Business | Technology
Disrupting the Status Quo: How Submithub, Captcha, and Lemonade Insurance Are Re-Inventing Their Respective Domains
Transforming Industries In Business
In the modern fast-paced business landscape, innovation and change are no longer luxuries — they are essential constants. Companies that refuse to adapt and evolve risk being left behind in an economy where disruption is inevitable. Companies that thrive are constantly pushing boundaries, re-thinking traditional industries, and creating new value for their customers.
But what does it take for a business to truly embrace innovation and change? Submithub, Captcha, Re-captcha, and Lemonade Insurance all epitomise the structural, strategic and tactical approaches required to differentiate their respective value propositions and stay ahead of the curve. Whether as a startup, an artisan, or an established enterprise, there’s something to be learned from these companies which are changing the way we think about business.
Submithub
Submithub is a platform that helps musicians and record labels promote their music to music blogs and playlist curators on platforms like Spotify.
The main problem it helps alleviate is that with traditional methods of music promotion, such as finding (trawling blog pages and twitter bios) and sending emails to curators, is that it is time-consuming and has a low response rate. Most blogs and playlisters have their own guidelines for how to submit music, and it requires a lot of time and effort to tailor every email to its recipient curator.
Even then, the response rate is still low, and the higher the quality of the curator, the less likely they are to respond. Submithub aims to solve this problem by making it easy for artists to submit their music to multiple curators at once, while also making it easier for curators to sift through submissions.
It streamlines the submission process for both artists and curators. Artists can upload their music and pay to submit it to curators, who can then listen and respond directly from their end.
The founder of Submithub, Jason Grishkoff, is also the founder of the popular music blog Indie Shuffle. As the website grew, he found that the submission process became increasingly clunky and time-consuming. He realized that this was a problem not just for him, but for curators of other websites as well. He created Submithub to address this problem and make the submission process easier and more efficient for everyone involved.
The company offers a range of services, including a submission tool (multiple blogs simultaneously), as well as a blog directory and a playlist directory.
Learn more about best practices and statistics on this fantastic blog post by Tom Anderson of Two Story Melody.
Captcha & Re-Captcha
Before inventing the world’s most popular language learning app (Duolingo), Luis Von Ahn cut his teeth in academics at Carnegie Mellon.
Alongside a team of engineers, they sought to address the issue of bots spamming websites by creating challenges that are designed to differentiate humans from computers. These challenges, known as CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) protect websites from spam and abuse by requiring users to complete simple tasks, e.g. identify a series of numbers or letters.
The genius behind this business model innovation was to then take the millions of hours of ten second increments, computing of 200 million words per day, and put that to good use helping transcribe text. Re-captcha, a version of the Captcha challenge later acquired by Google, helps to digitize books and other written works by placing elements for whom the system knows the answer, alongside elements for which it doesn’t (e.g. an old library book segment). Transcription of these small portions of a text were typically done manually, incurring significant cost. However, with the constantly improving accuracy of machine learning algorithms, the team was able to synchronise multiple human Re-Captcha responses to digitize texts for entities like the New York Times (and their entire archive).
These continue to evolve with the introduction of audio and image CAPTCHAs, as well as noCAPTCHA which is able to determine whether a human has hovered the cursor over the link vs. a bot running a script to tick the box. CAPTCHAs serve an important purpose in protecting websites from spam, but can create difficulties for users (e.g. the visually impaired with audio CAPTCHAs) so finding the right balance between security and accessibility is an ongoing challenge. Nevertheless, the business model innovation here is truly disruptive.
Lemonade Insurance
Insurance is one of the largest industries in the world, a monolith. Global property, casualty, and life insurance premiums alone amount to approximately $5 trillion. Insurance is 7% of the global economy yet, as an industry, has historically struggled with a negative perception amongst consumers. Trust is difficult to develop, with claims around emotionally charged negative events, such as illnesses or accidents, heavily scrutinised and criticised in view of the optics of large corporations profiting from misfortune.
Lemonade, an insurtech company founded in 2015, aims to leverage technology in the form of data analytics, artificial intelligence, contemporary design, and behavioral economics; to make insurance more affordable, precise, trustworthy, and socially impactful.
A unique aspect in this regard of Lemonade’s business model is its “Giveback” program, where the company donates any extra premiums to charity after paying claims and expenses. This not only differentiates the company from traditional insurance providers but also helps promote the company’s socially responsible image. In this way they are able to mitigate moral hazard, with the optics now being that rejected claims are not predicated on boosting profits (excess profits go to charity) but actually due to the fundamentals of that particular case.
Additionally, as opposed to long drawn out claims processes that are typical in environements of high levels of information assymetry, the company’s chatbot, AI Maya, enables customers to get covered with renters’ or homeowners’ insurance within 2 minutes. There is also an onus on expedience with paying out claims, with the company’s focus on younger and first-time insurance buyers allowing them to build highly recurring and naturally growing revenue streams in ancillary realms such as pet insurance.
Another key element of Lemonade’s business model is its utilization of reinsurance — a risk management technique where an insurance company purchases insurance from another company to protect itself from the risk of significant claims. Lemonade has partnered with some of the world’s largest reinsurers, such as Swiss Re, Munich Re, and Hannover Re, to offload excess claims, thereby minimizing volatility and maximizing trust and social impact. This innovative strategy led to the company raising $480 million in 5 different rounds before going public in 2020.
Go Your Own Way
These companies represent just a few examples of the innovative business models that are emerging in the modern business world. From music promotion and Captcha challenges to digitization and insurance, these businesses are using technology and data to rethink traditional industries and create new value for their customers.
Notable mentions
- X To Earn: a web3 model revolutionising engagement
- PledgeBond: an invention of the author seeking to unlock gamified charitable fundraising.
Papa — linktr.ee/papajams
