1. Network - just as you describe. Freemium/ad revenue. Low $/High volume
2. Platform - sell data derived from Network to manufacturers, eg. “Part X is increasingly popular and likely to go out of stock” or “part Y is a popular alternative to X”. Medium $/medium volume
3. Send them your BOM and pay consultancy rates and they’ll use 1 & 2 to make direct recommendations like “you’ll save 4 cents by replacing X with Y and reduce risk by sourcing Y from supplier Z”. High $/high touch/lower volume but they’re probably killing it right now in this arena during the chip shortage.
Too bad because FindChips is an excellent product and I was prepared to give them my money.
Probably not a good example of how to implement a freemium upsell pathway.
A lot of people. Supply chain issues are a real problem, especially right now.
If you're a company that suddenly has orders for a very expensive product you designed 20 years ago and a handful of parts are holding up production, you'll spend a heckuva lot of money sourcing components to build inventory so you can ship orders.
No, this is not a hypothetical :-(
Various bits from their website [1]:
> Only Supplyframe’s Design-To-Source Intelligence (DSI) solutions deliver actionable insights that drive better decisions across new product development initiatives, full product lifecycles, and strategic sourcing of direct materials.
> DSI Network: Unmatched electronics industry parts & design cycle data
> DSI Platform: Industrial-scale intelligence platform
> DSI Solutions: Transformational, AI-based solutions
Notably, they own findchips.com and componentsearchengine.com.
Is it really just "we have a bunch of websites and collect and present all sorts of information about chips"? Who pays for that? How on earth does that translate into $70 million in revenue?
[1] https://supplyframe.com/why-supplyframe/