Seite - 95 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

if necessary, activates driving agencies. The startup’s developers implement new features in the product and get firsthand feedback from the drivers or carry out orders themselves. For the acquisition of B2B customers, the offensive communi- cation of existing customers has proven to be themost successful approach. 3.3 Approaches toDesignMinimumViable Platforms In the analyzed case studies, we identified three specific and one general approach tominimumviable platformdesign.All named startups startwith the identification and implementation of a core transaction between actors. With kawaloo, for example, this is the provision of storage space by a supplier in exchange for a fee fromthecustomer.Parker et al. (2016)andCusumanoet al. (2019)alreadydescribe the relevance of early focus on a core transaction in relation to the successful development of digital platforms. We empirically underline this finding in the examined case studies. Basically, the concept of the minimum viable product is applied to themore complex context of amulti-sidedmarket. The core transaction is, therefore, to be understood as the simplest way of representing the value proposition of the platform for the addressed actors. All further services, offers, or additional transactions are to be understood as complementary features to the core. The special approaches can be explained on the basis of procedures for each of the studied startups. Thefirst approach, called immersion, describes ahighmanual effort of a platform sponsor, in our caseAnyyogi, to deepen the understanding of the supply and demand side. The platform sponsor takes on the role of a market participantandengageson theplatformtocreateahigh levelof learning in theearly daysof theventuredevelopment.YCombinator founderPaulGrahamdescribes this procedure in a blog article published in 2013with the title “DoThings that Don’t Scale”using theexampleof theplatformstartupsAirbnb.Anyyogiprovides further evidence of the added value in prioritizing early-stage learning and improving the valuepropositionover automation.Themain advantageof the immersion approach is that startups can reduce their early effort of building, e.g., supply-side relations when testing the experiences of the demand side. Although the immersion into a demand-side/supply-side actor enables the startup to test the covered role, the generated insights are biased. LogCorp is initially buildingon the supply side of its delivery services platform itself by keeping drivers available, independent of demand, and in order to be able to immediately serve any requests thatmayarise.This approachof servingoneside of the platform as a sponsor is called anticipation. Thus, the startup initially concentrates on testing the assumptionsmadeon the demand side and focusing the knowledge gained on this side.At the same time, demand can be built up through theself-createdoffer,making theplatformmoreattractive for independentproviders in a second step. This approach comes at high risk, without an early problem– solution fit test of the customer demand, kawaloo leverages other platforms to create the necessary reach to test its minimumviable platformassumptions.Calledpiggybacking, this could alreadybe Development and Validation of Platform… 99