Locked on Local Episode 6: Jeff Mundee

For 15 years, Jeff Mundee has been a game programmer, programming during the day, and working independently on gamified software user interfaces in his spare time. For the uninitiated, a gamified software is simply a software that performs a task – e.g., producing financial reports – that has been set up to play like a video game.

Most of Mundee’s independent work came from conversations with people in his network. About one out of ten of those conversations lead to actual work. Then, in 2020, when covid hit, it was more like ten out of ten, and the scope of the projects got bigger and bigger.

Mundee had to make a decision then, whether to continue with the norm, or to begin a company of his own.

That’s when he launched Spandrel. Since its inception, the company has designed archeology software, augmented reality (AR) library software, and a lot more, completing over 16 projects in 2022 alone. The main difference in Spandrel’s software from conventional software is that the user interface is gamified.

Spandrel’s ability to handle complex projects has steadily increased. Many of these projects need to be done quickly and on an extreme budget, like the program Sefira. It’s a 3D AR version of the National Library of Israel. The project required building a complicated augmented reality app (like Pokémon Go). The project needed the capability to function in multiple languages, and and it had to interface with a “crazy weird” library API (the part of a software program that talks to other software programs).

It should have taken a ton of resoures, but Spandrel completed it in a week thanks to the collective experience of a diverse team. “We already had someone who knew exactly how to get the AR going … we knew exactly what hardware, we knew exactly what software, we knew all the plugins … we already had UI pieces on hand.”

Mundee’s team has grown to five full-time and twelve part-time employees, including programmers, illustrators and composers.

He sees his company as a way to serve more organizations in the local economy on smaller budgets.

Serving this sector comes out of Mundee’s passion for interesting projects, and is happy to continue with Spandrel for as long as there is work: “For me personally, I have a hard time saying no to cool things. [If someone says"] ‘You wanna do this really cool thing that’s probably never been done before, at least not like this?’ what am I going to do, say ‘no’?”

Listen to the full story on the Ignite Locked on Local Podcast here.