Analogies

Analogies are everywhere. Take from different fields to increase your perception of your own field.

I recently talked to a company growing and selling in-home hydroponic kits to grow crops in an apartment in the city for example, where most people do not have gardens like in suburbia. Given my experience in the startup world as well as in technology, I thought of their idea for some time and realized that there are quite a few business models that they can go towards, as they had the tech but didn't know how to progress it into an actual business.

Here's the list I came up with:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Selling access to the infrastructure (but not the infrastructure itself) with which customers can then do whatever they want
  • Sell access to hydroponics kits (kits) for individuals, restaurants, companies (groups) to grow their own crops, but they have to maintain it themselves
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Selling infrastructure with less control over the details but more ease of use for customers
  • Sell access to kits with certain crops already available, and groups can pick what they want to grow, and perhaps customize the crops and crop choice
  • Serverless - Grow crops on demand based on needed capacity
• Software as a Service (SaaS) - Selling access to the product without selling the infrastructure itself to run the product
  • Sell the crops themselves to groups so that they don't need to grow crops themselves
  • Boutique grocery stores
  • Delivery of crops on a regular basis
  • Delivery of meal kits on a regular basis with additional included groceries such as pasta or rice
• Desktop as a Service (DaaS) - Sell remote access to the product
  • Monitor crops from anywhere with a web app or mobile app. The app could show crop yields, stats, expected time to delivery, expected time to expiration, et cetera
  • Complementary to the other models, not a replacement
• On-premise - Sell the product to be deployed directly on the property of the customer, and sometimes maintain it for them
  • Grow the crops on the premises of the groups and maintain it for them
• Self Service - Selling the infrastructure itself, not just access to it
  • Sell the kits themselves
• Distributed Computing - Selling where the product usage occurs, oftentimes taking a percentage of every sale
  • Allow other people to grow crops and sell them locally
  • The crowdsourced Uber/Airbnb model

This list came up due to my experience in business and technology, but if I had expertise in other fields, then this list would've been different. Learn from different domains and create analogies between them to think of new ideas and combinations of those ideas.