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Join Wendy Coulter and Hanna from Hummingbird Creative Group as they delve into the nuances of brand building and the Hummingbird Effect with Nick Jain, CEO of IdeaScale. Discover how small changes can lead to massive impacts in business, from marketing and employee morale to product innovation and company valuation. Nick shares his journey, the importance of ROI-driven decisions, and the critical role of agility and data in creating breakthroughs. Perfect for CEOs and marketing leaders looking to amplify their brands and drive success through innovation and strategic decisions.
00:00 Introduction to Brand Building
00:54 Meet the Team: Hannah and Nick
01:53 Nick's Journey and Insights
04:58 The Hummingbird Effect in Action
10:02 Psychology in Sales and Marketing
14:32 Impact of Marketing on Business Valuation
27:10 Innovation and Experimentation
33:16 Conclusion and Contact Information
Creators and Guests
Host
What is The Hummingbird Effect with Wendy Coulter?
Welcome to "The Hummingbird Effect," a podcast dedicated to uncovering the subtle yet powerful ways that small innovations can transform your business. Hosted by Wendy Coulter, CEO of Hummingbird Creative Group, this show delves into the stories and strategies behind successful brand building.
For over 25 years, Wendy has helped CEOs and business leaders redefine their brands through innovation and compelling narratives. In this podcast, she shares the insights and lessons learned from her extensive experience, exploring how a strong brand orientation can significantly increase the value of your business.
Each episode features engaging conversations with industry leaders, business advisors, and innovators who have harnessed the power of branding to make a substantial impact. Discover how focusing on core values, mission, and vision can drive your brand beyond mere marketing tactics, fostering a culture that resonates with your audience and enhances your business's reputation.
Inspired by the concept of the Hummingbird Effect—where small, adaptive changes lead to remarkable outcomes—this podcast aims to help you understand and implement the incremental innovations that can elevate your brand and business.
Join Wendy Coulter on "The Hummingbird Effect" and learn how to evolve your brand, attract more customers, and ultimately enhance the value of your business through strategic branding.
[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Wendy Culture and I help CEOs and marketing leaders unlock the power of their brands. For years, business leaders have focused on marketing tactics, but what truly matters is building a strong brand. Think of it like the Hummingbird Effect. Small innovations in branding can lead to surprisingly big results, increased valuation, a stronger culture, a marketing message that resonates.
[00:00:52] Wendy: Many other things. Today we're diving deeper into the world of brand building and I have Hannah from Hummingbird Creative Group. She's our brand strategist with me today. Hi Hannah.
[00:01:03] Hanna: Hi, Wendy.
[00:01:04] Wendy: We were just talking about it being a pretty cold day today. So, um, have you got your, your heater going
[00:01:10] Hanna: my heater is going. It always is going. Yep. My toes are warm.
[00:01:17] Wendy: Awesome, awesome. We've had a busy day in the office with a lot of meetings and so this is kind of our, um, our, our our pause for today and we get to meet someone. Um, really awesome. Nick Jane is joining us today. He's the CEO of Idea Scale. Um, and Nick is a finance and innovation expert based out of Philadelphia.
[00:01:43] And he is really cold today. So welcome to the show, Nick. Good to see you.
[00:01:47] Thank you
[00:01:48] Nick: Thank you so much for having me on the show, Hannah and Wendy. Really excited to be here.
[00:01:52] Wendy: Awesome. Um, well, I, I, I generally like to start with a fun fact and so, um, if anyone checks out your LinkedIn profile, they're gonna see poker player in the top line. So tell us a little bit about that just to get to know you a little bit more.
[00:02:08] Nick: Sure. So I started playing poker about four or five years ago. I now play semi competitively. I'm probably good enough that I could make it a full-time job if I wanted. I don't want that. Um, nowadays, I recently had a kid, so I'm no longer really playing that much poker. But one of the cool things I've started doing recently is, you know, being a tech guy who loves math and machine learning, I started applying, I built a machine learning tutor to teach me how to play even better.
[00:02:31] And it's actually extraordinary. So if you actually go look down my LinkedIn, you can see these really crazy analytics. I've taken big data AI and started using it to make me a better poker player, which is kind of just such a cool thing to, and fun thing to do, and nerdy, I guess, to do.
[00:02:45] Wendy: That is really cool. And another use for ai. I learn a new use for AI every day, so, um, so thank you for that. Well, so talk to us a little bit about your journey. Um, you've got finance background, you just mentioned tech innovation. Um, talk us through the journey that got you to where you are today, Nick.
[00:03:06] Nick: Sure. So in a personal level, I was born in a mix of ca, born and raised in a mix of Canada and India. Um, came to the United States about nearly 20 years ago for college. Studied math and physics there. Then went off to Wall Street and spent a bunch of time on Wall Street as a professional investor doing big multi-billion dollar private equity deals or hedge fund deals.
[00:03:25] Learned a lot about finance, learned a lot about how companies work and learned a lot about management teams. And like it was really cool, you know, especially in my, your early twenties to be, you know, your junior person at a big firm, but you get to be near the CEO of a billion dollar company 'cause you're investing in his or her company.
[00:03:40] So I learned from some really extraordinary people. Um, and about five or so years ago, I fell into a really interesting career. Which is I am a professional CEO, which means that companies or private equity firms hire me when their organization is ready for that next stage of success. Um, so, so far I've run a hundred million dollar revenue trucking company.
[00:04:00] So you can imagine this is a big trucking company with thousands of trucks going across the road. Then I've I co-ran a small $2 million revenue men's shoe startup. Um, and now I'm running Idea Scale, which is a. The world's largest innovation software company. We've been around about 15 years. We have employees in eight countries, um, you know, hundreds of clients.
[00:04:22] Um, and you can imagine just across my career now, I've been in a bunch of different companies from trucking to shoes to now B2B software, and that's what I do for a living. I take companies that are doing well and making them do great, are companies that are doing poorly and making them do well.
[00:04:37] Wendy: You're one of those really diverse people, um, and I admire that. It sounds like you've just got a wealth of background and, um, that makes for a good innovation guy. Right. Um. You've got all of this past experience to draw from innovation. So, um, so that's fantastic. Well, I'm gonna jump into some questions about Hummingbird Effect, right?
[00:05:02] Um, I shared a little bit about what that means at the beginning, um, and that is where seemingly small changes in something you do with your business can make a. Really significant and positive effect in another area that you might not have been expecting. So can you share a specific instance where you've seen that happen?
[00:05:24] Nick: Sure. So I'll give an example on the product side of things. For example, we're a software company. We're always tweaking little features, um, you know, changing the colors on things and all as well as launching big new products or big new features. And I'll give an example, like I. A humming verbs type effect.
[00:05:39] So we have this, we're think of our software, like a social media platform where people post ideas. Like, just like on TikTok, you post a video or on Instagram, you post a photo. Um, one of the really, really small changes we made was we changed the color and size and shape of our submit button. It's a very trivial change.
[00:05:55] You're literally just changing. And all of a sudden we found that there was like a 40 or 50% increase in the number of people submitting content. And imagine your TikTok and you slightly change your button and all of a sudden you get 40% more users. That's an extraordinary change now. Um, so that's again, and that actually made more of an impact than some of the bigger, cooler features that I was personally excited about, that hey, we're launching this entirely new software module, so.
[00:06:19] That's a very classic example of like the hummingbird effect, where you get extraordinary outcome changes for what should be trivial changes. Hey, we changed the color of a button from gray to orange. Why does that matter? Yeah, it's a little prettier, but should it matter that much? It does.
[00:06:33] Wendy: Nick, do you think that was predictable in any way? You know, I mean, we are in marketing. Hannah and I are in marketing, and we do things every day. You're always trying to make the best decisions. Um, and so, you know. You think you know what different colors mean and the impact that that will have, or what the size of a button should be best on base practices, best practices, but was that predictable in any way as you look back?
[00:06:58] Nick: So yes and no. I think in general there's a philosophy towards in building software or any product. It could be a child's toy truck or a doll that you wanna make a product really easy to use. Right. Um, and so a lot of these small changes that we're making, we are doing it specifically in our software to make things easier to use.
[00:07:18] We know not all of them will work, but we have a general belief that these stupid little changes we're making are making our software easier to work. So yes, there was. Philosophically or strategically, we knew that there would be a positive impact. And then tactically we were actually, for this specific change, we had a pretty high confidence that, hey, our button's kind of hard to see.
[00:07:35] It's, it's just a little plus sign that's hard to see. Let's make that plus that little tiny gray plus sign into a big orange sign that says post or submit. Make it like stupid obvious that this is. In big letters, posting a new idea or posting a new piece of content. So we had a big sense that this would make things a lot better.
[00:07:54] Now I expected kind of gut feel like five to 10%, the fact that it had like a 40 plus percent impact. I. I think it would be difficult for folks to predict the, um, at least quantitatively predict that qualitatively, we know people are, for lack of a better word, lazy. They like big buttons. They like a stop sign that is big in red.
[00:08:12] It says Stop, right, makes it easy. Whether you're in Japan or France or the United States, you see a big stop sign octagonal red. You don't have to see the French word arre to know that means stop, right? That same thing applies for software design or marketing for that map.
[00:08:28] Wendy: Okay, so as a numbers guy, what is the true impact of that in your situation? Like, I want, I want the listeners to get an idea of scale here.
[00:08:41] Nick: Sure. So I've got several hundred customers across 25 different countries. I've got two and a half million users or so across the world. Um, I. A any given day, I have probably several thousand ideas, and my ideas are more substantive than a funny TikTok video, right? This could be an idea for new invention or a way to change the culture of your organization.
[00:09:01] So. A 30 to 40% increase means that each day people are contributing 30 or 40% more ideas. That could be transformative. The could be not always, because there are bad ideas, could be transformative to their organizations. These could be 30 or 40% more new products that a toy company puts out. Or resolving cultural issues in your organization's manufacturing plant or increasing safety by using a different type of ladder.
[00:09:27] Um, what we really excel at is capturing both the small ideas and big ideas. And imagine if in your life you had 30 or 40% more ideas, both big and small, how to make your life better and add Now think about what that means for our clients. We're a billion dollar companies or the US Post Office, Pfizer.
[00:09:45] Imagine if they were 30 or 40% better at collecting and implementing great ideas.
[00:09:51] Wendy: Yeah. That's great. That's great. Um, do you have any other examples that you've seen really make an impact in what you're doing or in a different area even? I.
[00:10:02] Nick: Sure. So, um, I'll, I'll try and avoid giving a product or engineering example and let's go into, a, a sale. Let's go into more of a sales and marketing example. So in the world of sales and market, or let's, let's start with a bit of human psychology. Human beings are not machines. We have all these psychological biases.
[00:10:21] And anyone who's actually a professional salesman or, or a salesperson or marketer should have a good understanding of these biases. You could have like. Fomo, loss aversion status quo bias. There's all these, you know, crazy biases that exist in our brain. And it's important when you're communicating with customers to understand they sometimes may have these irrational biases and you don't wanna take advantage of them, but at the same time, you want to figure out what is blocking your customer from making a decision that he or she should be making.
[00:10:49] Um, and so one of the things we did was we started training our salespeople and understanding the four or five major, biases that affect human decision making. The most famous, you know, the, probably the two most famous ones that are relevant in the business world are status quo bias. People like doing whatever the default choice is.
[00:11:07] Um, and then the second is loss aversion. People care about losing a dollar more than they care about winning a dollar. In fact, about three times more on average, um for the average person. And those are really important things. So like when you're framing in a marketing context, let's use an example, right?
[00:11:24] Um, we, you know, on our, on our free signup page, we used to have a button where you actually had to check to sign up for our mailing list. Now you actually have to uncheck to sign unsign up for our mailing lists, right? And that actually increased the number of people who are signing up for a mailing list by like five x, right?
[00:11:41] Unsurprisingly. Um, or on the loss aversion thing when we're talking to customers. We have, we not only say that, Hey, you know, we can help you make a million more dollars, but we instead sometimes say, or more frequently say, we can help you avoid losing a million dollars. Because even though those two things are mathematically equivalent, winning a million dollars or avoiding losing a million dollars, turns out the latter's way more powerful psychologically and much more emotionally impactful to the average human being.
[00:12:11] Wendy: So I think when we make, um, we make a change to, um, a sales process and it leads to more sales, then that's the expected re result. Right. Um, are there other unexpected results that have happened from training the sales team about the psychology around that in a bigger way?
[00:12:36] Nick: That I don't know specifically 'cause I actually spend very little of my time in sales. I intentionally a CEO, like I try not to be a salesperson. Because then when my customers ask me what's good, bad about my product, I become biased. Right? When you're acting as a salesperson I try and be kind of the neutral CEO who says the honest things.
[00:12:53] That, here's what's great about my product, here's what could be better. Um, so I actually don't hop in sales conversations that frequently, to be honest.
[00:13:00] Wendy: Do you feel like they ever use it in like a culture conversation? Um, like to interact with each other in a better way or even to interact with you and or leadership when they want to? Create, create something new themselves and get your buy-in.
[00:13:20] Nick: So the answer may probably be no, because it's really hard to, you know, it's very easy to change how someone does their job or not. Very easy. It's easier to change someone, how someone does their job versus their philosophy interacting with human beings. I'll give an example. I know all this stuff. I studied it, I use it my day-to-day work, but then ask me if I, I use loss aversion and framing things with my wife.
[00:13:39] No, I don't. Right? I'm making investments and I know I should be framing it as like, Hey, this prevents us from losing money. Instead of, Hey, this is going to make us money. And me, despite being a near expert in these topics, I don't even use it in my personal life. So I would venture a guess that if I were to try and somehow measure whether my employees are using this in a broader context, probably know.
[00:14:01] As a person who's been, um, involved in mergers and acquisitions and finance quite a bit, um, can you talk about a time that a change has been made in marketing that has affected another area? Um, business valuation. Now obviously sometimes a sales increase will affect business valuation, um, or that has affected culture in a positive way.
[00:15:01] Wendy: Um, changes that you've seen that companies did who are in that merger and acquisitions space that were small changes that really led to a ben big impact for them. When they were either valuing their business or trying to find an interested um, buyer or trying to find another company to merge with, do you have any examples in that space?
[00:15:24] Nick: Yeah, I'll I'll give two examples and I can, you know, give two idea scale examples. So number one is we have about 10 times more organic traffic than my next, like five competitors combined. Um, I. Right. Even if companies that are roughly equal size us, we just get what? Much more notoriety on Google and Bing, because partially we've been good at SEO partially we just put, put out great content.
[00:15:44] What that means is, and I've tr I'm in active m and a discussions with most of my peers 'cause we're trying to consolidate the industry and when I chat with their boards, they know who we are because like, regardless of whether we're bigger or smaller than them. We're there on the internet, right?
[00:15:57] We're there in French and Chinese and English. Their customers know about us, right? I'm, I'm doing some work in Brazil and there's a local Brazilian company that does what we do, but their customers ask about idea scale, right? So when I'm having an m and a discussion, we don't have to explain who we are.
[00:16:11] That gives us a lot more credibility. Um. Because their co, their boards know who we are. Their executives know who we are, their customers know who we are. Um, and even if that doesn't directly translate into sales, which is obviously the more direct path, it lends a greater credibility and gravity. And also it says in m and a discussions, I can say, look, we're really good at marketing.
[00:16:30] That's why you should join with us, because then we can take the combined companies, their great product strengths, their operational strengths, and and add idea scale's, amazing marketing on top. So the, you know, the sum is greater than the whole, um, at a cultural level. I'll give another example. So one of the really challenging things for, you know, any company.
[00:16:48] Is you want people inside the company to also be excited, right? It's one thing, obviously excite your customers and your prospects, but you want people inside to be excited. And an idea scale. One things I think we've struggled with and are getting actually a lot better in Q1 of this here is getting people internally excited and aware of all the cool products and features that we're putting out.
[00:17:07] So prior to last year or so, yeah, we would put out these cool features and stuff and we would send out notes to our customers and people and internal people, but we wouldn't really like. B build a buzz inside. And so like there wasn't that much excitement about our product roadmap this year. I think we've done a good job at a much better job at saying, Hey, here's all these little tiny changes we've made, like the submit this, this big, you know, big orange post button, or, Hey, we ch moved, we got rid of these random things that sucked.
[00:17:34] And we're telling people, Hey, we're getting rid of these things. We're putting it in your face. And then on the bigger feature side, we've done a lot more internal and external marketing. Letting people know, Hey, we're launching this huge feature on January 15th. Here's some internal documents you can send to customers.
[00:17:47] Here's some tutorial videos. Here's a product, you know, demo video. Here's a buzzy, you know, HiFi a video with like all this inspiring music in the background. And that has the benefit not only of creating more content that can be shared with customers, but also making people realize internally, Hey, this company is doing really cool things and I wanna be
[00:18:05] Wendy: part of that.
[00:18:07] Yeah. I love that, that improvement of employee morale when they get so excited about what you're doing.
[00:18:13] Hanna: Mm-hmm.
[00:18:14] Wendy: Um, just from very simple things. I, I love, I love that impact. Of these small things. Um, I think that's so important. So what have you learned from kind of shifting that communication with your internal team and creating that, that shift that changes their morale and changes their excitement about the company? What will you take forward from that?
[00:18:41] Nick: I think two things. Number one is that. Conscious effort is required to build morale. I kind of had in probably incorrectly assumed that morale just happens. If the, if things are going well and everyone's happy and you're treated with respect and dignity and you make money, Pete morale will be high. Um, I think I've realized or I'm learning and I don't claim to be perfect, that morale building does actually require active internal effort um, and a greater appreciation for that.
[00:19:09] Um, number two is that, look, I'm the CEO of the company. I'm the boss like. But even from I think I've appre gained a greater appreciation that people's attention is har. Even internal people's attention is hard to grasp, even if you're the CEO. So when you're telling people that there's these cool features coming out, you have to do so really aggressively because people's attention spans are very low, even if you're the CEO, right?
[00:19:34] You can't just force it down on them. There has to be a lot of conscious effort from ma many directions. In order to make people internally aware, and again, that's, it's important to note that because even a COI can't make people aware and excited unless it requires kind of an inundation
[00:19:50] Hanna: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:51] Nick: marketing.
[00:19:54] Hanna: Nick, you, I'm taking us way back to the beginning 'cause I, I meant, meant to ask this, but you've stepped in and made a lot of companies grow. Um, can you kind of talk about. Your initial roadmap, and I know it's probably different for every company, but what's one change that you always look to make or something you're always looking for that has made you so successful as you've taken on these roles?
[00:20:23] Nick: Sure, I'll, I'll, can I give three? 'cause there's actually three that tie together. First is cost management. A lot of companies just suck at managing costs, and it's really important to get rid of like the stupid costs. Like I, there's a company I joined that was paying a hundred, $200,000 a year for a CRM that they didn't even use.
[00:20:37] Shut that off. Right. Um, so number one, get, get like tie to your house, get things in order. Number two is make people learn or te not make people learn. Teach people how good business decisions are made. So there's something called return on investment, which is a big buzzy word, but it's actually how you're supposed to run companies.
[00:20:55] But most people have never, you know, gone. The business school router had a mentor who taught them. How do you make a ROI positive marketing decision or ROI positive engineering decision. So make your senior leaders. Understand that and implemented that and from everything as small as, Hey, should I go fly to this trip this customer conference to, Hey, am I gonna spend a million dollars to build this new product?
[00:21:15] Um, so that's number two, teach the ROI mentality and decision making framework, and third, become data driven. Right? You, you always hear that, but if you don't know what's going on in your data and you can't analyze your data, you are running the company blind. And that's true of your HR data, your finance data, your marketing data.
[00:21:31] You need to have that data and you need to have people who are capable and interested in looking at it to guide their bus and to guide their business.
[00:21:39] Wendy: So what advice, um, you just shared. Three great, um, pieces of advice with us. Right. Um, but what advice would you give other businesses that are looking to identify and leverage making small changes to create big impact? Like what piece of, what would be your number one piece of advice that you would give a business owner or a CEO or
[00:22:05] Nick: I.
[00:22:05] Wendy: leadership team?
[00:22:06] Nick: would go to that, that second piece of advice, learn how to make good ROI positive business decisions. And ROI has two real factors, like what is the benefit of a decision and what is the cost of a decision? And in your framing of the Hummingbird Effect, you were talking about how small changes make big impacts and that's literally what ROI Good ROI based thinking is about. You want to minimize the cost of an action or decision or initiative to get maximum impact.
[00:22:31] So that's something we think about at idea scale, a lot like. What are small changes I can make that don't cost me a lot of money or effort or time that result in the maximum output? And you always have to be comparing the small cost or the small effort relative to the potential big impact in a quantitative way.
[00:22:49] Hanna: Other than ROI, like, other than the money that will be coming in from your ideas, how do you prioritize which small change to make or large change? What other aspects can you look at to really drive that decision?
[00:23:05] Nick: So this is gonna sound silly. No other no. Nothing else should be prioritized, right? The whole point. Of good decision making and there's, we can get into business school theory and finance theory is like at the end of the day, when you're thinking about employee morale, employee churn, creating great products, what you're really doing at the end of the day is translating that into is, will, will this allow the business to capital compound capital over years or over decades?
[00:23:27] Um, and when you're deciding how to prioritize things, in theory, what you should do is literally do everything that is ROI positive and there should be no sequencing. So if you have 20 projects that are all ROI positive. If you're a well run company, you should go do all 20 of them simultaneously. In fact, that's what we try to do at Idea Scale because that is, you know, the optimal way to run a company now, and thankfully, we are in a situation where we are generally well resourced enough to pursue them all.
[00:23:54] Now, if you're not able to pursue them all, then there's kind of two right ways to do it. One is you do something, you do a, a bastardized version of ROI called net present value, which is you figure out which is the most dollar positive impact rather than percentage positive impact. Or you just go from top to bottom and say, this is a thousand percent ROI idea.
[00:24:14] Then this 950, this is 50, this is 10. Both of those are like kind of technically acceptable. Um, but in theory, in theory, if you're an extremely well run organization without too many constraints, you should actually just do it all simultaneously. Like why would you leave a hundred dollars lying on the table to pick up later?
[00:24:31] I. Go do it now. Go hire someone to pick up that a hundred dollar bill or that million dollar bill.
[00:24:37] Wendy: So Nick, in today's like fast-paced business environment, I mean things are moving faster than they ever have. Before, how do you feel like companies can stay nimble and adaptable, um, in, in order to capitalize on these, these small changes making a, a big difference for them?
[00:24:57] Nick: Sure. I. A, a company's agility is basically a function of two things. Number one, the agility of the individual components of the people of, of the organization, which are the people. And number two, how those people interact with one another. So any company can really only change those two levers. Either you get people who are instinctively more agile, more fast, more fast paced, or you change the interaction model of how they work together.
[00:25:21] Um, there was who was it? There was a company I just saw on the on the news this morning. They just they just terminated a bunch of their middle managers. They realized they couldn't change the people, but they changed. The model those people interact in, in order to create, reduce the amount of bureaucracy.
[00:25:36] So if a, an organization, whether small or big, wants to become more nimble and again then you really can only change the people or you can change how those people interact with each other. I.
[00:25:45] Hanna: Is there a good indicator in that situation of, is it the people or is it the way that they interact with them? Or is it just how you as a leader want the company to go?
[00:25:58] Nick: So, the, the. It's, it's the former, there are ways to measure how agile or how innovative your organization is now on innovation. That's literally what I do for a living. So yes, there are quantitative metrics to say Hannah's organization super innovative and Nix is not, or vice versa. Um, we in, yeah. So there's a ton of research if you want to go look at how to quantitatively do that, check out our blog or Wikipedia.
[00:26:21] And we're typically the two best places to look on anything on innovation. Um. On the individual level, it's a bit more complex. Quantifying people or what's the term? Psychometrics is kind of a, still, it's a science. Now, it's not like voodoo, but it is a real science. But it is a constrained science for a bunch of reasons.
[00:26:41] Number one, we don't have a lot of data. Number two, often that data interacts in ways that affect protected classes in a, in a negative and perhaps illegal way. So you have to be a lot more careful about measuring the um. Measuring, quote unquote, the agility or intangibles of people in a quantitative way.
[00:26:58] In fact, there's a Supreme Court case from the 1970s that actually bans you in the United States from quantifying the intangible aspects of of people for employment purposes. Duke v Griggs, if you're ever interested,
[00:27:10] Wendy: so talk to me about what you feel like the role innovation and experimentation plays in creating
[00:27:19] Hanna: Hmm.
[00:27:20] Wendy: breakthroughs in business.
[00:27:23] Nick: Sure. So I'm a scientist by training, right? Science is fundamentally built on the idea. If you run an experiment. It either fails or succeeds and then you run another experiment and you run another experiment, and always experiments are really, you're hoping for certain outcome, but you're being modest in understanding that the other side of the outcome is still a valuable learning experience.
[00:27:40] I expected A to happen. B didn't happen. That meant my theory was wrong. The same applies in the business world. A good business, you know, doesn't lay out grant strategies and bet it all on red. Right. That's a bad way to run a business. In fact, there's a ton of research that businesses that lay out grand strategies and they bet it all on one or two big initiatives tend to do really poorly because it's really hard to predict the future of the world.
[00:28:04] Good businesses, what they do is they run lots of small experiments, fully understanding that most of those experiments are going to fail, but one or two are going to hit it outta the park and you scale those up dramatically. A couple are gonna do okay, most are gonna suck, and that's okay. So there's a lot of research on this businesses that have a more experimentation minded mentality where they take a lot of small bets and don't penalize failures or fire people because they fail to at a small, low cost experiment.
[00:28:32] Those organizations tend to not only be more agile, but compound more capital and be more creative over kind of almost any time horizon.
[00:28:43] Wendy: That's great. That is a great, um, insight, whether a business is large or small, just making sure that you're. Experimenting all the time. Um, talk to me a little bit about who your ideal client is there at Idea Scale, Nick, and, and what do they gain from your platform?
[00:29:06] Nick: Sure. So our customers are, our target customers are the largest organizations in the world. So my customers today include like the US Post Office, Pfizer, Comcast, ING Bank, these large organizations, right? Typically north of a thousand people or north of 500 people. And what our software does for them is three things.
[00:29:24] Number one, well, philosophically it helps them innovate faster. But what that, ignoring the buzz line words, what it does is really three things. It helps them collect great ideas from their constituents. That could be their employees, their voters, their shareholders, whoever the constituents are, right? It helps collect great ideas.
[00:29:39] Number two, we help them figure out which ideas are good versus bad. 'cause not all ideas are good, or they may be good, but not relevant today. And number three, we help you turn, go from idea to implementation of that idea, whether it be as silly as changing the snacks in the, the office kitchen to launching a billion dollar product.
[00:29:56] Um, so that's what we do for our customers, again, both in the public sector, in the oil industry, in the finance industry, in the healthcare industry. Um, and the cool thing is, by the way, our software actually does the exact same thing for smaller organizations, and that's why we actually offered completely free for organizations less than a hundred people.
[00:30:13] Um, it literally, and by the way, no strings attached. There's no like, fine for nothing. It's literally for free for anybody. Who's working for a team of less than a hundred people. So you could be 99 people at a billion dollar company like Samsung software's completely free. Um, because we realized that like, hey, the software's really useful in all of these contexts, really for anyone.
[00:30:32] And we understand that some small organization can't pay for enterprise grade software like ours, but we still want to be there. 'cause one day they will grow up and be a larger organization and we'd love for them to remember that we were there for them when they were a little bit younger and smaller.
[00:30:46] Wendy: So is that the ROI on having more snacks?
[00:30:50] Hanna: I think so. Oh.
[00:30:51] Nick: Well, no, the ROI having more snacks is actually kind of different. Somebody actually did this, by the way, offering free soda and snacks. Some investment bank in New York did this experiment like 15 years ago that it just made people stay longer and that was great 'cause you're getting, you know, these high leaks, very, very expensive employees to work a hundred hours a week instead of 80.
[00:31:08] And that's great 'cause you're doing it for like a couple of bottles of soda.
[00:31:13] Wendy: I love it. I love it.
[00:31:14] Nick: Or coffee or what? Or like a high-end co you know, a high-end coffee machine, a Keurig instead of the the typical heated you know, ground cup coffee machine that people had to fill. Keurig cups are really expensive by the way, right?
[00:31:26] And yet somebody in an HR department in these big banks or big companies have realized it's worth paying these, you know, three bucks per curd cub. 'cause the employee's gonna work two hours la longer, which is worth a hundred bucks to up. You, you chuckle, but like there's some smart HR person who has actually done this at any
[00:31:43] Wendy: Oh, absolutely. Right. Hannah, any more thoughts or questions from your side?
[00:31:50] Hanna: I don't have any more thoughts. I just kind of wanted to go back and recap. 'cause you touched on a lot of, a lot of little hummingbird effects and they're not little, in your case, they're, they're big, they're big effects. Um, so becoming data driven, um, you kind of mentioned when companies really start digging into numbers, even at a smaller level.
[00:32:11] They can uncover those little tweaks that have a huge impact on efficiency and profit. It's kind of like finding their sweet spot. And then we talked about customer psychology and their biases and how powerful those are. So realizing just how people think differently, like the whole idea of loss aversion can make such a big difference on.
[00:32:35] In customer engagement and a tiny change in how you phrase something can totally flip the results that you're getting. And then agility in teams, how small changes in how we work together can speed everything up and make things flow better. I think that's something that a lot of companies and can relate to.
[00:32:58] So it's really cool and interesting to learn from you to see how all these small adjustments. When done with the intention that you give them can lead to some pretty big wins. So thank you for walking us through all of those. It's been really great to learn from you.
[00:33:14] Nick: Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here.
[00:33:16] Wendy: I love that recap. Hannah, thank you so much. You really captured it, um, very, very well. Um, Nick, would you, do you have anything else to share? Um, and definitely share your contact information
[00:33:30] Hanna: Mm-hmm.
[00:33:31] Wendy: and all of that, and that'll also be in the show notes.
[00:33:34] Nick: Perfect. Yeah. Nothing else to share. I'll give three ways to get in to see like what I, or we are up to. Number one, my personal website is nick jane.com. There's a bunch of the random poker projects for my implementation of Flappy Birds, so there's a bunch of just silly stuff and fun stuff on there.
[00:33:47] Like what I'm personally up to. Um, number two for idea scale. Our website is idea scale.com. I encourage anyone to check it out. We have a no Strings unlimited free version of our software available for anyone who's a part of a team, less than a hundred people. And number three, if you wanna get in touch with me personally, the best way to do so is via LinkedIn.
[00:34:08] I respond to a hundred percent of messages, so people should feel free to DM me.
[00:34:12] Hanna: Wow, an impressive stat.
[00:34:15] Wendy: Well, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. Nick, we really appreciate all your insights and thank you to all of our listeners to this episode. Um, take what you've learned from Nick today. Um, there's a bunch of great nuggets here and go find your hummingbird effect.