Am I Non Profit or For Profit or Something In-between?
What kind of company is best for my idea?
About three years ago I started to get a new question from entrepreneurs: is my idea best suited to a nonprofit or a for profit or something in-between?
At first I found the question strange. It seemed so binary to me. When I was graduated from college, there were two basic career doors to open:
Are the business models we use constraining us from building the future we want?
Utilization
Organization
Optimization
Mechanization
The way we imagine and discuss new business models seems to be trapped back in the first Industrial Revolution. We talk about “creating machines,” “measuring throughput,” and “optimizing efficiency for zero defects.”
One of the first jobs in unlocking a business model is to define a customer segment, and figure out customer “pain points.” You know you’ve struck gold when you uncover a “hair on fire” problem that is so tremendously painful the customer will work with your earliest version of the product just to douse the flames.
The belief about pain points is reinforced by investors, incubators, accelerators, and entrepreneurship curricula like Lean LaunchPad.
Business and capital model ideas, cases, teardowns, and deep dives on how to build organizations that have different philosophies for growth, impact, and purpose.
