Where the money actually comes from
Maya wants a premium tier and wants your view by Thursday. You cannot give one yet. You have never looked at how Sona makes money.
A few models cover almost everything
- Five models, usually two at a time01
Five models, usually two at a time
- What does one more user cost?02
What does one more user cost?
- Near zero, or real money03
Near zero, or real money
- The buyer is not always the user04
The buyer is not always the user
How Netflix and Spotify handled it
Two companies that look identical can make opposite calls and both be right, because one more hour costs them different amounts.
Netflix and Spotify
Both sell subscriptions to stream media, and their product decisions look nothing alike.
Netflix owns or licenses most of what it shows for fixed fees, so an extra hour watched costs it little and it pushes engagement. Spotify pays rights holders largely per stream, so an extra hour costs real money. That helps explain its push into podcasts, where it could own more of the content.
Public commentary. No affiliation.
Doing it with AI, and where it breaks
Pick a product you use daily. Ask a model for its revenue lines and the product decisions that only make sense given them. Verify two claims against a primary source.
Models invent precise revenue splits with no source. Treat every number as a guess until you find it in an annual report, an earnings call or a first party post.
Lay out the revenue lines of [product]. For each, name one product decision you can see in the app that only makes sense because of it. Mark every number as SOURCED, with the source, or ESTIMATE.
Build it
A one page business model teardown with two claims verified against primary sources.
The worked solution
Stuck, or want to compare?
There is a worked solution. Try the build first. Reading it before you have attempted anything is the fastest way to learn nothing.
Checkpoint
If you did the build, these take two minutes. If you cannot answer one of them, that is the part to go back to.
Moving on marks this lesson complete. Finish the build first, it is the part that counts.