Meet Jordan Dominguez | Entrepreneur, Cofounder, Software Developer, & Photographer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jordan Dominguez and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jordan, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
To be quite honest I was a born entrepreneur, it only took me until recently in life (and a couple of career switches) to fully realize it. For as long as I can remember I was always creating, building, and selling my skills.

My mother loves to tell people about how at age 5 I was out front of our house setting up shop, not with a lemonade stand like a normal kid, but with a pad of paper offering to draw caricatures for passerby’s.
I don’t think I got too many takers that day on our sleepy suburban sidewalk (at least that weren’t related to me), but it was the early seedlings of a lifetime of creating, building, & “hustling”.

At age 14 I taught myself photoshop and started freelancing doing design work online. My trick was that I would communicate only through email, take payment through PayPal, and they would be none the wiser that they were dealing with a young teen. Looking back I’m sure I was more obvious than I realized, but that didn’t matter, getting a freelance paycheck as a middle schooler I felt on top of the world!

That entrepreneurial mindset, combined with a love of learning and an inability to sit too still blossomed into a wide variety of ventures (along with their complementary learnings/experiences/failures), ranging from agencies to dropshipping stores to subscription box businesses and more.

For college I went to Cal Poly SLO, majoring in business (mostly because I had no idea what I really wanted to do at the time, and figured “everything is a business at its core”), which lead me to marketing. I ended up picking up a minor in psychology before that was all through, mostly out of self-interest, but also partially its applications to marketing, organizational management, and working with others as a whole.

After some time on the business side of an AI startup post-graduation, I fell in love with programming. Long story short, I pivoted careers, learned to code, and then went into a role in software engineering, which I did for 5 years.

My most recent jump – my leap into full-time entrepreneurship – was inspired by that history, a combination of my skills and interests aligning, and a healthy dose of desire to craft my own future and have a more active hand in its creation. That, plus I wanted to work for myself.

In February of 2022, I left my high-paying software engineering job to focus on my own businesses, to be free to do what I want when I want, to create/build full-time, and to make my impact on the world without anything else holding me back.

I am currently working on an e-commerce brand called Luxury Home Bar, my photography business JJD Photography, and a technology startup (with a small team) focused on helping people understand and optimize their time called TimeAlign.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I am kept busy professionally by a wide variety of tasks, and I honestly love it that way. I’ve always been a “wears many hats” kind of person and I think life would get quite boring to me any other way. I am also naturally very curious about the world and how it works, and have succeeded in part because of my ability to learn and apply new things, so I spend a decent amount of time learning and trying to find ways to improve. From design to business to engineering and back again, I’ve always strived to keep a beginner’s mind and continue to stay hungry for new knowledge and new understanding.

That being said, I do tend to try to balance my professional life between making, managing, and marketing (to borrow a few of Paul Graham’s terms), depending on what is most required at the moment. I try to embrace seasonality and life’s natural ebbs and flows, whether that be my personal energy, the “heartbeats” of the work myself or my team is producing, or the seasons of the year themselves.

Funny enough I mainly do photography now as rest from the rest of it, it’s a great creative release and lets me get out of logic & management mode and explore new places, letting my mind work in different ways. I sell prints on my site but only do shoots on a case by case basis to protect my time and energy.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
As a local San Diegan I think the pressure is on here, and I can already hear some of my friends’ judgments…

What I would say is that I love the city of SD and that I’ve always said each of the neighborhoods has its own flavor and unique characteristics. If I had people visiting for a week I’d probably show them around some of the city’s distinct neighborhoods and enjoy what they each have to offer. PB/OB/La Jolla/Downtown/GasLamp/Sea Port/North Park/South Park/Encinitas all pop into my head.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
There are SO many amazing people that deserve a bit of credit and recognition in my story, too many to name for fear of leaving any out. I am blessed to be surrounded by a phenomenal circle of intelligent, passionate, hard-working, caring individuals who have inspired and supported me and who will continue to do so into the future, as I hope to for them.

But the two that deserve a special shoutout are the two that brought me into this world, my parents! They have given me the world over, and are very much the reason for the man standing (typing?) before you.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jordanjdominguez/
https://www.instagram.com/jjdphoto/
https://www.instagram.com/jjdportraits/
https://www.instagram.com/luxuryhomebar_usa

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanjdominguez/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jord4n_j

Other: My business pages: https://www.timealignapp.com/ https://luxuryhomebar.com/ https://jjd.photography/