My passion project - Part 2

The COVID-19 pandemic created an influx of players. I implemented a subscription-based pricing model with Stripe but I never ended up using it because I ended up pivoting the business model. Popflash, a competitor, also implemented a subscription-based model because their Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) reached $8,000/month in server fees which was unsustainable.

I wanted to build an Esports company. Instead of serving individual players, I started exploring how to cater to tournament organizers. The idea was to automate the management of tournaments and have tournaments organizers bring in the players. As a company of one, this approach would allow me to focus on building instead of marketing.

A few notable moments when pivoting:

1. Since I had competed in corporate leagues since 2015 and knew exactly the pain points for small-medium tournament organizers. I pitched my services to CEA.gg and they bought in for their 2020 Spring season which started ran from March to June. I iterated on Scrim Tournaments throughout their season and listened to feedback. It's surprising to find how the most valuable feedback and reporting of issues is not always direct. I had to watch player streams and look at chat logs to discover them myself.

   First up, after a hard-fought and wildly entertaining @CSGO season, #Microsoft @Office ultimately took the throne! Their \$2280 Grand Prize will go on to benefit @CPCharity!

   — Corporate Esports Association (@CorporateEsport) June 9, 2020

   Microsoft Office, my previous team since I left the company, would go on and win the CEA 2020 Spring Season

2. Earlier this year, my team had competed in two tournaments, one of them which we won. We saw first-hand the troubles and inefficiencies of Faceit's tournament services. A few teams dropped out of the tournament because of the long delays between matches. It appears that the organizers didn't have any other options but to continue using Faceit. I pitched my services but they needed support for their EU players and I did not have plans for expansion into the EU then. I now see this as a missed opportunity.

   Congratulations to our Wingman Tournament winners - Team BrettGmbH (Karuso33, STRNK1_1) for EU and Team Dduk Guk (csxr, irok) for NA!! We would like to thank all players, spectators, @SquishyScot and @FACEIT themselves for making it such a success!

   — Mapcore Hub (@MapcoreHub) January 6, 2020

   Winning my first tournament of the year.

3. It took a few weeks of iteration for the service to be "self managed". I define that term as not needing any manual intervention on my part for the service to run smoothly. By April, I started going out on weekends without worrying about things blowing up.

4. I generated $160 monthly recurring revenue (MRR) within the first week of pivoting. My operating expense ratio (OER) at that time was about 25%. I knew that if I could onboard more tournament organizers and have a shared pool of servers, the expense ratio would significantly drop. This was validation that my pivot was in the right direction.

The tech stack which I briefly covered in part 1 helped me build with confidence. I designed scrim.app with the goal of being easy to maintain for myself, low cost, and highly available & consistent. Thanks to serverless functions, the Firebase platform, and many open source projects - I am able to achieve just that in a short period of time.