP flow-work and hence theoretically triple your capacity!
Or, translated to profits, assume you're running a typical service company where say 80% is BRP (consulting, hospital, government, etc.), your profit margin is 20%, and that you could sell any extra capacity without extra costs: Then your profit could increase eight times or 700%.
Model your business
With a strategy at hand one must now model the business - it's resources and processes - in other words how value can be created.
But that's not enough, the goal for the business model is to make it as effective as possible. You have now defined (in the strategy) what constitutes the best possible value for the customer which should entice him to pay accordingly, so now the task is to keep as much of the value for yourself as possible. Then you have a good business model.
Keep in mind that effectiveness (what you do) is way more important than efficiency (how you do things). To quote Peter Drucker: "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
Efficiency is like hygiene, you should handle efficiency like you handle taking a shower every day - but focus should be on effectiveness, the "what you do" or what people at your business do.
This business model is what we create using the thingamy, using graphical interfaces so you at all times can see a representation of it.
And change it at any time, even when it's running. That way you can run your business without even having to dole out positions, titles, have launch parties or buy 50 baseball caps.
No implementation - just model, test, change, test, use
Thingamy is one single system with two interfaces, one for the user and one for the one who models and maintains it all.
It pushes you to revisit your strategy which will give you the main resources and activities that you need to deliver your value in the most effective way.
When your resources and activities are defined in the thingamy graphical, no-coding interfaces, it's ready to be used.
Then you can tweak the flows, change the resources or create new reports on the fly with instant effect for the users.
If you are to deliver a new and different service this is the only way to go; there are limits to what you can predict about the market, you have to live with your best guess and launch it (as a working draft/alpha/beta in thingamy) - then see how the users react and how they use it. That's when thingamy's strength comes to show - you can enhance the strong points, kill the bad ones and add new features and processes on the fly until you have a success.