To many creating a business is an intimidating feat. The process is long and complicated and it can be difficult to know where to start, yet this has not deterred Jenny Caplan who is currently developing her business Jukiyo.
What is Jukiyo?
Jukiyo is a social project platform on which people can create and collaborate on complex creative projects. On the website, they can find people with various creative backgrounds and relevant experiences needed to further a project. For example, a game developer could search for an animator or other relevant positions which they might not be able to find in their current networks. The teams can be managed using different chat channels and organisational tools which keeps everything organised. Jukiyo is similar to social media in that it has groups and chats encouraging the social aspect of the website yet also has a professional side on which companies will advertise using agile framework management systems. There are six different phases to the project: Social, educational, professional, creating, AR and VR although the last three are expansions and it is the first three which will be the main focus of the site. There are also varying ranks amongst the members. There are the people who make the projects and the people who join the projects, at both amateur and professional level. Eventually, Jenny hopes to be able to set up a company studio for game or animation.
The difficulties of starting a business
Jenny studied Computer Arts at Abertay University and is now doing Game Art and Animation in the USA. Due to her being a game artist she finds she is more comfortable as a developer, therefore she focuses more on the planning of the project. However, financial struggles are an ongoing problem she must face. Companies will generally not invest in a project that is not currently operating, yet these kinds of websites take a lot of money to develop. Banks will not give out loans to web designers as they are not offering a product so there is no physical object to display, and funding competitions similarly favour products over websites. Jenny realised she needed a partner or other people to be working with her to kickstart Jukiyo as it would be impossible for her to take on this large, complicated and expensive project by herself.
Due to the overwhelming size of her project, Jenny has decided to narrow it down to marketing for Indie game companies to start with in order to generate revenue which will then be used on her main business. She runs Facebook groups with a user base of over 300 000 members which she started in 2014. She plans to move them to her own website on which Indie game companies will be advertising their new releases as they all harbour an interest in games and animation. Depending on how many of her users go and buy the game through the affiliate link, she will get a certain percentage of profit.
Jukiyo today
Although Jukiyo is still only at market validation stage, Jenny already has her own website. She has created the social aspect of it but hasn't been able to add all of its features yet as she isn’t a web designer and has had to teach herself how to code and create everything. Being an admin on Facebook groups and having to manage different moderators in different timezones and training and interviewing them made Jenny realise she wanted to manage some kind of website in the future, through which she came up with the idea of creating her own platform last year. She attended Abertay Bell Street Ventures, a fast track business course run by Coca-cola. This is an intense program for business start-ups in which she did all the basic planning, Since then it has evolved and become more complicated. She looked into ways of development and took entrepreneurship classes in the US where she got some help and learned web design. Now she is on the Accelerated UK Elevator program which runs for two months. This involves daily business classes in which she talks to various people such as founders of game development companies. Although she sometimes finds talking to the CEOs of big companies slightly intimidating, it is also helpful as she has been pushed out of her comfort zone and has really gone in deep figuring out her business.
Being a woman in business
Fortunately, Jenny did not feel that being a woman put her at a disadvantage when it came to setting up her project despite the fact she was told it would. There is a lot more help for female entrepreneurs now. In fact, there were more women in her cohort than men. The Coca Cola project in which she was involved aims to help 5 million women start their own business by 2020, and have now moved on to 10 million by 2030. However, Jenny has not managed to stay completely sheltered from the reality of sexist discrimination in STEM.
She was originally going to go into mechatronics (robotics) but ultimately decided to go into Computer Arts. This was largely due to the fact she was the only girl in her class doing engineering science and felt left out of groups as no one wanted to team up with her due to her being a girl. She ended up having to do everything herself. Still choosing to look on the bright side of things, Jenny says that at the end of the day this was a good thing because she learnt how to do every part of the project herself, as in the groups the tasks would be split therefore the other students would only end up learning about one small part of it. When making her final decision for her degree she went for Computer Arts as she knew there would be more women and she wouldn’t feel so excluded.
Currently, Jenny is seeking help with prototyping the project and would love to meet talented coders - if you would like to get involved, contact Jenny on LinkedIn!
Jenny is certainly an inspiration when it comes to achieving what you put your mind to and it is reassuring to see that slowly but surely STEM is becoming more inclusive of both sexes. We wish her all the best with her future projects.
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