How to Build an Innovation Culture and Make Innovation Happen in Marketing

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Today we are talking about how to massively increase your organic traffic and leads and, crucially, how to be really analytical about all of your marketing so you can run a profitable business.

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And we have a great guest to help us talk through it today.

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Nick, welcome to the show.

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Hey, thanks so much for having me.

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Eric, Really excited to be here it today.

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Nick, welcome to the show.

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Hey, thanks so much for having me, eric, really excited to be here.

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Why don't we start off by you just sharing a minute or two about who you are and what you do?

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Sure.

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So my name's Nick.

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I'm the CEO of IdeaScale.

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We are the largest innovation software company in the world, been around 15 years, made countries now hundreds of major clients Pfizer, us Coast Guard, us Post Office, comcast you name it.

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Our clients are pretty big organizations that impact us all on a day-to-day basis and our software is the brains of their innovation operations.

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As for me personally the quick overview is grew up in a mix of India and Canada, but now I've been in the US for 20 years.

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I studied math and physics undergrad, went to business school at Harvard, spent a bunch of time on Wall Street doing big private equity deals and then for the last four or five years, I have somehow become a CEO, or a professional CEO.

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So this is the third company I've either co-run or run directly, and my job is how to take companies that are good and make them into extraordinary billion dollar companies.

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Wow, that is quite the profile profile.

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Congratulations on all of that success.

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Let me ask you, what is innovation?

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software okay.

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So everyone wants to be doing something better.

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Tomorrow that could be improving your factory process, that could be coming up with a new killer marketing campaign.

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That could be coming up with a great app, a new technology, whatever it is.

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You got to be doing new, innovative stuff every day.

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How do you do it?

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You can stick a bunch of guys in a room and say go be creative, creative or, coke, go come up with new stuff.

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That's a terrible way of doing things you actually need.

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There are right ways to be creative.

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There's right ways to actually come up with new products, new marketing campaigns, in the same way that there's a right way to do a CRM or a right way to do a accounting software.

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Our software is the right way to do innovation.

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It helps people be more creative and also to make sure that the good creative stuff floats to the top and actually gets and turns into reality and doesn't remain an idea.

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Awesome, yeah, I think it's a science as much as an art, right?

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So before we jump into your story, just so people have the context, can you give an example of how the innovation software works and does creativity the right way?

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Sure, so I'll use it.

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Give an example of how we use our own software.

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Right, you should eat your own cooking, as somebody smart once said.

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So we use our own software at Ideas.

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If you want to contribute, it's ideasideascalecom and we use it to develop our own software.

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So when we think about what new features we want, we have an ongoing campaign where anybody in the world can contribute an idea that hey, ideascale needs to build this feature or change this or kill this because it's a stupid part of your application.

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Other people around the world it could be students, it could be customers, it could be my own employees either contribute ideas, vote those ideas up and down, and then the best ideas rise to the top, the most upvoted ideas, the ones that the algorithm thinks are the best, and those are the ideas that then our product team says okay, we're putting this on the roadmap, we're getting this built, we're shipping it out in a couple of weeks.

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So, literally, the ideas for how we build our own product are coming from our users and from our employees and from our customers and from random students around the world anybody really, those ideas and they're being ranked based on how good they are, based on other users and then they're being turned into reality.

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So our product is really a function of using our product.

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That's awesome.

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You have democratized the product roadmap.

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Is that the case?

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Part of it.

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That's one of the use cases, right, but you can also a more silly use case is you know, one of our clients I heard once used it to brainstorm ideas for what snacks they should have on the kitchen, in their company kitchen.

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So the idea is just like there's all everybody, every company or every organization, is trying to do new stuff tomorrow, different than they did today.

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How do you figure out, a what you're going do, and B how do you make sure that stuff actually gets done?

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Because there's all this creativity in people's brains, but there's not a good way for that creativity to be ranked and then ultimately to make it in front of the CEO or the executives who get stuff done instead of just having only internal think is awesome, and having a way to do that is great, so we're ready to be inspired.

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Why don't you tell us a story about some of the best marketing that you and your team have done?

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Okay.

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So IdeaScale has gone through a tremendous marketing journey over the past two years.

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So when I showed up, our website did not have a talk to sales button and it didn't have a get a demo button, which sounds kind of crazy for a software company.

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So we've, you know, and today we have those, and we've done a whole bunch of other things, but I'm really going to focus on organic marketing.

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So in software, like, there's lots of ways to market right, you can do social media, you can do paid advertising on LinkedIn or Google or Facebook or whatever.

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We chose to go the organic route.

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So what we did was we created a blog and we made it a world-class repository of amazing content.

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So if you read our blog articles, they never mentioned idea scale.

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They're not what I call thinly veiled advertising.

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They are the how-to documents If you are an innovation professional.

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They are not attempts to sell our software.

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We don't even care if you like buy our software.

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It's just the best repository for content.

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And we obviously did some SEO optimization on that and we were thoughtful about the types of articles we wrote.

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But because we wrote just amazing content that all ended up on near the top of Google's ranking list for pretty much any topic in innovation on almost any language in the world.

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So if you're searching for innovation in German or Chinese or how to do a fishbone diagram, you're going to come across three resources Wikipedia, harvard Business Review and us right.

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So we're always top three on pretty much any topic.

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And what that's meant for us is we have had roughly a 50 to 100x increase in organic web traffic.

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I have 5x more web traffic than my next nine competitors combined, so you can imagine the level of success this has driven.

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And that's obviously translates into leads.

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We used to get one inbound lead every like three or four months and now we get something like 30 or 40 inbound leads a month, and that's really, by the way, I sell B2B software really expensive B2B software so 30 to 40 leads is extraordinarily good for a company of our size and scale and the price point we're at.

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So the kind of the moral of the story is like we achieved in.

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Well, the summary of the story is we achieved like a tremendous increase 50 to 100x increase in web traffic and the way we did that was we had extraordinary content right Again, not thinly veiled advertising, not five ways to use idea scale software.

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Just here's how you do great innovation.

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And then we also made sure we were very analytical about the types of articles we were writing and how they matched up, not only against Google's algorithm, but against the content that people cared about, right.

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So that's pretty amazing.

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What was the hardest thing about doing this strategy?

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Sure, I think we had to combine three things that don't necessarily reside in one person's brain.

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Number one we have to have the good content right, and the innovation experts are perhaps or not, perhaps definitely at idea scale.

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They're different than the SEO expert, right?

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So we had to take the person who had the innovation content for the people who had innovation content who are spread around the company, because that's what we do.

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Number two, we had to take the SEO person who understood all the algorithms and all the tips and tricks about metadata.

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And number three, we had to combine with analytics, because there's trillions of keywords out there.

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Right, you can optimize around our trillions of blog articles you could write.

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How are we going to write just a few hundred, something that can be done in a person you know, within a few weeks or a few months?

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How do we prioritize which articles we write?

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And we were very analytical about that.

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We use some kind of complicated but not PhD level math to figure out.

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Okay, here's the you know 5 million articles we could write, but here's the actual, you know thousand we're going to focus on instead of writing 5 million.

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So that's great.

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How many articles did you have to write to get these sorts of results?

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Just give me a general ballpark idea.

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Yeah, our first batch, of which resulted in about a 50X increase in traffic, was about 300 articles.

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Okay, so were these painstakingly crafted by some really smart people on your team.

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So, yes and no, we definitely used AIs.

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So we would have human beings write out the structure of them and AI fill in the words.

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But then we also were very careful about having human being make sure that it was not AI generated junk, where it always says, in today's fast changing times or whatever ChatGP loves using this phrase in today's fast moving business environment, or whatever right ChatGP loves using this phrase in today's fast moving business environment, or whatever, which is just so generic sounding.

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So it was human being wrote out the template.

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Ai helped fill in the body of the content.

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Then human being edited to make sure that it was good that it didn't sound like AI generated.

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So there was multiple levels of kind of iteration there.

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And you mentioned analytics being a big part of it and tracking what's working.

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I think overall in marketing, analytics is so key these days.

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Can you talk a little bit about that?

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Sure.

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So I'll give an example from the SEO Again.

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You know there's trillions of keywords.

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How do you figure out which keywords you go after, which blog articles you write?

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So we broke it down into kind of three metrics that mattered, for every given keyword had AI Actually, we used it in analytical AI, not the typical chat chief tease but a different sort of AI rank every single keyword that was potentially relevant to us on three metrics.

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Number one what's the volume?

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Is this a keyword that gets searched, you know, millions of times a day or you know once every blue moon?

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Number two how easy is it to win this keyword right?

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Is this impossible because everyone and their cousin is competing for this keyword, or is it a you know a diamond in the rough?

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And number three how relevant is it to us?

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Okay, because selling you know, apple pie, while I love, apple pie is not relevant to idea scales business, whereas somebody who's looking for innovation, software, is highly relevant to us.

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So we then plug those three numbers into what's called an exponential decay equation, which you can look it up on Wikipedia.

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How to do this?

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You don't have to reinvent the wheel.

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I have a math degree but I'm too lazy to reinvent the wheel.

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I looked it up on Wikipedia.

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We plug these three numbers in and it spat out a number that says look, we want to focus on the words that are some combination of high volume, highly relevant to us and easy to win.

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And then we stack, ranked everything in based on that final output metric and just shrug, and then our SEO person and our content people just went through from top to bottom like whatever's the highest scoring on those, on the combined product of those three metrics.

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We just, you know, started cranking out articles.

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So that way we prioritize the things that were right.

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At the first things we did were the things that were highest volume, most relevant, easiest to win, which is what you want right, most bang for your buck.

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Absolutely so.

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Some people would say this strategy is harder to do today because Google is saturated.

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But do these tactics you're using overcome?

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That Is that sort of the moral of the story.

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Sure.

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So there's an old economics joke, right?

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If you find a $20 bill on the ground, the economist says it doesn't exist, because if it was there, somebody would have already gotten it.

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It is harder to compete in Google today than it was, let's say, in 2005.

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That's certainly true Algorithms.

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Google has, you know, improved its algorithm to be less gameable than it was in 2005.

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And you have a lot more competitors.

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Right, a lot of people weren't doing any organic advertising in 2005.

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But today, if you don't have a website, you're out of business, right, and now you could be a local coffee shop and you have a website.

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So it is more difficult.

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But the good news is, in a lot of areas, people are still not doing organic content.

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Well, their focus is to really game Google's algorithm, and the problem with that is Google is anti-gaming.

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It's improving its algorithm almost every few months to make it anti-gameable, anti-gamifiable.

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Basically, you can't cheat Google's algorithm, right?

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Or it becomes increasingly more difficult.

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So the focus has shifted from hey, how do you game Google's algorithm?

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To having great content.

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And there, in many areas of the internet, it's actually very not competitive, right?

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Again, my competitors have been around for as long as I have.

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Many of them actually had much larger marketing teams.

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I did this with one dedicated SEO person and one and a half content people, right, and I was one of those half content people, being a full-time CEO at the same time, so and most of my competitors had like five to 10 dedicating marketing people doing all sorts of marketing stuff.

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So we were able to do this because we were just a lot more analytical and thoughtful about how to do it.

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And, again, we'd never set out to again, we never set out to game Google's algorithm.

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We just said we're going to make this the best resource for innovation content on the internet.

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And look if, hopefully, people will obviously be grateful that we put out all this great content and they will make us the first call when they're ready to buy innovation software.

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If it's not, it costs me a few pennies of hosting a month, right.

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So for all the free riders, that's okay.

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That's part of the internet.

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Most of the internet is free riding.

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Yeah, I think this is a great strategy, particularly given the inflation around the cost of advertising on Google or LinkedIn or other sites.

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You don't have to have a math degree to know that those costs are through the roof.

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I mean that equation is kind of broken in terms of SaaS metrics, right?

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Yeah, so so it's actually funny in business.

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When I was in business school in 2016, we did a.

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We had, we did a marketing project where me and like two other people we did marketing for a company that sold or did a subscription service for high-end coffee grounds, and when we did the math, it was like, wow, the ROI on this is insane, right, you spend $10 in advertising and you generate 50 bucks in revenue.

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And we weren't being sophisticated about it, right, it was just like let's put up a Google and Facebook ad and see how it works.

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You run that same analysis.

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I went back out of interest and did that same analysis today and you spend $10 on advertising, get $3 of revenue back.

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And that's for B2C, but it's also probably true in B2B as well.

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We spend near zero at idea scale on paid advertising literally like a few grand a month, which is tiny for a company of our scale.

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Most of our competitors are spending tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, and the reason we don't is because the cost of advertising has increased so much that it's actually negative ROI for many companies, both B2C and B2B.

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Spending a dollar or spending a hundred dollars on Google or Facebook advertising may only get you 50 bucks of revenue back, and that's bad.

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That's a bad decision.

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Like whenever you do that in advertising, you're losing money.

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Advertising has to be positive ROI, so that's why we've pulled back or actually basically cut it to zero, and really focused on the organic or not just organic SEO, but also other modes of advertising that are not part of the paid advertising game, because that's a race to the bottom.

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That's why Google's valuation is a trillion dollars and everyone who spends on Google is losing money along the way.

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I just marvel, because when I first started Google advertising 20 years ago it was $1 a click, $2 a click and today you're looking at $40 a click for competitive keywords.

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It's nuts to look at that is.

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It's a really bad magic trick for marketers to spend something like $3,000 in advertising to acquire $1,000 in revenue and just repeating that over and over again is a recipe to go bankrupt right.

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Yeah Well, the funny thing is like, you're absolutely right, I agree with that.

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That's why we're incredibly disciplined about kind of our wine by the way, I've run B2C as well for a shoe company before but the funny thing is you know what you say about people spending $3,000 to get $1,000 of revenue.

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A lot of marketers don't realize they're doing this right, because marketers are really focused, have not gone through the math or analytics, and their CFOs or CEOs have not held them accountable because they're so focused on growth at any cost rather than growth at an ROI positive cost, and that's a fundamentally different skill set that a lot of marketers, unfortunately, aren't trained in, and a lot of CFOs are often not given the power to hold their marketing teams or advertising teams accountable to this.

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Now, good companies, by the way, do do this well.

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They have incredibly disciplined marketing teams, and the best examples, by the way, I would say, are somewhere in the big CPG companies, like the cereal companies and the Coke company and the soda companies, because they didn't realize if their marketing ROI is negative, they are out of business.

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So so quick.

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So being the CEO of a SaaS company.

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How do you run a profitable company?

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What are a couple of pieces of advice you'd give to other leaders?

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Sure.

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So we are incredibly profitable and we are entirely bootstrapped.

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We've never taken a dollar venture capital, even though we've been in business 15 years.

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My profit margins look more like Google's or Facebook's on a percentage basis than they do like startups, which is pretty awesome.

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And the way we've done this is kind of threefold.

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Number one our decisions are ROI based.

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We're running the company financially the way you would a billion dollar company, rather than you know we're a scale smaller than that today.

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So we're running with the same level of sophistication and stewardship that a large company would.

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And a silly example of that is I'm the CEO of the company.

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I spent $4 on a coffee on a business trip recently.

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I submitted a receipt just like anybody else, because I'm held accountable to that $4, the same way we were holding somebody accountable to $100,000 conference expense.

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That's number one.

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Number two is we've tried to be trained leaders in each of their departments on how do you make good decisions that make business sense, and often engineers aren't thinking about how do we make good, you know, decisions.

00:17:45.259 --> 00:17:46.300
Let's just go build it.

00:17:46.300 --> 00:17:50.798
But it wasn't a good decision to go build it in the first place versus the labor hours required.

00:17:50.798 --> 00:17:57.080
And number three we're really focused on what's called small experiments rather than big swings.

00:17:57.401 --> 00:18:06.855
By small experiments, whether we're talking a new product feature or a new marketing campaign or a new engineering project, we run a bunch of small experiments that are very short.

00:18:06.855 --> 00:18:11.034
Let's say they cost $1,000 and they take us a week or two to figure out whether it was a good idea.

00:18:11.034 --> 00:18:16.875
And after we run the experiment, we do two things If we look at whether it failed or succeeded.

00:18:16.875 --> 00:18:19.201
If it failed, we just shut it off and stop doing it.

00:18:19.201 --> 00:18:24.354
Or, in the case of a product, we revert to an older version and if it works, we do more of it.

00:18:24.354 --> 00:18:33.859
We scale it up 100x, really, really quickly, and that approach means that we cut our losses really quickly before they cost us and we scale up our wins really quickly as well.

00:18:33.859 --> 00:18:39.763
That allows us to be good at iterating fast, failing fast, but also scaling up fast.

00:18:42.105 --> 00:18:46.848
I think those are three really good ways to be profitable.

00:18:46.848 --> 00:18:59.576
Do you have a favorite test that you did recently where there was some internal conflict or different beliefs about what would happen, and how did it go?

00:19:00.017 --> 00:19:03.211
Yeah, okay, so I have a funny one from the product side of things.

00:19:03.211 --> 00:19:08.233
So think of us almost like a social media platform where people submit ideas and vote ideas up and down.

00:19:08.233 --> 00:19:10.596
Right, what does every social media platform have?

00:19:10.596 --> 00:19:12.076
It has a button that says like post.

00:19:12.076 --> 00:19:17.577
If you go to Twitter, there's a big blue button that says post, right, so we had this little button at the top right of our application.

00:19:17.577 --> 00:19:24.311
That it was just a plus sign, you would figure.

00:19:24.311 --> 00:19:26.001
A plus sign is pretty obvious that, hey, this is how you submit an idea to idea scale.

00:19:26.021 --> 00:19:27.250
We changed that plus sign to the word submit behind us.

00:19:27.250 --> 00:19:31.178
All we did was add the word submit and it seems like such a stupid change.

00:19:31.178 --> 00:19:32.556
Like, does that really make a difference?

00:19:32.556 --> 00:19:34.253
Based on our data so far?

00:19:34.253 --> 00:19:47.596
It tripled the usage of that button Because people apparently not everybody gets the word plus or gets the symbol plus, but the symbol plus, combined with the English word submit, makes it stupid, obvious to everyone.

00:19:47.596 --> 00:19:49.701
So that's one where we ran the experiment.

00:19:50.123 --> 00:19:57.857
We thought it wouldn't work, but it had a huge impact A three X increases, enormous increase in terms of usage of a function or button, and so we kept it.

00:19:57.857 --> 00:20:02.315
In fact, we're going to make one more change, where we're going to change the color to make it more obvious.

00:20:02.315 --> 00:20:02.977
Right now it's gray.

00:20:02.977 --> 00:20:05.102
We're going to make it bright orange on a blue background.

00:20:05.102 --> 00:20:07.816
So hopefully that results in an even bigger change.

00:20:07.816 --> 00:20:08.838
And that's again.

00:20:08.838 --> 00:20:09.661
If it didn't work.

00:20:09.661 --> 00:20:18.037
By the way, if it resulted in nothing and it took up extra space, because now you have to write the word submit, we just revert to the old version and say no harm, no foul, took us a few hours of engineering time.

00:20:18.217 --> 00:20:21.280
Let's that's wild.

00:20:21.280 --> 00:20:27.930
A B tests like that, with very small changes, can yield such huge differences.

00:20:27.930 --> 00:20:33.498
It's just wild, psychologically to me and socially, that that's the case.

00:20:33.498 --> 00:20:39.461
But that sort of dramatic change from such a little minute thing is ponderous, isn't it?

00:20:39.490 --> 00:20:48.622
This was like two weeks ago, by the way, right, and our entire engineering process, our marketing and engineering process, are designed for these rapid experimentations.

00:20:48.622 --> 00:21:00.510
We have a couple of big projects that take a long time to do, but most of our changes are rapid fire let's put it out, test it, analyze it and then cancel it or continue to, or move on to the next thing.

00:21:00.510 --> 00:21:02.936
And how many tests do you run?

00:21:02.936 --> 00:21:03.498
A year Is it?

00:21:03.980 --> 00:21:04.922
a hundred a thousand.

00:21:05.230 --> 00:21:09.579
On the engineering side, we're releasing about five small new features every week.

00:21:09.579 --> 00:21:11.076
Is our target, okay?

00:21:11.076 --> 00:21:22.137
Sometimes they're changing a button, sometimes they're changing a color, sometimes they're moving menus around, and then we're releasing about three to six big features a year, and those are ones that take a long time to engineer.

00:21:22.137 --> 00:21:29.094
Where possible, though, we try and break them into small mini features so that we can get feedback along the way rather than have to wait till launch day.

00:21:29.094 --> 00:21:36.304
On the marketing side, we're running about four to five marketing campaigns a month, and each of those have A-B variations.

00:21:36.304 --> 00:21:39.152
And again, if the marketing campaign fails, we've learned that.

00:21:39.192 --> 00:21:41.556
Hey, you know this advertising on Google didn't work.

00:21:41.556 --> 00:21:42.376
That was an experiment.

00:21:42.376 --> 00:21:48.065
We tried it out a year ago and every once in a while we test it again to see if Google's marketing expense ratios change.

00:21:48.065 --> 00:21:49.633
If not, we stop doing it.

00:21:49.633 --> 00:21:53.362
Simple as that, very simple, very simple.

00:21:53.362 --> 00:21:53.843
I like it.

00:21:53.843 --> 00:21:56.641
Hard to do in practice, but very easy in theory.

00:21:56.641 --> 00:22:01.315
It requires a lot of discipline to say it's okay to fail as long as you fail cheaply and fail fast.

00:22:02.938 --> 00:22:03.358
So that's.

00:22:03.358 --> 00:22:13.163
My next question is, beyond using the software to get people to vote on the ideas, how do you build a culture of innovation at a company?

00:22:13.910 --> 00:22:14.111
Sure.

00:22:14.111 --> 00:22:24.699
So I think that's basically what we're trying to encourage our customers to do, and I think, to have a culture of innovation, a sustainable culture of innovation, you need three things, what I call the three-legged stool of innovation.

00:22:24.699 --> 00:22:26.096
Number one you need the right people.

00:22:26.096 --> 00:22:29.259
So you need people who want to be creative, who want to do new things.

00:22:29.259 --> 00:22:32.298
Number two you need the right incentives and process.

00:22:32.298 --> 00:22:34.637
And number three, you need the right tools and technology.

00:22:34.637 --> 00:22:36.794
So to achieve that idea scale.

00:22:37.115 --> 00:22:39.830
Number one we focus on people who are trying to do new things.

00:22:39.830 --> 00:22:40.090
Right.

00:22:40.090 --> 00:22:44.101
We don't want people who are just going to show up at nine do the same thing every day.

00:22:44.101 --> 00:22:44.962
We want them to.

00:22:44.962 --> 00:22:50.564
If they're not submitting ideas, sharing ideas, then they're probably not right for a culture of innovation that we want.

00:22:50.564 --> 00:22:55.303
Right, we want people who are doing new things every day, or willing to try and do new things every day.

00:22:55.683 --> 00:22:57.951
Number two the process incentives.

00:22:58.010 --> 00:23:20.460
We reward people for coming up with new ideas, or for using our own software or for submitting new product ideas, whether that be monetary rewards or we have this taco system, which is, like you know, paths on the back that people can redeem for gift certificates or also like promotions, right, we notice when somebody, hey, like if the head of bugs is submitting ideas on how to make our software better, that means he or she cares about our software and is thinking how to make it better.

00:23:21.260 --> 00:23:23.622
And then, number three, the tools and technology.

00:23:23.622 --> 00:23:25.364
Right, there's many tools and technology.

00:23:25.364 --> 00:23:28.005
Our software is one of the tools and technology people can use.

00:23:28.005 --> 00:23:37.373
It would be very silly if we weren't using our own software, because then we're saying like, hey, we can try and be innovative without doing this, and either our software sucks or we don't need it.

00:23:37.373 --> 00:23:40.195
In either case, then we're sending the wrong message to the customers.

00:23:40.195 --> 00:23:44.721
Turns out, our software is actually pretty good at helping us figure out what features we want to build.

00:23:44.721 --> 00:23:53.614
We actually run a private version of it that's not visible to the public, on how we figure out what new marketing campaigns we want to run too, so we don't just use it for a product.

00:23:54.615 --> 00:23:59.050
Yeah, I think all of those things make sense Broadly.

00:23:59.050 --> 00:24:06.415
It seems to me that people just have to care and they have to be curious, right Like they had to be passionate.

00:24:07.705 --> 00:24:12.057
There's a lot of places where people care but they don't have the tools to do something cool.

00:24:12.057 --> 00:24:17.387
So, like I'll give an example from Google right, google once upon a time used to have what they call 20% time.

00:24:17.387 --> 00:24:17.689
You could.

00:24:17.689 --> 00:24:22.730
The company said, okay, work for on our stuff four days a week, but one day a week go actually be creative.

00:24:22.730 --> 00:24:25.196
So the resource that Google gave people was time.

00:24:28.265 --> 00:24:32.616
If you're working 80 hours a week being a developer, you don't have time to like go expend your creative muscles or build your pet projects.

00:24:32.616 --> 00:24:39.990
Right, whether it be Google Maps or a half of the Google applications we used came out of like somebody's 20% time 10 or 15 years ago.

00:24:39.990 --> 00:24:43.458
So people companies do need to give people resources.

00:24:43.458 --> 00:24:45.108
Those resources could be technology.

00:24:45.108 --> 00:24:55.996
That could be money, that could be time to go do creative things, because no matter how creative somebody is, if they're overworked, they're not going to spend that time doing creative things that actually move your organization forward.

00:24:55.996 --> 00:24:59.112
You need time, money, resources, technology to do stuff.

00:24:59.112 --> 00:25:08.098
You could have a great product idea in mind, but if you don't have, let's say, figma or Canva or Adobe to design stuff, you're not going to design that great software.

00:25:09.205 --> 00:25:10.150
That formula makes sense.

00:25:10.150 --> 00:25:11.134
I agree with that.

00:25:11.134 --> 00:25:15.712
You had to have all of those pieces to live the innovation dream.

00:25:15.712 --> 00:25:19.204
I would say One final bonus question.

00:25:19.204 --> 00:25:37.277
So, because you said in your story that you and the team used AI for your organic SEO and content strategy, how can business leaders use AI every day to make their business and life better?

00:25:37.704 --> 00:25:38.185
Sure so.

00:25:38.185 --> 00:25:42.196
At IdeaScale, by the way, almost everyone uses AI actively as part of their job.

00:25:42.196 --> 00:25:46.096
It's, in fact, part of our interview process now to make sure you have those skills.

00:25:46.096 --> 00:25:51.307
So it's a core part of how we do everything, whether it be marketing, product software engineering, coding, et cetera.

00:25:51.307 --> 00:25:52.731
I would give three tips.

00:25:53.032 --> 00:25:58.105
Number one every executive actually almost every professional nowadays should go take a course in prompt engineering.

00:25:58.105 --> 00:25:58.625
It's free.

00:25:58.625 --> 00:26:00.548
Coursera has one, takes eight hours to do.

00:26:00.548 --> 00:26:02.609
Go learn how to use ChatGPT powerfully.

00:26:02.609 --> 00:26:03.911
It'll make you 10x more productive.

00:26:03.911 --> 00:26:05.492
I've done three of these myself.

00:26:05.492 --> 00:26:09.116
So, number one don't just teach yourself how to use ChatGPT.

00:26:09.116 --> 00:26:13.060
There's courses that teach you how to use this stuff really, really powerfully.

00:26:13.060 --> 00:26:19.509
One pro tip learn what's called a persona pattern.

00:26:19.509 --> 00:26:21.380
Tell ChatGPT act as a CEO or act as a world-class product designer, and it gets much smarter.

00:26:21.380 --> 00:26:22.705
That's one of the things I learned during the courses.

00:26:22.705 --> 00:26:23.727
That's number one.

00:26:23.727 --> 00:26:24.689
Go take those courses.

00:26:25.289 --> 00:26:32.790
Number two look at what you're spending your time doing and go Google if there's a piece of AI that does it for you.

00:26:32.790 --> 00:26:39.349
It's called agentic AI AI that replicates part of your job or all of your job, anything that you're spending a lot of time doing.

00:26:39.349 --> 00:26:45.596
Somebody's probably built an AI to do now, and that AI is anywhere from 80 to 150% as good as you right.

00:26:45.596 --> 00:26:56.434
A lot of what I do I'm trying to outsource to the AI now because I realize, hey, I'm pretty good, but like AI can get do 90% of the effort, equality in 0% of the time, and isn't that awesome.

00:26:56.434 --> 00:27:04.231
And number three, don't be afraid to redefine entire business processes to be around AI.

00:27:04.231 --> 00:27:06.452
Like, really think, do I need a sales team?

00:27:06.452 --> 00:27:14.307
A silly example is do I need a sales team?

00:27:14.307 --> 00:27:19.924
You know, a silly example is do I need 40 sales to people doing this, or can it be one salesperson who is 40 times more efficient because we have this team of agentic AIs running around him or her and supporting him or her.

00:27:20.005 --> 00:27:21.410
Yeah, I think that's great advice.

00:27:21.410 --> 00:27:30.449
The prompt engineering thing in particular I've spent a lot of time on it over the last year or two and getting really good gets you dramatically better results.

00:27:30.449 --> 00:27:32.973
I can do projects in two days.

00:27:32.973 --> 00:27:39.775
It used to take weeks to just slug through it with rolling up your sleeves, so I think there's some great stuff in there.

00:27:39.775 --> 00:27:46.074
Is there a favorite thing that you like to do with AI that you think it's the most fun or the best at?

00:27:48.938 --> 00:27:50.339
I like wargaming with it.

00:27:50.339 --> 00:27:55.224
So I've been in some very complex political negotiations with M&A, with some of my competitors.

00:27:55.224 --> 00:28:01.095
I'm trying to like acquire a merge with them and those are very delicate discussions so I wargame with them.

00:28:01.095 --> 00:28:09.211
I program the AI to behave with all the personality information of one of my competitor CEOs and then negotiate back and forth with the AI.

00:28:09.211 --> 00:28:13.807
So I'm, you know, prepared for both live negotiations as well as email negotiations.

00:28:13.807 --> 00:28:16.071
And remember I've heard to her plan to talk to.

00:28:18.056 --> 00:28:18.355
Wow.

00:28:18.696 --> 00:28:19.357
That's epic.

00:28:19.357 --> 00:28:19.925
I love that.

00:28:19.925 --> 00:28:20.507
Fun fact.

00:28:20.507 --> 00:28:36.271
I've also used that in a personal context for negotiations with my wife, right, so like, okay, how do I you know, yes, so programmed, there's an AI version of my wife that I practice with before I, you know, enter into what could be sometimes complex negotiations with my or discussions with my wife.

00:28:37.885 --> 00:28:38.730
That's amazing.

00:28:39.486 --> 00:28:46.611
She loves that I'm coming and being a lot more empathetic, a lot better prepared, more concerned about her pain points in any discussion we have.

00:28:49.006 --> 00:28:50.068
Practice makes perfect.

00:28:50.068 --> 00:28:51.634
Like that's great.

00:28:52.065 --> 00:28:53.909
Practice with the right partner makes perfect.

00:28:53.909 --> 00:28:56.275
Correct In this case an AI partner.

00:28:57.096 --> 00:28:57.518
Correct.

00:28:57.518 --> 00:29:00.513
Any final thoughts on what we've talked about today?

00:29:00.513 --> 00:29:02.951
Anything I didn't ask that you wanted to share.

00:29:03.795 --> 00:29:03.976
Sure.

00:29:03.976 --> 00:29:06.343
So one just philosophical thing on marketing.

00:29:06.343 --> 00:29:12.849
Right, I think a lot of marketing is people think about it as convincing people to buy your software or your product.

00:29:12.849 --> 00:29:15.030
I think that's a bad approach to marketing.

00:29:15.030 --> 00:29:21.316
Good marketing is trying to show people that, hey, we have a tool that can solve a pre-existing problem.

00:29:21.316 --> 00:29:23.778
You have convince people to buy.

00:29:23.778 --> 00:29:26.940
Whatever junk you're selling, they'll buy it, but they won't be a repeat customer.

00:29:26.940 --> 00:29:38.055
Whereas if you help them whether you call it education or discovery if you help them, educate them or help them discover something that you're actually solving a problem, they're much more likely to be recurring or repeat customers.

00:29:38.055 --> 00:29:41.009
And that's obviously where the value of any customer relationship is.

00:29:41.009 --> 00:29:44.634
Whether you're selling burgers, like McDonald's wants you to come back every week for a burger.

00:29:44.634 --> 00:29:57.440
If they sold you a burger once, their advertising was an absolute waste of time, right, their burger actually has to be good tasting and the advertising is just helping you experience it for that very first time Awesome.

00:29:57.460 --> 00:30:07.388
Well, Nick, thank you for your story, all your insights and suggestions today for things that people can do to get better at being innovative.

00:30:07.388 --> 00:30:13.736
I'm going to link to your website and your LinkedIn so people can get in touch if they'd love to learn more.

00:30:13.736 --> 00:30:15.847
Thank you so much for being with us today.

00:30:15.847 --> 00:30:17.753
Thank you so much for having me, Eric.

00:30:17.834 --> 00:30:19.156
I appreciated the opportunity.