From Starting Her First Company In Middle School To Founding A Consulting Business And Game Company Making Waves. Here’s How She Did It!

Kristen Daniel grew up admiring business and longed to be her own boss. She enjoys experimenting with new ideas and collaborating with family and friends who have run businesses.

Daniel founded her first firm in middle school and went on to start two more, KnowSkill and Pentorship, during her professional career. Her third venture, Heard It All Before, is a game company inspired by her DJing experiences with family and friends. She founded the company during the pandemic, when everyone was confined to their homes.

According to Scheller College of Business, she now combines her game firm with advising brands with product strategy, business model creation, and CEO coaching.

Heard It All Before, billed as the first game of its sort, blends Daniel’s love of business and music. The goal of Head It All Before, she says, is to open up new avenues for music discovery through gameplay centered on music sampling.

The game allows users to “listen to song snippets via a QR code and race against the clock to name music originals and samples,” she told Scheller College of Business.

“The games are hybrid physical and digital playing experiences designed to bring players of different generations, backgrounds, and music tastes together. Players compete to see who has the best ear for music samples,” she said.

“Ultimately, the game is about sharing stories and discovering more about the sounds they love. We want the art of sampling to be a source of curiosity and joy beyond someone being a music enthusiast. We’re excited for our players to explore back catalogues of artists whose digital footprints have been minimal in the past and to develop insights around it,” Scheller MBA alumna Daniel explained.

Daniel says she got the concept for the game while sitting on the couch during quarantine and looking at her amateur DJ set in her living room.

“The turntables were broken, but my mind wandered to times when I played originals and samples of music for friends and family. That daydream turned into a game idea, which I then prototyped in Canva and started to play with friends and family virtually,” she said.