TrueCar is aiming to solve the "lemon" issue in the car dealer market, by providing customers with a huge amount of pricing data for all types of cars, thus helping them to not overpay for their car. The question is: [...]
SJB's Profile
SJB
Submitted
Activity Feed
Great blog!! Thanks Allen! What I really like about this company is that they seem to focus on the one thing they are good at! And: they only accept project where they have CEO backing! When I compare that with the big consulting firms: I think they do have the knowledge and ability to do that stuff, meaning they have employees that know how to do it. The problem is, the have even more employees that do not know how to do it and their struggle is, to prevent the employees that have no clue what to do, from still working on this projects, instead of just getting the experts in. This is the challenge of larger consulting firms with a huge variety in services – the internal political battles over clients and the sheer size which makes it really difficult sometimes to get the right people on the right topic at the right client!
This won´t change I guess so quickly, why I think that Palantir has quite a solid edge in the business…
Great blog and ideas!! I think the value capture is here the biggest challenge. It would be interesting to see the click rates for the digital advertisements. Personally, I would hate to see ads that leverage my locations and the weather information, while I just want to check out the weather (especially, since there are providers of weather information that are free). So, I am really not sure how this value creation could be monetized…
Maybe, it could be linked also to winter end sales or so, which would give customers more the feeling they really benefit, because they get discounts?
Great post. My concern with the business model is that I don’t think that the platform is really sticky. Multihoming in this business is very easy and makes sense for both, the nerd and the client. Especially since they have the matching issue, a new competitor with a better product and maybe a smaller fee could disrupt their business.
This is great stuff! I would love to see how this develops over time:
– Is the employee participation sustainable?
– Does it yield better results over a longer period of time?If that is the case, this methodology can be applied to a lot of other corporate settings. Especially the fact that it solves the “we are not heard by management” problem could be a really nice side effect of this crowd intelligence!
I think this initiative is not well aligned with the overall strategy and vision of the company, as well as the nature of the craft beer market. AB is a global company pursuing large scale product rollouts. The craft beer market is the complete opposite, local, and small in size. I guess, the reason why they did not succeed is because of that, not the crowdsourcing (which seemed to work quite well)…
Amazing post!!! Thanks for helping me understand what they are actually doing.
My question is: how can they enter markets, where users are suspicious of this kind of banking? Markets, where both, the regulation is tough and customers are not used to this form of banking (thinking specifically of Germany). How can you still build your network? I guess, once you have a critical number of users, the trust is easier to build. But how do you start??
I was working for GrabTaxi during Field 2 in Vietnam (also founded by an HBS alum). We talked a lot about GrabTaxi and discussed whether we can expand it to Vietnam. In the end, we decided that it is not quite there. Everybody owns a motorbike and the only reason not do drive yourself is, of you are drunk. Unfortunately, this is socially accepted and the demand (as far as we tested is) is not there.
Interesting to continue following this market!
Great Blog!!
Interesting stuff, thanks for the great post. I always had a different perspective on professional networks and headhunters, but this really adds some more flavor to the picture.
I always thought of these communities as a “free service”. I have my profile page there and I can do some networking. The whole headhunting thing, for me was a different story. I will use headhunters in a later stage of the career. In addition, I considered professional networks such as linkedin sort of the 1st level of headhunting. The 2nd level are the headhunters. Quite frankly, the headhunters do use the professional networks and they are probably the best source for talent they ever had.
It would be interesting to really get some numbers on the implications of digital and professional networks on headhunters. Your post suggests that they are in trouble and cannot reposition as the 2nd level of job search. We will see how it develops further…
I wonder how the ideal digital transformation of such a player with these governmental restrictions would look like. In my opinion, the real digitization of such a player is primarily in the non-customer facing units, ops and IT. This is, where you can really cut down costs by moving processes from analog to digital. Getting the customer digitally involved is just the last phase.
My personal experience with USPS. Sending letters from europe to the US. Out of 5 letters/packages, I received 2. Given that “success rate”, I wanted to track the shipment, but the European postal services cannot provide tracking after the package entered the US. It just disappears in a huge black hole… so sad!