A New Growth Design for the Sharing Economy

June 22, 2020 5 minutes read Viewpoints revealed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

As the sharing economy has increased recently, there’s a new development design for lots of business to follow suit and adopt, especially as the world continues to shift and change in the post-COVID period. With the overwhelming shift to virtual work because of continued social-distancing standards, there’s a chance for business to end up being much more decentralized. And heightening accessibility to items and decentralizing operations can cause incredible, Uber or Airbnb -like development. Should your company consider this model, too? Why Reinvent the Wheel? The companies that started the wave of the shared economy are the ridesharing platforms Uber and Lyft and housing huge Airbnb. Since then, the sector has actually continued to grow thanks to the boom of coworking spaces and even clothes and furnishings leasings. It boils down to this: Companies do less by decentralizing the work, and customers get more at a lower price as a result. Development ensues.

This is likewise seen with memberships. Not just do companies like Rent the Runway and WeWork offer a regular monthly cost for services clients can offer, however Patreon, as another example, puts the power in the creator’s hands by letting them produce their own membership model. Through the platform, consumers can pay a month-to-month charge to gain access to what the developer makes on a monthly basis.

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Why You Must Utilize a Subscription Organisation Design Another innovation that’s mastering a brand-new growth design in the age of the sharing economy is Kava, a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and lending platform for cryptocurrency. Referred to as the’Uber of Bitcoin,”Kava is a digital-lending platform enabling loan generation to users of significant cryptocurrencies. They have adopted the growth-by- decentralization design by automating the process for users throughout the world to immediately create loans and perfectly link them to global need(markets to exchange their loans for USD, EURO, CNY or any currency). Brian Kerr, CEO of Kava Labs, notes

that decentralization requires that both the supply and need side of a service are satisfied, which for them, came down to building a robust network. “Decentralized systems require an increase in capital to get off the ground,” he describes. “It’s not enough to build a decentralized company model alone, you have to inject a large amount of money into the system to kick-off the snowball P2P effect.”

To totally comprehend both sides of the supply-and-demand formula for this growth design, think about an example like stationary company Punkpost. Customers can order personalized cards, pick a handwriting style and add notes about what they wish to be illustrated. These notes are then sent out to artists, who do the work for them. When companies are embracing this model, there’s a dilemma of selecting what pool of consumers to focus on first– the supply side or the need side– to efficiently grow their user base.

The concern, then, becomes how to construct both sides at the exact same time. It seems like a massive endeavor, so we can seek to the giants who did it first. According to a recent Harvard Organisation Evaluation case study on the growth models behind Uber, Etsy and Airbnb, these companies focused on the” two-tiered development phase.”For Uber, the primary step was getting its initial 1,000 users, which, in their case, was on the service side(the drivers themselves). They couldn’t market to clients (riders) unless the infrastructures of the chauffeurs were in location and they had validated that motorists would want to sign up for the platform. It belongs to a chicken-and-egg situation. How can you make certain that you have everything in location to be ready for the consumers on the user side?