The 12 Business Model Types

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Pepe Villatoro, Co-founder and CEO of Fuckup Nights, opened the workshop with one question: how many of the 12 existing business model types have you seriously considered for your company?

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Most were running on one or two. The full map — subscription, licensing, platform, SaaS, outcome-based, freemium, asset arbitrage, ecosystem, community, data — wasn't familiar territory.

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The problem isn't not knowing them. The problem is never examining them in a structured, disciplined way. And most of the time, it's failure — or the threat of it — that finally forces you to open that map.

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Rolls-Royce stopped selling engines and started selling flight hours. Deel turned regulatory friction into a global SaaS compliance product. Neither of these are startup stories. They're stories of companies that decided to redesign the core question: how do I capture value?

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Flywheels and Exponential Organizations: What Separates a Profitable Model from a Strategic One

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Knowing the model types is step one. Step two is making them hard to copy.

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That's where the flywheel came in — self-reinforcing cycles where each element drives the next. Amazon uses one. So does Fuckup Nights: more events build more community, more community attracts more companies, more companies fund more events.

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A well-designed flywheel is almost impossible to replicate. Not because it's secret, but because it takes years to build.

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The workshop also introduced Salim Ismail’s Exponential Organizations (ExOs) framework:  companies that grow 10x faster without needing 10x more resources. Applied not to Silicon Valley startups, but to a construction firm in Michoacán or an agro-industrial business in the Bajío region.

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The practical question on every table: what part of your current operation, if you accelerate it, could set everything else in motion?

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When Business Owners Sit Down to Talk About Failure

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On day two, attendees worked through real cases of business models that failed — and companies that reinvented themselves as a result.

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Yahoo turned down the chance to buy Google for $1 million in 1998. Sixteen years later, Yahoo sold to Verizon for $4.8 billion.

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The point wasn't the numbers. It was this: the most expensive failure isn't the mistake you make. It's the right decision you never took.

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The 5 Levers to Innovate a Business Model: From Theory to Your Own Hypothesis

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The Brain Trust was the most honest moment of the workshop. Four or five people looking at a colleague's business model and asking the most uncomfortable questions they could think of.

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The 5 levers block — customer segment, value proposition, channel, revenue stream, cost structure and assets — let each table work on a real company in the room. Not a hypothetical. Their company. With its underused assets and assumptions that hadn't been questioned in years.

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That's exactly what Fuckup Nights has been doing with organizations in 100+ countries for over a decade: creating safe spaces where hard questions are allowed, and where failure — or the threat of it — becomes the starting point for something better.

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What This Workshop Made Clear About Business Model Innovation

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Not every company needs to become a digital platform. Not everyone needs to scale globally or adopt AI in the next six months.

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But every company has unquestioned assumptions. Inherited models. Potential flywheels no one has noticed yet.

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What this workshop proved — with real business owners from traditional industries in the heart of Mexico — is that business model innovation isn't a startup privilege. It's available to anyone willing to ask the right questions.

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"The most dangerous business model doesn't exist yet. Someone is designing it right now. Are you going to wait for it — or build it yourself?"

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If your company is ready to ask that question — and work through it with a team that's led this conversation with leaders across five continents — here’s how we do it.

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