Scott WILSON: Joticle – Innovations and More

Tell us something about yourself, your background

I grew up in the early years of personal computing when my first laptop around 10 years old was the size of a suitcase and weighed 25 pounds, believe it was the SLT. It was at this time that I grew a deep interest in coding and BASIC and making my little games that mimicked a popular text game at the time, Zork.

Me as a kid explaining to my Dad’s friends the game I developed

As I moved into my teenage years is when I discovered the joys of being an entrepreneur. I had moved into a new community at the time in Laguna Niguel, California and a newfound friend of mine used my Mac 512k to print out lawnmowing flyers. We had zero experience, zero ideas about what we were doing, but we had an idea of how we were going to fund pinball and pizza. With it being such a new community and we were the first ones to canvas our neighborhood with fliers, business boomed. There was an early lesson learned in this venture as we were young and not so aware, quality and dependability mattered to the customer. We could not pull off the cute kids with a lawnmower roll because we had set expectations with our flyer that we were so much more. My friend moved and I lost interest in mowing lawns by myself. Hindsight is I could have brought in a partner and taken over the entire hill over time. Hindsight. My entrepreneurial spirit followed me into college where I pursued Jazz Studies during my first go-around in college.

The musical entrepreneur in me (in the middle)

I see being a musician as very entrepreneurial as it is very risky and requires that you sell your story and image non-stop with little or no support at first. In this phase of life, I learned a lot about marketing, design and pitching my band to people, selling tickets, many things that carry over into business. This was all before the web at first so you had to use your feet and get out there and engage with the community in real person. I have a very storied musical career but never attained superstar status. I was a voting member of the recording academy, been to the Grammy 8 times, released studio albums, won an LA Music award, featured in newspapers and magazines, even made some money. The truth of the matter is, even with all those accolades we never ascended to the next level that a small group of people gets to. This lesson has carried over to my journey with business. Soon after my college Jazz experience I returned to the computer and began to code again and made a career out of that as a full-time employee, but mostly as a consultant. I have worked for very large companies and some mom-and-pop experiences. Being independent has always been a mark of my entrepreneurial spirit, which is why I consulted more than I was an actual employee.

List your ventures with a brief explanation of each

In 2001 I created a software consultancy firm Position Earth that focused on SMB software solutions. We had an 8-year run and then I walked away from that business almost hand in hand with when I walked out of the music industry 2 years later.

In 2010, I left the corporate world after a 2-year stint as a Director of IT for a boutique hotel chain to pursue a family start-up in Prescott Valley, AZ with my parents. We co-located inside an aerospace building, with our main goal to creating ammunition reload company. This lasted 4 years and the exit was ugly, but I learned a lot about starting from scratch, again in an area I had no expertise in.

In 2017, I was researching a software language I wanted to dive into and was so frustrated with how horrible search engines and forums are for researching a topic that it set off a lightbulb in my head. Joticle was born and we have been tenacious enough to raise money and release an MVP and then pivot our model completely and looking at the next stage of our company.

Our first billboard in Phoenix for a contest we had

How/Why did you start as an entrepreneur? What set you off?

Aside from what I mentioned above. I think I am drawn to create something out of nothing and bring an idea to reality. I love the journey way more than the end results. The uncertainty, the risk, the ah-ha moments all add to the alure.