A self-sustainable Future for BetaJester
BetaJester Ltd was founded in May 2015 by three graduates of the University of Hull. They work to help businesses looking to use games and digital experiences to improve their brands and products. We spoke to Co-founder and Technical Lead Adam Boyne about their journey, what pitfalls they’ve overcome in the past year and what the future looks like for the fellow Yorkshire firm.
Our natural ways of working lent themselves quite well in terms of our navigation of the whirlwind year that took a lot of use by surprise. We had all done some WFH previously, and being an almost entirely digital company the conversion wasn’t too taxing. We didn’t really slow down in terms of development, realistically the major issues have been in the form of a lack of spontaneous collaboration i.e. we aren’t in the same office so we can’t just see when one of us is struggling or grab each other to work on problems together.
Another issue has been the lack of events, not purely because we enjoy attending events, but over time a lack of physical events has resulted in a lack of networking which, in turn, has meant fewer spontaneous meetings which would have otherwise resulted in additional work. We have had to work to utilise our digital networks to create and chase leads to make up for the lack of in person meetings, but it is still noticeable.
In that same vein, we wanted to take our digital marketing a step further and took on a work placement individual who helped us set up a Google Business page and start a newsletter. Each of these was to help us try to reach more people, and by extension make them aware of our services. Following the end of the placement, we’ve not really seen a significant change in incoming requests, but I think that’s more because marketing needs to be sustained over time to make a true impact.
2021 is an exciting prospect for us and we’ve doubled down on reaching out to our contacts and networking groups to raise awareness of our offering. We’re also looking at taking on more projects involving IP, as we want to become more self-sustainable as the year goes on.
Over 2020 we saw very little by way of growth, which, given the year it was we were happy to sustain our progress from the previous year. We definitely want to use this year to grow our team and business, but how successful we will be in that regard will come down to opportunities that appear in our circles. We are currently working on a few opportunities which should help us to rapidly expand and develop over the next six months.
It’s often difficult to showcase our AR/VR work over conference calls as people cannot see what we see, but we have some exciting plans on the horizon to combat this! We’re exploring ways to join calls whilst using AR/ in VR so that we can introduce our work whilst still remaining remote. This should bring an aspect of novelty and innovation to client calls whilst also presenting a real business use case that can help us demonstrate our capacity for developing immersive solution.
Make sure to keep an eye out for some exciting stuff coming from BetaJester this year! If you’d like to collaborate on our blog and tell us how you’re keeping things fresh in 2021, get in touch!