We were lucky to catch up with Colin Helm recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Colin, thanks for joining us today. Let’s go back in time a bit – can you share a story of a time when you learned an important lesson during your education?

The most important lessons I learned in college was scheduling, organization, and project management. When you start a company, you will need to wear a wide range of different hats to have any chance at success. Whether it be managing finances, selling your concept to investors, selling a future project to potential clients, project management, and marketing. In retrospect, it reminds me of the collegiate experience where you’ll have to balance business classes alongside other subjects that may not be your primary focus such as geology, creative writing, and other required courses. Versatility is critical in such a small team and a willingness to take on new challenges that may not be comfortable or one of your choice.

Founders walk a fine line in early stage startups, with limited financial resources and the need to build each team from the ground up. It is crucial to find capable and motivated cofounders and early employees, as responsibilities will quickly become overwhelming and unmanageable for a solo founder. In both the early stages and the growth stage, planning and organization will be essential for coordinating these various teams in order to maximize return on every dollar spent.

Colin, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I have worked in startups for most of my career, with prior experience with advertising agencies. I loved the creative and exciting environment of the agency world but wanted to help build something from the ground up. I worked at 3 separate startups and went through the Techstars program before deciding to launch my own in 2022. I have always been interested in video games going back to my childhood and wanted to find a way to combine exciting gameplay with education. I’ve always been a history nerd and remember pretending to be sick so I could skip school to watch the History Channel. Video games also fed my passion for the subject and I realized there was a gap in the EdTech market, with brilliant AAA games being developed but educational software lagging behind.

The modern student is very different than those in previous generations. Traditional education systems are still highly reliant on students sitting in a grid of desks and taking notes to later memorize. They are remarkably capable with technology as they were raised with tablets and are accustomed to consuming digital media. Most prefer YouTube to traditional TV and have a plethora of content to choose between. They also play video games at a higher rate than any other generation. Humans lose focus after 15-20 minutes of a lecture due to a lack of involvement. We realized interaction would be key to capture and maintain their attention, traditional documentaries may be a bit slow for some and lack any sort of feedback. To remedy this issue, we are building interactive historical environments in order to immerse the student in a different period of time to allow them to experience life and place themselves in the role of various historical characters. Whether it be a Roman citizen or Senator, we want to give the experience of a digital field trip combined with role play and historical accuracy.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

We initially set out to build two products, a recreational open world Roman game alongside our educational product. Due to the SVB situation and some changes within the team, we decided to focus on our educational product due to the ability to differentiate ourselves and carve out our own niche.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Our pivot from our initial concept was hardly easy, as we had devoted most of our resources to the construction of a combat demo for the open world game. This is not something particularly appealing to higher education, so we had to rethink our go to market strategy and rebrand and rebuild our PR efforts.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://bldngblckstudios.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colin-helm/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/CaesarVerse_io?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
• Other: Both our websites are currently being updated due to our rebrand but the new ones will be codexromanus.com and bldngblckstudios.com

Image Credits
Genzio Media (our amazing marketing agency) https://www.genzio.co/