About:
Vimeo Inc, which was founded in 2004, is a video software solution company that offers a full range of video tools via a software-as-a-service model. We are aware that all industries at one point or another are faced with a difficult time. Such a situation at Vimeo brought out an innovative idea from an employee.
The Business model innovation:
In 2014, when Anjali Sud joined Vimeo, the company was losing money. The company had annual revenue of under $40 million and was trying to build a subscription service to rival the likes of Netflix and YouTube.
Anjali had previously worked as a consultant and helped entrepreneurs to come up with ideas to grow their SMEs. This experience really helped, when she was placed in charge of Vimeo’s creator-services division, which provides Software as a Service (SaaS) tools designed to help filmmakers with post-production.
Sud had a different idea. Instead of thinking on the entertainment side of things, her focus was on silicon-valley plumbing, aka entrepreneurs. Her idea was to create a single-stop platform for businesses to record, edit, store, and distribute videos.
Sud’s idea was accepted by the management and she was assigned a small team to test the idea. The idea was soon a success, and within 3 years, in 2017, Anjali Sud was promoted to the CEO of Vimeo. She had given Vimeo business model innovation a new start.
“One of the reasons I was given ownership of the creator side of the business is because it wasn’t, at the time, the area that was getting all the focus and attention, so they could take more of a chance on me. That’s not a bad strategy. It gives you an opportunity to own something yourself – especially if you’re passionate about it – and maybe get an experience that you wouldn’t normally get if you just went down the standard track.” – Anjali Sud
Results:
Under the leadership of Sud, Vimeo’s business model innovation reached great heights. As of November 2022, Vimeo has about 1.6 million subscribers.
The story depicts how a simple strategy change from a business perspective can help a business grow leaps and bounds. Want to read more inspiring stories like this? We have seen numerous examples where ideas changed the fortunes of organizations. Be it BASF’s successful intrapreneurship program Chemovator, ITC’s e-choupal initiative, Nitin Prajanpe’s experiments at Hindustan Unilever, or Deutsche Telekom’s UQBATE program.
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