A platform is a business that connects people through technology, making an ecosystem that allows value to be created and exchanged. Platforms can host several different kinds of users, like how Amazon has both sellers and buyers, or they can have one primary type of user, like Facebook’s community of users who interact with each other socially. The significant thing in common is that they bring people and organizations together in one place where they can interact with one another. Platforms match users for financial or social transactions, which creates value.

Online Platforms: A Primer

Platforms are businesses that match users to each other in order to make financial or social transactions that create value. Value arises from the community the platform serves.Platforms multiply profit because they benefit from network effects, which can help the value of a network to grow exponentially. As individuals join, the potential number of connections between individuals skyrockets algorithmically, making the network more valuable.Network effects are the result of increasing value for those who are already on the platform, and they increase with the scale of the platform.

The Network Effect

Because platforms don’t own the resources that create value, they can grow much faster than pipeline businesses. Platforms also scale better. Growth isn’t tied to resources, so it can occur faster. Platforms bring new supplies to market because users are always coming up with new things.There are still plenty of pipeline companies still around today, but whenever they have to compete against a platform business, they lose.Platforms invert the firm, which is to say that many of the processes that take place inside pipeline companies are external in platform companies.

Better And Faster Scalability

Platforms typically enjoy two-sided network effects. The two sides required for interaction attract each other; for example, on a site with buyers and sellers, the presence of buyers attracts sellers, and the presence of sellers attracts buyers. Network effects can come from and affect both sides of a network.Platform businesses are the most efficient value creators, compared to other types of businesses, because they harness the power of network effects.

The Power of the Platform

Frictionless entry makes it possible for users to quickly and easily join a platform.Side-switching platforms allow users to switch roles. Beware of negative network effects. If there are lots of users, it can overwhelm the system.There are positive same-side effects, which are good effects that increase on one side. Negative same-side effects. For example, an increase in users can increase competition.Positive cross-side effects. When there are more vendors, consumers have greater choice.  Negative cross-side effects. Too much choice, too many ads, too much competition, etc.

Network Effects: The Good And The Bad

Deciding where to begin in platform design is difficult. Copying other companies doesn’t always work because platform businesses tend to be different from each other. Instead of trying to imitate another platform, the focus should be on the interaction. Platform design should always start with the core interaction. The core interaction has three components: participants, value unit and filter. After figuring out what the core interaction is to be, design the components in the above order.

Architecture: Principles for Designing a Successful Platform

Three of the most important functions of a platform are pull, facilitate and match. Pull attracts users to the platform. To facilitate transactions the platform provides tools and rules; this is the scaffolding of interactions. And platforms must match users to each other. The right consumers should find the right producers.

Functions Of A Platform

The more peripheral a feature is to the core mission, the more peripheral it should be on a platform. If only some users need it, then it shouldn’t be junking things up in a central location. This will make the system run more efficiently.Always leave room for organic and spontaneous change. Look at how users are behaving; see if they’re putting the system to unexpected uses. This can suggest new directions for the platform to take.

The End To End Principle

Platforms are places where buyers and sellers can come together and transact business. It isn’t a business model. Platforms have been around for ages. Platforms include traditional marketplaces where goods, like produce, are sold.Platforms eat pipelines.  The internet has largely replaced newspapers as the main source of news for many people. News organizations don’t have to pay for paper, printing, distribution and countless other expenses when they publish online. An efficient method of dispersing the news “ate” a less efficient pipeline.

Disruption: How Platforms Conquer and Transform Traditional Industries

The internet provides infrastructure and coordinates communication. Platforms make use of these features for transactions all over the planet. There are several reasons for this. <ul><li>The internet can reduce costs, as it did in the news industry. </li><li>Platforms find new sources of supply. They make it easier for producers to participate, it’s easier to get their products into the value chain.</li></ul>

Reducing Costs

Platforms enable new forms of consumer behavior. People will gladly jump into a stranger’s car when they use Uber. It wasn’t too long ago that such behavior would have been considered crazy dangerous. Platforms enable this because they have built-in mechanisms to engender trust between users.Platforms change quality control into user driven curation. Users gravitate towards higher quality goods, edging out the less desirable products.

Taking The Uber Ride

Separating assets from value. Ownership of assets like equipment should be separated from value. For example, pooling the use of a MRI machine means everyone can use it without having to buy their own.Re-intermediation. There are new kinds of middlemen. For example, executives in the music industry used to rely primarily on agents in order to find new talent. Now they’re just as likely to trawl YouTube in search of good acts.Market aggregation. Markets combine and become centralized. For example, Alibaba has created a single platform for wholesalers all over the world.

Three Different Kinds of Platform Disruption

<ul><li>Follow the rabbit. Set up a non-platform demonstration so people will know how cool your platform is.</li><li>Piggyback. Recruit users from other platforms.</li><li>Seeding. Create value that will appeal to at least some users.  </li><li>The marquee strategy. Identify key users. Bribe them; treat them well.</li><li>The single-side strategy. Create a business around products or services that benefit a single set of users.  </li><li>Producer evangelism.  </li><li>Big bang adoption. Use traditional push marketing to create a big splash that draws attention to the platform </li><li>The micro-market strategy. Target a tiny, existing market.</li></ul>

Eight Ways to Launch a Successful Platform

Viral growth is a pull process. Create an environment where users tell new people about the platform. Viral growth depends on the user to be the sender. The sender shares a value unit. Allow the value unit to spread to existing networks. Then there has to be an actual recipient to receive the value unit. Viral growth can accelerate the platform’s expansion at an extremely rapid rate. Facebook is an example of a platform where users draw in more users through viral growth.

Viral Growth

Charge a transaction fee. This way, people aren’t discouraged from joining the site to begin with.Charge for access. For example, on employment websites recruiters usually pay to list jobs.Charge for enhanced access. LinkedIn is free to users, but they can pay a fee to see complete listings of the people who have looked them up. Charge for enhanced curation. Offer high quality. People are more than happy to pay a premium to purchase the things they want if they can easily get exactly the thing they want.

Monetization: Capturing the Value Created by Network Effects

To be open means to have no restrictions on development, commercialization or use. In another definition, it can mean that any restrictions — like rules and fees — are reasonable and nondiscriminatory.Getting the right amount of openness is difficult, but important. Openness encourages innovation, but the more openness there is the harder it is to monetize and control a platform.

Openness: Defying What Platform Users and Partners Can and Cannot Do

In manager and sponsor participation, the sponsors control the platform architecture, the manager controls interactions. Often these two roles are played by the same entity.Developer participation has two different kinds of users. Core developers are usually employees. Extension developers add value to the platform, usually from outside the business. With user participation, any user might have the ability to freely add content. The problems with this kind of participation includes the possibility of lower value content. It’s useful to find some way to curate the content.

Three Kinds of Decisions About Openness

Governance is all about creating good rules. A platform is composed of a community of users. Like all healthy communities, there need to be rules protecting the members of the community. The wrong kind of rules, however, can alienate users. To avoid this, platforms should observe three fundamental laws of good governance. <ul><li>First, rules should always create value for the customer. </li><li>Second, those writing the rules shouldn’t use their power to change the rules in their favor. </li><li>And finally, platforms should never take more than a fair share of the wealth.</li></ul>

Governance: Policies to Increase Value and Enhance Growth

Tools for governance include laws, or platform rules, and norms, the desirable behavior within a community. Architecture, or programming code, can be used to reinforce desired behavior and make unwanted behavior difficult to perform. And finally, markets, including not just financial monies but also social currency. Orderly markets reduce risk for the participants.

The Tools For Governance

The way to understand what’s going on with a system is through metrics. By measuring the right things, needs, performance and other aspects of the system can be assessed.Platforms are a new business model that require new ways to keep track of what’s going on.Platforms must track and manage a different set of metrics than the old pipelines did.Platforms create value through network effects. Good metrics focus on positive network effects and the activities that can affect them.Rate of interaction success is important. A high rate of successful interactions draws users.

Metrics: How Platform Managers Can Measure What Really Matters

Liquidity means that there are some producers and consumers, and there is a high percentage of interactions. You can track liquidity by measuring the percentage of listings that lead to interactions. It’s also important to look at illiquidity, which happens when transactions aren’t possible. For example, when Uber users want a ride but there are no cars available. People get frustrated by these kinds of things and can become so discouraged that they leave the platform.

Liquidity

Matching quality measures how well the search algorithms match users to make transactions. People want to find what they’re looking for. Search results shouldn’t bring up a bunch of noise that users must sift through. A good metric to measure this is the sales conversion rate — the percentage of searches leading to interactions.Trust is essential. No one will risk money to buy something if they can’t trust the site to provide them with high quality information about the product and the transaction. Trust is built through careful curation.

Quality and Trust

When users go to a number of different sites to do similar kinds of transactions, it’s known as multi-homing. It’s better for the platform if it can keep all those tasty transactions at home on the platform. One way to accomplish this is to limit platform access. Platforms should try to get exclusive access to essential assets so users won’t want to go to other platforms.It’s always a good strategy to foster innovation and capture its value. Keep a close watch on the apps that are developed for the platform. Absorb those apps that look like they might take off.

Strategy: How Platforms Change Competition

Regulations should be reevaluated everywhere because the whole game has been changed by platform businesses. Often enough, new economy businesses have just ignored existing regulations. This has brought a host of ethical problems.Dominant platforms might resist change and innovation- after all it’s the status quo that gives them the edge. This does not serve the public good. People won’t have access to the improved technology.

Policy: How Platforms Should (and Should Not) Be Regulated

There are many industries that will probably convert to platform industries in the coming years, these include information intensive industries, industries with non-scalable gatekeepers, highly fragmented industries and industries characterized by extreme information asymmetries.Industries that are resistant to platform transformation include industries with high regulatory control, industries with high failure costs and resource intensive industries.

Tomorrow: the Future of the Platform Revolution

Uber. Airbnb. Amazon. Apple. PayPal. All of these companies disrupted their markets when they launched. Today they are industry leaders. What’s the secret to their success? These cutting-edge businesses are built on platforms: two-sided markets that are revolutionizing the way we do business. 

A practical guide to the new economy that is transforming the way we live, work, and play.

Stashed ideas

Platform Revolution

Because B2B transactions tend to be larger and vendor relationships longer-lasting, B2B companies must rely more on relationships and partnerships to expand into new markets.Entire business models may be built on partnerships that allow companies to serve customers they otherwise couldn’t.

Expanding into Business-to-Business (B2B) takes more than just opening a new page on your website

Consumer decisions can be based on emotions, personal preferences, and peer influence. Decision-making in businesses is much more complex.More people have to weigh in, and there’s a strong emphasis on desired business results, such as reduced expenses and overall benefit to the client’s company.Emotion really has little to do with solar when it’s a business decision.

How Will You Appeal to Customers?

Both consumer- and business-facing companies have to pay attention to the fundamentals and realities of today’s environment. Meaning, technology is a critical factor. More specifically, a company’s digital marketing, web presence, social media, and SEO efforts must work together seamlessly to translate search <a href="https://www.boostability.com/seo-from-rankings-to-revenue-infographic">rankings into increased revenue</a>.It’s all about presence, traffic, lead generation, and converting a prospect into a customer—whether that customer is an individual consumer or a business.

What is Similar Between B2C and B2B?

Now is a great time for B2C companies to expand into the growing B2B marketplace, but success will depend on how well you understand the differences between these two market segments.

Here's How B2C Companies Can Break Into B2B Markets

This is a balancing act. A low price isn’t always ideal, as the product might see a healthy stream of sales without turning any profit. Similarly, when a product has a high price, a retailer may see fewer sales and “price out” more budget-conscious customers, losing market positioning.Ultimately, every small business will have to do its homework. Retailers have to consider factors like cost of production, consumer trends, revenue goals, and competitor pricing. Even then, setting a price for a product isn’t just pure math (numbers behave in a logical way; humans, not so much).

Setting the right prices for your products 

<ul><li>Understand costs. If you order products, you have a straightforward answer of how much each unit costs you, which is your cost of goods sold. If you create products yourself, you’ll need to determine the costs of your raw materials.</li><li>Define commercial objective. Think about your commercial objective as your company’s pricing guide.</li><li>Identify your customers. Consider the disposable income your customers have.</li><li>Find your value proposition. What makes your business genuinely different? To stand out amongst your competitors, you’ll want to find a pricing strategy that reflects your values.</li></ul>

How to choose a pricing strategy

<ul>
<li>Cost-plus pricing: You make the product, add a fixed percentage on top of the costs, and sell it for the total.</li>
<li>Competitive pricing: It refers to using competitors’ pricing data as a benchmark and consciously pricing your products below theirs.</li>
<li>Value-based pricing: Value-based pricing refers to setting a price based on how much the customer believes a product or service is worth. It’s an outward approach that takes your target market’s wants and needs into play.</li>
</ul>

6 common pricing strategies for small businesses (part 1)

<ul>
<li>Price skimming: It refers to when an e-commerce business charges the highest initial price that customers will pay, then lowers it over time.</li>
<li>Penetration pricing and discount pricing: It’s no secret that shoppers love sales, coupons, rebates, seasonal pricing, and other related markdowns.</li>
<li>Keystone pricing: It’s when a retailer determines a retail price by simply doubling the wholesale cost they paid for a product to set a healthy profit margin.</li>
</ul>

6 common pricing strategies for small businesses (part 2)

Finding the best pricing strategy for your products is a balancing act. Here are 14 formulas to help you pick the perfect price for your products.

The Price Is Right: Strategies for Finding the Ideal Price for Your Products

‘Building for Everyone, with Everyone’ means producing inclusive products and services. The customer should feel that the product fits with who they are, and was built just for them. It boils down to these core components:
<ul>
<li>Listening</li>
<li>Caring</li>
<li>Being humble</li>
<li>Empathy</li>
</ul>

Inclusive Products and Services

The all-important first step here is to develop an understanding of your users/customers/clients – understanding who they are, where they come from, what’s important to them, and how their core needs are represented in your product or company mission. To become more inclusive, we need to build diverse teams and ask users what they need, and why. To become more inclusive, we need to build diverse teams and ask users what they need, and why. We need to build a thorough understanding of our users, revealing our biases and uncovering (potential) areas of exclusion.

Understanding Your Customer

Diversity in language can lead to misunderstandings, and how a shared language helps create clarity and alignment around diversity. At the core of product inclusion are four pillars: product inclusion, diversity, equity and intersectionality.

A Common Language

<ol><li>Product inclusion: The practice of applying an inclusive lens throughout the entire product design and development process to create better products.</li><li>Diversity: Location, language, available infrastructure, etc.</li><li>Equity: This is the quality of being fair and impartial in terms of access, opportunities, and success for all individuals. This is not to be confused with Equality.</li><li>Intersectionality: The interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, class, and gender.</li></ol>

The Four Pillars

<ol><li>Has your team been exposed to product inclusion?</li><li>Have you identified a champion for your product inclusion efforts?</li><li>What’s the product challenge?</li><li>What’s the inclusion challenge?</li><li>How do the product and inclusion challenges align?</li><li>Whom do you need to influence to unlock resources to solve the problem?</li><li>What’s your action plan for a test/pilot?</li><li>What partners need to be involved to execute, document, measure, and communicate the results of your test/pilot?</li><li>How can you build the resources to continue this work?</li><li>What’s your public commitment to documenting and sharing the outcomes of your work?</li></ol>

10 Questions We All Need To Ask And Answer

What makes product inclusion difficult is that it requires product managers and leaders to be honest and clear about who they’re genuinely aiming to serve.Once you’ve worked through some of the above ten questions, you can start being much more intentional about how you design your products.

The Challenge Of Product Inclusion

<ul><li>Identify the market opportunity for key demographics.</li><li>Recognise what real users want.</li><li>Identify the market opportunity by examining the gap between what is currently being offered and the key demographic needs or desires.</li></ul>

Building a human case for product inclusion

<ul><li>Naming exclusion unlocks the potential of inclusion.</li><li>Team diversity is reflected in product diversity.</li><li>Everyone is different.</li><li>Needs and preferences change with context.</li><li>Everyone is biased!</li><li>Equal isn’t always equitable.</li><li>Designing for a minority also benefits the majority.</li><li>Diversity accelerates and amplifies learning and innovation.</li><li>Diversity and inclusion are good for business.</li></ul>

Basic Product Principles

<ul><li>When in doubt, subtract</li><li>Never say “No” without offering “Yes”</li><li>Be tough, not rough</li><li>Risk nothing, change nothing</li><li>Seek the invisible</li><li>Quality is a habit</li><li>Magic > Logic</li></ul>

Maxims About Product Inclusion

To make a business case for product inclusion, we start with evaluating our metrics needs, to identify whether any existing metrics need to be amended or augmented by new ones:<ul><li>What metrics do you currently use to assess the performance of your product or service?</li><li>Do your existing metrics provide insight into the needs and sentiments of non-majority users specifically?</li><li>What does “underrepresented user” mean for your organisation, team, process or product?</li><li>Where do you not have insight into the needs and sentiments of underrepresented users?</li></ul>

Measuring product inclusion performance

Metrics can be classified into two broad categories, or buckets: socialisation metrics and product inclusion metrics.<ul><li>Socialisation metrics – These are the metrics we can use to track progress in terms of diversity and inclusion awareness and participation.</li><li>Product inclusion metrics – These are the metrics we can use to track progress in terms of integrating product inclusion into what our product teams are doing and the outcomes of those efforts.</li></ul>

The Two Buckets

Another way to classify metrics is to distinguish between input and output metrics:<ul><li>Input metrics – These metrics are meant to track the resources used to produce the desired outcome with respect to product inclusion.</li><li>Output metrics – These metrics reflect the outcome resulting from a given input.</li></ul>

Input And Output Metrics

Diversity and Inclusion to build better products from the front lines at Google Establishing diverse and inclusive organizations is an economic imperative for every industry. Any business that isn’t reaching a diverse market is missing out on enormous revenue potential and the opportunity to build products that suit their users' core needs. The economic “why” has been firmly established, but what about the “how?” How can business leaders adapt to our ever-more-diverse world by capturing market share AND building more inclusive products for people of color, women and other underrepresented groups? The Product Inclusion Team at Google has developed strategies to do just that and Building For Everyone is the practical guide to following in their footsteps. This book makes publicly available for the first time the same inclusive design process used at Google to create user-centric award-winning and profitable products. Author and Head of Product Inclusion Annie Jean-Baptiste outlines what those practices look like in industries beyond tech with fascinating case studies. Readers will learn the key strategies and step-by-step processes for inclusive product design that limits risk and increases profitability. Discover the questions you should be asking about diversity and inclusion in your products for marketers, user researchers, product managers and more. Understand the research the Product Inclusion team drove to back up their practices Learn the “ABCs of Product Inclusion” to build inclusion into your organization’s culture Leverage the product inclusion suite of tools to get your organization building more inclusively and identifying new opportunities. Read case studies to see how product inclusion works across industries and learn what doesn't work. Building For Everyone will show you how to infuse your business processes with inclusive design. You’ll learn best practices for inclusion in product design, marketing, management, leadership and beyond, straight from the innovative Google Product Inclusion team.

Building For Everyone: Expand Your Market With Design Practices From Google's Product Inclusion Team

If you're running your own business, chances are you either are already or will need to do some marketing. It's a great big world, and getting noticed when almost every market is saturated is becoming increasingly more difficult. Don't worry - here are eight ways you can stand out from the crowd and master your marketing.

Ready To Spread The World About Your Business

You need to know who you are talking to. Defining your target audience goes a long way to crafting your message. <ul><li>Who is your target market?</li><li>What do you get asked most often by your customers?</li><li>What are the most frequent pain points or comments you get?</li></ul>Whether you go digital or hand out leaflets on the street, a targeted message is likely to have a bigger impact than a blanket campaign.

Understand your customer

Email marketing is great for getting the word out, but did you know open rates can climb significantly by reducing the words you use in your subject line? Remember, you are not telling the whole story - you just want the person getting the email to be interested enough in what you have to say to open the email, and follow the calls to action. If you really want to stand out, choose one word, and make it count.

Use shorter subject lines

Just because we live in a digital world, don't write off outdoor advertising, like billboards. Choosing a striking image and a few keywords with a clear call to action will still get you noticed. Work with an agency and it won't necessarily break the budget to make that person at the bus stop realize that it's been ages since they bought bread from a proper bakery.

Outdoor advertising

There is no getting away from it - we live in a world where social media rules, so you might as well begin using it to your advantage! To avoid being overwhelmed, choose one or two platforms to engage on. <ul><li>Discover the best social media platform for your business</li><li>Take our free on-demand webinar series on social media marketing</li><li>Download your free social media planner</li><li>Find out how to manage your online reviews like a pro</li></ul>

Engage on social media

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the process of designing your website (and its content) so that it appears near the top of the list in search results. According to Smart Insights, the first five organic search results (below the paid adverts) account for 67% of all clicks. After all, when was the last time you went to the second page of Google? The higher you can rank your business, the better the chance of a user finding you. You can use Google Adwords for free to see what people are searching for in your industry.

Explore SEO

Do people know what you're selling? You might think it's obvious, but it may not be to a potential customer. Make sure people know about all the services you provide. Have a clear and easy way for people to contact you, and consider making your prices readily available on your pamphlets, website or even business cards. The less work it is for the customer to engage you, the more likely they are to do so.

Send a clear message

There's no denying that everyone likes a freebie. Consider handing out samples or running a competition. You don't have to go big on this one, use it to showcase your product or service and get you noticed.

Run a competition

A happy customer is a returning customer, and word of mouth is a great and free tool available to you. People trust recommendations from people they know. If you make the best bacon butty in Ipswich, make sure that it's the same every time. There is nothing worse than inconsistent service,and if your customer knows they will always get the same from you,they are likely to not only return,but tell others. However you choose to engage, the number one rule is to not get discouraged if your campaign is not an overnight success.

Platform Revolution

Here's How B2C Companies Can Break Into B2B Markets

The Price Is Right: Strategies for Finding the Ideal Price for Your Products

Building For Everyone: Expand Your Market With Design Practices From Google's Product Inclusion Team

Eight marketing tips and tricks

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