Dream Journey Jones is building SEEDstudio with community

Humble Beginnings

As an 80's baby growing up in the inner city of New Haven, Connecticut, I was obsessed with basketball, music, and video games. I was also the family-appointed "techie" who would setup and fix our electronic devices.

As an honors student, I was one of the first in my family to go to college. In 2001, I attended Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) with the goal of becoming a walk-on for the basketball team, and honing my entrepreneurial skills.

Unfortunately, those plans didn’t come to pass as I couldn’t afford out of state tuition during my second year. This led me to begin a career in Sales and indirectly foster my desire to become a founder of my own business in the future.

Finding Myself Through Adversity

Throughout my sales career, it was challenging to find a company that offered innovative products that excited me; especially one that had a culture that aligned with my personal values. So I jumped from job to job, until I eventually stumbled upon an opportunity to start my first side hustle: selling cannabis to my network at my former university.

Everything was going smooth until a string of unexpected events happened: My father passed away, and a couple months later I was charged with conspiracy to distribute marijuana. I ended up being incarcerated for a total of 6 months. Fortunately, that was a blessing in disguise for me as I discovered what I wanted to do with my life during the period.

I became fascinated with the alternative economy that operated within the prison camp I was located at; which inspired me to begin thinking about how to fuse experimental economics with the power of social networking. I was determined to begin my research and development into these spaces once I was released.

Taking a Leap of Faith

In the Spring of 2009, I was finally free from the criminal justice system, and my life’s focus shifted. The majority of my time was spent on learning about and practicing eastern spirituality, doing a deep exploration into economic innovation and technology, and working a part-time seasonal job at the only place that would hire me: a local movie theatre.

After getting laid off as a seasonal worker in February 2010, I was filled with both excitement and fear. Was the Universe trying to communicate with me? What would I do for income? However, I vowed to myself that my circumstances would not hold me back. I was going to create my own future. This was the moment I began to take action toward my dreams of being a full-time entrepreneur.

The Dream Journey

My entrepreneurial adventure started with (1) designing an economic innovation framework called “Producism”, (2) connecting with students at my former university to co-create an idea incubator cooperative that experimented with niche social networks, and (3) creating a personal challenge that forced myself outside of my comfort zone and helped raise awareness about the work we were doing.

This challenge entailed giving away 90% of my belongings to the homeless (only minimalist living), having no home of my own (only couchsurfing), and having no guaranteed income (only freelancing, bartering, and gifting). In exchange for room and board from my supporters, I offered my skills to help them begin building their startup ideas.

This challenge began in Oct. 2010 and lasted until Oct. 2013 when our team received a $50K grant from a successful tech entrepreneur. This adventure was documented as a YouTube series called “The Dream Journey”.

Embracing Failure & Loss

The grant that we received funded a pilot we were developing at my former university, VCU.  The project was called Producia, and it was a social marketplace for cash-strapped college students to find resources to build their creative projects; it used a time-based digital currency instead of traditional money.

Unfortunately, we didn’t reach our goals for the pilot, eventually ran out of funding, and was rejected by all of the accelerators we applied to. I believe we failed because we were too early to the market, the product had a high learning curve, and we focused more on creating new features instead of building community.

Eventually, my co-founders and I parted ways to work on our own digital agencies. I continued to refine my work and skills knowing that I would eventually get back to working on products instead of exchanging my time for income. 

But then another devastating life event happened, my mother died due health complications. I felt lost; the same feeling as when my father died. I needed to channel those emotions into something constructive. I knew then that I had to get back to building my dreams instead of building someone else’s. I was going to start a new venture.

Coming Full Circle

I believe in the saying “the further you go down, the higher you go up”, because it’s been a recurring theme in my life. In the summer of 2018, I was fortunate enough to gain a small inheritance from my mother's untimely death to enable me to focus full-time on building out my ideas and plans, with my new company, SEEDstudio. I took the next 2 years to work on my personal development and a strategy for bringing new products to market...then in early 2020, the Pandemic happened.

I started to witness a lot of R&D work I did back in the early 2010s, begin to become more and more mainstream: crowdsourcing, new types of startup incubation, alternative funding, impact entrepreneurship, the creator economy, crypto, online learning, niche social networking, startup societies, new types of gaming, and more. Now in 2021, I feel like the world is now ready for this new frontier of economic innovation...and here we come.