Page - 93 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

3.2 Case Studies of Early-Stage PlatformStartups In order to illustrate our thoughts with some practical insights, we have created three different case studieswith early-stage startups that are based inGermany.We conducted structured interviews for each case study, which followed a semi-structured interview guideline. The respective companies have been selected because they recently developed and implemented a platform businessmodel. All threeare still inanearly stagebutalready report revenueandagrowinguserbaseas metrics for traction. 3.2.1 Anyyogi: The YogaCommunity Platform Anyyogi connects yoga teachers, students, and a space where the class can take place on one platform. The founder Natalie Pompe, herself a passionate yoga teacher, spotted theopportunity for creatingAnyyogi in 2018when she intensively explored the economics of the yogamarket. After the completion of the training, there are basically twoways for yoga teachers to practicewhat they have learned. As a trainer, you can either signup in ayoga studio or organize classes under your own name. Both paths offer advantages and disadvantages. It is difficult to be accepted as a trainer in a studio because the competition is high. In addition, the studiokeepsa strongcontrolover the timingandcontentof thecourseprogramand it extracts a large part of the revenues. For independent trainers, on the other hand, theproblemishowtofindasuitable roomfor theclass andhowtofindandaddress potential students. Many do not manage to keep the frequency of courses or the number of participants as high as to make it profitable in the long run. Anyyogi addresses, in particular, the independent trainers and takes on the role of the studio inaparticularcapacityas theplatformprovidesspaceon theonehandandsufficient participants and reachon theother.Due to theplatformstructure, the trainers retain a significantly higher share of the generated revenue as rooms are only used tem- porarily and the operation of extensive infrastructure is no longer necessary. In the platform design process, Anyyogi explicitly relies on an existing community of selected trainersandsolves thechicken-eggproblembyguaranteeingahigh-quality offer on the platform. Students and new trainers are actively integrated into the community through networking during events and communication activities through theplatform tomaintain the initialmomentum.At the timeof the interview inmid-2019,Nataliewas stillmanagingmanyclassesherself,whichenabledher to gain a very detailed understanding of the desires and needs of all the groups involved, which she then translated into an automated software platform. High loyalty of trainers and students, identificationwith the platform and the brand, as well as user-drivenmarketing are someof the advantages of the community-driven approach of theAnyyogi platform. In the context of technical implementation and scaling, Natalie works in particular on questions concerning the automatic quality assurance of the service and the user-friendly design of the platform interfaces. To answer these questions, she is currently iteratively developing different versions of the platform, which get tested and optimizedwith selected users. Development and Validation of Platform… 97