ITT 087: How to Create a Platform with Marshall Van Alstyne

Marshall Van Alstyne is the Chair of the Information Systems Department at Boston University, Research Associate at MIT s Initiative on the Digital Economy, Co-Author of the book Platform Revolution , writer for Harvard Business Review as well as other articles including Strategies for Two-sided Markets .

In this broadcast, Marshall Van Alstyne and I talk about:

• How his experience of coming up through the Dot.Com boom helped him to understand platforms.
• The four times that giving things away for free works in platform creation.
• Examples of how companies fail to understand the nature of platforms.
• The differences between Network Effect and Virality.
• The Anatomy of the Sneeze and how it helps us to understand Virality.
  • Host: who is infected already
  • Target: who are you trying to reach
  • Germ: idea you want to spread
  • Medium the way that idea is spread
• The problems associated with launching a platform.
• Six different launch strategies and how they work.
• The importance of testing your market to see which launch strategy is a good fit for your company.
• The relationship between monetization and launch strategies.
• How competition may affect your launch.

How to find Marshall Van Alstyne online:

• Website: platforms.bu.edu
• Marshall s book Platform Revolution .
• Twitter: @InfoEcon

 

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The post ITT 087: How to Create a Platform with Marshall Van Alstyne appeared first on Tom Morkes.