Capitalism in the Age of Free Riders

LinkedIn’s recent sale to Microsoft is yet another case in point that freemium business models are a struggle to scale. LinkedIn offers excellent value to its users. Still, few are willing to pay for that value. Thus, the company faces a slowing growth curve, resulting in the decision to sell.

The truth is, on the Internet, everyone wants everything for free. Especially consumers.

And so, almost all media / content related business models are facing a wall.
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The Art and Science of Conversion Optimization

Those of us who run web businesses know well that conversion optimization is tricky business. It is both art and science.

You need to get design elements right. You need to get messaging right. You need to get the site’s navigation flow right. You need to establish brand credibility. You need to be able to do multivariate testing to see what works, what doesn’t. You need to understand the psychology of your buyers to address objections. Blah, blah, blah …
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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you recommend entrepreneurs to focus on if they’re looking to work in this space? What kind of problems would you steer them towards?

Mike Massaro: In financial technology cross-border transactions, I think the traditional money remittance space is prime for disruption. It’s not a space we’re directly in, but a lot of the companies out there are looking towards shared ledger technologies. I think we’re going to see people focusing on segments of that vertical.

Our business model is a good example where education payments alone account for about $53 billion in cross-border transactions. A lot of people would look at that volume and would probably put it in the cross-border remittance bucket. You can build a very targeted solution like we have to solve the problem that exists in many cross-border transactions. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are the segments besides education? You’ve taken the education use case and fleshed it out. What other big-ticket items are you catering to?

Mike Massaro: Back at Money 2020 Conference in Vegas, we announced medical tourisms reports. In a similar manner to what we do with educational institutions, a number of the largest academic hospitals in the United States came to us and said, “We have the same problem.” We kept hearing about inbound medical tourism patients coming into the United States for knee replacement or cancer treatments. They are these very large dollar amount payments. Sometimes, two to four times larger than what you’d see in education. They have the same problem. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about the variety of different ways that people do make these kinds of payments. It sounds like education is one of your big segments. Is that your only segment?

Mike Massaro: It isn’t now. We started the company there. We’ve been around for about five years. We had focused on education exclusively. Very recently, we opened up another vertical for medical payments. Hospitals started having a similar challenge. There are these large dollar payments coming from consumers all over the world who are coming for medical care and there’s no easy convenient way to pay. That’s our second vertical that we’ve just opened up and found some great traction there. We opened up other segments as well like consumer large payments. We’ve got a number of other segments that will likely be interesting to us in years to come.

Sramana Mitra: As it pertains to the roots of your business, you are serving a segment of big ticket fund transfer. Is that part of your segmentation?

Mike Massaro: That’s right. It’s typically tens of thousands of dollars. >>>

From Unicorn to Unicorpse: Etsy Falters on Amazon’s Entry

Etsy (Nasdaq: ETSY) went public earlier this year, a much awaited IPO at an $1.8 billion valuation. But since listing, serious issues with the company have resulted in a tumbling valuation under public market scrutiny. At its current stock price, Etsy is still appearing above the billion dollar mark, but barely so. And its trajectory indicates that Etsy is on its way from being a prized Unicorn to a faltering Unicorpse.

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Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are other core areas where you think marketing automation and Sales 2.0 is making a real difference?

Carol O’Kelley: To where you can make systems work for the marketers or for the sales people, instead of the other way around. You can even look at an auto dialer that’s improving the efficiency of the sales organization. I think that it’s easy to overlook some of those things and say, “Those have been around for a while.” But if you think about the increased efficiency that’s brought the average demand generation, those can be great productivity boosters.

Sramana Mitra: Are there other trends that you would want to touch upon? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bob Dufour, President of Fusion (Part 7)

Bob Dufour: It’s having someone who can start understanding the psychology of that consumer and the opportunities presented to digital retailers. At least in my experience, that’s a big missing gap for somebody who really understands those needs during that journey, especially as millennials start taking hold and as their purchasing power gets bigger. I think they’re used to 99 cents. Trying to sell something for $30 is going to be a real shock to them. These microproducts with microprices is going to be important. Technology integration, cross-device integration, and digital enablement of suppliers—those are the things that I would say are opportunities that jump out based on our business.

Sramana Mitra: Listening to you, I’m thinking about this article that I wrote a long time ago in 2007 for the first time. It’s a definition of Web 3.0 that I came up with, which is a formula: 4C + P + VS. The four Cs are content, community, commerce, context, with personalization and vertical search. You may want to look up some of that writing because a lot of what you’re saying is the commerce elements driving off any context.
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