Getting Started with Business Models

Nicely done piece with lots of links.    Via O'Reilly.   Gives you many ways to think about business models.  For data scientists, yes, but for most anyone thinking about how to get started in making money by reaching out to customers.

10 Reads for Data Scientists Getting Started with Business Models  by Conor Dewey

If you’re getting started with data science, you’re probably focusing your attention on mostly stats and coding. There’s nothing wrong with this, in fact, this is the right move — these are essential skills that you need to develop early on in your journey.

With this being said, the biggest knowledge gap that I’ve encountered during my data science journey doesn’t deal with either of these areas. Instead, upon starting my first full-time role as a data scientist, I realized, to my surprise, that I didn’t really understand business.

I suspect that this is a common theme. If you studied a technical field in college or picked things up using online courses, it’s unlikely that you ever had any reason to deep dive into business concepts like models, strategy, or important metrics. Adding on to this, I didn’t really come across data science interviews that stress-tested this type of understanding. Plenty of them tried to get a sense of product intuition, but I found that it rarely went beyond that.

The fact is that business understanding isn’t taught or evangelized in the data science community to the extent that it’s used in practice. The goal of this post is to help bridge this gap by sharing some of the resources that I found most helpful as I got up to speed on how businesses work from the inside-out.

16 Startup Metrics

This article from Andreessen Horowitz is a great place to start if you’re trying to get familiar with the slew of metrics and acronyms that get thrown around in a business, whether it’s a startup or not. On a more general note, their posts are consistently high-quality and are almost always worth your time. If you have a larger appetite, check out their follow-up post on 16 more metrics and the thread below for some additional tips on metrics.

30 Successful Types of Business Models

An overall solid resource, the articles at FourWeekMBA are worth exploring at some point. I particularly recommend this for an overview of all the different business models out there. It’s hard to come away from this without learning something new. For a more practical dive into business models, I also found this post going over how Slack makes money interesting.  .... "