Part 2 - ‘Monetize’
We are not in it for the money. We do need to sustain ourselves however.
The second part of our plan is making our product(s) go viral and generate a small amount of passive income to sustain our non-profit organization. This part is still far ahead in the future however. As we still need to work on a market fit of our products - in particular Flind - it is not yet important to think about monetization. Why not, you ask? Because it is highly likely our plans will completely change by the time we get market fit and arrive at part 2.
Monetization comes after market fit
Amazon started as an online book store and did not think about AWS until almost 10 years later. Facebook was (and remains for the moment) free and did not think of a business case until years later. Netflix started with distributing video tapes. We are not comparing ourselves with the greatest tech companies in the world here, but we can learn a lesson from them. The lesson is that monetization comes after making a great product, at which time the business case is a lot easier the make. Nonetheless we should think about how to ensure growth of our organization and accumulate resources in order to achieve our goal: to make the maritime industry sustainable. So how do we aim to accumulate resources, if we proclaim everything to be free for now?
What is free now, what should remain free?
Right now everything is free. We do what we do because we have an intrinsic motivation to make the maritime industry sustainable. Coming forth from this motivation is the belief that knowledge and information needs to be free. Everything that we can share, we will remain to share. That means that stories, insights and how to guides will remain free to use, in the very least at a basic level.
Ideas to ‘monetize’ in the future
Given our belief that some things should remain free, what remains there to be made money from? The focus should be on business cases that ensure future cash flow and generate a passive income, all while freely sharing at the same time. How hard could it be, right? Some ideas are shown below.
Put a paywall behing certain parts of Flind, or after a certain usage (the insight to the costs for example)
Ask 1 euro to download the how-to-guide in your own company format (products can easily be put in the shopping environment in Squarespace)
Beg for money like Wikipedia and Winzip
Facilitating transactions is the business model
To be fair, we do not know exactly how we will monetize our free advice in the future. As 2020 has shown us, it is sometimes even hard to predict what will happen next week. What we do know however, is that we believe that money is not to be made by selling our time for ‘work’ to another company. Real money is made with scalable concepts, basically a transaction of information or knowledge that can be repeated indefinitely. From indefinite interaction, a sustainable passive income can be made by a multitude of ways. Which one exactly remains to be seen, but we do not need to know beforehand. We will simply try and experiment our way to the top.