Video game startups are popular and can also be popular failures, but one Midwest founder of a company creating products for Minecraft is telling others how to start up the right way.
Video games and role-playing games are big business, but video game entrepreneur TJ Nissen, founder of Network Nirvana, says there’s “about 1,000 and one people” also attempting to start a business in it right now.
On Tuesday, Nissen gave a lecture titled “From bedroom to boardroom: my journey to create a gaming empire,” livestreamed from Dakota State University on YouTube.
As the founder of a profitable gaming company Network Nirvana, Nissen emphasized how important it is for Midwest startups to get connected with a good set of business owners, find a unique product that’s cheap to market and to sell it to a niche crowd.
More:FAST launches grants for startups and small businesses in South Dakota with grants up to $10k
Partner up with ‘walking phonebooks’
A good place to start is at a university like DSU, Nissen said. He started his business while he was still a student at the University of Northern Iowa’s business center.
“Anything in the gaming industry is getting to be extremely hard,” Nissen told the Argus Leader. “You need that support.”
Nissen joked that although he shared his first small office with a small college painting business and spent a lot of time inhaling fumes, the connections he made were the difference between failed ideas to profit and eventually a full-time business.
“It’s moderately easy to learn how to write some code,” Nissen said. “But jumping through all of the business hoops like taxes, state business laws and all that kind of stuff is a whole different ball game.”
Nissen grew products in conjunction with the UNI student business incubator program, “which helped him realize he could do what he loved as his career rather than working for someone else,” Katherine Cota, director for economic development at DSU, said.
His Network Nirvana website gets thousands of hits from Minecraft fans looking for new “worlds” or levels to play in, and is a full gaming company.
More:Startup Sioux Falls receives $1M to encourage entrepreneurship in underserved communities
Create a niche product and fail fast
Nissen also said it took him some luck and plenty of time to turn his passion into profit.
His first attempt selling a product “failed miserably” and his first attempts, creating board games or even Dungeons & Dragons products, didn’t sell well either.
At a wedding for his former German teacher, Nissen happened to sit down at a table of librarians, who spoke to him about his worlds he created within Minecraft, an extremely popular video game. The librarians and his own teacher told Nissen about licensing out his video game worlds — those areas of Minecraft with plenty of details for players to create or play the game in — to libraries throughout Iowa.
More:Sioux Falls kombucha producers open kitchen, storefront on Minnesota Avenue
He jumped at the chance to change from a new tabletop game or video game products of his own and trying to compete in that market to a niche: a game within a game.
NirvanaOnline worlds ranging from 1960s to Chernobyl things licensed out to 11 libraries at one point. Nissen also taught classes around the Midwest’s libraries showing gamers how to code and write their own worlds.
Create a network of customers
Now Nissen tells students to create super fans and to be loyal to those fans and customers because they’re all that’s left if other revenue models start to slip.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, all library events and in-person video games at branches stopped. Nissen’s source of money was gone in an instant. So, Network Nirvana created a Patreon account, which is a subscription service, so fans could log in and continue playing the game from home starting at $5 per month.
“Even now, I still stay up until about five in the morning writing code trying to perfect the worlds,” Nissen said with a laugh. “I’m probably the worst business person in the world… But it works if you don’t give up.”
Network Nirvana is offering free trial games on its server until Nov. 19 to try out a world.
