If you want to make money, you might want to focus on physical scalability rather than popularity and reach. Really.

Web start-ups tend to confuse popularity with financial success. There are some revenue models to convert established popularity into money, but these are centered around advertising, subscriptions or transaction commissions. It might work, but there's only a thin, vulnerable connection to what is actually on offer. The growing dead pool clearly shows that investors don’t buy it anymore. Apparently, formerly unique traits become commodity: anybody can do Web 2.0.

It’s just getting too easy. Functionality is quickly copied. A highly scalable infrastructure is widely available for anybody. Widget frameworks, social network generators and cloud storage and computing allow start-ups to quickly reach an enormous audience. But then there came the crisis - and the outlook of a possibly giant growth factor without any sound revenue doesn’t impress investors like it used to. So, it’s becoming harder to add value in the digital realm, unless you bring a viable revenue model into the mix. 

To make money, you will have to search for the things that are hard to do – that’s where the revenue is. One of the options is monetization by materialization: transforming virtual creations of consumers into physical products. It’s a tough job, though. Virtual scalability is almost a commodity, but physical scalability is a different story. For example, it took Nike about five years to make a rather modest portion of their apparel available for customization at NikeID.com. Even Lego calls their Lego Factory “an expensive way to sell bricks”.

We are trying, too. Albumprinter provides several brands with services to create personalized photo products from digital images - mainly books, calendars and organizers. Consumers of our own B2C brand Albelli are offered to personalize not just the contents of a book, but also to customize its physical aspects. This requires a highly flexible production facility. On the virtual side, a service platform with open APIs, Adobe AIR and Amazon S3 is used. Hard work pays off, though. We tripled production numbers for the fourth year in a row in 2007. In 2008, we won the Deloitte Fast 50 for the fastest growing tech company in the Netherlands. 

However, before you start your own customization toko, be careful: physical scalability is the catch. Christmas is one of our peak periods in terms of orders. This season, our facility pushes out over 10000 products a day. For starters, that means thousands of unique bundles of customized pages need to go together with a fitting number of personalized photo covers. Wrongfully mixing up the cover and contents of a book is obviously not an option - so in our book, a serene Christmas doesn't exist.