How Do You Get from Advertising to Product?: A Discussion with Nicco Leone on The Lion's Den Podcast

‍

Transcript:

hi everyone welcome to the Lion's Den once again today we speak with Danny Nathan who's the CEO of Apollo 21 now

Dany started his career in advertising and then at a certain point shifted into product product design product

development product launch and we have a great conversation where we talk through what those things entail designing a

product and launching a product and and really trying to make take a product from never existing to suddenly everyone

knows about it and it's a fascinating fascinating conversation you know with Apollo 21 his company now Danny and his

team um they basically work with companies to identify needs whether

those needs are internal operational needs or external product you know customer facing needs and they Design

Technology Solutions could be mobile apps web apps it could be internal software tools that facilitate you know

better efficiency inside so it's sort of a product meets operation operations and

software consulting company I would say um but unlike other Consulting companies they don't just create the strategy and

then leave they really get embedded uh and make sure that their ideas and their Visions come into reality so really cool

conversation really smart guy you're going to enjoy this one Danny welcome to the lion Den thanks for having me I'm

excited to be here of course of course well I'm I'm pumped to talk to you because I want to dig into Apollo 21 and

product design product strategy all that stuff that you that you do at Apollo 21 and and I really want to dig into it

because I've never done anything like that so my career has yeah I've been like Finance operations a little bit of

systems but more like operational software stuff never product design or anything um so I'm very curious to learn

how it works what your process is how to do it best um but let's start at the

beginning a little bit because you you started your career in advertising is that right I did way back

when okay and so how did that go what what what was that like and why did you

end up getting out of it uh so I started my career in advertising in the early

2000s and I was probably the last batch of people out of AD school that ignored

the fact that the internet existed so it was all magazine news paper TV ads whatever and

um I really I to be frank I got into the world of advertising and found out very quickly that I didn't like it at all um

I I have sort of a I've come to terms with the fact that the most fun you'll ever have an advertising is during AD

school and once you get out into the real world it's sort of a a mean nasty place okay and my biggest frustration

was that I was spending my time making ads that were designed to interrupt

people at inopportune times to sell them something that they didn't want to be sold and it just felt dirty and like

annoying and I don't know you know you sit at home and you watch TV and you go uh commercial break whatever you know

and it's really hard to sort of reconcile that with oh yeah but by the way I spent all day making commercials

and so I uh I sort of took it upon myself to find a way out and landed in the world of uh technology and product

design and all of the fun stuff that you mentioned a moment ago got it okay so I

was looking on your LinkedIn page and so you know once you were out of advertising one of the things I saw on

there is you ended up joining a digital Innovation consultancy called makeable I

know it had a previous name but let's just say makeable and I was reading on the summary there so

it's uh you know everything on product design and strategy engagements

everything from concept to user experience visual design the production of the actual stuff I saw you worked

with General Mills AMX Dyson so what exactly were you doing on these projects

how did that how did that work uh it varied pretty heavily um we were we were

sort of the misfit toy box and people would call us in and effectively you know often they would say to us all

right we've got those guys over there doing our ads we've got these guys over here doing our website or whatever we

want you to come in and tell us what's missing and what are we not thinking of that we could do to have an impact and

so uh it varied it was that vague it was that vague sometimes it was yeah

sometimes it was sometimes it was a little more specific um we helped Dyson launch their bladeless fan product when

it first came out um and I that was a really interesting one we flew out there and had no idea what we were going to be

looking at or what we were going to be working on they just said we want to hire you we have a secret project and

show up here on this date and so we walked in and I mean they literally had like a fan prototype on the table with

like you know a drape over it and so we were still sitting there going like okay what is it and you know we're expecting

a vacuum cleaner or something and of course they pull it back and you know the first time you see one of those things it's just like this ring with a

Bas on it you're like uh cool what is it so uh that was a fun one uh yeah so we

helped with the launch of that we helped um kind of design and launch a number of products for American Express uh we

built an installation for the Museum of Modern Art here in New York that was a ton of fun so um basically folks would

come to us when they wanted something unique and different that sort of shook

things up and that took advantage of the realities of where technology and social

media and all of that fun stuff was now bear in mind this was 20072 2008 you

know in there so the iPhone was brand new social media was kind of finding its

legs and really becoming a thing that everybody started using and it really changed the dynamic of how companies

thought about interacting with customers and people in general and it was the

reason that I enjoyed it so much was that it was um exemplary of the opportunity to shift away from the kind

of interruptive advertising model that I had grown so frustrated with and so I I

was in hog heaven when I was there um and it was just a it was such a liberating experience to work with

brands of the caliber that you've just described doing things that were not can you make us a TV spot to sell our

platinum card or whatever it was and so um it was a ton of fun and a huge

learning experience for me yeah so so with the Dyson example um it looks like

what you get so what you said is you did like a big Global product launch so what does that mean a global product launch

is that figuring out all the different distribution channels of your messaging

to hit the right people like what is it yeah that was where should we launch it

when how should we get it in front of people uh you know should we spend money on a media buy or is there some other

way to interact with customers and to make them aware of the new offering um

and effectively effectively they said here here's a thing we want to sell X number

of them by you know I I don't remember the dates and months and stuff at this point it's been a while but you know we

want to sell X number of them in the next six months like tell us how to do it and so you know at this time as I

said social media was really finding its footing and so the ideas of influencer marketing were in their infancy and were

extremely effective at the time and so um we we worked with Dyson to create and

sort of package up uh these unique additions of the new fan and they they came in these really cool gift boxes and

it was all sorts of like it was fun little science experiments that you could do with your kids using the fan

and we had like a a cast fan blade in there that was like in memorium of the

you know the old school bladed fan um and there was like uh there was like

this parachute that you could attach to the fan and the fan would spin but it was so smooth that this like parachute

would just hang out in front of it and kind of do this thing uh as it moved back and forth and so we created these

really unique boxes that had the fan and a bunch of acrs in them and then we uh

sent them to a whole bunch of influential bloggers and people in the social media space and things like that

and we held Roundtable discussions with James Dyson and those people so that they could sort of meet the man and hear

from him why they decided to build a fan and then we held a number of events and

built a almost like a museum or a traveling exhibit that um showcased the

science behind the fan and why it was better than you know the thing that we were all used to getting at Bed Bath and

Beyond or whatever and so it was it was really kind of a mixed media experience that was surrounded with quasi marketing

all focused on getting people to talk about the fan and share it on blogs and

things like that so that it would gain traction and awareness when they went to launch I see okay yeah that is actually

fascinating it's like taking something that didn't exist previously and overnight trying to turn it into

something that feels like it's always existed because everybody knows about it and everybody's exactly yes that's a

great characterization interesting okay so I'm I'm scrolling up a little bit on your

LinkedIn page and I'm seeing I'm seeing up above that it looks like after your time at at makeable um I guess you were

probably a pro at a lot of this ux UI design stuff because I'm seeing I want a

nom and I'm seeing date night is so now you're at the point in your career where you're starting to just offshoot

independently these like different apps and tools and services and stuff yeah that's exactly where I was so I spent

about five years at makeable and eventually left because I felt like I had spent five years coming up with some

really fun amazing ideas for a bunch of other people but it had gotten my brain churning about you know okay what what

else could we do and you know hit a moment of of well why do I have to be beholden to somebody else to make that

happen let's go and create and so I want and N was kind of a fun little side project it was effectively Pinterest for

recipes but it launched before Pinterest did and then of course Pinterest came along and as I like to say they ate our

lunch um yeah but exactly anyway so you know that was

a fun experiment we uh it got really popular in South America of all places for some reason until we had uh I don't

know 15 20,000 users down there and um you know we played with that for a little while and then date night is was

the first startup that I really went out to pursue as like okay I'm going to do this startup thing as opposed to just

kind of make a fun toy to put out in the world and so um my then girlfriend uh and I started that one we

had met online at a time when this was pre- tender pre-app dating it was when online dating was like you know a big

old profile and all of that stuff and um we sort of had this aha moment of well

there's a lot of people who are meeting online now and that's becoming much more the norm or at least acceptable what

happens when people who have met online are now in a committed relationship to one another but are used to thinking

about and building relationships online how can we continue that Trend into the world of uh I'm now in a relationship

and so date night is was a platform designed to both remind people in

committed relationships and then help them discover date opportunities so so that they could whatever keep the fire

alive you know sort of not fall into the Trap of yeah Netflix and pizza tonight

or whatever it was right okay cool so you were basically it was like a a massive Marketplace I guess

we could call it of a bunch of different date ideas and were there like coupons and table availabil so it was it was

partly coupons it was partly reservations it was date ideas and it was a mixture of Discovery and content

opportunities so um we were doing a lot of uh interviewing couples in relationships to learn about what date

night meant to them and what qualified as a date night and what didn't things like that and then um the platform would

allow you to specify some interests and part of what made it unique is that we created it as kind of a dual connected

account thing so I had an account my girlfriend had an account but those two accounts were associated with one

another and so it would look at it and go oh you know Danny likes to go and walk in the park and have a great

cocktail and you know his girlfriend likes to go to the beach and I don't know whatever try new restaurants here's

interesting ways to combine all of those or some of those interests into an experience that can happen in a day or

an evening or whatever it was and so we would sort of match you up and then kind of programmatically plan out your date

of like hey make a dinner reservation here Wander over here and grab a drink at this really great cocktail bar and

then finish the night with a show at whatever or something like that that's actually kind of Genius because then

nobody feels like oh I guess we're doing your idea for date night tonight or my oh this is this is my week we get to do

what I want it's like mix a little bit of what everybody wants cool cool okay

um are you are you married now or do you still have a girlfriend uh I am married to that girlfriend you're married to

that girlfriend do you guys still maintain your date nights we try to uh you know as as we've

gotten older and life has gotten busier uh we have perhaps not been quite as good about it but you know we we still

think back to those days and try to make a point of getting out and doing things that are you know specifically

purposefully designed around letting us sort of shed the work week and you know enjoy one another's company good good

yeah I I'm terrible I I my my wife and I don't do date night nearly enough we say we need to and then weeks pass we're

like yeah we gotta get out there yeah my biggest take away from that was uh she made it very clear that Ikea did not

count as a date what if you lay in one of the beds together and like watch a movie or

something that it could that might that might have Twisted it around I don't I don't remember exactly how it came up we

were uh we we had to make an Ikea run for some reason and uh it was while we

were working on date night is and I cracked some stupid joke about you know oh look we got date night in this week

she gota gave me this look like yeah never say that again that's funny all right I'm

scrolling up on LinkedIn still skipping ahead a little bit maybe um design Sprint Consultants so now you started

did you found that one so that was your company okay and it was the name says it

all so you're basically what it sounds like yeah so uh are are you familiar with the design Sprint

process not in detail I mean I understand what it means but not in detail got it so a design Sprint is a um

a process that was created out of Google Ventures and it's basically a onewe kind of Deep dive Workshop into hey we have

this problem here's the opportunity that we see how do we go about solving that and then actually create a prototype of

it and test it with real users and the whole process is condensed into about five days and it's an incredibly

valuable and worthwhile process especially when applied in the right way and um we had been running a number of

them and decided to just sort of formally create a a thing around that

okay got it and is do you find that that's like the best way to do like ideation and design early on or uh it is

a process that I believe in and that I still utilize to this day I don't think that I think it's really hard to call

something the best way uh especially when you're talking about building new products and the ventures that are there

to support them um it works differently every time and

part of the pain and joy of entrepreneurship and Venture building and new product development is figuring

out what's going to work this time and so we do still lean on the design Sprint process as a way to explore

possibilities and to test them quickly but there are other tools in the toolkit that we have learned to layer in and

sort of mix and match into the into the mix okay gotcha and so at that at design

Sprint Consultants were your clients mostly startups or were you also working with some like corporations

it was a pretty good mix so we did some work with the corporate insurance company we did some work with some ad agencies we did work with a number of

different startups it was it was surprisingly diverse in terms of uh the types of clients that were interested in

trying out that process and seeing how it could work for them okay cool all right so now I'm skipping forward to

early 2021 so this is now we're getting to Apollo 21 yep um which is the

business you're currently running so tell me a little bit about AP 21 so Apollo 21 is an innovation and

product design studio and basically we work with clients anywhere from idea

stage startups up to Fortune 100 companies and generally we help them do any of three things so we help ideate

and then build technology that they will sell to their customers we help them assess internal

processes and then build technology to help them with workflow management and

uh operational efficiency and managing data and marketing and all sorts of things like that and then the last thing

we do is help companies understand and create an innovation strategy that um

makes sort of the operational and the cultural side of that uh doable and tangible and you know moves Innovation

Beyond just a talking point and into something that is repeatable and actionable within the

organization got it okay okay and and something I was seeing on your website that I don't know if I totally

understand is this concept of venture driven growth so what do you mean by

that so Venture driven growth is the idea especially in larger organizations

that um Innovation and opportunities for scale don't have to come explicitly from

things that are created within your own walls but rather uh companies can begin to think and act almost more like a

venture capital firm where they can support outside companies in the development of something that aligns to

their Core Business and then utilize that investment as either what I think

of is almost like an insurance or a hedge against their own future so if you think about a really large company um

you know supporting a startup for example that might end up being a disruptive element in their own industry

there's two ways to look at that you could either try to combat that startup and prevent them from Gaining market

share in order to protect your own Market Market or you could invest in them and help them grow so that their

success becomes your success and that way even if they do start to chip away at your user base your customers you

know things like that you still win because you're invested in their

success interesting okay so it's sort of the um

Microsoft they own Bing right and then they obviously had this massive investment in chat GPT okay so it's sort

of that that kind of thing um yeah it's the it's the thinking that surrounds uh

why might we choose to invest and fund outside companies to help our own growth as opposed to sort of pulling up the

drawbridge and going nope we're only goingon to focus on what's Happening inside the house and so is that so when

you have like a a you know larger organization that you're working with is this sort of part of your engagement

with them is encouraging Venture driven growth and sort of teaching them how they might go about that yeah basically

and it's not not every single engagement kind of lands in that area but it's always something that we keep in mind and it's a huge opportunity that we see

especially for larger organizations and so even if you haven't brought us in to help develop a venture driven growth

strategy there's a really good chance that we'll start pointing things out and start kind of uh looking at how those

opportunities might be manifested in whatever it is we're we're doing and so you know one of the ways that we look at

that um is the development of joint ventures the development of new Revenue lines for example so you know a lot of

companies kind of go okay well um you know we do this at our core how do we go

and find a new customer Market that aligns to our core business but that we

can't currently serve and so often that comes to Bear through the creation of something new and that could be

something new that you own and operate wholly or it could be something that you work with an outside company be at a

startup or another highly established organization to create and own again for

the benefit of everybody involved fascinating huh yeah I want to

pick your brain on that maybe later um it's a it's a very cool idea okay so

going back to the a couple of the other things you said that you guys do so the first thing I I think you said was

ideate and Design Technology products solutions that kind of thing which I

guess would be more like customer facing sorts of things and then the second one was like internal software

and Technology to make internal processes more efficient so

exactly what would you say the your split is between those two in terms of

like which one you spend more of your time on oh that's a good question

um maybe 6040 in favor of the the kind of internal side of things um and not

okay yeah yeah interestingly and it's not necessarily by choice I think we've just we've had a decent number of

clients that have come to us or been referred to us because we've been successful in that space and so you know

we've we've developed a bit of a reputation around being uh capable of helping companies solve those types of

challenges and one of the things that really differentiates us from other quote unquote Consulting companies um

and if you talk to anybody who's worked with Consultants one of the biggest complaints is usually well they came in

you know they learned a bunch and then they handed us a big stack of slides and said well here you should go and do this

and then they leave and the you should moment in my experience tends to be really frustrating for people because

cool I should well how do I you know how do I make that a real thing and not just

a a you should and so where we differentiate ourselves is we will help discover the you should but we bring all

of the uh necessary capabilities along for the ride in terms of and we can help

you create it and here's how we would do it and here's the technology required and here's how it's going to integrate

with your existing technology etc etc and so not only can we help you figure out what's broken and how to fix it but

we can then make that a reality gotcha so if we talk about the

internal you know operational efficiency stuff um one of those projects like what would be an example of one of those

projects are we talking about like rolling out a new project management tool or is it okay it could be um but

generally speaking you know project management is is one way to look at it but generally speaking the things that we're creating are um highly bespoke for

the needs of that particular organization and so I'll give you two examples um one we had a financial

services company that came to us and their original kind of problem statement was very simply help we're drowning an

email and that was it and so we spent about a month in Discovery with them to

uh interview a bunch of the internal stakeholders to understand where those emails were coming from etc etc and to

make a long story short what we discovered was they're drowning an email because their entire process was email

when you need this email Bob when you need that email Jane email email email well of course you're gon to drown an

email if that's the only way that you do anything and so what we ended up doing with them was working to Define what the

in this case the three most used processes were internally and then we built a piece of technology uh that

effectively forc them and guided them through the use of that process and put

everything at their fingertips so in this case the financial services company was um a money manager for high net

worth individuals and so uh they were running thousands upon thousands of transactions every day and it was

anything from here's my mobile bill pay it to I just bought a new I just bought

an LLC from somebody or a company from somebody go and spin up a new LLC make the bank transfer pay them get it all

stood up get all the legal stuff like go do everything for us and so what we built was a highly flexible system that

would track through every single transaction and all of the associated documentation and then notify the right

people at the right time within the organization and outside of the organization to get all of the ne necessary um sign-offs and approvals and

then go through and execute the transaction and in the process would track every single movement within the

system so that had a super robust audit Trail and if anything ever went wrong or a client called and said hey this ended

up in the wrong place they could literally track back to the date the time the transaction the person that executed it who gave permission for it

etc etc and really run their business on that and so it moved all of the communication off of email and into a

purpose-built system um similarly we had a client in the remote guarding space so think

hundreds of properties each with tens of cameras and sensors and microphones all

being monitored by like three people in a single location remotely and similarly

they came to us not because they were drowning an email but because they had found product Market fit by cobbling

together a few disparate pieces of technology that were already available on the market and they had reached a

point where in order to scale they were going to have to hire two or three more people for every new client just to

support and kind of manage all of the inbound alerting of a cat just ran across the screen a dude's trying to

break into a car at this apartment complex you know and kind of help figure out okay we don't need to send an alert

for the cat but we do need to do something about the guy trying to break into the car and so we again built from

scratch a full operational platform that took in all of those different feeds

prioritized them in the background based on what was being recognized in the camera uh through computer vision and

artificial intelligence and then managed all of the alerting to the three or four people that were sitting in the command

center so that they could pay attention to the guy trying to break into the car but not worry about the cat walking

across the screen for example wow crazy yeah okay do you often

do you often find that you're building from scratch when you're doing these sorts of things uh most of what we build

ends up being from scratch with a slight caveat which I'll get to in just a second here but usually when somebody

comes to us they're asking us to build something that just isn't available off the shelf and so it really necessitates

building from scratch the caveat however is we do have a piece of foundational technology that we own called mission

control which is not so much like it's not a SAS platform where you could go and sign up for it and just start using

it tomorrow instead I liken it to um kind of like a box of Legos so we've

looked at all of the different projects that we've done for a variety of clients and said okay everybody needs user

management everybody needs data ingest some people want project management kind of views things like that and so we've

built modules for all of those things and based on a project that comes in we sort of dump the box of Legos on the

floor pick out the pieces that we want put them together build whatever New pieces they need and now we have new

pieces that are part of the toolbox and we put it all back together for them and keep going makes total sense okay um

switching over to the when you're helping a client develop a sort of customer facing tool um so what what

kind of tool would that look like are we talking more like web app when we're talking down or what it is generally

some sort of application whether it's web or mobile or desktop it frankly kind of doesn't matter to us we're we're

happy to play in all of those spaces um but that is generally often that's

looking for some sort of new new way to engage with customers be it a new Revenue line or a new kind of media-

driven offering so uh again to give you a couple of examples we worked with a client for about a year and a half that

is in the rodeo space of all things and you know Rodeo is not exactly the the Bastion of technology and so um you know

their goal was to bring a technology oriented experience to the world of

rodeo and so we we actually did both types of projects for them we built a ton of internal software for managing

the operations and production of rodeo events and then we also built for them a mobile application that was effectively

ESPN for Rodeo and so that was a way for them to engage both fans and athletes

create more connectivity between those two groups and then also to help people become aware of what events were

upcoming give them a place to watch those via live stream uh check out what the standings are at any given time

during the season things like that um so that was specific to them we had another

client you should do you should you should find a way to integrate that with all of the mechanical bulls and all

sorts of bars around Texas and get the score how long people were able to stay on the

mechanical B there there be a rank that's fun I like that exactly what

was the other one you had another example uh yeah the other example that I can offer is um we have a client in the restaurant space and they were primarily

direct a consumer and were looking to create a new Revenue line and so we helped them ideate and build a B2B

catering offering that took advantage of what made them unique which was um they

are effectively a ghost kitchen that operates about 30 different restaurant Brands all delivery only all out of a

single kitchen and so the advantage and the huge differentiator for their catering offering was you could order a

burger I could order sushi and it all shows up at the same time in one order got it very cool yeah this is

awesome stuff so okay I want to switch to um I just have to ask you this question before we like run out of time

yeah please so so AI is big buzz word you know yeah you

know you know more about it than I do I'm sure so I mean what's your take on it is uh are we all going to be on

universal basic income not working anymore in 10 years or what's going on uh I don't know if I'll go so far as to

say that I think that AI is here it is absolutely going to change the way that

we view the world and the way that work gets done the biggest thing that I tend to tell people is it's not coming to EAS

your job tomorrow um and the more you can learn what it is capable capable of

of how to use it and how to take advantage of it in whatever role you're in the more protected you will be and

the more time you will have to figure out how to integrate it into your life and or protect yourself against you know

being eaten alive by it and um you know we get a fair number of clients that come to us and say oh my God AI is here

we need it we don't know what to do and the reality is we're still very early most of the applications that we're

seeing for AI are they're excuse me they're useful they're interesting

they're exciting to play with and they are toys like the big changes in AI are

things that I think we haven't even thought of yet you know the the beautiful promise that is AI really

isn't oh it can help write a tweet or a paper for you or whatever it's right the

impact is going to be in the mass scale change of how things get done and we're

a little ways off from that still got it have you taken some of the toys and started integrated into that Lego set

you had mentioned earlier oh absolutely we're we're playing I I use AI every

single day full stop um and it's it's anything from um the ability to scale

content creation for the purposes of SEO for example so programmatic SEO is a

huge talking point these days and it's usually reserved for uh you know AB

comparisons things like that so if you look at like a a clutch or a G2 where it's you know which is better substack

or beehive you know automatically they will create a page that's substack versus beehive because they know

somewhere out there somebody's going substack versus beehive on on Google and so part of what's interesting is the

ability to then do that at scale for Content that is not comparative but rather is uh you know is generative in

nature in terms of how can we drive more traffic to our website so that people

learn about 21 or whatever else that use case might be interesting okay well the

I want to wrap things up here the the examples that you gave um of the different companies it was restaurants

rodeos financial services so I guess it's safe to say you work with any industry we are industry agnostic

industry agnostic and any size company larger companies okay any siiz company

any industry um and you'll just fit the engagement to the need sounds good yeah will fit the engagement to the need

really what it comes down to is if you have a problem that you are trying to solve or an opportunity that you're trying to crack and Technology can play

a role in that then we can help and really where where we're differentiated

is in the Consulting plus execution side of things so we are not order takers uh

we really are not thrilled about projects or somebody comes to us and says here's a giant list of requirements could you go make them live um we can

yes but it's boring and we don't like to we like to get involved and collaborate deeply with our clients to understand

what they're trying to accomplish and why and what the ideal outcome is and then help work with them to figure out

how to get to that outcome awesome okay cool well I'm going to link to your website which I believe

is apoll 2.io is that correct yes awesome so we will link there uh in the notes and

otherwise Danny thank you very much for joining me in the liance den my pleasure thanks for having me

‍