Summary of John Mullins's The Customer-Funded Business

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Book Preview: #1 Entrepreneurship is an important field to be in, not only because of the money and the fame, but also because it creates a lot of the jobs in the future.

#2 The author is a professor of entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He has written the books The New Business Road Test and Getting to Plan B, which teach readers how to start and grow their companies with the capital of their customers.

#3 The book addresses the five customer-funded business models and the key questions that should be asked when considering and pursuing each of them. It also addresses the key implementation questions that will surely arise.

#4 In 1995, the Coca-Cola company entered India, where it had never operated before. It needed maps to locate its new bottlers, so the company hired the Vermas, who had just started an IT training business, to provide it with digital maps.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Feb 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669347033

IRB Media

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Insights on John Mullins's The Customer Funded Business

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 11

Insights from Chapter 12

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Entrepreneurship is an important field to be in, not only because of the money and the fame, but also because it creates a lot of the jobs in the future.

#2

The author is a professor of entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He has written the books The New Business Road Test and Getting to Plan B, which teach readers how to start and grow their companies with the capital of their customers.

#3

The book addresses the five customer-funded business models and the key questions that should be asked when considering and pursuing each of them. It also addresses the key implementation questions that will surely arise.

#4

In 1995, the Coca-Cola company entered India, where it had never operated before. It needed maps to locate its new bottlers, so the company hired the Vermas, who had just started an IT training business, to provide it with digital maps.

#5

The Vermas didn't need venture capital to start and grow their business. They funded the growth of their business by charging their customers for digital maps, which allowed them to gain clients and expand.

#6

Customer-funded businesses are not exclusive to India or the 1990s. Many companies, both large and small, have been founded by entrepreneurs who used their customers’ money to finance their operations.

#7

Raising money is a full-time job, and trying to do so while launching a startup is a recipe for disaster.

#8

Customer-funded companies offer numerous benefits to both entrepreneurs and investors.

#9

Customer funding is a great way for early-stage companies to secure capital.

#10

In its early days, Ryzex bought decommissioned mobile computing equipment that was gathering dust and sold it to business users who needed to expand their existing fleets.

#11

Some companies act as a matchmaker between buyers and sellers, such as your local real estate broker. They take the order but do not own the goods or services that are sold, which means they do not need to invest money in inventory.

#12

Subscription models are ones in which a customer agrees to buy something that is delivered repeatedly over an extended period of time - perhaps a product like newspapers or a box of organic veggies, or a service like cable TV.

#13

Customer-funded companies can be very successful, and many of them are being built every day.

#14

In the physical world, stores use a variety of strategies to limit the amount of product they put on the market. One of these is by using a model of limited quantity for a limited time, with the product then being unavailable forever.

#15

Vente-privee is a European company that was the originator of the flash sales concept.

#16

The second business model is the service-to-service model, in which a company starts by