What strikes me in the stories like this is that with each step you got further and further away from the money. It seems to be a bias of some sort in entrepreneurs, that the farther you are from the money, the more businessy a thing you do.
Look here. Let us assume that we are talking about one single customer. That customer has a wallet and wants some stuff done, say, cleaning.
Cash flow goes like this
First business:
Customer -> Cleaner (you are here)
Second business:
Customer -> Cleaner -> Marketer (you are here)
Third business:
Customer -> Cleaner -> Marketer -> Review platform (you are here)
Science of ecology tells us that in every food chain 90% of all the energy gets lost on every step. A plant in every given moment contains 10% of all the energy it got from the sun. A herbivore gets 10% energy of all the plants it eats (1% of initial sun energy). A carnivore gets 10% energy from herbivores (0.1% of sun) etc, etc.
In terms of business if we have a cleaner who thrives on 10 customers, a marketer already need 10 cleaners to thrive, meaning that he/she has 100 cleaner customers in their network. A review platform needs 10 such marketers which collectively have already 1000 households in need of a cleaning service to be serviced. That distancing from the money and diminishing the impact on the person with money (remember, the guy wants clean floor, not 5* review on some platform he never heard of) eventually leads nowhere...
Look here. Let us assume that we are talking about one single customer. That customer has a wallet and wants some stuff done, say, cleaning.
Cash flow goes like this
First business:
Customer -> Cleaner (you are here)
Second business:
Customer -> Cleaner -> Marketer (you are here)
Third business:
Customer -> Cleaner -> Marketer -> Review platform (you are here)
Science of ecology tells us that in every food chain 90% of all the energy gets lost on every step. A plant in every given moment contains 10% of all the energy it got from the sun. A herbivore gets 10% energy of all the plants it eats (1% of initial sun energy). A carnivore gets 10% energy from herbivores (0.1% of sun) etc, etc.
In terms of business if we have a cleaner who thrives on 10 customers, a marketer already need 10 cleaners to thrive, meaning that he/she has 100 cleaner customers in their network. A review platform needs 10 such marketers which collectively have already 1000 households in need of a cleaning service to be serviced. That distancing from the money and diminishing the impact on the person with money (remember, the guy wants clean floor, not 5* review on some platform he never heard of) eventually leads nowhere...