The 10 Most Promising Platforms in Forbes’ Annual List

By Erik Zambrano

Forbes Most Promising Companies of 2015

Forbes recently released their list of America’s 100 Most Promising Companies of 2015. Instacart, a grocery shopping and delivery services platform topped the list. Seventeen other platform businesses joined Instacart on that list. They’re listed below in order of their Forbes ranking along with 2014 revenue figures.

What is a Platform?

A platform is a business model that creates value by facilitating exchanges between two or more interdependent groups, usually consumers and producers.

Successful platforms facilitate exchanges by reducing transaction costs and/or by enabling externalized innovation. As a byproduct, platforms also create ecosystems and leverage their inherent network effects. With the advent of connected technology, these ecosystems enable platforms to scale in ways that traditional businesses can’t.

It’s important to remember that a platform is a business model, not just a piece of technology. Below is our classification for exchange and maker platforms and the categories within each.

 

Marketplaces can also be categorized as providing commoditized or un-commoditized services. The difference on this spectrum revolves around the degree to which the product or service can be standardized.

For example, Uber provides a commoditized service because the passenger doesn’t care about much besides getting from point A to B in the car they selected. Therefore, they should be setting the price on behalf of their producers. However, Airbnb provides an un-commoditized service because its renters potentially care about location, number of bedrooms, WiFi, pool, pet policy, etc. The more factors that influence a purchasing decision, the less commoditized the service offering will be and the more likely producers should set their own prices for their services.

Applico’s Ten Most Promising Platforms of 2015

While the Forbes list uncovered promising companies to pay attention to in 2015, it provided little data specific to platforms. After identifying the 18 platform companies in the Forbes list, we did additional analysis and ranked them differently from Forbes. Our approach relied on Mattermark, a company that provides data on private companies for investors to better understand the true potential of these companies as platforms in 2015.

We evaluated the platforms against four attributes – growth score, mind share, unique monthly visitors and funding figures. We ranked the companies (from 1 to 10) four different times based on how they performed against those attributes. We assigned points based on a company’s ranking (10 points for being ranked #1 or 1 point for being ranked #10). We then summed up the company’s points and used the final company score to create the ranking below. Note: For the Forbes ranking below, we assigned rankings based on which companies appeared first on the list i.e. Panjo was #7 on the Forbes list but because it was the second highest ranked platform on that list, it received a #2 ranking.

Takeaways

• We agree on Instacart and Answers.com’s prospects for 2015, but are more bullish on Box than Forbes.
• We believe online tutorial brands like Craftsy and Pluralsight will fare better than Forbes’ expectations because of their established audience and their impressive growth numbers.
• While SeatGeek has a knack for growing mindshare, growth and monthly unique traffic are near the bottom among the top ten. These figures are concerning because its business relies on people selling and buying tickets on their platform.
• We’ll certainly be tracking Panjo in 2015 because of the pronounced discrepency in its ranking between our list and Forbes. Their ranking against our attributes is below average compared to other platforms. A definite bright spot is its bootstrapping ability as the company has only raised $1.9M to establish a $42M business.
• Zozi was omitted for our Top Ten list because of similar below average numbers as Panjo. It will have a lot to prove to investors since it’s raised $21 M from them.

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Filed under: Platform Innovation | Topics: platform, platform thinking