I Spent 100 Hours On A Video Game. It Taught Me How To Build My Business
A game-inspired framework for the stages of online brand building
Last year, I spent 100+ hours playing a video game.
Starsector is a space-fleet RTS game I got addicted to sometime last year. It’s not a popular game, so I’ll spare you the painstaking mechanics details.
Simply put, you start with one underpowered ship, bad weapons, barely enough fuel to limp between star systems. You take whatever missions pay. You die a lot. And slowly, through conscious decisions about fleet composition, resource allocation, and which fights to pick, you build your endgame fleet and a couple of sweet colonized planets.
The pull of games like this is the progression: clear levels, visible upgrades, a knowable map. You always know where you are and what comes next. (And the awesome space ships, but I digress)
Building an online brand has the same underlying structure. Stages. Transitions. Compounding returns on the right decisions. The difference is that nobody gives you the map.
I want to give you the map. And I want to tell you what to build on specific points of that map.
The problem with playing blind
When you’re in the jungle, everything looks like jungle.
No landmarks. No sense of whether the work is paying off or whether you’re walking in circles. You publish, engage, tweak your bio, launch something, hear crickets, and wonder if the whole thing is broken.
The disorientation breeds doubt. Am I doing this right? Is this normal? Should I be further along by now?
This isn’t a new phenomenon. Researchers Neil C. Churchill and Virginia L. Lewis documented predictable stages of business growth back in 1983 in the Harvard Business Review. Their model mapped five stages: Existence, Survival, Success, Take-off, and Resource Maturity. They showed that businesses face common problems at similar stages, regardless of industry.
The same structure applies to building an online brand. The stages are predictable. The problems are common. The progression is mappable.
The reason most creators feel lost isn’t that their situation is unique. It’s that they can’t see the stage they’re in.
And when you can’t see the stage you’re in, you play the wrong game.
The wrong-stage trap
Imagine building a $500 course before you have 100 engaged subscribers. You spend weeks on production, slide design, a launch sequence. You release it to silence. Three sales, two refunds.
The conclusion feels obvious: “Courses don’t work for me.”
But the course wasn’t the problem. The stage was.
This happens everywhere. Launching a premium offer before validating demand. Hiring a VA before you have systems worth delegating. Obsessing over email funnels when you don’t have an audience to funnel. Spending days on SEO when you haven’t published enough to know what resonates.
Each of these is a late-game play attempted with early-game resources. The result is wasted time, burned energy, and the false belief that something fundamental in you is “broken” or “wrong.”
It’s not. You’re just building the wrong things for your level.
That’s why understanding the progressions is important, and that’s what I’ll examine below.
The digital entrepreneurship game progression
The stages of online brand building have been lived by thousands of creators before you. What follows is the progression map — adapted for the creator economy and the AI tools available in 2026.
The goal: figure out where you are, build what matters at your stage (spoiler, it’s not an app, not a platform, not an AI tool), and stop attempting plays that belong three levels ahead.
Early game: Mission, marketing cadence, community
Early game is about existence and survival. You’re proving this is viable and that you can sustain it.
In brand-building terms, that means building three things:
Mission. Clarify what you’re here to do. Not just your niche, your conviction. The problem you can’t stop thinking about, the change you want to create.
Marketing cadence. Develop a consistent publishing rhythm. Prove to yourself — and to your audience — that you can show up. Build the muscle before you worry about the output.
Community. Start forming real relationships. Comments, DMs, collaborations. Not networking as strategy (you don’t have a strategy here yet, honestly), but genuine connection as a foundation.
In game terms, this is flying missions with your starter ship, taking whatever jobs pay, and learning how the mechanics work.
I’m not gonna lie, this is the hardest stage. It’s a struggle, and you die a lot (I can’t remember how many times I rage quit and logged back in to finish a particular scenario — a phenomenon called save scumming, for obvious reasons).
But … it’s also the most fun.
That sensation of doing something new, of embarking on a new adventure, is very addictive. It’s what keeps serial entrepreneurs coming back for more.
When in the early game, you don’t need to bother yourself with late-game tweaks. In brand-building terms, ignore: posting times, trend-jacking, frequency optimization, and SEO hacks. These are distractions when you haven’t built the fundamentals.
Instead, focus on skills, creative process, and community. These are the things that compound. Even now, I prioritize building on these foundations over optimization.
Transitioning to mid-game
There’s no specific follower count or a revenue milestone. Rather, the signal to transition to more “advanced” plays is a pattern. A theme.
The signal is this: you have to build small assets.
For me, this signal was the topics I keep writing about. My newsletters keep circling the same topic. Comments engage most on that thread. DMs ask variations of the same problem.
This is the sign that you’ve found something worth systematizing.
For me, the theme of “how do I write better with AI without losing my voice?” kept surfacing. Newsletters, comments, DMs — all gravitating toward the same gravity well.
The Authentic AI ebook was the asset that answered it at scale. That single shift from “answering one person at a time” to “building something that answers hundreds” pushed me into mid-game.
The trap at this stage is continuing to play early game tactics and never growing. You might have become too comfortable or too afraid to advance.
For example, this is a trap I see many writers in Medium falling into.
They’ll get one viral article, then decide to make writing their full-time job. But they don’t evolve. Instead, they double down on their writing. They write one, two, articles a day, trying to build a sustainable income off a viral moment that happened through the quirk of an algorithm.
When the platform changed its monetization policies, they had to redo their system. They were stuck in the early game, with no way to proceed.
So, are you in early game right now? The way out is to build your first asset.
Mid-game: Expand the asset portfolio
Mid-game is not about building anything big. You don’t have to vibe code your way out of this stage (although, you can — vibecoding is great).
It’s about building the muscle of seeing a problem, creating a solution, and testing whether it sticks.
One lead magnet becomes three. One ebook becomes a workbook, a quiz, a playbook. You’re solving more problems at scale, and each attempt sharpens your judgment.
This is a practice arena. In Starsector, mid-game gives you slightly better ships. But you can’t buy everything, you certainly can’t buy the big fancy capital ships, or you’ll cripple your economy. Instead, you’ll buy multiple frigates (small ships) and cruisers (slightly bigger ships), and build around them.
You need to consciously compose your fleet, decide on specific builds, maximize results within constraints.
Thus, your first few assets should be gifts — not because they lack value, but because you’re learning which problems resonate, which solutions land, how to make them land, and which audience segments act on what you give them.
My progression:
The Active Prompt Vault (Free)
Outline + Prompt Kit (Free)
Authentic AI ebook (my first, real, paid product)
The Unpromptable Business Playbook (which I just finished making), then
The AI Readiness Diagnostic Quiz (which I also just finished making).
All low-ticket or free. All solving specific problems.
(By the way, I’m looking for 10 beta readers and testers for the The Unpromptable Business Playbook and The AI Readiness Diagnostic Quiz, details in the CTA below.)
The key learning from mid-game: you can’t predict which asset converts until you’ve built several. The market tells you what matters, not your assumptions.
Case in point — I spent hours designing a polished Canva-formatted Outline and Prompt Vault. Careful layout, branded colors, the works. It underperformed. A scrappy Google Doc prompt vault I threw together in an afternoon took off.
Production value does not equal resonance. You’d never know that without the reps.
Midgame transition to late game (and a trap to avoid)
The most common mid-game mistake is jumping the gun. You turn your first asset into a core offer before you’ve built the judgment to know if it deserves that weight.
Core offers demand heavier investment in time, energy, positioning, support infrastructure. They’re your main revenue vehicles. Without multiple reps, I would have poured everything into that polished Canva vault. The data saved me.
Stay in mid-game longer than feels comfortable. Build more small assets. Let the data accumulate. When one asset keeps pulling ahead — through engagement, conversion, and the pattern you can’t ignore — that’s your signal to go bigger.
And when that signal comes, here’s how to build the core offer:
1. Find a big problem. A real obstacle that’s keeping your audience from their goals. Something they can’t solve alone without a significant investment of time, money, or effort. Your small assets already gave you the data on what this is. The recurring theme that kept showing up in comments and DMs? That’s the thread. Pull it.
2. Find a way to solve it for them. Not “teach them how to solve it” — that’s what your free assets did. A core offer means you take on the burden. You build the system, run the process, deliver the result. The shift from educator to operator is what makes a core offer worth paying for.
3. Package it. Give it structure, a name, a clear scope. Define what the client gets, what the timeline looks like, what the outcome is. The packaging is what turns a vague service into something people can say yes to. Think of the difference between “I can help you with AI” and “A 4-week sprint that builds your custom content system, delivered and documented.”
4. Do it for free. I know. But hear me out. Your first one or two clients should be pro bono — in exchange for honest feedback and a testimonial. You haven’t delivered this offer at this scale before, and the testimonial is worth more than early revenue. Documented proof of impact is the fuel that makes every future sale easier. Skipping this step means selling a promise. Doing this step means selling proof.
5. Launch it the way you launched your small assets. You already built the muscle — the audience, the publishing rhythm, the relationships. Use the same channels, the same voice, the same community. The difference is that now you have testimonials, a refined offer, and the confidence of having delivered results.
Late game: Core offers and infrastructure
Late game means you have core offers, a handful of clients, and documented proof that your work delivers. The guesswork is behind you. You know which problems are worth solving, you know how to solve them, and you have the testimonials to back it up.
You also have the infrastructure to iterate. New offers become easier to build because the muscle is trained. Refining an existing offer takes days, not months. Your audience trusts you enough to tell you what they need next — and you trust your own judgment enough to act on it.
This is where your business should leverage the complicated AI systems you’re dreaming of building. Here, AI stops being a simple accelerator and starts being a differentiating factor.
This is where you create differentiation through your systems.
Late-game builds is about magnifying your differentiation. The systems I build for founders at this stage capture the specific way you think, sell, and deliver, and they scale it without diluting it. Automated hyper-customized diagnostics, financial trackers, AI-powered mass outreach and qualification.
These are the big, fancy, powerful capital ships you could never have afforded early or mid game.
AI becomes the infrastructure that lets your best thinking reach more people without you being the bottleneck.
Scaling in late game
You don’t just scale by building one AI system. You can go multiple ways:
Solo operators use AI systems as their team. Content generation, lead nurturing, customer support, delivery — infrastructure replaces headcount. One person with the right systems produces what five could.
Small teams use AI as a force multiplier. Two people with aligned skills and the right automation output what ten could. You’re not replacing humans but amplifying a small, aligned crew.
Both paths are valid. The choice depends on the problems you want to solve.
I’m in the middle of this transition. I’ve partnered with a technical expert for a business, and I’ll be announcing this collaboration in the coming weeks. Solo would have worked — but it would have kept me grinding on early-game technical skills when my strengths are on the conceptual side: marketing, sales, discovery calls, strategy. Partnering let me skip that grind, shorten my curve to impact, and widen my area of possibility.
We’re working on a couple of projects together right now, and the output is more than either of us could produce alone. More details in the coming weeks.
What “winning” looks like
Late-game victory means you’ve hit your revenue or impact goals. Core offers are established. Impact is documented. The machine runs and hums along.
But winning doesn’t roll credits. It unlocks a new map.
Early game of a higher game
You beat one game and find yourself at the start of a bigger one.
The general progression is the same. You typically will have to tweak your online presence, effectively starting from scratch. Then you measure demand and gather data through small assets, leveraging that for core offers, systems, and etc, going from early game to mid game to late game.
But.
The options multiply: scale from solopreneur to agency. Expand from one market to several. Move from “making money” to “building a legacy.”
You choose which higher game to play. You enter the higher game carrying everything you built: the assets, the judgment, the team, the proof of your previous game. And the fact that you get to choose — rather than scrambling for survival — is the reward for playing the earlier stages well.
It’s a completely new adventure: higher stakes, bigger impact, proportionally bigger risks.
It’s a good game.
Final thoughts
I haven’t played Starsector in a couple of months.
This business game is more addicting. Yes, I can’t own cool spaceships and alien-killing weapons. But building a business has same pull; clear progression, visible upgrades, a knowable map. But the stakes are real. The metaphorical fleet you build actually affects your life.
Figure out where you are on the map. Play the right game for your stage, and stop falling into traps.
The progression is there. It’s always been there. Now you can see it.
P.S. In mid/late game and wondering if you should build AI-powered systems? I’m looking for 10 beta readers/testers for the Unpromptable Business Playbook and the AI Readiness Diagnostic Quiz. You get them free in exchange for honest feedback. Reply to this email or DM me if you want in.
I love the analogy and I completely agree just like a game there are stages in entrepreneurship and you ought to keep playing each to its merit :)
This one: "You're just building the wrong things for your level."
Games, businesses, lives are all wired the same way. Enjoyed to see your breakdown through your lenses.
Thanks, James!