Jeric Jones acknowledges his love for gaming — including board games — might be seen as “nerdy.”
“I really like the game Settlers of Catan,” Jones told Technical.ly.
It also might be, for him, a new income stream.
Jones, a New Orleans native with over a decade of experience as a software engineer, has taken his passion and turned it into a startup idea.
The 44-year-old new father, who splits his time between New Orleans and Toronto, where his wife lives, works for an international firm that specializes in SAP consulting while he builds his new venture, Band Controller.
His device is a removable controller that attaches to a smartphone screen for enhanced gaming. The idea was good enough for Jones and his business to be admitted into the IDEAinstitute, a program from the New Orleans-based startup accelerator Idea Village.
He’s graduated from the program and is in talks with manufacturers and marketers about launching the company. “It’s an exciting time,” he said.
For this edition of How I Got Here, Technical.ly spoke with Jones about growing up with tech ambitions, graduating from college while being displaced by Hurricane Katrina, starting his career and launching his startup.
Where did your tech journey start?
When I was around 10 to 12 years old. One of my cousins, who worked as a geophysics engineer for Shell, introduced me and his younger brother to creative tools like Photoshop and showed us that these were the kinds of tools professionals used to make things. I was already interested in video games, so I gravitated toward graphic design, but I felt that if I wanted to seriously learn programming, school was the best path.
In high school, I attended two schools at the same time. I went to L.E. Rabouin for liberal arts and the New Orleans Center for Science and Mathematics, now Sci High, for science and math. We spent half the day at one school and half the day at the other, taking buses between campuses. The STEM program offered a lot of hands-on learning, though it didn’t have a software engineering track, so I didn’t really get significant exposure to software development until college.
I was displaced during the storm. It became much harder to balance school and work.
I attended the University of New Orleans and majored in computer science. I knew going in that I wanted to strengthen my software skills to complement my background in design. The program was challenging, but it gave me a very strong foundation.
Hurricane Katrina interrupted my education. I was displaced during the storm. It became much harder to balance school and work. Afterward, I could only take a few classes at a time while working to support myself. Looking back, I don’t think you fully understand the gravity of what happened while you’re living through it. It takes years to process the experience and realize how much it changed your life.
During my time at UNO, I also became involved with a student game development club. I had already spent a lot of time reading about game development and collaborating with people online, so I was able to help strengthen the group and work on some interesting projects.
What was your first job in tech and what do you do for work now?
My first professional job was with ReedSoft. I started there as an intern and was eventually hired full time. The company specialized in financial process automation, using OCR and workflow software to capture information from documents and move it through financial systems with minimal human involvement.
Over time, the company was acquired several times, and my role evolved from customer-facing consulting work into serving as an escalation resource for other engineers. When teams encountered difficult technical issues, I worked directly with development teams to help resolve them.
Today, I work for a multinational consulting firm specializing in SAP-related financial process automation. I’ve been doing this kind of work since 2012, and my job remains based in New Orleans, even though I now split my time between New Orleans and Toronto with my family.
Tell us about getting into entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship really started for me with games. I’ve always enjoyed making things, including video games and board games, but I never viewed it as a practical career path because the gaming industry seemed volatile and there weren’t many opportunities in New Orleans when I was growing up.
Some friends and I were working on games and realized we didn’t know much about business, so I joined the IDEAinstitute to learn about entrepreneurship. The program introduced me to concepts like customer validation, market research and developing a business model.
Band Controller grew out of my frustrations with mobile gaming. Modern smartphones are incredibly powerful, but touchscreen controls don’t feel satisfying. I bought a budget phone controller and realized physical buttons dramatically improved the experience, but existing controllers are bulky and awkward to carry around.
I also noticed that many games leave unused space on modern phone screens because of aspect ratio differences. That led me to wonder if I could create a controller that interacts directly with the phone’s touchscreen, adding tactile controls without sacrificing portability.
During the IDEAinstitute program, I spent months iterating on the hardware and software through 3D printing.
I had been thinking about the concept since at least 2021. Earlier this year, I found parts I had ordered years ago, built a prototype and tested it. The hardware worked, and I was able to emulate a USB gamepad in software, giving it broad compatibility with different apps.
During the IDEAinstitute program, I spent months iterating on the hardware and software through 3D printing. The device only became fully playable about a week and a half before graduation, but the accelerator helped me make valuable connections. I’ve since met with experienced entrepreneurs, marketers, investors and industrial designers, some of whom have expressed interest in helping with funding, manufacturing and design.
What is your advice for someone getting into tech in New Orleans, or tech entrepreneurship?
If you’re interested in entrepreneurship, I definitely recommend joining an accelerator.
More broadly, focus on building something you genuinely want to create. Along the way, you’ll encounter tools, skills and processes you’ve never used before, and you’ll need motivation to learn them. If you’re only learning something in the abstract, it’s easy to lose interest. But if you’re trying to bring an idea you care about to life, you’ll naturally put in the work to fill in those gaps.
Think about what you want to make, learn how to do it from start to finish and get your hands dirty.
What games and video games do you like?
I tend to gravitate toward strategy games, especially real-time strategy titles. I’ve played enough of them over the years that I can usually jump into one and do pretty well.
Growing up, I also loved fighting games. In New Orleans, it seemed like every arcade, bowling alley and even pizza places had a crowd gathered around a Street Fighter II machine, and those are still some of my favorite gaming memories.
