I founded SV249 to give Sudanese professionals — designers, production and creative companies — access to high-performance PCs and devices in a market where they were hard to get. Around 90% of the business ran online. I positioned it as a trusted technology solutions provider, with pricing anchored to the value we delivered.
The most persistent feature request in our customer feedback: customers wanted a physical store.
A store was a proposed solution, and I didn't yet know what problem it was solving. Building it as specified would also have added fixed cost that pricing had to carry, pulling us off the value-anchored price point the positioning depended on.
Before investing in infrastructure, I wanted to understand the need behind the request.
I ran customer interviews to test the request rather than confirm it. I used Jobs-to-be-Done to understand what customers were trying to accomplish, and the emotional reassurance they were seeking around the purchase.
| Functional job | Emotional job |
|---|---|
| See and handle the devices before buying | Trust a high-value purchase from an online-first business |
| Understand how their PC is built and maintained | Feel part of the process, not just the receiver of a box |
The interviews pointed to three underlying needs: visibility, trust and participation. A store was one way to meet them — the one customers could picture, because it's the one they already knew.
I moved the question out of the solution space and into the problem space.
Framed that way, the answer didn't have to be new. The build process already existed; it had always sat backstage. Mapped as a service blueprint, the opportunity was to move the line of visibility so a backstage process became a customer touchpoint.
Hypothesis: if customers could take part in the build, the needs behind the store request would be met — at the cost of technician time rather than capital.
The riskiest assumption was whether customers would actually want to participate. I tested it at the lowest possible cost with a concierge MVP: sending technicians to customers' homes to build their PCs with them. No space, no buildout, only technician time.
Customers welcomed it, accepted the process, and actively engaged with it. The pilot provided early evidence that the experience was desirable before we committed to fixed infrastructure.
With that evidence, I moved the experience to a fixed location: space in my existing workspace, opened by appointment to customers who requested it. Customers built their PCs alongside our technicians, asked questions throughout, and documented the process themselves.
That documentation became co-created brand content — customers producing the proof of the positioning themselves.
I didn't build what customers asked for first. I tested whether the need behind it could be met another way.
The lab moved cost from capital to capacity: technicians worked longer hours and ran a tighter build schedule. I accepted that deliberately — a variable cost I could manage, where a storefront would have been a fixed one I couldn't reverse.
The lab met the underlying need without a retail buildout, and the content customers created there helped grow a 1,000-member advocacy community.
As founder, all of it: the discovery, the reframe, the MVP, the lab, and the cost of being wrong.