5 innovative startups that can inspire your business model

A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers and captures value. This would mean that every business has a business model either formally or informally.

A business model can be divided in 9 parts which make up the business model canvas. This parts are: customer segment, customer relationship, customer channels, Value propositions, key activities, key resources, key partners, cost structure and revenue stream.

As most businesses commonly try to disrupt the value proposition, a change in other parts of the model can create a disruption as well.

Below are 5 startups that would have disrupted their industries in other parts of the business model:

1. Blendle

Blendle is disrupting the journalism industry. It is a journalism startup that offers all articles of all newspapers and all important magazines in one web app, with one paywall, where users will only have to pay for the articles they read. It is not only disrupting the delivery channel of the journalism industry but also the revenue model as well which is a micro-payment model. This kind of model is very common in the game industry.

2. Zazzle

Zazzle is an online marketplace that allows designers and customers to create their own products with independent manufacturers (clothing, posters, etc.), as well as use images from participating companies. In the creative industry, Zazzle is disrupting the process new products are developed. This process is a combination of two consumer trends called co-creation (between customers, partners and competitors) and open innovation. One can say that Zazzle disrupted the key resources, key partners and key activities segment of the business model canvas simultaneously.

3. Everlane

This is an online direct to consumer clothing brand that focuses on its values of transparency or as they say “consumer wokeness,” by breaking down what each garment costs to make and why. It also uses a psychological pricing that shows you how much each clothing is typically sold and how much Everlane sells it. This type of disruption is focused on the customer relationship angle. “The Everlane of X” has become the elevator pitch to describe any company pulling back the curtains on its sourcing and prices.

4. GoldieBlox

Is an interactive building toy company, but for girls.They target girls or moms who are tired of the stereotypical girl toys and helping to ignite the buildings in their girls. It is also a way to create an awareness that girls can be engineers, too. This is one customer trend called breaking the stereotype. One can say GoldieBlox disrupted the customer segment by targeting an underserved customer niche.

5. Sockfancy

Can you imagine disrupting something so functional as socks? Socks!! Well, this is what Sockfancy did. Sockfancy is an online platform that delivers a box of random socks every month for a subscription fee. Instead of the one-time payment common in the fashion apparel industry, They changed their revenue model to a subscription model.

Let’s see the visual representation of each disruption in the Business Model Canvas(BMC)

An overview of the above startups in one BMC

Getting familiar with the above startups should help you know how to innovate your business model or what sort of disruption already exists out there.

Here is a blank Business Model Canvas for you to download and fill for your startup. Feel free to submit to us a filled BMC via mail for a free evaluation.

Freebies

Starting and running a startup can be less expensive than you think by knowing the available cost-effective and free tools out there available for startups to use. We created a list of 40 tools that bootstrapped startups should know about. Here is the link to the PDF. The catch? You get to pay for whatever you want to download from the PDF plus a certificate that has a discount code. Enjoy!