How do start-ups develop sustainable business models?

Scholars emphasize the need for sustainability-oriented entrepreneurs to create appropriate business models to balance financial, ecological, and social objectives. Balancing and prioritizing multiple objectives within the business model, however, can lead to tensions and conflicts that need to be managed. Despite more than two decades of scientific discourse on business models in the context of sustainability, recent research concluded that the field can still be considered as ambiguous and infant. In this article, we address this issue by presenting evidence on how nascent sustainability-oriented entrepreneurs prioritize sustainability dimensions within their business models. We performed a case study approach considering the business models of three start-ups as individual cases. Our findings indicate that nascent sustainability-oriented entrepreneurs frequently rebalance the sustainability dimensions within the BM and that the prioritization often shifts towards the economic dimension as financial pressure increases. Subsequently, we contribute to the literature on sustainable entrepreneurship and the literature on sustainable business models.