Reverse franchising

“Franchising” is basically about selling someone the rules for how to run a business which have been proven to work, along with a known brand name. That (I imagine) is what you get when you buy a franchise for McDonalds.

As business gurus have pointed out, proven rules really help improve your odds with a start-up, on the basis that (they say) 80 per cent of start-up companies fail in the first 5 years, while 80 per cent of franchise start-ups survive the first five years.

Having a proven business model is really useful.

For “Software for Domain Experts” we don’t yet have a proven business model, but we’d like to create one with your help – and once we have it, we can make it freely available for everyone to use.

We can guess what the fundamental components are:
– spot a market need (which probably takes specialist insight, ie you’d need to be a domain expert yourself to do this)
– put a team together – involving software people and domain experts – and make sure you can work together well with people  in your team
– build (what you think is) a product quickly, making maximum use of off the shelf software framework tools
– your domain expert works together with domain experts in the market (no salespeople here) to try to build interest
– iterate, improve the product, build up a customer base
– offer them really good personal service, the sort they can never get from a big company
– repeat

I don’t think the above list of components really counts as a ‘business model’ but perhaps it provides something useful to build on – next step is to refine and develop the components!