Club Esports

Two months ago my brother slacked me and said he wanted to start a gaming community that hosted tournaments for esports. "Similar to how our university offered intramural sports, I want to do that for gaming".

We decided to do an alpha tournament with only people we knew so we could gather feedback. We invited two teams, and then set up a Call of Duty Modern Warfare tournament.

It went well, and then we started working on our community and what it would take to host our first tournament. Decided on an eight team tournament over two nights. As I was building out the advertisements, I just put April 24 and 25 on it - and we stuck with it. We put together an ecommerce website ( https://club-esports.com ) and are now selling schedules for our first tournament. We gave our alpha testers free entry for the first tournament, which took up the first 4 spots. But then we had two teams purchase their schedules, and that counts as our first revenue.

FYI - it's only $40 total revenue.

Put an ecommerce website together to advertise and sell schedules. It's a simple shopify store so we were able to include swag with it as well.

My brother and I had done this before for other side gigs we worked on so it was pretty easy. The longest part was deciding which of the themes we wanted more.

I also put together some advertisements and tournament info sheets using canva.com

We finished our first beta tournament. We don't even have a website yet, but didn't actually need one. We recruited our friends to come and play in a tournament that the three of us hosted.

After each phase we called the captains and gathered feedback and then moved on to the next phase.

It was a pretty rough tournament, but the crazy thing was that they LOVED it. At the end they all raved about how much fun it was to play with their friends, against another team that wasn't random.

Mostly just slack messages back and forth

My brother reached out and said he wanted to try starting a business around gaming. "What would it look like if we created something that was similar to college intramural sports leagues, but for gaming?"

So we started talking about the requirements and what we would need to know/have in order to pull this off.