Igniting Innovation from Within - Danny Nathan

Jon Coogan (00:01.215)
And what I will say is it's recording, but I'll do all the edits and stuff afterwards anyway. So if there's any breaks or I end up looking away to get something, I'll cut all that kind of stuff out. So it will be fine. So don't worry about any silences or time thinking or anything like that. We can, we can add it quite easily afterwards. And let's get going in three, two, one.

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (00:17.688)
Yeah, no worries.

Jon Coogan (00:25.85)
Have you ever wondered what company, sorry, sorry again, have you ever wondered how companies ignite their entrepreneurial spirit and drive innovation from within? Welcome to Mindset Mavericks, where we dive into the minds of leaders driving the future of innovation. Today, we're thrilled to have Danny Nathan, the founder of Apollo 21 on the show. So Danny's mastermind behind Apollo 21. So a unique company is sitting at the intersection of innovation consultancy and product science studio.

So Danny, he's got two decades of product development experience. He's worked with an impressive roster of companies, including American Express, Getty Images, Dyson, amongst many more. And he's made a name for himself by transforming visionary ideas into real world successes through methodologies like lean customer development and design sprints. And design sprints is one of the topics we're going to discuss today. So get ready for an insightful conversation, overcoming innovation challenges and exploring the future

venture development. Let's jump in with Danny Nathan. So welcome very much and thank you very much for joining me today.

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (01:31.704)
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here

Jon Coogan (01:33.903)
Thank you. So I want to go into first Danny, it's a bit about your origin story really. So I want to find a little bit about yourself and what made you start up Apollo 21? What was the driving factor that led you to start Apollo 21?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (01:48.878)
Apollo 21 is sort of the culmination of about 20 years of, career experience. I started in the world of advertising, realized very quickly that I didn't particularly enjoy it. mostly because I was not excited about building a career in a world where companies were paying to effectively shout in people's faces and tell them that they should be doing something or buying something or whatever. And so I.

made a point of getting out of the world of advertising, ended up landing in an innovation consultancy that I helped build for about five years. I was one of the first 10 hires or so. And then that was sort of my introduction to the world of entrepreneurship and startups and really just kind of an eye -opening experience around alternative ways of thinking beyond what I had learned to date in marketing and ad school around how companies and brands can interact with customers and can really learn from and add value to the

to the lives of their customers while trying to effectively, of course, sell them something, but in a much more symbiotic manner. so I spent the next few years bouncing around a number of startups, either that I had founded or that other folks had founded. And eventually in my last role, I was serving as head of product at a startup in LA and spent about the last year of my tenure there

of a little SWAT team where I was asked to help some of the other portfolio companies from our primary investor with their technology needs. And so I was doing work then that looked a whole lot like the work that we do today at Apollo 21. And so after about a year of doing that, my founders and a couple of the folks from the family office tapped me on the shoulder and said, you hey, you should think about going and doing this. You seem to enjoy it. so

That eventually led to the creation of Apollo 21, which started a little over three years ago now. so that's what I've been doing.

Jon Coogan (03:40.111)
Okay, so just out of interest, so when you were looking to do Apollo 21, you obviously wanted to do things a little bit differently. What specifically was it you wanted to change and was it that you thought Apollo 21 could do differently that wasn't being done before?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (03:53.742)
You know, you kind of nodded to it in our little intro there. I view Apollo 21 as unique in that we sit at the intersection of an innovation consultancy and a product design studio. And so really it is bringing together those aspects of my past experience and taking a look at how we can layer the two together and really think about the ways that companies are built and the ways that products are built today.

in alignment with the innovation goals, especially with larger organizations. So there's a lot of large orgs that, you know, claim to be innovative, innovative, excuse me, innovative, talk about innovation, et cetera. And really when push comes to shove, it's a lot of talk, but not as much action. And so we built Apollo 21 as a means to help those companies understand what the organizational and the cultural impacts of a commitment to innovation look like.

with of course all of the skills at our disposal to then bring those ideas to life and help them actually get through the make phase as opposed to just the you should phase. And that's one of the things that a lot of folks complain about or mention if you ask them about experience with other consulting companies is that, yeah, there's a lot of great ideas. We heard a lot about what we should do and then they left and we were stuck holding a big presentation or something but.

Nobody was there to help us kind of usher that project forward. And so we are very much aiming to bridge that gap between the, well, here's how to come up with ideas for what you could be doing to foster innovation, and then we can help you bring them to life.

Jon Coogan (05:35.087)
Okay, just one of the things that you use to bring those things to life. I know you do some design sprints and that's something I've seen you talk about previously and you talk about on your website. How do you use those design sprints to help with that process?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (05:51.352)
So design sprints are just kind of one tool in the toolkit. Generally, when we engage with a client, we start with some sort of discovery period. And it's usually about four weeks of us really digging into their business. And it's an opportunity for us to understand clearly what the problem is. Often, the problem that comes to us and the problem that is the one that needs to be solved aren't in direct alignment. Sometimes somebody will come to us with.

a symptomatic problem of a deeper issue. And so we really focus on helping kind of uncover what that deeper issue is and understanding how it then results in whatever that symptomatic problem is. And so our discovery period allows us to dig into that, to learn about our clients and their business and what their goals are and how that problem is hindering them. And so it's an opportunity for us to hold anything from stakeholder interviews where we're talking to a bunch of folks within the building or within the organization.

to talking to customers and helping begin the customer development process. And then sometimes not always that will then result in a design sprint or something of that sort to begin ideating alongside our clients, what that solution is, how it might come to life, how it aligns to their business and the capabilities that they have in house so that we can create something of value for their customers and for their business that really does help them with.

their efforts in innovation and their efforts in growth in terms of finding new opportunities for new business models, new revenue lines, et

Jon Coogan (07:25.827)
Yeah, I think what would be really handy is you've spoken quite a lot about how in -depth you go and how much you really kind of foster that relationship with your customers to solve these problems. It'd be quite good, certainly for me, to hear some of success stories or some of the types of problems you are solving for customers. Have you got any examples of the kind of thing that you are innovating in?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (07:48.93)
Yeah, I'm happy to. And it's one of the things that's so exciting about our business is that the problems are always different. And so the solutions and the things that we get to dive into are always unique for every project. we are relatively industry agnostic. We've done work across remote guarding and security, restaurants, sports, et cetera. And so to give you a couple of concrete examples, one of my favorites is we had a client in the Western sports space. So think cowboys and rodeos and

know, bull riding and all that fun stuff. And that project started off relatively small. They had acquired a few other companies and had a bunch of data from those companies that they knew they wanted to take advantage of, but didn't really have any way to understand or dig into because the data had been delivered to them from, I think it was five different companies in the form of like a hundred different CSVs broken out across, you know, advertiser data and customer data and ticket buyer data and et cetera, et cetera. And so.

We started off by just building them an internal platform into which we ingested and then normalized all of that data and gave them some insights and analytics views of how they could begin to understand what they had at their disposal. And then to make a long story short, that engagement ended up lasting about a year and really gave us the opportunity to build out the internal and operational technology infrastructure for their organization. And then also build out some customer facing technology as well.

in this case in the form of kind of an ESPN for rodeo type of application. And what was so exciting about that was because we were deeply ingrained and because they had great access into the industry, we were able to really focus on the customer development process and understand what rodeo fans were missing from the rodeo experience in terms of technology and also what the athletes were missing. so what started off as an effort to build two different

applications, one for athletes and one for fans, really ended up becoming a singular experience digitally because what we found in our research was that drawing the line between a rodeo athlete and a rodeo fan is really difficult because a lot of fans who enjoy watching rodeo at the professional level enjoy participating at a regional, local, amateur level. so those people consider themselves athletes. And by

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (10:12.856)
helping them bridge the gap between the experience of being a fan and being an athlete, I think we were able to help create an experience that really was more holistic and made everybody feel like they were part of what was going on in the world of rodeo, regardless of whether they were a, quote, weekend warrior or whether they were out there on the big stage getting paid for what they do. And so that was really exciting. Another great example.

more in the operational space, we've had a number of clients come to us that had some sort of operational problem. And so it is not unusual for us to work with our clients to tear down their internal technology systems and rebuild from the ground up something that will help them usher how work happens within the organization. And

We did work like that for financial services clients. We've done that for remote guarding and security and a number of others, including some aspects of the rodeo client as

Jon Coogan (11:11.095)
Okay, so yes, it does sound like it's really broad and diverse area they're working in. What do you think are the biggest challenges really to innovation within companies?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (11:25.034)
I think the biggest challenge that companies have today is that as they grow and as they discover product market fit and begin to think about how to build efficiency into their operations so that everything moves smoothly and so that they can effectively ring every dollar out of every penny that goes in, they also kind of wash away the opportunity for innovation. And so what you see is that companies are

aligning their operations to the ideals of efficiency, to the ideals of protecting capital investment and aligning those operations to quarterly earnings and trying to ensure that those earnings grow quarter over quarter and year over year. And the problem with all of that when it comes to innovation is that for better or worse, innovation is inherently a inefficient process from both a capital perspective and a time perspective and a resource perspective. You have to

spend the time and the energy to think about and explore and experiment to figure out where the opportunities for innovation are. And those activities do not align well to the level of efficiency that most mature companies are looking to establish.

Jon Coogan (12:37.445)
Yeah, I think it is that that whole old saying of speculate to accumulate is one of those things where, like I said, it takes resources, takes time, takes money. But without that, you can't get that innovation that could lead to great things. I think that's definitely, yeah, definitely what seems to be coming across.

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (12:56.652)
Yeah, absolutely. think the other big thing to keep in mind there is that, you know, the way that really the way that you establish a culture. And we talk a lot about a culture of innovation, for example. And for me, what that means is enabling employees to experiment and to try things and ultimately to encounter failure along the way without having to be concerned with repercussions. so, you know, employees inherently are

concerned about whether their job is going to be safe, et cetera, if they are doing things that are interpreted as failure. And so the more we can help re -envision the idea of failure as learning opportunity and learning experience, then the safer people will feel to explore those endeavors.

Jon Coogan (13:42.191)
Yeah, and what ways does Apollo 21, for example, kind of foster that culture of innovation? So I know certainly you've just touched on it a little bit there where you do give some autonomy and let people run with ideas and test things out and be supportive of those. Is there particular things that you put in place to kind of foster that innovation within your workplace?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (14:03.662)
yeah. So within our own walls, we operate fully remotely in what we call a row or results oriented or results only work environment. And for me, that is one of the foundational aspects of our effort to create a culture where people feel like they have not only the freedom to explore and fail, but really just the freedom to do their jobs in the way that best suits them. And so, you know, for us, as long as your work is being accomplished and you're attending, you know,

the hopefully few meetings that we do have on the calendar. I don't really care when and where you're getting it done. If you want to work from a beach in Tahiti, that's amazing. And if you want to work at your desk in LA, then that works also. And everything then unfolds from there in terms of how our team has sort of the opportunity and the right to explore things, to try things, to experiment with new technology, to bring ideas to the table.

We have an open system for submitting what we call charters or project ideas where anybody in the company can grab that document, create a copy, and start to fill it out with the outline of whatever idea it is that they have in their mind. And ideally, to then begin experimenting with validating that idea without needing to get permission. And so we try to create a space where

people really do feel like if there's something that comes to mind, they have an opportunity to try it out and then to bring it to the table and talk to the rest of the team about it so that we all have an opportunity to either get on board or to question it constructively or see where it might go.

Jon Coogan (15:43.757)
Yeah, no, think that's a really good idea. And I think it's something that I certainly try and foster is if people come to you with an idea of something or you've got a challenge within your organization is trying not to be that first person to speak. think people do naturally, if you are a leader within a business, they'll sometimes agree a little bit too much. It's nice to put those ideas out, get those ideas come back in first and just letting everyone have the opportunity to speak.

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (16:07.946)
Exactly. Exactly.

Jon Coogan (16:12.314)
Just a couple of bits that you wanted to touch on and it's around just building a business and leadership. And I know you did mention that you've been involved in startups and a number of businesses, advertising, et cetera, before starting Apollo 21. So was Apollo 21 your kind of first founding business or did you have others before that?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (16:31.534)
No, I've failed multiple times before Apollo 21. It is, I don't know, it depends how you want to slice it or how you want to count. It is not my first time. My first company, my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, and I started together as sort of an iteration of what might happen for couples who met online. And of course that whole world has changed now. And this was pre Tinder and pre...

Jon Coogan (16:34.037)
Okay.

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (17:00.174)
you know, app swiping and so on and so forth. But that was in 2012 that we started that. And there's been a number of other companies in the interim. We also have a couple of companies that we run as sort of side businesses. So I have an e -commerce business that chugs along every year now and, you know, earns a decent little bit of revenue. It's nothing amazing. And it certainly doesn't pay for our lives or even our rent, but it's just fun and gives us a

what I call a place to experiment, you know, it's our science lab. So it's the company that we can try things with and fail with without quite as much concern for repercussions because there's no employees to be concerned about or anything like

Jon Coogan (17:30.414)
Yeah.

Jon Coogan (17:42.145)
Yeah. And you know, I love hearing about failures as well. And similarly to your own story, really, I've had a number of businesses, I've currently got an e -commerce business as well as my kind of day job business as well. So it's good to hear that people are having similar experiences. And I think one of the things that does put people off businesses are certainly trying again is failure. So it's good to hear that other people are going through similar things and had similar kind of background and not been afraid to try again if something does fail. where did you get that mindset

although you've had some setbacks what is it that made you keep going?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (18:17.738)
I have always just sort of had this tenacity and need to build and create things and to be frank, I've never really enjoyed the idea of a corporate job and therefore I've never really held one down. so the, you know, I've worked at smaller companies and the ultimate end state of that for me has always been working for myself. And so a lot of it has been experimentation to enable that to happen. And then

I've also developed, I've really, I've developed a bit of a personal mantra, which is fail beautifully. And it's just a constant reminder to myself that failure is gonna happen at every step along the way. And that unlike what we were taught as children, failure isn't a bad thing. And, you know, to me, that's one of the biggest mindset shifts that we as people need to get to as we go from, you know, younger years into adulthood, where we're taught from a young age that failure is a negative thing and that, you know,

It is representative of all things bad. And what I have come to realize over the years is that failure is just another way to figure out what isn't working and what you might want to try next. And so I have tried to embrace that personally and to continually remind myself that, to your point, everybody has moments of failure and everybody tries something that doesn't work. And part of the problem, especially these days with the way that social media has changed the world is that

generally if you're looking from the outside in what you see are the, you know, successes or at least the perception of success that somebody is trying to put forward. And so having that reminder that, you know, everybody goes through it and everybody fails has always been a grounding mechanism for me.

Jon Coogan (20:03.023)
Absolutely, I love that term as well, fail beautifully. I'm definitely gonna be using that one in the future. Yes, so as we've talked about, you've got a lot of experience over 20 years in kind of innovation and product development. So one of the things I wanted to ask about really is...

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (20:07.655)
Please, please do.

Jon Coogan (20:21.611)
How you've seen technology changing what you're doing over the years, so certainly with things like Web3, AI, and them both being huge at the moment, how have you seen technology change the way we innovate?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (20:37.543)
It depends how far back you want to go. you know, as I nodded to when I started in advertising, I was sort of one of the last classes out of ad school that was not taught about technology. So my experience in ad school was TV spots and magazine ads and newspaper ads. And what I ended up finding so frustrating, this was back in the early 2000s, was that the lack of

consideration around technology and the connectivity that it afforded between companies and brands and their customers and the people that are interested in them was that in the world of advertising that I'd grown up in, it was a shouting match. was who could shout loudest to get their name to ring in your head. And right around the time that I left advertising and started my first role in an innovation consultancy was also

literally about two months after the first iPhone came out and right around the time when social media was becoming ingrained in society. And so what was so interesting at that time was to watch how rapidly the interactions between people and brands changed based on the level of accessibility that people had. So all of a sudden, as everybody gravitated towards social media, brands had Twitter accounts. And at the time, of course, they were

manned in a way that sort of sat outside of the norm of customer service. And so they became almost like this gateway to getting more attention from companies that would otherwise be difficult to get help from, for example. And so they really changed the dynamic for how people and companies interacted with one another. And then ultimately, I think the bigger driver behind all of it is the...

the ability for technology to enable a value exchange between customers and companies that was much harder to do before. You know, if you look at pre -technology days, the, you know, the value exchange between customers and companies was I pay you, I get blank. And now it's really changed and the opportunity for companies to be drivers of community and drivers of education, in addition to selling products and services.

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (22:53.41)
has created an entirely new dynamic that has been heavily accelerated by technology. And so as you move forward and you begin looking at the things that you called out like Web3 and AI, what we're seeing again is a change in the dynamics of how people interact with technology and therefore the brands that are using that technology.

in both instances of both web3 and AI, think in many ways we're almost too early to see what the real ramifications will be. And it's almost unfortunate in that the way that AI, for example, has been used heavily so far has been in content creation, for example. And while it's great for saving people time, it's also not the most amazing content.

It's there and it's got the facts behind it usually, and a few made up whatevers that some computer hallucinates. But what we're seeing today is that companies are utilizing AI as a way to inundate people with SEO driven articles or whatever. And so I think that frankly, we're still in the midst of figuring out where that value exchange is going to come back into balance and how things like AI are going to help.

Jon Coogan (23:48.684)
Yeah.

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (24:12.654)
kind of find that unique interaction point between people and people and brands and so on and so forth. And so that's part of what, as we at Apollo 21 think about innovation, we focus on very heavily is, you know, we hear a lot of companies saying, we need AI, we're late to the AI game, et cetera. And the reality is, yes, you need to be paying attention. AI isn't going anywhere. It's going to change everything. But it's also not one of those things that

every single company needs to rush out and start implementing at scale yet until they understand what the purpose of it is for them specifically. And I would say the same with Web3. You know, there's some really interesting use cases, but so far a lot of companies and a lot of people in general don't entirely understand the Web3 space. And I think we're still trying to find in many ways kind of similarly the value exchange that's going to happen there. And so ultimately I think that as technology progresses,

we go through these cycles of technology being new and interesting and being used anywhere and everywhere that we can think to put it. And then through that, we then end up with a process of narrowing down and figuring out, we tried it everywhere. Where do we wanna keep that technology and where is it really helping?

Jon Coogan (25:27.427)
Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking about it as you're talking there and it seems to be at the moment people are relying on AI rather than utilizing it. So you do get that lack of human connection and lack of, like I said, just personality added into those posts. Cause you do see a lot now which are generated and they do come across very formulaic. So yeah, think there's definitely, definitely does need to be a bit of leveling out really.

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (25:56.684)
I agree. think that the next couple of years are going to be really interesting as we see, again, much how mobile devices and the smart device changed everything. I think that we're on the brink of seeing another shift that we're just now in the process of figuring out.

Jon Coogan (26:12.76)
Are you currently seeing any trends in corporate innovation at the moment? you getting, I know you said got quite a diverse customer background and basis, but are you seeing any trends at the moment in terms of innovation within companies?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (26:29.123)
I think at the moment what we're seeing is a lot of companies kind of toeing the party line of, you know, discussing how they're innovative and talking about things that represent the ideals of innovation, but are not quite jumping in with both feet yet to embrace the realities of what that means. And I

I think there's a fair number of companies that are starting to realize that and starting to kind of play with the idea of, okay, how do we do more? How do we make innovation mean more? And I think that one of the interesting trends that we're seeing lately is more of a focus on corporate venture capital and the idea that companies committing to innovation doesn't necessarily have to mean standing up a skunkworks office somewhere and, you know, putting five guys in there with a budget and saying, here, go come up with something, but rather,

more diversity around how companies view what innovation means and how they can participate. So whether that is investing in or incubating new smaller companies that are aligned or adjacent to their core business offering, but that they need to keep some separation with. And so, you know, I think that's a really interesting space and a really interesting way that especially larger and more mature companies can help bridge the gap with the startups that are coming to disrupt whatever space they're in. And

The benefit of that is, I think we see a little bit less fear around the idea that a disruptive startup is going to come up from behind and, you know, eat your lunch, so to speak. But now there is an alternative way to interact with that company through partnership and investment, et cetera, that enables more established organizations to both protect themselves and their own future, as well as helping the innovative disruptors that are changing the way that things are done continue in their growth.

Jon Coogan (28:20.444)
One of the things you just touched on there is about what innovation means to businesses. In your own words, what does innovation mean to you?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (28:31.251)
That's a really good question that I should probably have a ready answer for off the cuff and I don't, but I think just sort of spitballing, innovation to me is the exploration of new ways to accomplish things and new ways to serve customers that enable companies to create longevity and to discover new ways to maintain relevance that they might not otherwise sort of align to.

Jon Coogan (28:57.931)
And if a company is one to be innovative, they want to start looking at processes and how they can improve what they're already doing, where's a good place to start?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (29:09.358)
Well, if I can plug myself for a little bit for a moment here, Apollo 21 is offering a like a two day innovation sprint that we call an accelerated innovation lab to help companies answer exactly that. And so the starting point that we put forward through that process, and hopefully the answer to your question here is we will sit down with those organizations and help them articulate what their goals are with innovation, figure out what innovation means to them and

Jon Coogan (29:22.52)
Okay.

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (29:39.502)
help them understand and outline what resources they have at their disposal that give them a clear cut advantage because the reality is that highly established and mature companies do have a huge advantage when it comes to innovation and trying new things in that they have a ready pool of resources. Usually they have capital that they can dedicate to that process. They have a whole team of people who are interested

and spending their days exploring and figuring out how to serve customers in that space who then have a whole pool of ready -made ideas that that company could pull from. And so we help companies sit down and figure out what those resources look like and what the ideals of innovation are that they want to uphold and how they can do that internally, whether that's through investment or through partnership or through incubation or through some combination of all three.

And so through this offering, we spend a couple of days really outlining all of that and giving them a means to continually evaluate a framework for evaluation of those ideas moving forward. And then of course we can help them put those ideas into action and bring those efforts to life or they're welcome of course to take the output of that effort and run with it themselves either way.

Jon Coogan (30:58.115)
Yeah, certainly one of the problems I faced when I first started a business, I had a lot of involvement with logistics and the backend systems for e -commerce, et cetera. And one of those, at that point in your career, you don't necessarily know what you need to do to be innovative or how you can streamline your processes. Is that something you'd still recommend people, for example, come speak to yourselves about where you want to be better? You have got all these things which you might have in place,

it might not be the most optimum way of doing things. Is that something people come to you where they're not actually really sure what the issue is, but they know they want to improve?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (31:37.206)
Yes, without question, that is actually probably, I don't know, at rough guess, at least half of our business is companies coming to us with exactly that type of question of, hey, we know something's working. We can't exactly figure out how to fix it or how to pinpoint it, or we know that technology can help in our operations, but we aren't a technology company and we don't know how to put that together. to give you a couple of concrete examples, and I nodded to this earlier.

we had a financial services client, for example, that came to us and basically their question was, we're drowning in email. Can you help? And that, that was the extent of kind of what they brought to the table. And so, you know, as I was describing our discovery process earlier, that was a really good example of where internal stakeholder interviews played a huge role in our discovery process and our ability to understand that the reason that these folks were drowning in email was

their process consisted of email, for example. So every single activity that happened within their walls resulted in an email to somebody. And of course, when you think about that, it's no surprise that they were drowning in email. And so what we ultimately helped them build was a piece of operational software that was designed explicitly for them around the three most time consuming and important processes that we worked with them to identify.

really guided their employees through the execution of those processes with all of the guardrails in place and all of the automation that we could muster in place so that it would streamline their internal operations and limit the number of emails that they were sending. And I think that the result was something like a 92 % drop in emails in their inboxes. So that was a huge impact.

Jon Coogan (33:24.291)
Wow.

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (33:28.098)
Yes, I think that the other side of what you're nodding to, John, is that innovation, we often think about how it might impact customers or consumers or what it might mean for inventing something new, but it doesn't have to. Innovation that happens within your own walls and helps streamline things for your own employees is just as valid and viable as innovation that is consumer focused. And so I think that that's an excellent place to focus and really a great way to...

dip a toe in the water of innovation. If you're not sure how you want to think about innovation in terms of its impact on your customers, but you know that you have opportunities internally, use your own workforce as your testbed. And we're happy to come in and help and demonstrate how we can help innovate in that space. And hopefully then demonstrate that if we can do it for you internally, of course, we can do it on behalf of your customers as well.

Jon Coogan (34:25.615)
I know it's really interesting and like I say, 92 % reduction is going to be a huge amount of time savings for any company. So yeah, that's great to hear some of the things you are doing when you haven't got specific goals in mind when you meet some of your clients. And it's quite clear, clearly still very passionate about innovation and what you're doing at the moment. How do you keep up that passion for innovation and venture development after 20 years of doing it?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (34:39.81)
Yeah, absolutely.

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (34:52.462)
I have found that there is no shortage of problems to solve. And that's the part of this whole thing that really at least keeps my interest peaked is I frankly, when I see a problem, I just can't help my brain start spinning on, huh, that's a problem. How can I solve it? Where would technology come into play? How can we make it easier? Who's going to benefit? Is there a monetization strategy there? Which is how inevitably my side businesses end up starting. You know, I go to do something for myself.

The side business that I nodded to earlier is designing and building accessories for off -road camping vehicles. Because I had an off -road camping vehicle and I found things that I didn't have that I wanted and so I went and made them and figured if I wanted them, somebody else might as well. In this case, it proved to be true.

Jon Coogan (35:27.523)
Okay.

Jon Coogan (35:39.963)
And one of my next questions is going to be how you continue to learn about innovation yourself. But I think you've partly just covered it there. It's just keeping that curious mind all the time and keeping your mind open and looking for opportunities. Is there other things that you do in particular to try and keep yourself fully involved in innovation and keep on top of developments?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (36:02.902)
Yeah, I mean, part of that is surrounding yourself with people who are similarly curious and then creating an environment where everybody can share. so, you know, for me, that is my internal team and our clients and so on and so forth. And so we have, you know, just a constant feed going around of, hey, did you see this? hey, this company is doing this now. hey, you know, check out this thing that's cool. And the other part of it for years now, I've just sort of had a mindset

when I see something interesting that's new, I go and sign up for it. you know, other than the, you know, the never ending amount of, you know, emails in the inbox from marketing and stuff that can be filtered out, it's a really great way to just consistently try things and figure out what other folks are thinking about, how other folks are utilizing technology. And that always spurs ideas of, you know, interesting, they applied this technology in this way to solve this problem.

that's sort of similar to what I'm thinking about over here. I wonder if I can borrow some inspiration from how they have solved that problem.

Jon Coogan (37:09.123)
And with that in mind, because it sounds like you've got a really good team around you, do you think that the remote working has affected how you do have those conversations and how you can innovate? Have you found that remote working has had an impact?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (37:26.51)
I'm personally a huge fan of remote work. I'm also a huge fan of teamwork and collaboration. And the two are somewhat at odds with one another. Anybody who you hear advocating heavily for a return to office, for example, generally points at the collaborative nature of being in the same building, et cetera. And I will not disagree in the slightest that there is value there. However, I also question whether that value is outweighed by

the cost of having an office and the limitations of only being able to hire people who live or are willing to move near that office, for example. And so the benefit for us of being remote is that it opens up our ability to work with people anywhere that they are and to bring in experts in whatever we need without having to worry about getting them to a certain geographic location. The other thing that

really enjoy about remote work is the freedom of enabling that kind of results oriented work environment that I mentioned earlier, because it really gives everybody the ability to have a balance in terms of how they choose to live their life. You know, there's no question of, you need to go pick up your kids from school or you need to run to a doctor's appointment or whatever, you know, not only do I not care, you don't need to tell me just go, it's fine. And so to me, that outweighs the

the benefit of on -site collaboration. However, it does require tooling then that enables you to maintain the connectivity that you need in that remote environment. so our team, of course, lives in Slack and we do a lot of work in collaborative tools like Figma and FigJam, for example, where everybody can be in the tool at the same time, seeing the same thing, but contributing uniquely. so,

What works for one company won't necessarily work for another, but we have found the tool set that seems to work for us that enables communication. And of course, we've worked hard to set up all of the necessary automation and so on and so forth so that if somebody makes a change or a comment over here, it gets alerted to us in places that we're sure to see it. And then beyond that, it's building a team that understands the value of communication. And

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (39:47.564)
as long as everybody is committed to communicating clearly and letting everybody know, you know, hey, I'm not going to be around for the afternoon or I need to go run an errand or whatever, or, hey, I have a question about this piece of work or this ticket in GitHub or whatever it is, as long as all of that is communicated clearly, I have found that we're able to keep things moving quite nicely with a remote team

It's also trained us really well for working remotely with clients. We're always happy to get on an airplane and go see a client, but at the same time, sometimes it just doesn't pay to travel across the country for an hour meeting or something. so knowing that we know how to work remotely amongst ourselves then influences how we interact with our clients and how we bring them into that work stream.

Jon Coogan (40:35.631)
But yeah, it definitely means the more exposure you got to remote working and things like this remote podcast, which wouldn't have been around five, 10 years ago. It definitely does start to come a little bit easier and people do start to start to feel a bit more comfortable, but it's certainly alien to start with. yeah, can agree with most of what you said there and certainly just being able to choose your resources from anywhere. as you've said, I could have somebody in Toronto working for me. And yeah, it's amazing just to be able to have such a wide pool to

from said

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (41:07.938)
Yeah, it makes a huge difference for us.

Jon Coogan (41:11.565)
What I wanted to just go on to now really is just talking about you've got clients all over the place, you've got quite a wide range of clients. So if you've got an ideal client, what would that look like to you?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (41:25.144)
For us, an ideal client is less about a specific industry or vertical and more about either the stage that you're at in your company and or where you sit. so generally, we engage with C -suite executives or at larger organizations, know, folks who have the word innovation in their title are often a good client for us. We often engage with customers who do not have a technology team. So.

you know, we do really well working with customers who either their business has been around for a little while or in spite of being tech motivated, as I call them, they are not, you know, technology enabled or a technology company. And so that allows us to come in and really sort of help bridge the gap and help them understand how to become more technology enabled and more technology efficient. And so, you know, often that's anybody from

scale up size startups who are looking to move beyond doing things that don't scale. There's the old adage of start your company by doing things that don't scale. And I agree with it completely. But at some point, you're successful in doing that, you then get to a point where you go, okay, now we actually need to start doing things that do scale. that's a great playground for us, especially as we were talking about operational technology and building efficiency and workflows inside.

you know, inside the walls. And then as you get into larger and more mature companies, you know, lot of the innovation that work that we do is focused on helping to talk to customers, go through the customer development process, understand where pain points are that align to that company's offering, and then ultimately to help them envision and create new revenue lines and new products to fulfill on those needs. so companies that are looking for that type of change are really where

our ideal client falls.

Jon Coogan (43:16.119)
Okay. And with that in mind, really, we've got listeners who are going to be budding entrepreneurs. Is there particular advice that you think you can give to budding entrepreneurs who are looking to start their business, they're looking to found a company, something that could help them at the beginning?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (43:32.278)
Yeah, there's a couple of things that come to mind. I usually throw out my fail beautifully mentality at this question, which we've already talked about. But the other piece of advice that I often give to early stage founders is it will take longer than you think it will. And it doesn't matter what it is, but it will take longer than you think it will. And so growing comfortable with that and learning how to live with that is one of the things that will help set you up for success.

The other thing that I will offer for very early stage founders is most folks have an idea, they land at what I call the napkin stage of, ooh, ooh, I want to build a blank for blank that does blank and it'll be awesome. And usually when somebody gets to that point, their knee -jerk reaction is, and now I must go build an MVP. And my biggest piece of advice is don't, don't do it

go talk to potential customers. Find the people that you think want the thing that you scribbled on the napkin and ask them all the questions that you can think to ask them and figure out whether the brilliant idea that you scribbled on the back of a napkin is actually a brilliant idea or whether it was only a brilliant idea, you know, 2 a or whenever it hit the back of the napkin. And I believe in that so much

Jon Coogan (44:51.18)
Yep.

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (44:56.002)
We are literally in the process of developing a pre -accelerator program for napkin stage founders to help them through that process. our program is designed explicitly around no wait, don't go build your MVP, go talk to people first so that you know what your MVP needs to be.

Jon Coogan (45:17.249)
That's really interesting, like I said, just make sure it resonates. And one of the things that clearly needs to be done is market research gets speaking to people, don't run away with things. So I'm quite intrigued by the program you're starting to do. So what does that actually look like in practice?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (45:33.91)
So I'm going to answer that question happily, but I'm also going to caveat it with we're still figuring it out a little bit. But what we're envisioning is a probably eight week accelerator program that will be a combination of individualized work that will guide founders through the process of conducting pain point interviews, discovering where their customers pain points align to their idea.

Jon Coogan (45:40.132)
So.

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (46:00.3)
working through storyboard interviews to help those customers then understand what it is they're looking to build. And then ultimately finding that kind of product market fit idea and beginning to articulate what the core requirements are that they could bring to life. Ideally with the solution being, you know, okay, I had a napkin idea that had five core features, but through talking to people, I have found that I only need two of them.

somebody gave me another feature idea that I had never thought of. And when I started teasing that with more, you know, more people that I was talking to that really resonated. So now that's one of our features. And then beyond that, you know, helping folks understand sort of what they're getting into in terms of what it takes to build a company. So basically what we're envisioning is every week it would be self -guided work combined with

cohort -wide meeting to discuss where everybody's at and to share learnings and ask questions, one -on -one meetings with the Apollo 21 team, be that our head of product or head of engineering, myself, whoever makes the most sense for where that founder is, and then also guest lectures from folks in anything from branding to design to data to legal structures

fundraising and what it takes to go out and build a fundable deck etc. All kind of crammed into a crash course of, as I said, about eight weeks.

Jon Coogan (47:28.815)
That sounds really good. Just about yourself and for that program in particular, where can we go to find out more details? What's the best way of getting in contact with you and following you and what Apollo 21 is doing?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (47:41.806)
Yeah, best place to find us is on our website. It's Apollo 21 .io. That's number two, number one. The pre -accelerator program is in the ventures portion of our website. So click on the Apollo 21 ventures logo anywhere that you see it. And then of course, Apollo 21 is active on socials. Usually Apollo 21 .io or Apollo 21 .io is the username. And I am also active on socials and spend a bunch of time in LinkedIn and things like that.

I am personally a blah blah blah slash among many on most socials. And if anybody happens to be in the New York area and listening, I also run a monthly founders dinner for technology folks to get together and actually meet one another and sit down over a meal. So I do that every month and more than happy to have people join.

Jon Coogan (48:14.712)
Okay.

Jon Coogan (48:29.959)
Fantastic. I've really enjoyed our chat today. So thank you very much for being on. It's definitely a few takeaways, but yeah, it's definitely a few takeaways. But I think my favorite one is just failing beautifully. I think that's a wonderful term that we should definitely be embracing. Just for a final call to action really. So any particular tips or any advice that you can want to finish off and leave with our listeners?

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (48:34.149)
it's my pleasure. Thank

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (48:54.358)
Always know where your next piece of business is going to come from.

I'll leave it at that, but it's super, super important.

Jon Coogan (49:00.709)
Fantastic! It really is, but now that's great. Thank you very much for your time. Really enjoyed pleasure and it was pleasure speaking to you. Cheers Danny.

Danny Nathan | Apollo21.io (49:08.587)
Absolutely. Thank you for having me