STARTUPS
In addition to consulting numerous start ups, Purple has the experience of incubating companies itself. In the case of award-winning formula1.com the site grew phenomenally from launch and was successfully sold to the organisers of the racing series.
Our own involvement with start ups means that Purple fully appreciate the need to conserve money when you're launching. More importantly, on numerous occasions Purple has taken a concept from the seed of an idea through the detailed planning phase and launch. So if you are launching an online business and you are more of an ideas person than a detail person, you've come to the right place. We'll happily share our ideas with you as well.
Over the years Purple has developed a set of processes which work well. Below is an abbreviated version:
- Client discussions and brief
- Find out clients unique proposition and differentiators
- Ask client which competitors and features they like / dislike
- Research
- Launch plan
- Purple produce preliminary set of features
- With client produce rough powerpoint of screens, flow and notes
- Graphic design of screens
- User feedback
- Database design and technical brief
- Develop software according to milestones
- Test and Review
- Usability testing
- Changes and Review (iterate)
- Launch
BUSINESS MODELS FOR SPORTS SITES
Purple started in 1994 at the dawn of the web. On the business strategy side the web has struggled since these early days with monetizing traffic. There are phenomenal business machines like Google, and then there numerous content businesses that struggle to cover their costs.
Purple helped to create several of the early sports web sites, but to run a sports site as a business the key is to have multiple business models and not rely on just one or two. Formula1.com was a good example, where the revenue streams were from:
- sponsorship and advertising
- ticket sales
- merchandise sales
- syndication of content
- subscription for fantasy games
- subscription for premium content
