You've all heard of the farmer with the goat, wolf, cabbage dilema right? He can only carry two at a time on a boat across a river. How does he transport all three without one being eaten in the process?
Ironically, when my two passions, education and web are mashed together as in Edufire, 2tor, etc, these startups create precisely this dilema (actually, can I say "paradigm" here? It'd be so fitting).
Let me explain. The easiest business model is referred to in the Daoist / Buddhist Circle of Emptiness. You take a space, you draw an arbitrary enclosure to artificially create an inside and outside. Nothing really changes or moves. It's just a perceptual change.
How do you intend to create sufficient back pressure so that when
You see this in Sag, Aftra, Steel Workers of America, The guys that have to flip on the light switches in your trade show booth, etc. It's called a union. Same people doing the same work. No physical shift in behavior or activity. Just an arbitrary line that redefines everything. This is the easiest business model.
Provide value to a marketplace that already exists while asking them to really change nothing. (PS. if you've ever wondered, this is why that "circle of emptiness is never supposed to be drawn closed.")
But, if you're going to create a disruptive technology, you must disrupt. Disruption is a violent event. Disruption is an active event. And the lowest common denominator for active events is the yin-yang. Google's business model is based on the Yin-Yang paradigm (THERE I did it!).
Google got you to stop using yahoo and the yellow pages and 411 and your BBS and who knows what else. How? They created a dynamic yin-yang cycle by offering free white rice to anyone fast. Google gives white rice and the whole world takes it. Nobody else gave as much as fast.
Then, naturally, the Dao takes over, "... and two becomes a multitude." Concession stands pop up on either side of the river of people to Google. Guys selling beans, beer, bread, beverages, etc... proliferate. And so do investors.
Trouble is, when you try and build a business model that requires three components. Daoists refer to this as "unity between heaven, man, and earth." And that is exactly what any educational web startup does.
For all intents and purposes, the "empty circle" model does nothing but define what people already value. It's kinda like a functional "emperor's new security blanket." The yin-yang model actually creates change by satisfying a hard prexisting need to one recipient group. 2Tor, edufire, and that UN school by Rasheed or whoever must do three things.
An educational website business model must satisfy students, teachers, and the value giver (the company).* If you bring the students without the teachers, they never come back. If you bring the teachers without the students, they get depressed - and when the students do start trickling in, they teach poorly. And the students never come back. Finally, you've got to do all this in a way that pays the value giver. Hell, if you need seed capital as well (that would be the 4th element and it's that buddhist symbol that looks like a swastica but reversed).
In science and evolution, when several things must come together at the same time and in perfect order, they call it, "indiminuative something or other. @journik me on twitter if you know that that is." Anyways, what I mean is that all things must come together in a passionate synchronous big bang for life to occur.
What Google did in it's duality paradigm is collect a shit ton of data, spider it, make sure their serving table didn't crash upon mass rice eater spike, THEN open the flood gates.
Now, getting back to you, how many key components are in your wallet (UGH! damn commercial!) .. in your business plan? How do you intend to create sufficient back pressure so that when the yin and yang meet or when heaven, man and earth meet, there will be a synchronous big bang?
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NEXT: Why people dont do what you want them to
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*unfortunately, this is where most of you will make a fatal miscalculation. You may think, well, I want a website, teachers wanna teach and students wanna learn. After spending millions on infrastructure, marketing and pr, you will most likely fail or get absolutely abysmal return on investment. 
Why? Because you will are missing the key driver. Imagine if Google decided to offer free chopsticks. If your main message to potential students is "affordable education," you are offering them cheap chopsticks.
An educational website is structurally orders of magnitude more complex than a dating website which also conforms to the trinity model. In a dating website, you, bring man and, well, woman together. They each want each other. DONE.
In an educational website, A teacher wants a student but a student does not want the teacher back. In an educational website, A teacher wants a student but a student does not want the teacher back. To a teacher, teaching is the key driver.
To a student, education is chopsticks - a means to an end. You cannot effectively motivate a key structural component to participate if you do not directly strike at his key motivator. How? Follow me and my team at http://twitter.com/solidtweeple/friends and let's talk.
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