3 Steps To Create A Sustainable Business Model

There have been many times when I would walk into a coffee shop or place of business and find a group of ‘founders’ pitching their friends and family about the app they are building that will revolutionize the world. The problem isn’t the fact that they are pitching their idea, it’s that they are trying to do it in a way where they would take an existing product, add bare minimum features, and try to sell it for $50 to $200 more than what their competitors are selling it for. To focus on creating an app where the only difference is a couple of features is like a car salesman trying to sell you a car with ’features that you might need’ to make the selling process a lot more profitable. Sure it makes money in the short term, but it’s just not a sustainable business model in the long term.

Houston, we have a problem…

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have thousands of dollars sitting around in my bank account to blow through every single time I have an idea. In fact, I started my first business with $5 dollars to my name and a group of friends who enjoyed communicating with each other while they played video games. They loved it so much that they were willing to gather around a 10-man game server and play for hours on end against each other. The problem was that every server we used had a delay each time our gun would shoot a bullet, causing people to scream and curse like a sailor in mere seconds. No matter which company we rented from, it was the same issue over and over again. We tried finding a solution to our problem using existing services, but we couldn’t find what we were looking for one reason or another. The funny thing is that we used to joke around saying that if we had our own server box, we would focus on making our customer’s lives easier because their pain is also our pain.

There must be a way to solve this…

After months of searching, I finally gave up deciding that enough was enough. I took my $5 and convinced my friends to match the same amount in order to rent a whole server box of our own. Finally, we had something of our own for a change. No longer would we be sharing with multiple renters because the only people that had access to our server box was us. At the time, none of us knew how to operate the server box and to make things worse, we impulsively dished out $100 a month just to keep the server running. A few hundred dollars later, we recruited a player who knew exactly what he was doing. He set me up with an account so that I could build a website for our gaming team. With his help, I was able to focus on making sure that the team got the proper exposure everywhere our name was mentioned while he focused on the server. If you are reading this OMGzItsButter, I thank you for saving the day because, you my good sir, helped to create what I now consider my first business in the technology space.

It goes without saying that creating a sustainable business model at such a young age is a feat in itself, but I learned my most valuable lessons from messing up over and over again. Each mistake was a lesson that stuck with me forever because I learned to problem-solve without having to commit additional resources to something that I can solve myself. I was always the introverted person in the group, opting to do everything by myself no matter how difficult the task was in front of me. I spent a massive amount of time weaving my way through the problem and testing solutions as I saw fit. Without these experiences to guide me through the process of being a business owner, I wouldn’t be as successful as I am today. The moral of the story is that you don’t have to open your wallet to change to the world, you just need an idea and constant execution to get it to the point where it will become functional.

Voila!! Totally didn’t mean to do that!!

Sure we blew through a few hundred dollars to get to the point where we could make money, but the lesson lies in what we did afterwards. We took the money we earned from starting our own server and invested it back into the team to ensure that we had the best services money could buy. For a while, money was not an issue and we survived by focusing on growth instead of profit. In retrospect, no one on the team took salaries and the sponsors paid for any expenses we had for participating in tournaments. While there were times when a player wanted to get a raise or buy something substantial, we always pretended as if the extra money didn’t exist. We built out the business and team to be as lean as possible to promote accountability and focused on the obstacles in front of us. By depending less on money and keeping the hunger to win alive, we were successful in creating an environment where we could all be on the same page.

Truthfully, we had a ton of excess money sitting in our PayPal account untouched and stowed away from everyone else. In the span of a year, we established an LLC and expanded our business to include six extra server boxes to host our friend’s servers and several websites for other gaming organizations looking to branch out into other games. We tailored our business to put our client’s happiness first before proceeding to sell them additional services. While our profits were low, our retention rate was high and it morphed into a more profitable situation in the long run. Also as a result of our lean practice, we avoided many of the problems founders face when funding their new businesses. We were able to inject ourselves amongst the most respected brands in our field and we had a reputation of having the highest quality products at the most affordable prices.

Conclusion

We're all products of our circumstances and choices in life. There is no escaping the situations that we’ve been through, but we can use it to elevate and explain why we deserve to WIN. I advise each and every person reading this article to think of an idea, execute on it to create a minimum viable product, and test for validation once you have something tangible that your targeted customers can touch or use. While it’s valid to switch the order in which I listed the steps, you will find yourself spending more time navigating through the process before getting to the point where your product is built. Lastly, you must believe in the product in order to effectively drive the message home. If you don’t, then find someone who can speak to your vision. There isn’t a more embarrassing situation than having your customers ask “Would you use it? How do you know this will work?” and having to answer that you don’t know because you didn't believe in the idea in the first place.

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If you liked this article and have an idea that you would like to talk about, please contact me and we can find a way to streamline the process.