El Tablero de Otto: Community-Driven Business Design from Zero

Context

El Tablero de Otto was my first entrepreneurial project — a hobby store and event space focused on trading card games (TCG), primarily Magic: The Gathering, in Lima. The existing market had two dominant players, both concentrated in commercial centers in Lima — distant, cramped and providing a transactional, low-service experience. A growing community of players in modern Lima had no local option that met their standards for space, experience or format diversity. This was not just a retail gap — it was a community design opportunity.

The Challenge

The business problem was not how to sell cards. It was how to give people a compelling reason to leave the comfort of their homes and spend three to four hours somewhere else — consistently, week after week. Through contextual observation visits and mystery shopping at competitor stores, combined with in-depth interviews, I identified four distinct player archetypes and mapped the full landscape of motivations and friction. Semi-professional players needed tournament formats that contributed classification points toward international events — the existing local offer didn't support this. Competitive players would only attend events with prizes worth competing for. Amateur players wanted to play in a low-stakes, social format and expand their collections, not compete. New players wanted to learn without making a major financial commitment upfront — they needed guided onboarding, not a product catalog. The challenge was designing a single service ecosystem that addressed all four archetypes simultaneously, with a sustainable revenue model.

My Role

As founder, I was simultaneously the business designer, service designer, brand strategist and community manager. This project was the first context in which I applied design methods to a real business problem I owned entirely. I conducted the full discovery process: desktop research, contextual observation at competitor stores, mystery shopping and in-depth interviews with Magic players. I defined the four user archetypes and mapped their distinct needs, motivations and purchasing behaviors. I designed the brand identity, service experience and event formats for each archetype. I designed and iterated the community infrastructure — archetype-specific WhatsApp groups, Facebook communities for card trading, and live streaming of tournament finals. I ran the business as a design experiment: launching events in trial formats, measuring engagement and iterating based on observed behavior.

Strategic Approach

The core strategic insight was that the store itself was not the product — the community was the product. Physical space, card inventory and events were infrastructure. What created retention, word-of-mouth and sustainable revenue was belonging: the feeling of being part of a group with a shared identity and shared rituals. I designed the service around four parallel experience tracks, one per archetype. For semi-professional and competitive players: high-prize tournaments with international classification formats, and live-streamed finals to capture the attention of players not yet coming to the store. For amateur players: low-stakes social formats designed around play and camaraderie, not rankings. For new players: free-entry workshops where attendees learned to play, met other beginners and received starter accessories as gifts — systematically reducing the financial and social barrier to entry. The community infrastructure connected all four tracks: archetype-specific WhatsApp groups kept the experience alive between events; Facebook groups enabled card trading and peer interaction; live streams of major tournaments created content that extended the community's reach beyond the physical store. The revenue model was built around a key insight: competitive and semi-professional players had low product spend (primarily accessories), while amateur players were the highest-value purchasers. The event ecosystem served both — competitive events drove traffic and visibility; community-focused formats drove product revenue.

Impact

• El Tablero de Otto became one of Lima's leading TCG stores — validated by community demand, not marketing spend
• Sustained organic attendance growth driven entirely by peer referral across all four archetype segments
• Four parallel event tracks running simultaneously, each with distinct format, pricing and prize structure
• Organic network expansion through partnerships with other Lima TCG stores who joined the mission to grow the player community
• Established the design frameworks later applied at institutional scale: archetype modeling, service blueprint design, community-as-product strategy and iterative event design