Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Jonathan Jennings, CTO and President of Weird Kid Studios, located in Torrance, CA, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Weird Kid Studio is a digital solutions provider. We create digital applications specializing in games, VR experiences, and apps. Our customers are the general public of game players and VR/AR users, as well as clients interested in creating technical solutions but who have no way of knowing how to build a game or reaching out to a game designer, or who knows how a 3D artist can help bring their worlds and products to life. We use our years of experience and skills developed in the space to help deliver technical solutions for organizations without in-house technical teams.

Tell us about yourself

I've been a gamer for my entire life. I remember playing Mario games before I even knew how to read growing up, so when I had a choice of career, the idea of making games wasn't just an easy choice; it was a choice that spoke to me deeply. After working on games for over five years and building VR experiences for three years in which I collaborated with the likes of Dreamworks, Walmart, the truth Campaign, Animal Planet, Sony, GM, Kia, and more, I finally started considering what it would be like to develop my own game.

I enlisted some of my most trustworthy longtime collaborators in our studios, Lead Game Designer Travis Van Essen (Borderlands 2, Bioshock Infinite, Spec Ops: The Line) and our lead 3D Artist, Victor Villalobos ( Kia, Toyota), and together we formed the core of our Weird Kid Studios team.

What motivates us every day is, I think, at our core, all three of us enjoy the craft of world-building and bringing a virtual space to life, whether it's Victor meticulously molding a space stations architecture for us, Travis tweaking and massaging the lights to get them just right, or me programming an interaction as simple as a background character having a drink or making it possible to smack a disco ball, when we work together we create virtual living environments and I think as creatives all we want to do is provide work that makes the users believe in our worlds for a little while.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Weird Kid Studios is a new venture, but I am proud to say our very first game application has received over 15,000 downloads on the Meta Quest store, we've sold a decent number of copies, we just launched our first content update and are in pre-production for our newest area. Effectively we've created a workflow and pipeline to not only make a game available to players but making an ecosystem to support the game for as long as we continue development. Having spent years focusing on my craft just as a programmer, I love that I have been able to take part in creating not just a product but a living product that will continue to grow and change.

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

Logistics easily, there are so many things to keep in mind when running a business: product visibility, maintaining social profiles and managing your "social media voice," making sure development moves at a decent pace, timing development while gathering media opportunities, making sure I communicate changes and upcoming deadlines to the team and then those awkward moments where all of these worlds come colliding together.

Balancing the technical, product, and communication needs, as a small business owner, can be a real challenge, and the fact that people rely on you to help make the final call and hopefully the "right" one at the end of the day.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Learning to separate your standalone product from your organization as a whole. Your company will ideally outlive any single product you produce, so make sure you think separately in terms of what's good for your business versus what's good for your product.
  2. Do yourself a favor and accept that you're going to make mistakes. Clinging to the idea you are perfect is what creates tension and resentment between people, and in a complex world where needs are ever-changing, you won't 100% of the time make the best decision, no one can or has.
  3. Celebrate every win. Running a business of any kind is a challenge, and to believe in something enough to want that challenge speaks to a unique sense of dedication and perseverance. So if all you did today was pick out your company colors, celebrate that; if today you just figured out a logo,  celebrate that. Hell, maybe you just got your first sample product put together, celebrate that! Success isn't just achieving the goal; it's every single step you take along the path to achieving your goal!

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.weirdkidstudios.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WierdKid12
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jjennings3/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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