Lensit: The business story told through our lens
by Evi Apollonatou and Evangelos Kentros
An analysis of the Business Model Canvas that helped us describe, discuss, design, challenge, improve, innovate, choose and ultimately create our journalistic start-up: Lensit.
When we first heard of the term “Business Model Canvas” during our class of Entrepreneurial Journalism, we had no idea what we had to do. Some of us had heard about journalistic start-ups or even followed some of them as readers. But create our own start-up? That was an huge challenge we were about to take on.
Of course our first step was a visit to Wikipedia. “The Business Model Canvas is a strategic management and lean startup template for developing new or documenting existing business models. It is a visual chart with elements describing a firm’s or product’s value proposition, infrastructure, customers, and finances. It assists firms in aligning their activities by illustrating potential trade-offs”. That was a good description but it was just the starting point.
“Business models are, at heart, stories that explain how enterprises work. Like a good story, a robust business model contains precisely delineated characters, plausible motivations and a plot that turns on an insight about value. It answers certain questions: Who is the customer? How do we make money? What underlying economic logic explains how we can deliver value to customers at an appropriate cost?“ (Magretta, 2010). That was more helpful. The words: story, model and value entered our thought process.
When we printed out the canvas, initially proposed by Alexander Osterwalder, it did all the hard part of our challenge: helped us put our ideas in order and articulate our start-up’s focal points. We described, discussed and tried to imagine our business. We created the characters and plot in regard with value. It gave us the opportunity to look at all nine building blocks of our business on one page. Each component of the business model contained a series of hypotheses that we had to test. This is where our story and the story of Lensit begun.
In the simple graphical template we described the nine essential components of Lensit: Key Partners, Customer Segments, Value Propositions, Channels, Customer Relationships, Revenue Streams, Key Activities, Key Resources, Cost Structure.
The first big step was Value Propositions. Why is a photographer going to choose Lensit over its competitors or alternatives? Lensit, as we imagined it, is a weekly digital photo album, focusing on documentary and street photography. What is unique about our start-up is that we value quality over quantity, so images are curated, filtered by our users and voted throughout the week. In our times, when selfies are flooding social media and the internet in general, we wanted to give photographers a safe space to start a dialogue between their craft and the public. This is the main reason we chose to focus on documentary and street photography. Consequently, we plan to issue the Lensit album every weekend, featuring the “top-stories” of each past week.
Lensit is a start-up with the goal of promoting the work of photographers. So in the Key Partners section we placed press photographers and amateurs alike. We also aim to collaborate with brands, photography schools and workshops.
We have the ambition of being a meeting point for the work of photographers of the press that seek alternative channels and audience for their work and amateurs who want to promote their love for the art of photography. We provide content for different Customer Segments, namely the public, subscribers and professionals. The general public can view the images uploaded on our website, our subscribers will be able to vote these images and purchase them if they want to. They will also be the users of our smartphone application. Finally, photographers who want to upload their images will use our “professional” accounts.
Subsequently, we identified the Channels to promote, sell and deliver our product. This was a crucial step, because it defined our interaction with our users. The backbone of Lensit is the website and the smartphone app, where everyone can get acquainted with us. Then, our social media presence is equally important, providing us with much needed visibility. That is why we built a Facebook page and instagram and twitter accounts.
How does the customer interact with us is the next basic component of Lensit. Next stop in the canvas: Customer Relationships. Quality in pictures comes first, and our meaning of quality is twofold; on the one hand, it means high resolution for the photographs we host and on the other, quality of content. All the pictures are copyrighted because we want our clients to feel safe when using Lensit. Ultimately, we want our users, both professionals and amateurs, to know that we put all our effort in promoting their pictures. That is why we decided to add a personalized newsletter featuring some of the pictures we are promoting and match the tastes of our users, based on the topics and hashtags they choose.
If we wanted to keep our start-up going, we had to think about one of the most important components for every business: Revenue Streams. We are going to charge a small percentage fee for every photo that is sold from our website and app. We are not closing the door, of course, to advertisements and we are prepared to have banners for photographers and every product linked to photography. Most importantly, developing native advertising stories via photographic narration is the next strategic step for the development of Lensit.
Additionally, the first of our Key Activities is getting in touch with photographers, photography schools and brands. Our goal is to try and build a sustainable and strong network among them.
Now it is time for our strategic assets, Key Resources, and ways we proposed to be better than our competitors. First and foremost, we have a great creative team with the assistance of high tech web developers. Our marketing and legal departments are the cornerstones of our start-up, essential for its growth and the users’ safety respectively.
Finally, in the Cost Structure section of the canvas we had to think what the partners of the team could do, in order to be cost-efficient. We needed to have a low cost start-up with the barest minimum capital, so legal department was assigned to Evangelos Kentros, Marketing was given to Christina Damaskou etc. The main cost covers the development of the website and the application. We also have to put aside a small amount of money for the cost of the domain name.
The above list is, of course, not exhaustive, since Lensit is still a work in progress. The many aspects and parameters of building a successful start-up show over time, but we are confident that with the mentoring of Prof. Betty Tsakarestou and our collective efforts, we will be able to overcome each challenge as it unfolds. This certainty stems from our belief in the idea behind Lensit. We definitely have a lot of stories to tell. Stay tuned!
