[00:00:27] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to The First Customer podcast. My name's Jay Aigner today. I'm lucky enough to be joined by Jedidiah Weller. He is the CEO and founder of Startup Wars. He's the managing principal and founder of Open Forge. I actually saw a really cool presentation. I think it was founder factory that I saw you at and walked away super impressed. Walk right back to the room and asked you to be on the podcast. and we got you on. So Jedi. Hello, sir. How are you, buddy?

[00:00:53] Jedidiah: Hey, I'm doing great. How are you, Jay?

[00:00:55] Jay: I'm great, man. Thank you for being on.

[00:00:57] Jedidiah: great to be here. it's a good change of pace, you know, from being outside in the cold weather in Philly. So, you know, I'm happy to be inside right now.

[00:01:04] Jay: I'm so done with the, I mean, I think it's warming up though. Spring's coming. You know, that's like the 

[00:01:09] Jedidiah: it's coming. Yeah.

[00:01:11] Jay: me says, spring is coming. So, I saw Startup Wars at Philly's, Startup Leaders Tech Expo, I think last year, really just like. A very, like eye catching kind of different like game slash simulation.

And it was like, what the hell am I even looking at? This is so cool. And I like checked it out afterward. And then, I didn't even know you were the guy there. And then now I find out, you know, you're not only that, but you're also the Founder of Open Forge. But, tell me, where did you grow up and did you have any entrepreneurship kind of, around you growing up that helped you be one?

[00:01:41] Jedidiah: Yeah. So good question. I, I grew up in actually an Amish country, out in like Western Pennsylvania. So I'm Pennsylvania Dutch, basically kind of like the Amish without the religion. the Amish are actually the only people who speak, Pennsylvania Dutch anymore. it's considered like a dying language or a dead language.

And, yeah, I grew up on an ace raker farm most of my life. And I was bored senseless. And so I did a lot of things online, and, you know, and thanks to the internet and the computer, you know, I was able to kind of, you know, expand my mind, you know, expand, you know, my interests and, yeah, I got into gaming, I got, you know, did a little business stuff.

Oh, what was your question about like, do I have any mentors?

[00:02:19] Jay: Or did you have any, was anybody around you, an entrepreneur that kind of pushed that, you know, got that fire going in you?

[00:02:26] Jedidiah: Honestly, that's a good question. I'd say like, I'd say not really, you know, my, father, he's had a, he was a nurse and he had started like a ice cream store, we call Weller store. but you know, my dad got injured when I was really young and, so, you know, we lost that, like that business and the house, you know, went through that whole nine yards.

I, don't think it was so much that I had a lot of entrepreneurial role models. It was more, I think that, you know, I knew going through this like big transition in my life, you know, where like my father got injured and, you know, like parents got divorced, stuck on that kind of thing. And then we, we're in the low income bracket.

I think that kind of drove me a little bit. You know, I was like, you know, I don't want to, put my family through this or be in a situation again. So I just kind of, I think I was just naturally drawn to it. And then I think the creativity and my father, you know, and the hard work of my mom, I think that helped me kind of get like the business owner mentality, but like, I've always wanted to start a business.

You know, I did like a little computer repair. Yeah. Back in, you know, high school and that kind of thing. but you know, I didn't have any money and, you know, and so when I went to school, I wasn't really thinking about starting a business. I was thinking more just like, you know, I need to get a good paying job.

but that didn't go along.

[00:03:41] Jay: what's the Open Forge story? Did that come before Startup Wars or was Startup Wars first?

[00:03:47] Jedidiah: Yeah. Yeah, no Open Forge came first. so, You know, it all started, I think about two years after college, I was working corporate, I hated it, you know, I was in a cubicle, it was probably like the worst work experience of my life. And so I got into the startup industry. I joined this startup, out on the West coast that was doomed for failure.

It was a whole rollercoaster of a story. Won't get into it today, but, you know, the long and short is the founder of that company actually ended up ripping off all of his investors and fleeing the country. So it was kind of like a Tinder swindler thing. And I was kind of caught in the crossfires where, all of a sudden, you know, like my last two paychecks bounced, I had, given, I donated some money to cover some people's expenses, and I just bought a house.

And so I found myself in a situation where I had, I think I had what, 2, 000 in my bank account. And I had 4, 000 a month in expenses and I was about 30 days away from going bankrupt. And I was like, well, this is going to be interesting. So I, you know, I ended up starting a business with my old co founder, Liz Brown, called Webjunto and that business went well.

You know, we built it up from 60, 000 the first like six months to, I think it was like a hundred thousand the first year, 240, the next year for 20, the third year. And then. 1. 4 million, the fourth year of business. And then when we split as co founders, cause you know, she didn't want to, you know, to have a sources agency anymore.

I went through and I, you know, I talked to her and we agreed that I could take over operations. It would just be, have to be under a different name. And so, that's how OpenForge was born. A lot of the team moved over with me. and when I started OpenForge. I took a look at all of our, like all of our revenue and all of our customers and like, what was the most profitable and it was clear that mobile applications were like where we shined, you know, Open Forge, which is amazing at mobile applications.

So I decided to cut out all the crap. I said, no more websites, no more anything else, you know, just mobile apps. And, that's how I think OpenForge, you know, did so well and succeeded. you know, we were one of the top mobile app, creation companies in the United States. we're a top trusted partner for Ionic framework, which is a huge framework for building mobile apps.

And yeah, we've, you know, we've served and we've built applications that have served over 20 million users across the world. The, U S and worldwide. So, you know, it's a really cool company and yeah, I'm really proud of my leadership team, you know, like Paulina Gallo, Billy Holler and, you know, Jared, et cetera.

And so, and that, company kind of just runs itself now. So, it's a good one. You know, I spent a couple hours a week maybe on it, maybe five hours a week, but, most of my time is spent on the Startup Wars now.

[00:06:31] Jay: Wow. what a journey from, you know, Amish country to like, you know, tech CEO and, 

[00:06:39] Jedidiah: Yeah.

[00:06:39] Jay: uh, 

[00:06:40] Jedidiah: Yeah.

[00:06:41] Jay: the opposite ends of the spectrum there. a little bit, tell me about who was your first customer at Webjunto? Do you remember?

[00:06:49] Jedidiah: Good question. I honestly don't remember. I, one of the first that I remember that I had a really great, relationship with was a company called truck blocks or the founder named Matt Stockwell. And he was a great, he's a great guy. And, you know, I remember spending, I don't know, probably thousands of hours on that project because.

You know, we weren't even billing for all of it. you know, just because I wanted to help, you know, see them succeed. But I think that was the first time I, that we helped a startup founder that, you know, we grew really close with, and it was a really cool journey. so yeah, but I don't remember the actual first customer of that company just because it's been so long now that was like 2014, so 10 years ago.

[00:07:32] Jay: And what about, Open Forge when you made the switch over? Do you remember like, Two questions and one is, do you remember the first customer post split from your co founder? And number two, how difficult was it to pair off everything else but mobile apps, right? I mean, it's a big shift to go from, we do everything. So we only do one thing, but we do it really well. And that's, you always hear the successful companies, right? They go, we don't do everything. We just do this thing really well. Like the smaller companies you grow and grow. They really focus on one thing. so who was your first customer for, Open Forge and you know, how difficult was that transition?

[00:08:09] Jedidiah: Yeah. So for OpenForge, you know, it was interesting. We, pivoted from WebJunto. And so basically like on a Tuesday, WebJunto closed. On a Wednesday, OpenForge was officially open. Right. And so we moved some of our customers over from, WebJunto to OpenForge. the, but it wasn't a, an easy like transition because some of our largest customers are enterprise customers.

They said, Hey, Jedi, look, even though. You've done great work for us. You know, this is a new tax ID. It's technically a new contract. You know, it just shows instability. And so even though we, you know, we'll keep working with you on, you know, in the first couple of months, we're probably going to transition just, you know, because it's a new company.

And I totally understood that. Right. And when we were early on. You know, it was a rough transition, you know, we were going month to month at that time, you know, revenue wise, like, you know, I didn't have more than one month of cash in the bank to pay payroll. So, and that made it even harder to actually do this transition, to.

You know, saying, okay, no to any other customer work. I think we lost probably maybe like one or two team members who were just like, not comfortable with the change or not comfortable with, you know, just that transition, because, you know, it's change and people don't generally like change, but it was ultimately the best decision.

you know, soon after that, we got some really large customers. you know, like we had, I think within the first year of Open Forge by specializing in just mobile apps, we change everything about our website. We change everything about language. We change, you know, just everything. And we leaned into the mobile app space.

We were able to get a customer that, individually. Paid us more than all of the years of WebJunto, you know, and I was just one, right? And we had multiple. So, I'm not gonna like say names on here, but, yeah, like it was a big transition. So, you know, I would recommend to people if they're, if you're trying to find your first customer, or, you know, if you're just trying to, if you already have some customers, but some of them are.

You know, a little disruptive or some of them just aren't quite worth it. Like, you know, the ones I'm talking about, you just got to fire them. You can totally fire a customer. It was actually the best advice I ever received as a founder by this guy named Matthew Grande. He was a business coach actually.

And, you know, he made us do this exercise called a start or a, customer checklist. That's what it's called. So we actually wrote down like, what are the qualifications of a good customer? And we, then we went through the list and if a customer didn't hit all of them, We sent them an email saying, Hey, sorry.

You know, and we reply, we'll transition you off, but we are no longer offering this type of service. And so, best decision I ever made.

[00:10:55] Jay: Wow. how, so even mobile apps, I think, especially. You know, 10 years ago, whenever they got really prevalent, is still a, it's a broad, you know, category, right? It could be anybody, it could be anything. and I see it a lot with my agency owner friends that run dev agencies, I compare it to.whack a mole, right? Where you're like some founder goes, I have an idea and you have to like whack them before somebody else does. And it's like, were you finding these customers that was it inbound? Was it outbound? Were you like focused on a specific type? Like, how are you finding those people who were like, had a good idea? Wanted to build a mobile app and got to those people as they were kind of in that buying window, ready to spend.

[00:11:42] Jedidiah: Yeah, we did a lot of community building events. And so, we ran the startup Junto, up until COVID hit. And, you know, that was a continuation of the Philly Junto, which essentially was just a way to educate people. And so whether or not someone had a startup that they were creating, maybe they were thinking about it, maybe they weren't, you know, over the course of years, everyone remembered, oh yeah, Jedi, OpenForge, mobile apps.

And, you know, when we talk about agency work, right? it's a clear distinction. Like when we get on a call with a customer, who's, you know, who's had this mobile app project and there's, they've been shopping around for different agencies, I mean, it's night and day. Like we, you know, like they'll tell us, wow, we've learned more in this single 30 minute call about what we need for a mobile app, then we've.

I heard from any call or any person that we've talked to before, because it's just like anything, you know, if you're trying to do everything, you're not going to be great at anything, you know, and so I can go through and I can spit off the actual rules and regulations for the app store, you know, basically by memory.

Right. And, you know, how many people can do that? And so can my team, you know, so our designers and developers, everyone are all focused on mobile apps and,and that's, was actually kind of a transition into a Startup Wars as well, because when we actually were first launching Startup Wars, we were launching it as a, education game for people to learn how to create a startup.

Right. And we were going to, we were going to target consumer market. So we actually started as a mobile app, at first and, and then it wasn't ultimately how we succeeded with start wars, but just because we were in the mobile app space and we're like, okay, well, this is going to be a mobile app.

we were wrong about that, but yeah,

[00:13:27] Jay: It's, you gotta be wrong about something along the way. Right. it's one other question before, I ask about Startup Wars. you mentioned the community building thing and, some, one of my guests had talked about, you really owning your backyard when it comes to running a services agency or any agency, really.

But, I mean, a services agency. You have a sizable market like Philadelphia. It's not the biggest thing where like, you know, in New York, everybody just ignores you because there's so many people just constantly, you know, beating those guys door down. Philadelphia is, I think, a great market for B2B service companies.

Cause there's enough business here for everybody. how did you guys kind of beyond the community events was your goal to kind of. Make your stamp here in Philadelphia and then spread out from there. Was it just kind of happenstance? Did you focus on kind of the local area? And is that how you guys grew so quickly,

[00:14:18] Jedidiah: Yeah. All right. So that's a good question. I would say that when we were pre COVID, we were focusing on Philadelphia for community building. And I think an important part about community building that's important to recognize for everyone who's out there is community building doesn't mean, you know, going out and just putting out information about yourself and talking about yourself all the time.

In the start of Junto. We almost never talk about Open Forge or about ourselves, right? It's all about the people around us. And that really helps to a create a safe environment for actual dialogue, right? Where you don't feel like you're getting sold to, and B, it also allows you to create meaningful relationships with people because everything's about relationships, right?

So, you know, when we were building that up. It was purely Philadelphia. Now, what happened is we ended up getting a lot of customers actually outside of Philadelphia, you know, and. What would happen is that people, you know, from our Philly June toes, our Philly meetups, they would know about us and know our brand, and then they would either move away or they would be talking with a friend who owns a company somewhere else.

And then we just started getting a lot of business from referrals, but ironically enough, outside of Philadelphia itself. So even though we were focused on Philly, our customers weren't there. yeah, so I don't know. I don't know if there's like a lesson learned from that, but that's just what happens. 

[00:15:45] Jay: right?no, I think it's fair. I mean, I think if you answered the question in a better way than I asked it, but Yeah, I think You know, focusing the reason why I asked the question is because I think a lot of companies, especially B2B service companies want to be national and they want to be international.

They want to own it. And it's like there is, I call it the hometown discount, right? Like the fact that you're in a location with somebody else, whether it's Philadelphia or, you know, Tampa, Florida or wherever it is, you're more likely to be able to get a conversation with somebody to talk about, just build that relationship.

Like you said, cause everything's relationships. Because you're in the same area, because you're in the same physical location, you can say, Oh, I'm from, Hey, you know, go birds. You know, you can say whatever, you know, little thing you can say, to kind of make that connection. So I always kind of bring that up because I am definitely a firm believer that, you know, you should start local.

There's no reason to try. it's harder to get somebody's business in California. If you're some new. B2B company when probably there's somebody close to you that you're ignoring because they're just, you think that being national and being whatever is this big special thing when in reality you're passing up, you know, income and revenue from places around you.

So let's move on to Startup Wars. you mentioned you kind of, it was more of a lead gen tool at first. Is that what you were saying? Like kind of trying to seed the idea of making apps.

[00:17:07] Jedidiah: no. so Startup Wars, you know, when we started it, we were running the Sarp Juntos and we said, okay, Hey, there's gotta be a better way to help educate people about entrepreneurship, about how to start a business. Right. So that was the whole. Premise around Startup Wars, a game, you know, gamified experience to help people learn how to start a business, right?

Because what was happening is people would come into the Juntos or to workshops that either we held or someone else held, and you would see that a founder would come in, they would get advice from someone, and they might understand the advice to probably try it, but it's one thing to hear and understand.

It's another thing to truly understand my experience. So I said, okay, well, there's gotta be a way to give people the experience. And so we started building this tool and I can actually show it 

[00:17:53] Jay: yeah, let me, uh,let me bring it up.

There you go. By the way, you were the first guest to have visuals, with the episode. So you win, you know,

[00:18:02] Jedidiah: Yeah.

[00:18:03] Jay: You came more prepared than most people. So congratulations for that. I'm excited to see this.

[00:18:08] Jedidiah: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, and, I gave this, this talk to, like,at Stevens Institute of Technology, basically there's this organization called NACPA, and there's a bunch of deans of business schools, you know, in the Northeast corridor. So I gave this talk there and I wanted to show the journey.

So when you invited me to speak, it was, I think perfect timing because I had some of these materials already made. So I'm like, you know, I might as well share them.

[00:18:29] Jay: Beautiful.

[00:18:30] Jedidiah: Yeah. But anyway, so, basically in 2018, we were running the Junto, you know, which is, this guy right here, you know, we had this idea, right?

And we piloted it out. We pilot out a very simple version. I think we spent a month on this. Now this looks like crap. It looks absolutely like shit. So, you know, Like keep that in mind. Okay. More is coming. But again, just like true startup, we had to validate a little bit. So we went to Philly Tech Week.

I remember, Paulina and Billy were under the table. We got like one of the tables, like a vendor table. I think we paid 200 bucks for it or something. And then they're under the table doing like the last minute, you know, coding and testing. and as I'm in front of the table being like, yeah, it's going to come.

It's going to come soon. You know, just give me one second. I'm like buying this time. And then like, I get like a. I say five minutes and I got a kick. I mean, 10 minutes. Well, finally, we got it ready. Right? And, you know, just this very simple thing. But people actually liked it. They liked the idea of it.

You know, we had, I think, 150 people sign up and say, yeah, when this is ready, I totally want to use it. We're like, all right, this is really cool. So that was in 2018. I think it was towards the middle of 2018. And we said, okay, now we got to figure out what we want to do with this. Cause we're still running Open Forge at that time.

And at that time we were still, you know, it was still quite busy, with my time, you know, helping the team transition to take over Open Forge. So we did a little bit of work here and there, but for the most part, we just kind of went into planning mode and then in 2020. We had a big, a retreat where I brought everyone from the team in from all across the world, flew them into the Poconos, we got this like little, like it was labeled as like a castle in the Poconos and we had our company retreat and we all agreed, okay, we are going to do this.

You know, we've been making our customers a ton of money, you know, which is great, but we want to scale, we want to add to our own product. So we decided to actually start building it. And so we started building it. Okay. And we changed the design. You can see here. It looks a lot different, right? You know, a lot more gamified.

And we started building it for about three months. And then all of a sudden, in 2020, what happened? COVID hit, right? And this is a really big, piece of our story because we had originally intended to go to consumer first and then target education. The reason for that is we know how to build consumer apps.

We know nothing about the education industry, or knew nothing at that time. And so now, all of a sudden, COVID flips everything on its head, and a lot of educators, well, every educator on the planet, now had to find ways to engage with their students asynchronously online. Because every university is closed.

So we said, you know what? Fuck it. I hope you bleeped that out. But that's what we said. We said, fuck it. We're going to just pursue this. This could be a golden opportunity here. Let's try to engage. So we did that with, six, I think it was six or seven initial instructors from, you know, six or seven different universities.

And we said, hey, this isn't really ready yet. But we're going to have it ready for the fall for, you know, the fall 2020 in August, and we'll do this customer discovery period, you know, with you, which essentially means that we would go into the actual class with the instructors and with the students, virtually, of course, and we would interview them.

Yeah. I had talked about the business. I would tell them what I'm telling you, you know, our process of the customer discovery, our process of building anything they want to know. I would just do everything I could to teach them. And it went really well. Yeah. You know, we had people, we had about 400 students in the first semester, that, you know, they all played, you know, it was still mobile app at that time, we interviewed them, we learned a lot, then we did another semester of it, you know, in the spring of 2021.

We upgraded the platform, obviously, you know, so we built more, we made it look better. We addressed some of the students issues, some of the bugs, you know, games take forever. You know, I'm used to building business mobile apps, you know, for like enterprise customers, you know, and we could get those done three to six months easy.

Games? Woof! Because the requirements are so, you know, Feel, you know, it's like, it's more of a feel to it. the requirements are never as clear in a game as it is in a business app. So, that was a learning lesson anyway. We just, we kept going until finally in, 2022, right? We had this point where students were ready to pay, instructors were ready to pay.

Everyone loved it. Something really bad happened.we didn't realize that at the bigger universities. Right, like state universities, like Ohio State, Florida State, you know, et cetera, and public institutions. They have rules and laws for accessibility about what their students, like, what they can actually include as a required assignment.

So, for instance, we actually could not distribute it as a mobile app because some of the students either didn't have a smartphone or had a flip phone or didn't have a phone, right? And so there's no way for us to distribute it here and to require that everyone you would use it, right? But you can require that students have access to a computer.

You know, maybe they don't have their own. But there's the school library,

[00:23:39] Jay: so now we had to do this transition where we had to spend a whole basically year transitioning the platform into web right from mobile, and there's still elements of it, you know, like this left panel here. This is still a mobile view inside the actual app.

[00:23:54] Jedidiah: You'll see different like mobile views that would basically just like put side by side.

[00:23:57] Jay: Right.

[00:23:58] Jedidiah: But it went, really, well. You know, after that large transition, it went well, students, you know, loved it. And now, you know, it's the platform that you see today, right? You know, which, we have four different simulations, we're building more every semester, and we've really created this as a platform for, you know, Entrepreneurship, you know, simulation creation that way, you know, it's not just one simulation, you know, where everyone's learning about one case study,

[00:24:22] Jay: Right.

[00:24:23] Jedidiah: that's the journey.

[00:24:25] Jay: That is a great story.

[00:24:27] Jedidiah: Yeah, thanks.

[00:24:28] Jay: that's, I mean, it's think a lot of people don't understand gamification and the fact that you guys kind of figured it out in a very important space. we're like, you know. If you were gamifying, like, I don't know, like physics or like some sort of like, kind of not abstract, but just, you know, a one off like type of education that you're like, this is like very applicable to a lot of different people who are just want to be business owners, right?

Cause they hear about maybe incorrectly the glitz and glam of being a business owner and an entrepreneur, and they want to do it. And then to provide that kind of all encompassing education in one platform and gamify it in a way that's fun and exciting and enticing. It's hard to do. You know, it's, I mean, I went to full sale to make video games.

Like I know what it, you know, what's involved in making them and how hard it is. And like you said, the touch and feel of requirements and like, how do you make it fun, but not just fun and actually like, you know, make sure they're actually learning things with it. and then on the opposite side of that, like make sure they're learning stuff, but it is fun enough to be engaging and like continue to bring people in.

And, so it's a very cool story, man. And I honestly,I want to play it. I

[00:25:39] Jedidiah: Yeah.

actually played it yet. So I am like dying to do this and like, learn how to run a business the right way, which I still haven't quite figured out how to do, I know. 

[00:25:47] Jay: all my years doing it. But this, that's awesome, man. I love that story. So what's kind of next for Startup Wars.

[00:25:53] Jedidiah: Yeah. So, in terms of where we're at, right, like I said, we have four different simulations and we were, we're now at the point where we can build them relatively quickly. Like maybe about one simulation. every three months, and we're slowly, you know, bringing that down. Like we're bringing the amount of time down.

one of the big differentiators with Startup Wars versus our competitors, and we kind of got lucky here, you know, and, these are some of our competitors in the space, like the top of the market and, you know, they're valuable. Don't get me wrong. but they're essentially Excel sheets on the web.

And the other problem with them is that they don't allow the students to choose personalized experiential journeys. Instead, they say, all right, here's a simulation. You're buying this simulation, and you know, once you buy it, everyone in the class learns this. But think about it. If you have an intro class for entrepreneurship, What are the odds that every single student is going to want to build the exact same type of business?

[00:26:52] Jay: Right.

[00:26:53] Jedidiah: You know? And so now you have a instructor has to choose. They have to choose one that they think reflects most of their students, but it's guaranteed to fail to reflect their students. And so what we did is we said, You know what? Let's let the students choose. So We actually let students choose the instructor creates an open assignment and the students can choose which one they want to actually, you know, go through or they can go through more than one.

So that's been, you know, like one of our biggest things. and then, you know, so next we're going to create. Yeah, a couple more simulations. and then ultimately our goal is to go to a roadblocks business model where essentially we open up the platform because remember not a simulation game or a platform,

Right.

Or we open that up so others can create their own simulations. And then we can have, you know, we could show your story. We could show the story of a game. Yeah. Yeah. You know, if a, a Steven star restaurant or an X, Y, Z, whatever business you want, we could actually put it in here. He has a lot of brand potential for those businesses, right?

Because now they can, you know, share their story with students, you know, across all these universities, across the entire nation, the entire world. and also give students the opportunity to learn through people that they look up to and inspire to be.

[00:28:07] Jay: man, I feel like we could talk to you all day. I want to have one more question about that. And then, so two more, questions. one is, if you had to start. Startup Wars specifically over again tomorrow, just with everything you've learned. And this isn't a, what would you do differently question.

But if you had to start over again tomorrow to build a, you business simulation application, what would be step one?

[00:28:32] Jedidiah: Oh, step one. I think doing more market research into who we want our customer to be, you know, like, like I'm not gonna lie to you. We do. Didn't really do a ton of market research into the education space. Actually in the education space, we didn't do any cause COVID hit and we're just, we just kind of follow the wave there.

and it worked out well, but like I said, we learned so much. I don't know, man, I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, because, cause here's why on one hand. If I did more market research, then I could have been better prepared, right? For certain aspects of the journey. But on the other hand, I believe in the mission of Startup Wars teaching people so they can fail safely in a game, in an environment that is reflected to them as opposed to real life.

So I don't give a shit. If they're going to,if customers wouldn't want it, I would still build it, you know, and I think that dedication to the project and to the vision of the project, I think that helped us along the way because it was a rough three years, you know, like. It took us a lot longer to build this than we thought.

you know, it was a lot of headaches, you know, there was a lot of like, you know, we didn't have the right team members for certain pieces of it, you know, like content creation, that kind of thing we had to train people on stuff that we didn't even know how to train them. And so what I'm getting at is, you know,if I didn't believe in the vision, if I was just going by, well, will people buy it?

Well, then the project might've just stopped a year and a half in because no one was buying it a year and a half. And people are buying it now,

but no one was buying it a year and a half in, you know, and so, yeah, I think everyone needs to, I think everyone needs to do a combination of find something that they're so passionate about that it doesn't matter what happens, they would do it on their own time anyway.

And do a combination of that and then do some market research to figure out how to sell it. Cause you do need to have an actual business in order to support yourself, your team, et cetera. Right. But I wouldn't say one or the other is the right approach.

[00:30:49] Jay: But where's the simulation to make us to make a business simulation? Do you have like an inception model where you're just going to like, here's how you would do that, in the game. Well, it seems like, one that's missing from the list.

[00:31:03] Jedidiah: maybe we'll do that on our 10 year anniversary. 

[00:31:05] Jay: going to say, it sounds like a, yeah, that's like a, a milestone, you know, celebration.

Like here's how, if you want to go do it yourself. 

All right. I have one more question. It's non business related. This is just about, you and your, personal side. if you could do anything on earth and he knew you couldn't fail, what would it be? Yeah.

[00:31:27] Jedidiah: I would fly. I would totally fly. You know, you know, there's those hotels up in the clouds I think there's six of them worldwide where I was like basically on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere I couldn't fail that means I could try to land and not fail at it, right? And so I would just Superman it up.

I'd take my wife We would fly to the top of one of these mountains. I would just you know, overlook it. I'm not talking an airplane I'm talking

[00:31:50] Jay: You're talking physical, you feel, I feel like Yeah.

I, with a name like Jedi, like I would assume you meant like Superman, not

like in an airplane. 

[00:31:58] Jedidiah: Yep. So that's what we would 

[00:32:00] Jay: that's a beautiful answer. I like that. All right. Well, if people want to find out more about you or get in touch with you, or if they want to talk about a Startup Wars or see Startup Wars or Open Forge, how do they do that?

[00:32:12] Jedidiah: Yeah. Yeah. So just go online for our company. So startupwars. com. it was an expensive domain, 

[00:32:18] Jay: I was going to ask, is that an expensive domain?

[00:32:21] Jedidiah: Yeah, it was. it wasn't as bad as I thought I was. I feared it was going to be, I think I paid like 10, 000 for it. but, and ironically enough, the person who owned, the Open Forge, domain wanted more, right.

But,yeah, so startupwars. com, and, Open Forge. io for Open Forge company. also start Junto is the community event we run. It's online now, ever since COVID. Yeah. We said, well, you know what? we like it online because we. Can serve a broader audience. So if you want to learn about, you know, startup stuff and, you know, share with our founders and, you know, share with what you've known, what you learned, and then also, ask questions about what you don't know.

That's a good place to be. So, yeah, I'd say all those three places. And if you want to get ahold of me, you know, Jedi hacks on Twitter and, you know, LinkedIn is just my full name, Jedidiah Weller.

[00:33:08] Jay: Beautiful. Well, very. Inspirational episode, my friend.

[00:33:13] Jedidiah: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

[00:33:15] Jay: I didn't expect, you know, the Pennsylvania Dutch, roots, I mean, I, maybe I should have with the name,

[00:33:21] Jedidiah: Oh, yeah.

[00:33:22] Jay: but, you know, it's a cool story. It's just kind of like persistence and trying things and like finding stuff you're passionate about and then like, learning and teaching.

So, I think there's a lot of good lessons in there for people. Thank you for being on, and we'll catch up again soon. All right.

[00:33:37] Jedidiah: Awesome. I appreciate it. Thank you, Jay.

[00:33:39] Jay: man. I'll see you, buddy.

Later. 

[00:33:40] Jedidiah: you. 

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