Great example of business model reinvention and a growth hacking mindset. I have a personal example (not as significant or as impactful as this but it follows the same thinking). When I was at Microsoft I had a role to find, engage and activate video games studios to put their mobile gaming applications on the Windows 8 App Store. The challenge here was that the App Store was new with no pre-installed base to monetise. The Windows Phone was also relatively new to market and competing against the two big incumbents of Google and Apple. The final challenge was that many of the breakout mobile gaming apps were not coming from the big "AAA" gaming studios (where Xbox had a publishing arrangement) but from smaller independent game studios. So the value proposition was challenging as a new app store, a new entry phone OS (that was more targeted at Enterprise than consumers) and game studios that had no real engagement with Microsoft up to this point. So, working with the Xbox team, we created a programme called Greenshoots and delivered this in partnership with Creative England. We brought EU funding to these small game studios and used that, wrapped with the Go To Market support of Xbox/Microsoft and engaged them around how to fuel their business growth and accelerate their mobile game app's they were developing with an initial launch on Windows 8. A key part of this was not to exclude the game titles from the competitors app stores (as that was counter to the intent of fuelling business growth) but have the game launch first on Windows 8 and/or launch with additional content and features. The programme was hugely rewarding to work on and saw many game studios go through it over the years and bring some strong performing games titles to both WIndows 8 store as well as the XBox Store. Net, net. The UK revenues for mobile games was the second strongest to the US in the World and the UK had the most vibrant ecosystem of net new small games studios joining the platform. We weren't selling the product (the app store) we were creating a support programme to help the studios themselves grow and be successful.
Great example of business model reinvention and a growth hacking mindset. I have a personal example (not as significant or as impactful as this but it follows the same thinking). When I was at Microsoft I had a role to find, engage and activate video games studios to put their mobile gaming applications on the Windows 8 App Store. The challenge here was that the App Store was new with no pre-installed base to monetise. The Windows Phone was also relatively new to market and competing against the two big incumbents of Google and Apple. The final challenge was that many of the breakout mobile gaming apps were not coming from the big "AAA" gaming studios (where Xbox had a publishing arrangement) but from smaller independent game studios. So the value proposition was challenging as a new app store, a new entry phone OS (that was more targeted at Enterprise than consumers) and game studios that had no real engagement with Microsoft up to this point. So, working with the Xbox team, we created a programme called Greenshoots and delivered this in partnership with Creative England. We brought EU funding to these small game studios and used that, wrapped with the Go To Market support of Xbox/Microsoft and engaged them around how to fuel their business growth and accelerate their mobile game app's they were developing with an initial launch on Windows 8. A key part of this was not to exclude the game titles from the competitors app stores (as that was counter to the intent of fuelling business growth) but have the game launch first on Windows 8 and/or launch with additional content and features. The programme was hugely rewarding to work on and saw many game studios go through it over the years and bring some strong performing games titles to both WIndows 8 store as well as the XBox Store. Net, net. The UK revenues for mobile games was the second strongest to the US in the World and the UK had the most vibrant ecosystem of net new small games studios joining the platform. We weren't selling the product (the app store) we were creating a support programme to help the studios themselves grow and be successful.