24-year-old entrepreneur Peter Zaborszky founded Renegade Games Limited just when the credit crunch was in full swing, February 2009, and managed to turn £30,000 angel investment into £50,000 profit in the first year.
Businesses closing, mortgage defaults, emptying high streets, the credit crunch has affected millions of people in Britain. But fighting entrepreneurs still try to start businesses, where ambition outweighs the difficulties of the current times.
Pete Zaborszky started a joint venture with Fubra Limited in February 2009, aiming to build a business around internet games. The experience both parties bought to the table was useful; Peter built an internet game aged 17, while Fubra built a media company based on useful websites with useful content. The company was started with angel
investment of £30,000 from Fubar.
The strategy employed by Pete was buying websites that already had revenue and using the revenue from these to build the business, employ staff and build new games. Initially, the company bought an existing game, Planetarion, one of the classic text-based games on the internet, and Peter’s older game was restarted. This presented a foundation in terms of revenue that the business could be built on. This revenue was cleverly used by Peter to build capital in the business and await further purchases that could be useful.
A few months later, an internet games directory was acquired that almost overnight doubled its revenue by optimizing the advertising on the website. This gave Peter the self-confidence to continue with the earlier strategy, as it was clearly working.
Speaking about what he did to achieve these fantastic results, Pete Zaborszky said, “Most websites do not think about the customer. Many website owners tend to be lazy and do not give their assets the attention they need. Just by working hard and thinking about the customer, I was able to improve results dramatically. Similar to Dragon’s Den star
Theo Paphitis and Ryman’s, just by optimizing operations and considering what customers want, a business can be turned around.”
Building on this, as well as profits from the first two assets, Pete decided to take a large risk, and using a mixture of capital accumulated in the business and debt, acquired a much larger gaming website. The deal struck was a good one; the debt repayments could be financed from the existing income from the website, and an increase in revenues was profit for Renegade Games. Using the same strategies, a 50% increase in revenue could be achieved on this website as well.
Fubra co-founder Paul Maunders explains, “We were impressed by Pete’s ability to use our initial investment to acquire and improve several small websites. His improvements significantly increased their earnings and cash flow in just a few months, which gave us the confidence to loan him further funds to apply his model to larger sites.”
Pete has plans to use his existing assets as advertising tools for the new game he is developing, as well as increase traffic and revenue from them substantially. Peter believes he can achieve profits of £100,000 next year, without any additional financing.
Anthony: Being laid off was the best thing to happen to me in my post-college life for the simple fact that I don’t think I would have taken the plunge so soon otherwise. It’s hard to walk away from guaranteed income and a daily routine. And I think a lot of people are in the same situation, where you have a good job with a great company, or even a decent job with a decent company and you don’t necessarily hate your career, but you don’t love it, either. And that’s why I am so thankful I was laid off when I was, before I got married, had kids, all that good stuff, because it allowed me to take a chance at a young age.
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