Talking All Things Innovation on the Awakened Titans Podcast

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Transcript:

welcome to awakened Titans podcast with Lily pesu mind-blowing conversations

with influential business Titans sharing how you can manifest abundance love joy

Success Through Quantum Awakening Quantum manifestation Quantum healing Quantum Miracles exponential business

growth and Innovative products and services discover how to leverage Innovation to grow your startup in this

Guest Introduction: Danny Nathan

amazing episode Danny Nathan has helped hundreds of companies focus

on innovation in order to grow and scale their business and he's achieved some incredible results such as helping one

Achievements by Danny Nathan

startup to go from zero to their first 50,000 users and he's helped another

company reduce meetings internal meetings by 40% and he's helped another companies

move Communications from email to internal platforms limiting emails by

92% and like this he has helped hundreds of companies to achieve higher

productivity through Innovation and he's the founder of Apollo 21 a unique

Apollo 21 Overview

company that sits at the intersection of an innovation consultancy and product

design studio the team at Apollo 21 helps clients ideate and build new

products and uh the ventures that support them and guides teams through

through the operational and cultural impacts of fostering an entrepreneurial

spirit and growing a culture of innovation so Danny thank you so much

for coming on this podcast and the first question is what's the secret to your

First Question: Secret to Success

success tenacity not giving up uh starting a business running a business

helping other businesses grow and find success is all very difficult and if you don't have the

thick skin to to kind of bear your way through it then uh just don't start

because it's really hard wow so how can startups and

Scaling Through Innovation

companies um scale through Innovation innovation's a weird word

every company likes to use it every company wants to believe and tell the world that they're being Innovative and

the problem with that is that when you really stop and dig into the actions that they're taking and the way that those Innovation efforts impact

the day-to-day of the business what you start to uncover is that a lot of that is kind of theater or lip service to the

world of innovation as opposed to activities that truly move the needle and so when you look at the way that

companies structure their efforts and measure success and so on and so forth they're focused on metrics and

activities that are born out of efficiency and born out of the need to make everything work as

smoothly as possible and the unfortunate truth is that Innovation isn't smooth it

isn't easy it's messy and experimental and requires lots of trial and air and

so the idea of balancing Innovation and growth through Innovation with the

ideals of um the balance sheets and metrics that run um successful

businesses is always a weird tug of war and you have to kind of figure out how

to play both ends of the Rope during that tug War battle thank you and tell us about the disruptive innovation you

have helped create um while working with these

companies that are disrupting the world yeah um we I'm going to back up a

little bit and explain just enough background to kind of make that make sense but we work uh we are an industry

agnostic company and so we work with a huge variety of companies across anything from Financial Services to

restaurants to sports and everything across the board and so you know for us what it really comes down to is

understanding the core opportunities within those businesses and understanding how those businesses are

aiming to impact the lives of their customers and so through processes like customer development we focus very

heavily on talking to customers to understand where those needs are that will help leverage the existing product

from a company into something new that will solve something that isn't being

solved today for that customer and that's kind of where that Innovation moment comes in but it looks different

every time we do it because of course every one of these companies are focused on something different for a different audience Etc and so we lean heavily on

customer development and we use that as an opportunity to then understand where are the pain points that we're hearing

and how do they align to the core offerings of our client so that we can sort of zero in on those two things and

figure out where the overlap in that vend diagram is and figure out what they can create that works for the business

and benefits the customer to create value for everybody involved wow thank

Real vs Pretend Innovation

you and what's the difference between real disruptive innovation and pretend

Innovation like you were explaining earlier um to me the difference comes down to how you structure your business

in support of what you call your Innovation goals so companies are doing a really good job today of talking about

how they're being innovative there's blog posts and articles and press releases and God only knows what else

that explain you know company X just did this Innovative thing or released an Innovative new AI chatbot or whatever

and you know the reality is that when you look at those things often what they

are is sort of surface level Innovation they're a little spit and polish on the top of whatever already exists so that

they can make it feel like something new that fits the notion of what innovative

means for customers and businesses today and that's all well and good but it is

largely theater you know a little spit and polish on top of everything else isn't going to change the way that

companies are doing business and it certainly isn't going to lead to anything that is uh overtly disruptive

so to speak and so what we spend a lot of time talking with our clients about is understanding clearly what it means

to be Innovative and how the ideals of innovation align to the realities of doing business and and that's where that

kind of tug of war moment that I was talking about a moment ago comes in around okay how do we create that

culture of innovation how do we give people within the organization the freedom and the permission to experiment

at the edges to try weird things to think about what new business models might benefit the company or its

customers and to think about how to bring those things to Life by experimenting as quickly as possible to

mitigate risk to understand the opportunity and to figure out how to

layer in those new things so that they change the way that the company does business and change the way that the

company interacts with customers and the problem space and all of that then comes down to again as I described earlier

sort of the the need for efficiency so as companies grow up and discover

product Market fit they begin to look for moments of efficiency across the

board how do we ring every dollar out of every penny in for example and those end

up aligning to Core Business metrics that look like quarterly earnings which

everybody wants to grow every quarter without fail um shareholder value and growth of shareholder value um

minimizing risk minimizing capital expenditure and ultimately creating

operational efficiency and at face value all of those are wonderful things that will lead to companies that are

operating like well-oiled machines so to speak but again Innovation is a messy

business and experimenting requires trying new things and trying new things inevitably cost money and the reality is

that if you're not willing to spend the money to try new things to figure out where you can mitigate risk and to figure out how you can bring new things

to life then you're not going to innovate full stop you are not going to

create anything beyond topical theatrical Innovation unless you're

willing to get your hands into the muck and to understand that a lot of those efforts are not going to

provide a are not going to provide a return on investment period and the ones that do are going to take years not

quarters to to manifest some sort of return and that's a really difficult thing for an executive team to sort of

wrap their heads around and understand well if it's not going to make a return in the next quarter why should I bother

with it and to me the answer to that is longevity you know if you're not innovating your company is dying because

somebody out there is looking to disrupt your industry and if it's not you that's looking to disrupt your own activities

somebody's going to come up from behind and do it for you thank you so much for that and tell

Disruptive Innovation Examples

us about a case study of a company you worked with in order to create

disruptive innovation and grow it to let's say 50,000 users or any other case

studies you would like to share with us and what steps did the company take in

order to create this disruptive innovation yeah let's actually run with the uh the 50,000 users example because

it's one of my favorites um we have a client or had a client they're they're no longer working with us um in a really

interesting space they were in the world of Western Sports so think Cowboys and rodeos and you know bucking Broncos and

all that fun stuff um they came to us originally because they had a data problem they had acquired a couple of

companies and had a bunch of data in disperate sources and full of csvs and

all the all the random stuff that comes with that and uh the very initial work that we did for them was just helping

them build out a quick data platform where they could understand the data that they had at their disposal and make

use of it and I'll point out that that in and of itself to me demonstrated a

commitment to Innovation there's not a whole lot of companies that look around and say you know what we have this stack

of data and it's just sitting there and we don't know how to access it let's actually take the time and spend the

money to figure out how we can make use of that data so that it will benefit our business and that really set an

interesting tone for the rest of our relationship and what started as that six- week kind of quick and dirty data

project turned into about a year and a half of work together throughout which uh we created a number of different

platforms and services for them many of which were internally focused but one of the most exciting was effectively

building out ESPN for the world of rodeo and so uh the company knew that

Rodeo fans didn't feel like they had a really in-depth touch point to maintain

an understanding of what was happening throughout the rodeo season you know they wanted a way to more easily follow

all of their favorite Rodeo athletes and to pick and choose which Rodeo disciplines they were most interested in

so that they could stay up to date with that and I nodded to the customer development process earlier and one of

the the real benefits to working with that team was they gave us the opportunity to truly execute on the

customer development process and so we had access to Rodeo fans who we could talk to to understand what was missing

in their Rodeo experience and to interview them to understand what would make their experience with Rodeo that

much better and to make it even more interesting we also had access to the athletes to ask them similar questions

and what we found was um we had originally started the project with the expectation that we would be building

two different applications one for Rodeo fans and one for Rodeo athletes and

through that customer development process part of what we found was that it's really difficult to differentiate

between a rodeo athlete and a rodeo fan because many Rodeo fans who watch rodeo

at the professional level participate at the local Regional level for example and they are you know Rodeo athletes

themselves but just on on sort of a smaller scale and so ultimately what we ended up doing was combining the ideas

of the two applications one designed for fans and one for athletes into a singular experience that helped athletes

create and maintain connections to their fans they had control over their own bios and you know could share things out

to their fans who in turn could follow their favorite athletes follow their favorite rudo disciplines Etc and so we

went through all of that ended up designing a really interesting application that was a combination of

you know all of our favorite social things so you of course had your feed where you could see what was going on and you had your bios where you could

see athlete profiles and things like that um and we were also live streaming rodeo events directly into the hands of

consumers and so that was a firstof its- kind application build in the world of

rodeo and took off very quickly we we were fortunate enough to release that app right kind of before and then

leading into two of the major rodeos in the US and it quickly Grew From you know

a little sort of uh newcomer to the uh to the world of rodeo into a 50,000 user

strong community of people who were fans and athletes of rodeo and really were

interested in getting something that they couldn't find elsewhere in the digital space that help them maintain a connection to the sport wow that's so

incredible so which steps should entrepreneurs take in order to create

disruptive innovation in their company um a lot of that depends on what

stage they're at but there is opportunity across the board and so I'll give a couple of kind of answers or

examples to that um one we for example we run a pre accelerator program or

we're getting ready to launch a pre accelerator program that is focused on very very early stage Founders so think

what I call napkin stage Founders where somebody says oh my God I Have This brilliant idea I want to build an app or

a whatever that does blank for blank so that they can accomplish blank and that's kind of where a lot of people

start is that's the brilliant idea and it could be scribbled down on the back of a napkin and because of where we are

just sort of in the tenure the world of Entrepreneurship today a lot of people GOI have this great idea surely I must

go build an MVP for it tomorrow and start getting it out into the world and

I would argue that that's wrong so part of the reason that we bothered to create this new pre accelerator program for

example is to help those early stage Founders Focus very much on the ideals

of customer development and helping them learn how to get from the back of the napkin scribble to a very clearly

defined idea that has been vetted through conversations with potential customers so that when they get to the

point of okay now I'm ready to build an MVP they know exactly what that mvp needs to have in it there's two features

out of the 10 for example that they might have had in their head um that are really meaningful and they know that

because they have heard it from people who they believe will be ready and waiting to buy that product once it's

live and so if you're the very earliest stages one of the best things that I would advocate for is talk to people

before you start building things and then start figuring out how to service that need almost manually before you

start building anything like wait as long as you can before you start building anything because the learning

that you will have by the time you then start building something will be so impactful on what you end up creating

that it will change the direction of everything that you're doing and as you move down the line into larger companies

more established companies even at the startup stages um that kind of continues to ring true there's a ton of

opportunity in talking to your customers and it's one of those things that when you say it everybody goes well yeah I mean of course we should talk to our

customers but if you actually stop and look very few companies take the time to

talk to their customers outside of something like an NPS survey or you know a hey how did your customer service rep

do kind of survey and yes that's all good information to have but it sort of doesn't qualify is actually talking to

your customers and so I guess push comes to shove that's one of the biggest things that I would advocate for and so

you know similarly I mentioned uh did I mention I don't remember we worked with the restaurant company that um started

focused on a direct to Consumer offering and wanted to grow a new Revenue line and so this was a company that was

already highly established and operating and I think at the time we started working with them had already delivered

a million and a half meals for example and they too were looking for opportunities to innovate and grow their

their business and so again through talking to customers and figuring out where the opportunity points were we

realized that there was a huge gap in the catering space that would enable them to um make a office catering

offering or business line that would allow them to serve

customers uh multiple different types of meals you know usually when your office is catering for you it's Taco Tuesday or

pizza Thursday or whatever it is and if you don't want tacos or pizza cool go get your own food and the benefit of

this was because they already operated 30 different restaurant Brands I could

order a burger you could order sushi and it would show up to the same office at the same time as part of the same lunch order and everybody gets what they want

and so again through that sort of focus on the alignment of customer need and

Core Business capabilities we were able to help them discover a whole new Revenue line and a new business offering

that opens up new opportunities and creates new opportunities for ongoing innovation in their business by

expanding their business thank you so much and please tell us about what other

steps entrepreneurs need to take in order to create disruptive innovation you can use perhaps another case study

to tell us about that um other steps come down to

focusing I think on what Innovation means within your own walls and really

coming to terms with what you're comfortable with in terms of innovation and how that will align to your business

so uh you know I've already said a moment ago that in order to commit to Innovation at least in my mind there are

certain ways that you need to view the metrics that are guiding your business and there are certain um levels of

flexibility that you need to have around capital expenditure for example in terms of willingness to try and experiment and

figure out what might work in the future and that takes a very clear strategic decision usually coming from the

Executive Suite or the SE Suite within that organization to say okay we believe in Innovation we believe that focusing

on Innovation and committing to the realities of that type of work will help us build and maintain longevity in our

business and we understand what the operational and cultural impacts are of that commitment to being more Innovative

we are going to do that for example and so um you know another thing that we

that we have started offering to help companies understand and execute on that is what we call an accelerated Innovation lab

and it's effectively a two-day workshop where we sit down with the executives at a company and help them understand and

evaluate and really Define what are your team's Innovation goals what are your core competencies how does that fit

within the governance um do you have an innovation board within your organization for example a group of

highlevel Executives who are tasked with overseeing those Innovation efforts and who have the freedom to say break the

rules for example and you know kind of go okay we're going to commit some you know some budget or some Capital to this

or we're going to be experimental by investing in this startup who we think might be disrupting in our disrupting

our business for example um and so over the course of that couple of days we work with companies to create a list of

deliverables and organizational ideals that will help guide their Innovation

efforts and help create a clearly defined framework around okay somebody

comes up with an idea within the organization how do we evaluate that how do we determine whether it fits our

goals or not how do we prioritize it then and figure out how we're going to execute on it and over what time frame

and then the brass tax of how are we going to pay for that uh is that going to turn into a business line that ends

up being spun into our parent organization or spun out of our parent Organization for example and really

within a couple of days we can get through a lot of the leg work to help kind of lay the foundation for cool now

we know how Innovation is going to work let's start executing on it wow that's

so insightful can I ask you for a list of more examples of how you helped the

founders of other companies innovate because you already gave some examples of the uh reducing the emailing and

reducing meetings time give us some more examples of types of innovation that you have helped Founders uh Implement yeah

there's a couple of those that we kind of knotted at that I haven't spoken to but um to drive them home for example um

Apollo 21 part of our business is what we call a venture studio so we build and

run businesses that we fully own and execute on and so helping companies reduce meetings by 40% for example is

born out of a product that we created called meeting cost calculator which is exactly what it sounds like it is the

grilled cheese sandwich of SAS products in that um it is a data dri dashboard

that helps HR teams CFOs Etc understand and manage the cost and outcomes of

their meeting time and you know it's one of those things where for years we've all looked and sort of laughed at the

idea well couldn't this meeting have been an email but nobody's bothered to actually take action on it and kind of

go okay well wait let's actually figure out if that meeting could have been an email and so we set out to do that um

the other example that that was thrown out earlier was helping uh a team reduce emails dramatically um we had a

financial services client to come to us for example that uh basically had a problem statement of we're drowning in

emails and we can't figure out why can you help and ultimately what we found out was that they didn't have an email

problem they had a process problem and so we helped them evaluate document and

then build operational technology to serve the exact processes that run their

organization in exactly the way that they want those processes to work and so

that piece of technology and the deployment of that technology within their business helped cut down on their

internal emails by I think it was literally 93% or something in that range

um because they weren't utilizing email as their process anymore and you can

imagine you know this was a company that was handling thousands upon thousands of transactions every day for their clients

I it's inevitable that you're going to get buried an email in that case because there's no way that you're going to keep

keep up with thousands of emails crossing your inbox um other examples uh

We've helped a remote guarding and security company for example similarly build out operational software so they

built a business that was focused on I think hundreds of properties across the country and Beyond each with tens of

cameras and sensors on them all being monitored out of a single office and managed by three people per shift for

example and they had kind of duct taped together a bunch of software to figure figure out whether the business offering

was even you know worth pursuing and eventually they came to us and said well we found product Market fit we know

people are willing to pay for this and that is good but we are at a point where in order to scale our business for every

new customer we would need to hire one or two new employees and so of course that makes for a very difficult uh

business operation to scale and so we worked with them to really create a a

fully Innovative uh operations platform on which their entire business was run

so all of the cameras connected to a single piece of technology that would utilize AI to understand what was

happening on the camera feed and prioritize the alerting to those three people in the office around hey this is

a dog walking by the camera you can ignore this one hey this is a person and he's banging on a car window you should

not ignore this one and really help kind of optimize the um the flow of operations through the organization and

the result was that um we changed their trying to think of how to explain this

their reaction time sorry I was coming up with the phrase there we uh we minimized the reaction time from uh it

was I think 12 to 18 seconds on average for an alert coming off of a camera down

to about two seconds so imagine somebody banging on a car window in 12 to 18

seconds they can have broken into that car already and started pulling stuff out and moved onto the next one but if

you can get to that within two seconds then you can have the police on their way very quickly and uh they had a

number of tactics for scaring people off like yelling at them through a speaker and things like that um so those are a

couple of examples I'm trying to think of others that I can rattle off quickly here um yeah those are the ones that

come to the top top of my head right now thank you so much what I love about you is that you you sound and you look very

passionate and very energetic uh because probably you work with a lot of creative thinkers and it's so exciting to help

all these disruptive uh Innovative companies and my question is how can you

make sure that all of these entrepreneurs don't run out of steam uh

because you know when you're building a disruptive Innovative company what happens is that you might need a lot of

money to implement a lot of these strategies that are really brand new so

um you could run out of money and then you're you're like yeah you have all the energy in the world but then how do you

have the to continue to implement this Innovative disruptive technology for

example yeah that's a great question and there's a couple of points in there that I I think are worth addressing I mean one the things that I'm describing are

not inherently expensive and I know I've said a couple of times you have to be willing to spend the money on it for example but um I appreciate you're

pointing that out because I should also be clear that I'm not advocating for companies to spend millions of dollars

annually pursuing random innovation ideas and the reason that we advocate so

heavily for things like talking to your customers and building things that are small in unscalable fashion so that you

can experiment is precisely so that you can conserve capital and extend Runway

and figure out where the risk moments are in the thing that you're trying to build in a manner so that you can

mitigate those risks As you move along and so as an example by talking to your customers in the example of our pre

accelerator program before you ever start to build building something is the

expensive resource intensive part of being an entrepreneur it's really cheap and easy to talk to people and so if you

take it upon yourself to talk to people first and utilize the the cheap sort of

one-on-one time of oh it doesn't really cost a whole lot for me as a founder or

somebody on my team to have a conversation with one of our customers for example or a potential customer the

more you leverage those opportunities the more you can figure out what might work because you have heard it over and

over again from 10 20 30 50 100 different customers and the more you can

leverage that learning to figure out exactly what you should be building so that again by the time you get to the

part of the process that is expensive the part that's resource intensive which is designing and building and then

supporting software for example you know exactly what features you need to build more importantly you know exactly what

features you don't know you don't need to build and so by talking to customers up front you can take that list of you

Importance of Customer Feedback

know 10 things that are on your product road map that you think your MVP needs and figure out which of the 10 are

actually the ones that are going to have an impact and so by the time you're done you may end up in a process that is six

months long either way but in One path you're going to spend you know six

Efficient Resource Allocation

months building full stop and that's expensive uh you know six months of four

Engineers or designer whatever that team looks like versus 3 months for example

talking to customers ideating building talking or sorry not building but storyboarding like figuring out what

those ideas are talking to customers again showing them those Solutions and getting to a point where one or two

people can facilitate the first batch of that work over whatever it is one month three months by the time you get to the

build period that is left over within that arbitrary six months that I've thrown on the table here um you will

move that much faster and so your six-month process costs you two people for three months and six people for

three months as opposed to six people for six months and so inevitably it is cheaper to handle that way the other

Cost-Effective Innovation

thing and especially as you're getting into more corporate sized companies that you can do is um think about ways to

deploy the capital that you do have at your disposal so that again you can mitigate risk you can experiment and you

don't necessarily have to be building things internally so that might look like um investing in startups that are

out to disrupt your industry for example and that in and of itself is a form of

Partnerships with Startups

innovation Pursuit because you are looking for those opportunities figuring

out what Innovation looks like within your market and then you're putting your organization in a position to be

participating in that Innovation as opposed to frankly being afraid of that Innovation you know most large companies

are are worried about the disruptive innovator who might come up from behind and start to eat their lch but if you

invest in them and partner with them and figure out frankly how you can help with them um you can take some ownership in

it so that their success becomes your success and you can learn from what they're doing very quickly so there's

lots of ways to execute on Innovation that are not massively expensive but

they require planning and consideration and they require the strategy that I

Innovation Strategy

described a moment ago you know that we try to deploy through our accelerated Innovation lab of okay we know what

Innovation means within our organization we know who exactly within our organization is responsible for that work and we know what they have at their

disposal to make it happen and so ultimately it doesn't have to be massively expensive but it does require

Conclusion

some flexibility of capital thank you so much Danny Nathan for these insights

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