.Dust

I came through a short, but inter­est­ing, post from Simon Judge over at Mobile Phone Devel­op­ment.

Simon makes a very good point. When you have a bril­liant idea for a mobile ser­vice you may find your­self engag­ing so many part­ners ask­ing for slices of the pie that makes the whole ser­vice not appeal­ing for each of the sin­gle part­ner on the venture.

I think that is absolutely true and, at the very same time, it is some­thing that you can­not eas­ily avoid.

Actu­ally the mobile phone ser­vices ecosys­tem is, as of today, work­ing like Simon describes.

We can try to make a sim­ple exam­ple. Let’s imag­ine that we decide to launch the best of breed music appli­ca­tion allow­ing our future cus­tomers to lis­ten to music and pur­chase or music from a ded­i­cated appli­ca­tion sit­ting on my mobile phones.

On the right side of the ecosys­tem I will have to live in I will found the con­tent own­ers, the music Major. Sell­ing this con­tent, even in dig­i­tal for­mat, is their core busi­ness and it is quite clear you will have to pay for that con­tent. That cost is going to be one of the major costs you will have to cover with your bud­get and it is going to be a recur­ring cost as you go with your ser­vices. This is a huge slice of the pie.

Then you have in your mind the best music appli­ca­tion ever designed. You need some­one to develop and test it on a vari­ety of mobile phones, pos­si­bly with dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies since you want to address the major­ity of your cus­tomer base. You need cus­tomers in order to make the busi­ness plan prof­itable. This is going to be a cost too and it may greatly vary depend­ing on the num­ber of plat­forms you are going to address. In some way this can be con­sid­ered a fixed cost and a small slice of the pie.

Since we want to offer to our cus­tomers the best music on the planet we will need to reach an agree­ment with dif­fer­ent labels and we need to aggre­gate their con­tent in the same place in order to allow our ser­vice to scale smoothly as our cus­tomer base increase over time. Aggreation, pub­lish­ing and host­ing is another ele­ment of the ecosys­tem and it costs money. Another slice of the pie.

We are almost at the end of the chain in this ecosys­tem. We have to mar­ket and deliver the ser­vice in the proper way. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion to end users is crit­i­cal for this be a suc­cess but this obvi­ously mean that money goes out of your pocket and slims down the size of the pie.

And, finally, we have the cus­tomer who is going to cook the pie for us or, in other words, give his money to us for the ser­vice we have designed.

Dif­fer­ent prod­ucts and ser­vices may vary slightly but this is a very com­mon approach in the mobile world.

As Simon has writ­ten there are a lot of actors involved in this and every­one wants a slice of the pie, even a small one.

It is true that you need to be very care­ful to seize the size of your slice of the pie but, at the end of the day, the pie is there and you may want to cook a num­ber of dif­fer­ent pies in order to eat enough to survive.

Unfor­tu­nately you can­not be the only player while deliv­er­ing your fan­tas­tic idea to the mar­ket. At least the oper­a­tor will be always there. So in your ven­ture you will be always part­ner­ing at least with another hun­gry guy.

Any­way Simon has made a very good point with his post!

Related posts:

1. Buy­ing music from a mobile phone
2. The mobile phone as a vend­ing machine
3. Your Mobile Phone Is Talk­ing To A White Cube
4. Set my mobile phone free
5. Turn Your Mobile Phone In A Mobile WiFi Access Point.