AEB Revenue Stream Ideas

Click here to open "Adam's e-parking lean canvas": https://canvanizer.com/canvas/M38JhaHQ0Ms

No wants to buy a car-shaped piece of land on campus. It is more accurate to state that what they want is somewhere to put a car in reasonable proximity to their on-campus activities. Once that distinction is made, it opens up the opportunity to a variety of alternate solutions, including novel revenue mechanisms. The AEB focuses on creating a marketplace for driveway space near campus.

We can now see a variety of new options emerge, some more attractive than others. We could sell the needed space by purchasing land on or near campus and subdividing it. In other words, we have the option of building a car park! Even if we did, however, it seems unlikely we would actually sell the subdivided spaces to customers. The major disadvantage to this revenue stream is that our customers probably do not want to buy land, and the pricing and legal issues could be quite complicated. It is good to be reminded of the options we have already discarded.

You might be asking: “Wait a minute, the big disadvantage of the car park is the construction cost. That was what drove the whole opportunity in the first place.” You are absolutely right, except that we are not talking about costs here. We are only dealing with the revenue streams. If we built the business model canvas around the “car park” idea, that issue would turn up in the startup cost section. In and of itself, the cost is not a problem. In fact, if you run a real estate or construction company, you might be thinking about whether you should be looking more carefully at whether there are car park construction opportunities near major colleges.

This is why it is important to carefully separate the pieces of the analysis. Everything is driven by assumptions we tend to keep hidden. Those assumptions will prevent you for seeing truly novel opportunities and lead you to overestimate the viability of problematic opportunities. It is only when those assumptions are made explicit, and all the pieces of the business model considered together, that the business model tool accomplishes its purpose.

Renting the space makes more sense (which is what we expected). After all, our target customers are not in the market to buy land, they just need to park a car. That also offers a nice recurring revenue stream. By contrast, it is not clear how we could license the space. A license is a right to use or benefit from an asset, but it is more commonly associated with assets that will be used by the licensee to generate revenues. For example, a movie producer licenses the rights to certain songs for use in the movie.

The subsidize option might, however, catch our attention. We are all familiar with this option, even if we do not consciously recognize it all the time. If you have ever searched for something on Google (or Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, etc.), then you have benefitted from a subsidy revenue model. Your search was “free.” It was subsidized by advertisers who pay that engine the right to display their clients’s ads near your search results.

Could we subsidize the e-parking model? I do not have a clearly viable answer to that, but I suspect there is something there. What if we convinced local car service companies to pay us for the right to send ads to the people renting the spaces? Imagine, for example, that the services would be performed on the cars while parked, so that the owners could get their oil changed while at school or work? My first, naive intuition is that this might be possible, with a large enough population of customers in a given area. Can you think of other ideas?