I received so much positive feedback on my overview of the Kids App Market. I have already written a follow up, and will finish the series with a wish list of how I hope the market will develop.
And now for something completely different.
Today, I have selected three contemporary phenomena. They all represent a snapshot of where we are right now, in their own unique way. Lots to think about and learn from here.
Björn
Three phenomena to learn from
iBuying Marketplaces that act as market makers. With the right data, there’s no need to match buyer and seller. Houses across the US are now algorithmically assessed, bought basically unseen, and then turned around for a (presumptive) profit.
Oat Milks Non-dairy beverages are everywhere. But how do you launch a product in a category where all your competitors seem so similar? This is story of how the Swedish company Oatly successfully took on the US, using baristas.
Sweetgreen-ificationThe hyper-targeting of the web reaches society. This article uses the US salad chain Sweetgreen as an example of how social signaling and exclusion has come all the way to lunch restaurants.
One report
Mary Meeker – Internet Trends 2019 Mary Meeker, formerly at KPCB and now at Bond, just presented her annual report of internet trends. While she unfortunately still hasn’t hired a designer, this is still a 333 page treasure chest of statistics. Interesting tidbits:
Smartphone shipments is in decline for the first time in 10+ years.
Programmatic buying of display ads now at 62% globally.
Digital Video has doubled in 5 years, and now represents 28% of all minutes spent with TV & Video.
My last post about the kids app market received a lot of interest and a fair bit of feedback too. It’s very rewarding to write when people take the time to read it. Thank you.
To honor the feedback that I got, I will address a few additions and questions here below. The third and last part of this series will be a wish list of improvements and changes that I think would improve the market.
– Where is the publishing and toy industry?
This is a fair question, especially since the early days of kids apps was mainly animated books. Toca Boca was also acquired by a toy company, so clearly there is a connection here.
In short, I look at them in the same way as the entertainment market. Both their strategy and outcomes are the same, more or less.
Longer version: In my model of the market, I chose to only include Gaming, Technology, Education, and Entertainment. This was a simplification to make it more clear. From a structural perspective, however, the publishing and toy industry treat the market very similarly to the entertainment industry. It is a supplement to their main business, and primarily serves a marketing purpose. Their apps are, mainly, created as a consequence of other products being developed first. This is what makes them a good candidate for licensing. You generally wouldn’t license out the categories that you consider your core business.
It is fair to say that there are more players in the market than I initially described, but the additions don’t warrant further analysis if you understand the entertainment side. Their strategies are almost identical.
– What’s the responsibility of parents that don’t pay for high quality apps?
Simply put: Why don’t parents pay for great apps? Wouldn’t this solve everything? In fact, many do pay. But they have stopped paying in the way that a lot of developers prefer, which is upfront. They are also not buying the apps of the highest quality, but rather the ones that are the best at marketing. But since the kids grossing top list is still growing, it means that more money is being spent in the category overall. So where is this discrepancy of perception coming from?
A large part of the kids market frowned upon using in-app purchases for a very long time. It was seen as unethical to try to sell to kids in the middle of their app experience. There’s still a strong case to be made for this, from an experiential point of view.
What’s changed is how parents choose to spend their money. They want to try before they buy. They are surprisingly fine with subscriptions. But the developers of high quality apps don’t necessarily have a product strategy (or overall philosophy) that aligns with this shift in consumer spending. It’s a bit of an indie mentality where you hold onto what you think is right, even if the world has moved on. For better or worse. The paying parents are still there though – they are just paying in different ways.
Then there are the parents that don’t pay at all. Regardless of the business model. And this is the vast majority of parents. They simply don’t value or perceive the quality to be high enough to justify the price. There are countless free apps for kids that seem fine. Why pay?
One reason for them to pay could be to avoid advertising or to not get your kids’ privacy violated. But in order for that to drive a purchase, you have to:
a) know that it is happening, b) perceive it as an issue you’d like to avoid, c) preferably have an equivalent alternative to purchase instead.
There are issues with all three of these prerequisites in the market today. For many parents, this is not clear at all. That being said – there are countless parents that do acknowledge it, complain loudly, and still won’t pay a penny to solve it. It would be better if they did. But this is unlikely to change.
I’m not saying that it is parents fault that the kids app market is hard. It’s not Apple’s or Google’s fault either. Or the developers themselves. But I am saying that all three parties could have – and can – do better.
– What are the advantages of making kids apps?
Perhaps my last post came across as more gloomy than intended. You can be successful in this market. I have been so myself. What I tried to illustrate were the complexities of the market. That naturally skews towards challenges rather than opportunities. But let’s switch sides a little, and shine some light on three positive aspects instead.
1. A recurring target group
If you’re 35, an app you downloaded five years ago is going to be pretty dated by now. Your expectations are higher than they were then. Your taste may have changed.
For a 3 year old, this is not necessarily the case. The 3 year old that is now 8 will feel similarly, but now there’s a new 3 year old in the market instead. And a 3 year old now, compared to a 3 year old five years ago, is going to be pretty similar.
What does this mean? It means that if you make a fantastic app for a 3 year old, it’s probably going to be fantastic for 3 year olds for a very long time. This creates a steady stream of new customers to a product that you finished a long time ago. This is a huge opportunity, if played the right way.
Some regular games fall into the retro category and experience something similar. But it is rare and tends to take much longer. Super Mario Bros 3 is still awesome (and was released in 1988).
2. International kids are similar
With a similar line of reasoning as above, a Chinese 3 year old is considerably more similar to an American or a Norwegian 3 year old than the 35 year olds. Cultural context gets added over time, and in school especially. For developers this means that if you have a great app in one country, other countries are likely to agree. With ecosystems like the App Store that lets you publish to over 100 territories with a single click – this is a big deal and something you should make the most of.
Parents, however, are not especially similar. Language alone can be a barrier. So the marketing will be a challenge. But compared to making a completely new app for a geographical market, this is a big opportunity to take advantage of.
3. It’s simple (but not easy)
Compared to many other categories, developing for kids can be quite simple. By simple, I mean that you don’t need to run constant A/B tests, yield optimizers for ads, price sensitivity testing, live ops management, or community engagement campaigns.
Look at Toca Hair Salon for instance. It is one of the most successful kids apps of all time. It doesn’t even have a backend. Everything lives in the app itself, works offline, and requires no server costs. Over time, this means the app is running at 0% margin cost and 0% distribution cost (minus the 30% cost of sales). Year after year (as per point 1), and in every market (as per point 2). That is a great business.
Now, it isn’t easy to make an app like Toca Hair Salon. But it is simple to run it, once you have it. That’s more than can be said for most regular games and online services.
– What about the ethics of marketing to kids?
This is a tricky one. And I’m no ethicist either. But I’ll offer a few pieces of advice to consider at least.
Do your homework before you start. There are a lot of resources in this space. I suggest you start looking at the Designing for Children’s Rights Guide.
Take kids seriously. They’re not small adults. They’re not stupid. They shouldn’t have to settle for less. This might sound obvious, but spend five minutes looking at marketing for kids and you’ll see why this is advice is needed.
Make your own guidelines, and stick to them. It is easy to get caught up in trying to increase conversions or click-throughs. But making your own framework can be a good ethical railing to hold onto when you get deep into operations.
Consider the context you are in. This isn’t your average “buy-500-gems-get-250-for-free” game. Or at least it shouldn’t be. Because the notion of buying virtual gems is predatory if the user can’t distinguish what that transaction entails. This goes for how the product is designed, and subsequently for how it is marketed (inside and outside of the app).
Follow the law. Know your COPPA and your GDPR-K. They are there for a reason.
This summarizes the majority of the feedback and questions that I received. As mentioned, the third and final part of this series will be a wish list of how things could be improved to make this market better for all parties.
How do you take on a market where the user isn’t your customer? A market that overlaps and competes with four major industries, but doesn’t belong to any of them?
These are questions that I’ve tried to answer in my latest blog post. It’s an analysis of the kids app market, but is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in building businesses.
Also included: some cultural highlights for the weekend. Enjoy!
Björn
Things I have written
The Kids App Market – A Strategic Overview My perspective on the kids app market and a comprehensive analysis of how it works. Whether you work with kids media or not, there’s plenty of food for thought here.
Three cultural recommendations
TV:Chernobyl, on HBO It has received a lot of praise already, but it deserves it all. Don’t sleep on this frightful, eye-opening, and beautifully produced mini-series.
Music:Reflections and Odysseys, by Rymden Rymden is a new trio that consists of the two remaining members of EST, together with Bugge Wesseltoft on piano. A worthy successor to one of the finest jazz groups in modern times.
Podcast:The Hand of Leonardo, by Michael Lewis Michael Lewis is not only a fantastic author, he also has a great podcast. It looks at the breakdown of shared norms and rules from different perspectives. This episode about the art world and a specific Leonardo da Vinci painting was especially interesting.
How do you take on a market where the user isn’t your customer? A market that overlaps and competes with four major industries, but doesn’t belong to any of them? These are questions I have been working with for the past nine years.
Since 2010, I’ve been in the kids app market. First it was as CEO and Co-Founder of Toca Boca, and more recently as an independent advisor.
Still to this day, I get contacted every week by people that want to learn more about how this early stage digital market works. This blog post is a summary of my experiences, and my perspective on how to think about it.
Introduction: Is this app educational?
Five minutes into your initial research, you’ll notice that kids apps and educational apps are terms that are used interchangeably. This primarily comes from the US, where childhood and education are often treated as synonymous.
While there is much more to being a kid than learning math, the market makes little difference between the two. This confusing notion is the starting point for why this market is complex. What does the market even consist of? Coloring books, next to phonics software, next to roleplaying apps. It’s a mess.
One of the reasons why it is messy is that the kids sections of the app stores are still young and underdeveloped. There is hardly any categorization, far too little curation, and search is bad (and often misleading).
When we started Toca Boca in 2010, we used to joke about the app stores. The physical equivalent would have been like walking into a toy store and finding all the toys laying in a huge pile. Hanging above the pile, there would be a sign that simply said “TOYS“. No categorization, differences in merchandising, or segmentation of any kind. To find something, you would have to dig in the pile and hope that you found something good.
Now – almost ten years later – that joke isn’t as funny anymore. Because we’re more or less in the same place.
But while discoverability is still bad and immature, some things have improved. Product quality is consistently higher now. Business models are more sustainable, but only for the developers that have managed to break through already. More on this below. But first we need to take a look at some of the definitions.
Definitions: What is educational, really?
As you browse the App Store and Google Play, you will come across numerous educational claims. Teach your kids to read! Get excited about math! Loved by teachers! If you look just one layer deeper, you will find very little support for these claims. That’s not to say that the developers are necessarily lying, but the burden of proof is very low. In fact, there are no neutral and independent parties that make assessments of these claims in the market. This may sound like a minor issue, but it really isn’t.
With no one to verify claims of educational content, parents are left to their own devices to assess these products. This is a very hard thing to do. It’s a little bit like walking down the cereal aisle at a super market. All the boxes are trying to make you think that they are a healthy choice. But with cereal you at least have the Nutritions Facts Label that helps you to compare. Kids apps don’t even have that.
With educational value being the primary requirement from parents, but no one there to verify or guide, the market ends up being like the wild west. Any developer can make any type of claim. The actual results differ a lot. As does the overall experience. If a parent searches for “educational apps” they’re almost certainly not going to find the best ditto. Therefore their experience of educational apps is going to be worse than it could have been. Imagine wanting to buy a great car, and leaving the lot with a Lada. You’re going to think all cars suck. Which is a shame, and also inaccurate.
This confusion puts the kids app market in a bad light. It makes it hard for real quality to shine through. And as if that wasn’t hard enough, there’s also the issue of the business models. Read on.
Business Models: It’s hard to make money from kids
Everyone loves a good story. In 2018, Apple said that they had paid out over $100bn to developers. At WWDC next week we’ll hear an updated and higher figure. What ever it is, it’s going to be a big number. But what the app stores never talk about is how that money is distributed among developers. Supercell alone made almost $6bn, just in the last three years (not all of it from iOS, but a very healthy share was). What’s the median – not average – revenue for app makers? We don’t know. But it would be a very different story. It would also be very different if we just looked at the different categories of apps.
The Kids category is tricky to monetize for several reasons. You have two audiences to begin with: kids and their parents. These two groups share very little in terms of incentives and overall interest alignment. One controls all of the money, and also the vast majority of all screen time control (of kids under 13).
This dynamic creates a very unusual use case for monetization. The user is not the customer. In order to monetize you must either create an alignment of interest between the two (kid and parent agrees that they should buy something) or rely on the one of them convincing the other (kid nags parent to buy something). This has more in common with selling pet products than most regular gaming.
To add to this complexity, the vast majority of money being spent in the app stores is consumables, bought through in-app purchases. You buy something, but you can always buy more (and that tends to be better). This is how you catch the whales.
The consumables model does not fit kids apps, generally speaking. Virtual currencies are always intentionally abstract, but for a 5 year old it is closer to plain trickery. Parents don’t want this for their kids (but they might feel fine buying boosters in Candy Crush for themselves). The Kids/Family section on the App Store and Google Play also has restrictions since a few years back, limiting the way you can sell in-app purchases. It now requires a few extra clicks and an age gate. This is, of course, a good thing.
If you can’t sell consumables, what are you left with? Four basic models. How they perform in the market primarily depends on your products, but you can oversimplify and segment it like I have in the model below.
A simplified look at the business models in the kids app market.
Paid Apps – Pay once, play forever. The dominant business model in the early 2010’s, but one that has been in a very steady decline ever since. A good fit for parents for the reasons above, but not an especially good model for developers.
Free, with in-app purchase – Try before you buy, basically. Even if you don’t sell consumables, you can still sell permanent expansion packs. And you can sell many more of them in the same app, as opposed to having to make brand new products all the time.
Subscription – Monthly updates, monthly payments. This is the by far fastest growing category for revenue in the kids app space. It also aligns with Apple’s general interests of driving revenue through services. They’ve been building out their subscription offering for developers substantially over the last few years. And remember, Apple didn’t even allow for App Store-based subscriptions outside of media products until 2016. So this is a big shift.
Advertising – Selling privacy compliant ads. Kids apps can drive a lot of traffic, but because of what I’ve described above this traffic doesn’t necessarily convert to sales. This is where the ads come in. Many parents are skeptical to the concept of ads for kids, but they are generally accepted in products that don’t require you to pay.
The question you should be asking yourself after reading this above is: how big is this market then? It depends what you define as the market.
Market Definition: Education + Technology + Entertainment + Gaming
The kids app market doesn’t fit into one existing industry. To understand it, you instead need to look at the adjacent industries that it touches upon. It lives between four different industries – neither of which understand each other particularly well. And they’re not used to competing with each other either.
The kids app market lives between Entertainment, Education, Gaming, and Technology.
In fact, the kids app market lives in-between – and overlaps with – four giant industries, but doesn’t really belong to either of them. This explains why newcomers (like Toca Boca and Sago Mini) have been able to take such strong positions in a market that has a huge amount of incumbents. They’re all incumbents in their own field. Not in the combined field. Identifying this was the initial opportunity in 2010, and I would argue it is still the opportunity in 2019.
Let’s look at each of them:
Gaming: Has never really taken kids’ products seriously, or considered it to be a major discipline of gaming. There’s an endless amount of new game studios that pop up every year. But very, very few of them have even the broader family has their target group. Nintendo being a slight exception here. Look at any Gaming conference and you’d be lucky to find kids’ games having more than a single session.
Education: Sells books to schools, broadly speaking. And they do that well. Given the complicated sales cycles of educational products to institutions, they have well established barriers to keep upcoming companies out of their core B2B business. These lock-in effects don’t, however, create especially good environments for innovation. Oligopolies rarely do. When new B2C companies started touching upon educational topics in their periphery, they didn’t really pay much attention. And still don’t.
Technology: Are often dependent on families as a unit, since the use of services often works best within the same ecosystem. Apple families sharing iCloud, Apple Music, Find My Friends etc. But catering to families means that you can’t completely exclude the youngest kids. Also, the tech companies run the app stores and the mobile operating systems which is their main contribution to this market. But kids’ products is not their focus.
Entertainment: Makes TV & movies, and considers most other categories to be better suited for licensing. Nickelodeon is a classic example of the innovator’s dilemma in this space. They don’t consider kids apps to be a big enough business for them to care about (compared to TV ads), and therefore it is treated as a secondary category – at best. The result is poor products, with generally poor performance too. At least in comparison to the strength of their brands. Disney and Sesame Street are very similar in this regard. They should be crushing everyone in this market on brand recognition alone. But they don’t.
So what is the size of the kids app market? It depends how you cut and slice these four markets above. Generally, people use the figure for the Education market since that seems to be the closest proxy. This isn’t a perfect comparison by any means, but an understandable escape route to a difficult question.
I think a more fair way to assess the market size would be to look at the following:
a) the assumed size of the kids app market (including kids games) itself + b) the share of the Education and Entertainment markets that you think will be digitized + c) the digital advertising spend on kids
I can’t give you an exact figure since there isn’t one to give. The point of writing this is to say that the market depends on how you define it. But that’s not what you’re here for! So let me contradict myself slightly and make a very rough and conservative estimate:
– Let’s say that the kids app category on iOS and Google Play globally grossed around $350 million in 2018. For simplicity, let’s ignore all consoles and PC games (Nintendo, Steam, Xbox, Playstation, etc). I’m also skipping Amazon here (that is a major player) and all of the games outside of the kids category.
– The Education market has an endless amount of estimates. This one says the global market in 2018 was around $6 trillion, of which less than 3% was spent on digital in 2018. But that’s still $152 billion. All of that isn’t for kids, so let’s give that a conservative haircut of 50%.
– The Entertainment market consists of all general TV and video entertainment. Disney+ will be an app for instance. Does that make it a kids app? Maybe. Netflix? Sometimes. But let’s be conservative here too. The global OTT market was $22.6 billion in 2018. Let’s say you can attribute 5% of this market to kids and family, even if it likely much higher than that.
In total, that would mean the total market size is around $80 billion globally in 2019. This assumes no growth and a lot of caveats, as you can see above. It’s still a respectable figure.
To make things more complicated, it isn’t entirely obvious what constitutes a “kids app”. The Entertainment section above illustrates this well. Is Angry Birds a kids app? A lot of adults play that. Is YouTube? A lot of kids use that. And so on.
The reality is that the whole market is on a sliding scale. It doesn’t fit neatly into demographic boxes. 6 year olds are playing Clash of Clans. 14 year olds are playing Toca Life. 2 year olds are also playing Toca Life. These products aren’t intentionally designed for them, but there’s also very little stopping kids from playing. Everything is everything, as Lauryn Hill once said.
Understanding this is important for a few different reasons:
1. You are competing with the best of the best, in terms of expectations.
Look at something like Clash Royale. Regardless of your opinion on their suitability for kids or methods of monetization – this is an incredibly polished and well-made game. No doubt about it. The creators, Supercell, is also one of the most successful and profitable games companies in the world.
Many of the kids you are trying to reach have played Clash Royale. They’re used to that level of fidelity and richness in graphics. This doesn’t mean you need to be like Supercell, but it does mean you can’t ignore the context that includes them.
2. Many kids are outside of the kids category.
It’s easy to look at the Kids top list rankings and think of that as the addressable market. But a closer look will reveal that a few major players aren’t even on that list, even if they definitely have a lot of kids as players. Apps like Minecraft or Roblox for instance. Disney is also largely absent from the Kids category on iOS.
The main reason for developers to not have their apps in the Kids category is to avoid the restrictions that Apple and Google have put in place. Take a look here for Apple’s version. They require parental locks and additional clicks when linking to a purchase or outside of the app, for instance. This is an inherently good thing for families’ safety, but is easily circumvented by simply not putting the app in the category in the first place. And by not doing so, they are also distorting the market perception. This may be changing though, as the FTC is putting some pressure on this issue. But regardless you should remember that this is only looking at apps that arguably are kids apps already, not the ones in point 1 above.
3. You’re competing for attention. Particularly on the device.
Ultimately, you are not competing with other kids apps but rather for their time and attention when they use their devices. Sometimes with the time spent without their devices too. Who is Toca Boca’s biggest competitor? I’d say it is YouTube. The amount of time that YouTube gets on these devices limits the time spent with Toca Boca. Neither company are intentionally going head to head with each other in a traditional sense (in fact, Toca Boca uses YouTube extensively). But in reality, there is a strong competitive force here. You could even make the case that the biggest competitor is school, given the time spent there.
I emphasize this because the reality is more muddy than one would have wanted it to be. Video competes with games. Homework competes with video. Sports competes with homework. Again, when understanding the kids market you need to take this context into consideration. The kids app market is not an island. It’s interlinked with everything else in kids’ and families’ lives. Time allocation, expectations, money spent – they are all connected far outside of their originally defined markets.
Marketing: The Incentives of Kids & Parents
Given the complex market dynamic described above, how can you effectively market to kids and families? The short answer is: you can’t. Or being slightly more optimistic: marketing is by far the most difficult part of this market.
There are several reasons for this. One of them is the simple fact that I stated above: Your user is not the customer. The majority of app makers will never have encountered this. Kids and parents are two completely different people with different interests, motives, incentives, and views on what quality is. To make things worse – a lot of times, your user can’t read. So there goes all UI and communication based on written language. These two things alone are a tricky challenge.
What’s more, the level of control and agency that kids have as they grow varies a lot. Below I have made an intentionally oversimplified model to illustrate this.
A simplified model to illustrate who really controls kids media and spending.
If you’re going for preschoolers, you can safely market to parents as your primary target group. It is unlikely that parents are going to let their kids roam freely in the app stores. And they have likely taken a look at the apps that they download before their kids start playing with them.
Once kids start school (around age 5-6), the influence of kids to kids starts to increase. Parents still know what’s going on, but they can’t control their kids interests to the same extent. Kids come home and ask for certain apps. Parents make the call if they can have them or not.
As kids become tweens and teens, parents start losing track of what they are really doing. It becomes tricky to both enforce rules, or to have any transparency into the reality of what apps they are using. A challenging time for many parents.
Regardless of age, kids’ and parents’ interests and perception of quality vary a lot. To generalize, parents care more about educational content than kids do. So depending on how your product is positioned, consider the likely recipient of your marketing message. Offering tutoring to a 10 year old is going to be a hard sell. Offering to the 10 year olds’ parent might work though. And vice versa with a game that is just plain fun.
Summary: How to think about the kids app market
When I first looked at this market in 2010, I thought we were already too late. The ship had already sailed. I quickly realized that in fact, the market had hardly even started.
When I look at it now, in 2019, I think it’s still early. The eco systems are yet to develop. There is supply and there is demand. But they’re not meeting each other adequately. As I described above, this is a market living between other markets. Until it grows up and becomes its own thing, it is going to be misunderstood and underdeveloped.
My macro view in 2010 was also pretty much the same as I have now. I posed three questions then:
– Will the amount of kids with access to touchscreen based devices increase over the coming 5-10 years?
– Will these devices decrease in cost and significantly increase in capacity and performance?
– Is it reasonable to assume that kids will use these devices for some form of entertainment and/or education?
If your answer to these three questions is “yes”, then there’s a market here. It doesn’t mean it is an easy one to capture, for all the reasons I’ve written about above. But it’s there, it’s early, and it’s waiting for the next generation of great products for kids.
Edit: I have written two follow up pieces that includes the role of parents, the toy and publishing market, thoughts on the ethics of marketing to kids, and an overall wish list for the future.
If you have more questions about the kids app market, I now offer single sessions that can be scheduled on the web. It’s a 90 minute advisory session where we go through the challenges and questions that you want answered. If you’re interested in scheduling such a session, please click here to see my availability.
One of the best parts of my job is that I get to consume a wide range of media. From pop culture to politics to technology. These are some of the more interesting pieces I have come across lately. Both things to learn from, and to enjoy.
Take a look below and click on something that sounds interesting!
Björn
Things I have written
Two Types of Strategy Tax Following up on the concept of a Strategy Tax, here’s a clearer definition of the two types you can find in a company. You will recognize them.
The Curse of the Modus Operandi The systems that you use to run your business, end up shaping it too. It’s a trap that I’ve fallen into many times myself.
Explaining devices that learn: Google AI and IF A much needed human perspective to AI and Machine Learning. If decisions are automated for you as a user – how would you know? And how could it be explained in order to empower you? This interesting and important question gets great treatment here.
Things to learn from
Nine Reasons Why Disney+ Will Succeed The last few years it has been a wise move to never bet against Disney. As they enter the SVOD market, there’s reason to believe they’ll do well there too.
Lisa Brennan-Jobs, the designing and writing of Small Fry Craig Mod does a great job in getting to the real craft behind the writing and designing of a book. The intricate details of care and love that went into the choice of typefaces alone makes this a fascinating listen.
Peace Bird EP, by Genius of Time The Swedish duo Genius of Time are back with three fantastic tracks that live somewhere between deep house and techno. Dark and moody.
A year ago today, I launched my advisory business. It’s been really great. The independence, flexibility, diversity of client work – all in all a very pleasurable working experience. And one that I’m intending to continue.
Five months in, I wrote a brief update about what I actually have been doing. I thought I would do the same now. I can’t mention any client names since some of the work is confidential. You’ll get the general idea though.
Some of the projects mentioned earlier are still ongoing, but this is a selection of the new projects I’ve been working on lately:
I wrote an extensive report on voice assistants and smart speakers for a Nordic media company. It was a combination of market data, strategic analysis, and case studies.
I did a full week workshop in New York that produced a new business concept together with a very interesting group of people.
I helped an XR company from Israel go to market.
I joined the team behind the chatbot Shim to help create a new product, Enjo, and reposition the company towards American parents. Earlier this week it was announced that the healthcare company KRY/LIVI had acquired Enjo. There’s a longer story to be told here, but that’s for another day.
I wrote a strategic overview of the kids app market for a new startup in Sweden.
I started working with the femtech company Clue (my first seed investment) as their acting VP of Special Projects.
I went to Denmark and spoke about how to create components of corporate culture.
I helped a California based edtech company with marketing and App Store Optimization.
I prepared a report on trends in corporate venture capital for a company in that sector.
Quite a year. A great balance between loads of interesting projects while still having time to read and learn more than in many years. If you have a project you’d like to work on together, please get in touch.
In any business there’s a series of rules to follow. Most of them aren’t explicitly stated, but follow a type of common (business) sense. A general modus operandi (MO) develops.
Both as a founder or an employee it’s easiest to stick to this MO. It feels sensible and like it saves time. But by doing so, you are recreating the same issues that these structures have created for all companies before you. To make it worse, people have a higher level of tolerance for these types of issues. They’re annoying but also implicitly accepted as “that’s just what office life is like“.
This is lazy. These commonly accepted problems are holding you back. And a lot of them make no sense. You want to buy a few books for $100? Ask your manager. Maybe expense it. You want to invite six people for a two hour meeting? That’s free. (Except it’s not. It actually costs $840, assuming $100K salaries).
As I wrote in The Strategy Tax, “doing the same thing as last year requires no preparation and little effort”. Your modus operandi starts to own you. It dictates rules that you can’t be bothered to challenge, or even think about.
Questions to ask yourself:
Why is it okay to lie in a budget, but not in a meeting?
Why does it matter how many hours someone works?
Why is an upward trajectory for your title assumed to be good?
No one knows. It just is.
The systems that you use to run your business, shape it too. Break the curse of the modus operandi and you’ve unlocked a new way to run and differentiate your business.
There are two different types of strategy tax in a company. One for product strategy and one for corporate strategy. The former is what people usually refer to, and it often comes up when describing Microsoft and its strategy in the 90s. Blogging legend Dave Winer wrote a good explanation of this in 2001, for instance.
A strategy tax is anything that makes a product less likely to succeed, yet is included to further larger corporate goals
Dave explains Microsoft holding back functionality from Internet Explorer to not cannibalize Word. Ben describes Google requiring Hangouts users to get a Google+ account. These are both good examples, albeit a bit dated now of course.
Expanding the definition But there’s more to it than that. For me, The Strategy Tax illustrates not only questionable choices within existing product but also general strategic inaction. I think about it as an inevitable duality of the choices you make as a company. You cannot have a strategy without having a strategy tax. But the amount varies. And how you manage it varies too.
It’s the cost of not taking a new opportunity, or passing on an acquisition.
This makes for two different categories of a similar phenomenon. That would mean a definition that looks like this:
Product Strategy Tax Suboptimizing new products to not inversely affect current ones.
Corporate Strategy Tax Indefinitely postponing change, regardless of the world around you.
Both are relevant and useful models to apply when understanding a company and its choices. They are lenses through which you can analyze company’s choices to better understand why they do what they do – and what they don’t do.
The Strategy Tax The hidden cost of the status quo. I suggest leaving budgets behind and adopting a new steering mechanism for innovation.
Startups and Unions Breaking the ultimate Silicon Valley taboo, I give three reasons why having a unionized workforce can be good for startups.
Three acquisition predictions I predict that Unity, MPI (Schibsted), and Zoom will all be acquired prior to their IPOs. Here’s who will buy them, and why.
Recommended reading & listening
Peak California A prediction that California’s tech companies will stagnate, and how this is connected to policy for housing and taxes. A must read.
I Embraced Screen Time With My Daughter – and I Love It Joi Ito writes a calming, science-based article for every parent that has been guilted into thinking all screens are bad. They’re not. There’s so much more to it than that.
The Dropout A podcast documentary about how Theranos duped investors, partners, patients, and the media into thinking they were the next big thing. A good reminder for everyone.
A great song & book
Falling, by LÉON This super catchy pop-hit comes straight from LÉON´s new debut album with the same name. Feels a bit like Christine and the Queens and Rae Morris.
The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner It’s been on lists, won awards, and become a bestseller. All worthy praise. If you still haven’t picked up this fantastic and funny novel, now is the time.
Scene: the board room. You’re presenting a new idea for investment. Your CFO is concerned. How much will it cost? How many FTEs will you need?
It’s predictable, but not unreasonable.
What is unreasonable is the asymmetry of continuing with business as usual. Doing the same thing as last year requires no preparation and little effort. But it represents the largest hidden cost of all big companies.
The cost of status quo This hidden cost is the tax you are paying for your current strategy. It’s the cost of not taking a new opportunity, or passing on an acquisition. Since it can’t be immediately quantified, it gets ignored.
Identifying your strategy tax is hard. It poses the question how to account for things that have not yet happened. That sounds impossible, but a budget is supposed to be just that too. Except of course it isn’t. It’s cognitive dissonance stemming from the finance department. Budgets and forecasts are, at best, partially wrong. But a map which is half wrong becomes all wrong if you don’t know what part of it can be trusted.
You know that part where you just extend whatever you did last year into the following budget year? It’s wrong (and lazy). Your 10% growth multiplier is enough to not cause your CFO to choke on their morning coffee, but small enough to not matter if you miss it. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Nobody ever got fired for projecting 10% revenue growth either.
Budgets have no answers What to do? Stop looking to your budget for answers about the future. It’s not in there. Instead, file a strategy tax form to your CFO annually. It should state what it is going to cost if you do not change what you’re currently doing. You’ll need to guess, but you’re doing that in your budget anyway.
Things like meeting calculators are crude, but serve the purpose of illustrating an otherwise hidden cost. The absence of action has a cost that must be shown. Compare that cost to the investment cost and the board can favor the bold. Today they favor the ones who play it safe. And without knowing it, they pay a hefty strategy tax while doing so.
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