POWER OF FREE! #11: What’s Your Platform in Intelligent Content Marketing: Emerging Platforms

Essentially what we did and what some other companies did was they essentially said, I want to be this big machine, I want to own the ability for people to, for example, access a particular song at anytime on demand for a very small sum of money.

And understanding that, to bring about that reality, they needed to develop a platform, they develop the platform that is Spotify. Similarly, somebody wants asked, they want to own the ability for people to turn their guest room into a guest house. And when that thinking was done, they then laid out the platform that enabled this to happen similarly with Uber. But even predating all of this, I should about the time when I first started my first immigration practice, early 90s, the IMDb came into play. And what I’ve understood about the IMDb is that it was a hobbyist at the end of the end of the 1990s, excuse me, the end of the 18 student getting all along at the end of end of the 1980s going into the 1990s.

And when the internet became available to him, he started to keep a record of everything that he knew about movies, no one else was doing this. And he’s continued to do this. And it’s now the IMDb which is the definitive source of of all information in relation to the movie industry. And that started out by this one particular individual thinking this could be an interesting library and interesting project. And it’s grown into a platform that has intrinsic value in the last I heard was that they have six or seven employees, and they’ve monetized it in some interesting way.

But this was way back when and it serves to illustrate the idea of starting out with something understanding that you’ve got the intention to build a platform in mind can bring about remarkable commercial outcomes. So when I understood all of this, I then asked myself, okay, I want to own the ability for people to manage their own visa applications. So what does that future look like? And they were going to manage the visa applications for free. So understanding that it was then a question of putting together all the pieces that represent our platform.

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