Executive summary:
LevelUP is a two-sided business venture that serves two customer segments; companies with a business problem and students who lack experience. The specific business idea is to create a platform that solves the problem of students not having the required amount of experience when applying for a job. LevelUP works as an intermediary between the two customer segments with on the one side; the companies having a problem related to their business, that they want to get solved by the students. The students can then submit solutions and will be credited with practical experience that they can write on their summary, or maybe a job position at the company.
Most of the revenue comes from the money-side of the business model with the companies looking for solutions to their problems. They pay a usage fee to put up a ‘problem’ to be solved. If the company does not receive at least three submissions to their problem within 7 days they will get a 90% refund. In order to attract the money-side further, the first upload of a problem is free of charge. If a problem gets more than 10 solutions from the students, an additional fee has to be paid in order to see these solutions.
The biggest threat to this business venture is well-established consulting firms that have a pool of consultants to draw knowledge from. The largest advantage that LevelUP has to compete against these firms is the price of getting solutions to the money-side’s problems. It is very costly to hire a consulting firm compared to what a service like LevelUP is offering with the use of crowd sourcing.
When creating an internationalization strategy, the physical distance can be a decisive factor if the company wants to hire the student in a position at their firm. A good initial strategy would therefore be to expand firstly to the Scandinavian countries, where the languages are similar as well as the culture. The next step would be to use physical distance as a metric to choose countries such as Great Britain, Germany and the Benelux countries where the language may be different, but the culture similar to Denmark.