Michael Karnjanaprakorn

So, all my research in my spare time has been 100% dedicated to entrepreneurship.  Now that I’ve jumped to the other side (business rather than branding), I’ve realized that coming up with the idea is the easy part – seriously, it’s like 1% of the equation.  It’s the other 99% – relentless dedication and perspiration that makes ideas happen.  And yes, Diddy and Jay-Z (maybe J. Dupri) are my favorite entrepreneurs.  They run shit.

With that said, here’s some things I’ve realized over the past couple of months…

1)  Management team is just as important as the idea. I’ve talked to a lot of analyists at Private Equity and Venture Capital firms and this has been a recurring theme.  They want to know that the entrepreneur has assembled an all-star team.  I’ve even heard stories of companies getting funded with NO IDEA at all.  Kind of makes you question the value of “innovative” ideas huh?

2)  “Everything has been done before.  It’s all about execution”.  Heard this quote in a meeting the other day and thought it was brilliant.  We’re always obsessed with doing something different.  How many times have you been in a meeting and heard “XYZ did that before.  We can’t do that.” Everything has been done before!  It really comes down to how you execute it which makes it successful.  And honestly, most new ideas are just improvements of old ones i.e. facebook improving myspace improving friendster.

3)  Developing a killer business and revenue model is the hardest part of the whole damn thing. Within the past 3 months, All Day Buffet has taken off exponentially.  It’s truly exciting but as our team has brainstormed ways to make it more sustainable i.e. revenue and business model that will keep it running, we’ve realized how hard it is.  It’s not as easy as coming up with a million dollar idea and having buckets of money pouring in from the sky.  With that said, I’ll dive deeper and share some insights on business and revenue models.

According to Idris Mootee, “a business model is the creation and distribution of economic value within a business system and it also involves what capital investment is needed and how a business sustains itself.”

A business model is a conceptual tool that contains a set of elements and their relationships and allows expressing the business logic of a specific firm. It is a description of the value a company offers to one or several segments of customers and of the architecture of the firm and its network of partners for creating, marketing, and delivering this value and relationship capital, to generate profitable and sustainable revenue streams.

Pretty simple.  After identifying the unmet need (as brand strategists, this comes naturally to most of us) but figuring out how to monetize that is where it gets extremely tricky.  If you’re launching a website, there’s a bunch of ways to monetize it:  subscriptions, ad revenue (which I advise to stay far away from), affiliate, etc.  But it gets even more tricky because websites like twitter have absolutely ZERO revenue.  Other VC’s have written about everything from freemium (offering something for free and charging for premium features) to the economics behind getting people to pay for anything at all.  Getting a consumer to go from “free” to $1/month is just as difficult as getting someone to go from $1 to $2/month

As you can see there are tons of things to think about when you’re an entrepreneur.  This is just the start of it.  For the next post, I’ll share the new business and revenue model ideas for the future of alldaybuffet.

Have a great weekend!