Master 60 Business Model and Revenue Terms: From Razor-and-Blades to Unit Economics
Deck KK0791 broken down: 23 business model archetypes, the metrics that judge them, and two card fixes to make before your first review session.
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Sixty cards, three very different jobs. Deck KK0791, "Business Models & Revenue Strategies" on Flip It is one of the tidier glossary decks in the entrepreneurship shelf, and the fastest way through it is to stop treating it as a single list. Cards 1–25 are model archetypes, cards 26–32 and 46–50 are financial metrics, and the rest are strategy vocabulary you will meet in any pitch deck or product review.
Study this deck: Business Models & Revenue Strategies
1 / 10Business model
Tap the card for the answer · swipe right if you knew it, left if not
Ten cards that define the deck
| Front | Back |
|---|---|
| Business model | A plan describing how a business creates, delivers, and captures value |
| Razor-and-blades model | Sell the base product cheaply, profit from consumables (razors/blades, printers/ink) |
| Freemium model | Basic service free, premium features require payment (Dropbox, Slack) |
| Customer acquisition cost (CAC) | Total cost of acquiring a new customer (marketing + sales expenses) |
| Customer lifetime value (CLV/LTV) | Total revenue expected from a customer over their entire relationship |
| Churn rate | Percentage of customers who stop using a service over a given period |
| Network effect | When a product becomes more valuable as more people use it |
| Moat | Competitive advantage that protects a business from competitors |
| 9 blocks of Business Model Canvas | Value Proposition, Customer Segments, Channels, Customer Relationships, Revenue Streams, Key Resources, Key Activities, Key Partners, Cost Structure |
| Payback period | Time needed to recover the customer acquisition cost |
Everything the 60 cards cover
Subscription, SaaS, advertising, marketplace, e-commerce, licensing, franchise, affiliate, transaction-fee, pay-per-use, direct sales, retail, wholesale, dropshipping, print-on-demand, agency, consulting, crowdfunding, donation, brokerage and leasing models; MRR and ARR; gross and net margin; unit economics; value proposition and product-market fit; platform and peer-to-peer models; B2B, B2C and B2B2C; white-label; loss-leader; dynamic, tiered and bundled pricing; cross-selling and upselling; recurring, one-time and passive revenue; scalability, economies of scale, MVP, lean startup and pivot.
How to drill it
Run the archetypes as a reverse deck: read the example, name the model. "Kickstarter" → crowdfunding. "Amazon Associates" → affiliate. "Uber surge" → dynamic pricing. The deck is written entirely term-first, so as written it never asks you to produce a term — and producing it is exactly what an interview or a pitch demands. Seventeen of the twenty-three archetype cards ship with a brand or product example, so the conversion is almost free.
Tip 1 — fix the gross margin card. The deck defines gross margin as "revenue minus cost of goods sold (COGS), expressed as percentage". Revenue minus COGS is gross profit, a currency amount; gross margin is that figure divided by revenue. Rewrite the back as (Revenue − COGS) ÷ Revenue before your first review, or you will carry the confusion into every unit-economics conversation.
Tip 2 — build one contrast card for the middlemen. Four cards describe a business that sits between two parties and takes a cut: marketplace (6), agency (20), brokerage (24) and platform (35). Their definitions overlap enough that spaced repetition will keep shuffling them without teaching you the difference. Make a single card asking "marketplace vs platform vs brokerage vs agency" and answer it in one line each — marketplace owns the transaction, platform owns the exchange infrastructure, broker is licensed and paid per deal, agency represents one side only.
Also worth a second look: card 38 lists Bitcoin and LendingClub as peer-to-peer examples, and LendingClub abandoned P2P lending in 2020 — swap in a current example. And note that "revenue model" (card 2) and "revenue stream" (card 46) are near-neighbours, not synonyms: a model is the strategy, a stream is a single source.
Open deck KK0791 in your Flip It library at flip-it.app. Once the models are solid, the natural next step is the vocabulary founders actually speak in: 139 startup and product terms, from burn rate to crossing the chasm.
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