What every business owner knows about gaming that you do not know
Is running your business your dream? Do you have a business you are currently running? Maybe the question should be “why should you own a business?
Business owners and entrepreneurs are gradually becoming the largest employer of labour. The fact is, even more, merrier when you learn that they contribute more to the GDP of some countries than Government IGR’s.
Forward-thinking leaders are now recognizing this powerful force. They are encouraging the growth of SME’s by creating foundational infrastructures, social amenities, and policies. This could be in the form of making SME’s non-taxable until they declare profit, ease business transactions by providing no-interest loans, etc.
These and many other laudable government initiatives do posses ripple effects on the economy. More people would be positively engaged, poverty level would reduce and consequently standard of living would increase. On the flip side, theft, kidnapping, pipe bunkering, prostitution, and other social vices would be on the downward trend.
Let’s be factual, creating a business is an entirely different beast compared to the fiery beast of maintaining the business. Many business ideas are DOA (dead on arrival). They do not thrive past the first 18 months of existence. Some do not go past the first five years of existence. Look around, how many businesses started two years ago and are still in existence today?
I would be making an entirely different post on how to generate business ideas that would thrive.
Let’s face the fact, the number one pain in the ass for every business owner is to get paying customers. A typically business owner would start his first sale by engaging his family, friends, and acquaintances and later scale up to acquiring some tens, hundreds, thousands and millions of paying customers.
While this is simple theoretically, but why do businesses still collapse before their fifth year anniversary? You know why? They exhausted their list of friends and family and find it hard to scale up. They eventually fade off when over-head cost cuts deeper. Some might be lucky to liquidate while others leave resources worth a fortune to rot away to seek greener pastures.
Grand entrepreneurs like Eric Ries, Grant Cardone, Brandon Burchard, Tony Robbins have developed formulae to convert ideas and get paying customers. It is just that the blue ocean of entrepreneurship is getting muckier than ever before.
That makes it more interesting, isn’t it? Entrepreneurship is not for the faint-hearted!
We are all gamers
When we think of gamers, we imagine a bunch of teens and adults wasting their lives trying to skill up and defeat surreal monsters, fun catchers and people who do not care about real-life problems.
This might be entirely a false mindset especially when you take another angle of viewing the gamers’ mind. We gamers are set of individuals that would sacrifice our nights, and resources to improve ourselves. We want to upgrade our skill, our arsenal. Our gratification lies in becoming monsters slaying hero, holding highest score and becoming grand Masters. We want our fans, our peers to keep talking about us, praise us and sing about us to others.
How do you differ? When all you want as a business owner is an army of fans, a tribe as it is now called. People who want more of you. They want to go overboard for you, sing about you. They want to be associated with a top gamer, a big gun.
Made in Aba shoes have Nike logo inscribed on it, made in Abeokuta Adire now have made in Italy printed upon them, the local hair salon has images. Now you know why! No one wants to be associated with an upcoming artist.
How does gaming solve your problem?
Big organizations do hack this process probably because they have the funds to roll around. They want customers to talk about them more. They work day and night like gamers to speak the language of their customers, see how other gamers are improving and try to be ahead. They don’t want to compete, they want to dominate.
In the last world cup, #issagoal is the top music and Coca-cola quickly used it to communicate with its audience. Now it is the #gbeBodie.
Different brands implement different tactics to connect to their customers and be where their customers are.
So how do you adopt this?
Simple, Eric Ries sums it all. All you need is an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Do not build anything super super yet but have long term plans that would be shaped by customers’ demand. Don’t feel too big to discard ideas, we do incur sunk cost. Google also dropped big ideas like Google plus.
With your MVP, go to where your customers are, let them see it, feel it and connect with them in their language.
With this, your business will surely have a long-lasting gamefull life.
