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Testing your ideas against reality can be challenging. Not everything will go as planned. It’s about keeping an open mind, having a clear hypothesis and running multiple tests to see if you have enough directional evidence to keep going.
This is the How I Tested That Podcast, where David J Bland connects with entrepreneurs and innovators who had the courage to test their ideas with real people, in the market, with sometimes surprising results.
Join us as we explore the ups and downs of experimentation… together.
David J Bland (00:02.52)
Welcome to the podcast, Brandy and Craig.
Brandy Old (00:05.646)
Happy to be here.
Craig Elias (00:06.65)
Thanks for having us.
David J Bland (00:08.44)
So if I remember correctly, we first met sometime during the blur that was the pandemic. So it was 2020, all my work from in -person had to be remote. And I was still helping out Draper University and we were connected because we were all these like Canadian startups coming through Draper and we started collaborating and I realized, wow, this is amazing stuff going up in Canada that I'm not even aware of. And I believe that's how we start.
collaborating. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that's how we got started.
Craig Elias (00:42.362)
Yeah, I think it was the first time we sent some students to the Virtual Draper bootcamp and I went through myself because I wanted to see what students were going through and I'm like, hey, David, this risky subsumption thing, I'm like, my God, I've struggled with this for so long. Can we do something? And that's how we got started. I think we got our first group, Randy, with like 25 students or something, do you remember?
Brandy Old (01:09.55)
I think that's about it.
David J Bland (01:11.832)
Yeah, so we started collaborating and then fast forward to recently, I was up in Calgary for Inventures, which was amazing conference, by the way. Thank you for inviting me up to speak to that. And I was thinking, I have to get you on the podcast because I want to hear about one, how you live and breathe this testing approach and how you're applying it. But you're.
applying it to help people learn how to do testing, which I think is fascinating. So maybe give me some background a bit on you all and how you're kind of thinking through this and some of the challenges you've had along the way.
Brandy Old (01:45.454)
Yeah, so maybe I'll kick it off because I was kind of the newbie to the group. So I started my career in helping student entrepreneurs after I graduated with a degree in English teaching. And I had to figure out how to teach people entrepreneurship. And my whole focus was I never wanted to be an entrepreneur because my mom was one and I saw what happened and I was like, no way would anyone pay me enough money to do this.
So I became fascinated with de -risking so that I could help new entrepreneurs avoid some of the mistakes that I saw my mom make over the years. And Craig was the entrepreneur in residence at Bow Valley College, sent an email out to anyone with entrepreneurship in their title at universities across the province in Alberta and said, I'll come do free workshops for you. And I was like, this is the ticket. So I invited him to come, then he introduced me to the lean canvas approach that Ash has designed.
Craig Elias (02:30.298)
I'm gonna say.
Brandy Old (02:43.246)
I bought his book, I read it and I built a really rough course and started taking in some experiment approaches that you use David around iterating, brought in my first folks for a pilot, got feedback from them, shared it to folks like Craig to get some pieces around how to make it better and then built an incubator program out of it that's still running today.
Craig Elias (03:05.434)
And then what happened for me was once that began to happen, we actually brought up Ash to Calgary for a day. And then Brandy and I were talking about the fact that bringing someone up once is OK, but we need to scale up all these mentors so more people can be helped. And it's not just me and Brandy doing all this work. So I was visiting Brandy's school one day, and I go by this boardroom that has glass doors. And what do I see?
On the big screen I see Ash and I start talking to Brandy and I'm like, we need to do something around mentoring and Brandy is a way better writer than I am. So she wrote a grant for I think something like $30 ,000. The next thing we know, we scaled up a lot of the mentors inside the province. And once we got people thinking differently about experimenting, it's amazing how things took off. And then something happened within Alberta Innovates. Did it not Brandy after that?
Brandy Old (04:01.678)
Yeah, so our original ask was to upskill people in post -secondaries. So there's a lot of people like me getting hired that didn't know how to coach entrepreneurs and they were coming to Craig and I all the time asking for help. And we were like, we need to do something about this. So we proposed to bring Ash up to teach people about the lean startup methodology and teaching the lean canvas. And Alberta Innovates who funded us with the grant invited some folks. So because it was COVID, we were going to bring them up in person.
And then all of a sudden his cost structure changed because we couldn't do that anymore. So we went from having, I think, 15 seats to like 40 seats, something in there. And we had quite a few folks from Alberta Innovates and other mentors in the ecosystem join. And they liked it so much that they actually built a fund where they had startups work through Ash's 90 -day startup process to learn about how to do the Lean Startup methodology. And we still use it today in a lot of our evaluation of our grants.
to help people understand how to iterate and test using a lot of experimentation methods.
David J Bland (05:05.176)
Wow, so it feels as if there was some organic kind of reach here, word of mouth potentially, you know, you're seeing success. What are some of the big challenges you had from getting people to just, hey, I want to build the whole thing and launch it to, I need to test my way through this and maybe talk to customers. What are some of the challenges you faced there and how did you overcome them?
Craig Elias (05:29.882)
So I think for me, especially with students, the way we overcame it was with money.
So what we did was we said, OK, if you want to be in this pitch competition, because the first time we ran this pitch competition, we ran it with no requirements. And we gave away $25 ,000 in cash. And students took that money, went away, and spent it on their ideas. And a year later, had nothing to show for it. So now we're like, we need to fix this. So what we then did is said, OK, we're going to create these lean startup challenges. And.
We had a little help from a friend in Detroit, used to be in New York, Adam Berk, who I think you know. So we created these challenges where if you wanted to be in the pitch competition, you had to do two things. One, you had to go away and interview total strangers, 25 of them. And if you did that, we then gave you up to $750 to then go run Facebook ads. So it was around how do we understand who's our customer? And then once we got the problem and the customer,
What are these risked assumptions and how do we go test these assumptions? And this was before I think I met you, David, and we were just lucky because the first thing was customer interviews and the second thing was online ads. And when I go to my two favorite pages in the book, 98, 99, like every single one of those things says, start with a customer interview and then go do online ads. So I think we just got lucky. Now we know what we're doing, right, Brandy?
Brandy Old (07:01.39)
and it's getting them to do the interviews. So still to this day people will do surveys over interviews and we continue to face that challenge in helping people get comfortable and going out to talk to strangers and find out what is actually going on in the market.
Craig Elias (07:18.938)
And I think part of the way we overcame that challenge though, David, was we then we had this boot camp and we then challenged one time we challenged students and said, hey, here's your challenge. You've got to do these 25 interviews. Do you want to try and get them done over a few weeks or do you want to just try and get them all done in one day? And we gave them this challenge and said, go do these interviews in one day. And it's amazing how many students came back with a team of people and had done 25, 30 interviews with total strangers. So it's amazing when you.
David J Bland (07:18.968)
Yeah.
Craig Elias (07:47.674)
Ask for something, it's amazing how you get it.
Brandy Old (07:52.782)
There's a tech that we use too at the boot camp, right Craig? VentureQuest? VR1. That's a cub.
David J Bland (07:52.856)
So.
Craig Elias (07:58.302)
So, Venture Blocks. Yes, so, are you familiar with Venture Blocks, David? So, Venture Blocks was created by Heidi Neck, who is the Entrepreneurship Professor at Babson College. And it actually, it's a simulation that teaches people how to do these interviews so they can practice before they go out into the real world. We also bribe them with cash there, because we say, hey, the top three people with the highest score,
Brandy Old (08:01.902)
Venture blocks, yes.
David J Bland (08:06.264)
I'm not.
Craig Elias (08:27.93)
Guess what you get? You get cash. And so we find that when there's an unmovable date, like you have to get done by now or you don't get there, and if there's cash involved, students are encouraged to do something now instead of.
David J Bland (08:44.376)
Yeah, it's interesting how the money's always gone, right? So it's like, what do you have to show for the money? And I think it's really smart because customer interviews usually don't cost a lot unless you're trying to do something B2B where it can get expensive to find somebody to talk to potentially. But customer interviews are pretty quick. There's other light evidence, same with surveys. What beyond interviews and surveys and ads?
do you see or do you help people test their way through their early stage ideas? Like what beyond those three do you see that are really impactful?
Brandy Old (09:16.942)
So the biggest one that I tend to start with is a day in the life.
So I come from a design thinking background and a lot of times early stage entrepreneurs or students go, well, I don't even know what problem I'm solving. I'm just fascinated in food security or the environment. So to help them get prepared for interviews, I take them through the day in the life exercise, which I think you have in your book for highly regulated spaces. Just have a conversation to find out, you know, like what's a year in the life of a farmer look like? What's a semester look like for a student? What's the lived experience?
experience of someone to help identify what those problems are without a leading question, which when we're doing interviews is a tough skill to learn of how to ask the right questions without going future tense or leading them down a path and assuming that the problem that you've identified is something worth talking about. So I find that to be one of the most effective tools that we've used.
Craig Elias (10:13.53)
For me, my other favorite one is landing pages. So as we're going through this process, I actually hired a developer to build me a template for a landing page that's modeled after the stuff that you taught me, David. And then what we do is every time a student says, hey, I want to use this, we can replicate that landing page. They can then modify it specifically by just changing a few words or a few pictures. And then.
We use Facebook ads to drive people to the landing page so they can then start doing some work around customer discovery. So I'm a fan of those landing pages. And I like the landing pages for two reasons. One, it's somewhere students can direct people. But it gets students to just think about the shortest way to describe the pains, gains, and jobs to be done. And it forces them to be super vigilant on how.
little can they say to create interest in what it is that they're doing.
David J Bland (11:14.552)
So Day in the Life, which I'm a fan of. I think I first stumbled upon that with the value prop design book from Alex Osterwalder and then Intuit. I actually have some folks from Intuit on a future podcast I'm excited about that run some other programs. And then landing pages. Yeah, I think templatizing that makes a lot of sense. You don't necessarily need a high price designer anymore and you potentially could test multiple ideas with landing pages. So I like that. So we're trying to progress to stronger evidence.
through helping students talk to customers. Maybe they want to go broader with a survey, still light evidence, but it's more than they can probably get in front of in a day. Go on to ads, to landing pages, also doing some ethnographic research in a way, going through and finding, observing, trying not to bias when you observe is probably one of the harder things. So what's the response been so far from students going through this process? Like where are they getting stuck or where are they needing help from you all?
Brandy Old (12:14.67)
I think one of the biggest ones that we see with our students is the interviews. After we take them through the boot camp, we've done 25 interviews with Complete Strangers.
And we do this in downtown Calgary on a weekend. So we usually send them out to train stations and libraries just so that they can get the experience of talking to complete strangers in places where they could actually have a conversation. And then they just assume that those 25 random interviews were enough validation to prove that they have desirability. So they go right into build mode usually after that of I've got a landing page. Now I'm ready to start to build my product. And we go, these weren't even your customers you were talking to.
Craig Elias (12:46.97)
Read it to them.
Craig Elias (12:58.33)
If for me, I think it's confirmation bias. So some of them are better at recognizing what I might call counterfactuals, data that doesn't support their opinion. And you've talked about this on occasion, David, especially last week. It's like, yeah, I talked to 25 people and two of them said I had a fantastic idea. We didn't do a testing card or some hypothesis in advance that said if 10 out of 25 say it's a good idea,
then I'm good, but getting them to do that step before they go away and do the interviews? Because otherwise they just see what they want to see and come back and sometimes when we ask them at the end, pause, pivot or proceed. And even in our last go around, there were a couple of people who we know probably heard 20 times out of 25, this is not a good idea, but all they heard was the five that says it was a good idea. They're like, we're going to proceed. We're not going to make.
any changes, we're going ahead just the way we thought we would.
David J Bland (14:00.344)
Yeah, biases are tough. I don't know if we can completely eliminate them, but we can certainly mitigate some of them. And I think having feedback from your peers or other people to help you. Certainly, if you do this on your own, it's easier for that to creep in. So I do think support from you both is definitely helpful there. What are some of the big success stories you're seeing come out of these early stage entrepreneurs? Because I feel as if you're you're investing in people more than the ideas, like probably nine out of the 10 ideas, I'm guessing, probably.
earlier are killed in some degree. So I'm curious, what are some of the big success, what are some of the things you can celebrate from this testing so far?
Craig Elias (14:43.674)
Andy, you wanna talk about Greg first? Let's talk about Greg, yeah.
Brandy Old (14:45.07)
Sure. Well, I was going to say, why don't you start with Draper University as a whole and then I can drill down.
Craig Elias (14:50.65)
Yeah, so I think here's where the successes come from. So the first time we did anything like this, we actually had a student pitch competition. We had a student named Cole out of Edmonton, who the way he tells his story is that when he was getting ready for this pitch competition, he got his teeth kicked in twice as the way he describes his experience. But it turns out in the room was Asra from Draper University. And she's like, you've got something here. I run a boot camp.
It's $12 ,000 US. I think you have something so interesting. I'd be willing to give you a scholarship." And he went down. There was 100 plus startups. So not just students, but 100 plus startups from 23 countries around the world. He came back picked as the most investable out of all of them. And when you think about, you know, two folks in Calgary and Lethbridge doing it once, you'd be like, wow, that's pretty cool. But when we do it almost two thirds of the time, it's like, how do you do that? Well,
Teach what David says. And we have another example of a student that actually comes from UofL that Brandy worked with. And he turned down the money. Go tell that story, Brandy.
Brandy Old (15:59.054)
Yeah, so it was fun how he started. He wanted to work on a business that was not legal yet, and he was hedging a bet on regulations changing. So it took a couple years to get him to switch over. Then he came to the kickoff weekend, did really well on his pitch, made it down to Draper University, and got offered an investment of six figures. So I got a phone call from him when he was down there and he went, I just got this offer. I'm not sure what to do.
So I connected him to folks like Brooke, who runs Class Rebel down here, who teaches founders about how to prepare for investments. He talked to Craig and some other folks in the network. And I think that's one of the most valuable components we can bring to these students is helping them talk to people that have been there and done that. And he decided that the investment wasn't for him. So he turned it down and came back and...
Craig Elias (16:37.05)
Thanks.
Brandy Old (16:49.934)
Still to this day, Craig and I are on the fence of, you know, when Tim Draper offers you money, that's a hard way to say no. So I give him chops for sticking to his guns and we'll, we'll see where he winds up, but it's, it's one of those things where, you know, we, we have our biases as well as advisors sometimes that we have to put to the side and respect what our founders are doing.
Craig Elias (17:10.201)
And here's the reason why I disagree with them. I don't know about Brandi, but here's the reason I disagree. We have another story of a lady who didn't win what we did, and she didn't get to go down to the full $12 ,000 program. She did the virtual program. And in the virtual program, Tim lets a handful of people pitch an idea. And she started with this idea here in Calgary or Edmonton. Nobody would touch it. She went down there.
Her idea, Tim thought was so good, he let her pitch in the virtual program and then she ended up, I think, in the top three. She won a scholarship to go down again, but this time in person. She got a six figure investment while she was down there. She came back home. Within weeks, she raised $400 ,000 more. She's now raising her second million dollars, but people wouldn't touch her here. But as soon as she went down to Draper and came back with a six figure investment, people were like, well, hang on a second.
If you have Tim Draper as an investor, here, take my money.
David J Bland (18:13.656)
Yeah, I don't know how many people have gone through a program that declined the funding, so that's always interesting to me. I've been helping out with Rape University probably since like 2014 or so, and I've seen so many amazing entrepreneurs come from all around the world. It's one of the reasons I still help with that program. I just recently, even this week, this week or last week, it was a blur, I helped like a bunch of entrepreneurs from Africa, Nigeria specifically, and walked them through business modeling and everything and riskiest assumptions.
That's one of the reasons I enjoy collaborating there, just early, early stage people all around the world getting to see what they're working on and their environment. It's so amazing. So when you think through, okay, so I'm just following this thread. So you're starting this program, it's starting to get some more organic reach. You have people coming down into Silicon Valley and winning funding there and coming back and socializing that. So there's kind of like that loop there. So how does one go about sort of...
knowing that, okay, it's time to scale this or this is something that we want to scale, you know, like maybe walk through some of the tests you're doing or your thought process around, like where's your risk moving in this whole program and in your approach? Because you've all been doing this for several years now.
Brandy Old (19:28.494)
Yeah, so I mean, our biggest indicator was people messaging us after our boot camp. We had folks from Norway joining us when we went virtual with COVID because they found us online and went, man, this is great. I don't have resources like this. And people would reach out and say, hey, like this is awesome, but you do it once a year.
where can I get help for this? So we had to put our heads together to start to noodle figure out what more can we offer in our community where those gaps are, which led to the creation of MVP Mondays, where we take two entrepreneurs every second Monday over a lunch hour with a panel of experts. And we go through testing business ideas where they have to share their riskiest assumptions. We help them figure that out and give them.
Craig Elias (19:59.642)
Thanks.
Brandy Old (20:12.814)
three experiments that we think would work for them to run away and test. So we started to build more of a community grassroots approach, building out different events and pieces that were a little bit more accessible.
Craig Elias (20:27.386)
And I think also some of this comes down to the financial. So one of the things that Brendan and I have is we have this simplified financial analysis spreadsheet, which typically takes maybe 20 minutes to go through. And we've been working for the last three or four months now to build an updated version that makes it easier for people to actually go away and apply for grants. And one of my favorite stories is that spreadsheet. I got a call from a lady who I think was in Calgary. I forget where now.
but she was applying for an accelerator in Singapore for health sciences and she found this spreadsheet and she used this spreadsheet in her submission to this accelerator in Singapore and then I got a text not that long ago that she got in. So I think once you understand that people want it, the next step is can you find enough customers or can you make enough money at it? And...
when you can start making money at it, then you start saying, okay great, now I can start throwing some resources, talking to family and friends, applying the accelerators. And for me, the amazing thing is when you think about, you know, not just doing it with a local, even North American accelerator, but doing it with something that's health sciences and in Singapore, like just giving people those resources and watching how they get used, this has been like seeing some of these folks scale because now they know.
I can make enough money at it. I think, is it called the Locomaximus or Locomax, what's it called, Brandy? Yeah, do you want to explain that just so folks who don't know what it is know what it is?
Brandy Old (21:58.574)
Maxima.
Brandy Old (22:03.79)
Yeah, so one of the things that we work on is entrepreneurs will focus on the most important point, the biggest problem, the biggest site that they can reach. And kind of the analogy is you want to climb the tallest mountain. So you're standing at the ground at the bottom and you find the tallest peak and you climb up that mountain and then you look over your shoulder and there's a taller mountain behind you. So when you're an entrepreneur and you're focusing on the big problem or the big idea, sometimes stepping out, finding resources and taking a different perspective can
help you find a bigger problem or a bigger opportunity that you didn't see in the first place when you first started. Where pivots become very important.
Craig Elias (22:40.154)
And I think it's making sure the market is big enough. And as Brandy tells this story, I'm just thinking about my weekend, because I went for a hike, and there was a ton of snow at the top, and there were two peaks. And I got to the first peak with my snowshoes and all my gear. And I got there, and I'm like, my god, there's still another kilometer and a half and 300 meters to go. I don't have enough energy to get all the way to the top. I had to give up. I'm going to go back for a third time just to get there.
Brandy Old (23:07.054)
when there's no bears, right?
Craig Elias (23:09.658)
When there's no bears, yeah, that trail got shut down a couple days ago because of the grizzlies in the area now. So I have to wait till the snow melts and the grizzlies go away.
David J Bland (23:19.224)
Okay, that's a great story. So I'm thinking through something you said I want to kind of double click into which is you're talking about these sessions. So MVP Mondays, which I joined as a guest on one and I thought it was a really interesting experience with founders there working through the real ideas. So we'll make sure the link is accessible for all you listeners. And...
You mentioned something about riskus assumptions. So it's something that has been really passionate kind of pursuit of mind over the last decade or so, which is how to get people prioritized properly. And this is one of the reasons we have assumptions mapping and all that. What happens, you know, this is always interesting to me, what happens when people are showing you how they're thinking about risk and it's, wait, you know what, there's no risk whatsoever. It's all, we have everything figured out or all my risk is.
is building, you know, I already validated, that's my favorite one. I talk to customers and validated that, or I interviewed a couple of people, validated that, or I ran some surveys and validated that. So how are you providing feedback to people or helping them understand that there are other risks than just building, or there might be some things that you're not considering, like tell me how that process goes.
Brandy Old (24:36.11)
So I tend to use Socratic questioning for my approach. Craig and I have two very different approaches. We're like good cop, bad cop. So we work really well together. I always come out of like, how do you know? Right? So kind of digging a little bit more into that validation. I'm sure you've seen this too, David, of people that, well, I just know. I worked in this space for 20 years and I just know.
And we know that's not enough to convince me to trust you. And then, you know, the question goes, well, how many people have given you money for this idea so far? And then they tell me zero. So I kind of try to lead them down the path of discovery for themselves of finding out, maybe I don't have it nailed down. A lot of the times people go, well, my marketing campaign is just not working. And so we have to try to get them.
through questioning to go down this road of maybe I don't have an understanding of the actual problem I'm solving. So I take the good cop approach of questioning to try to lead them to water. And sometimes when that doesn't work, Craig comes in with his bad cop piece.
Craig Elias (25:30.65)
This is the...
Craig Elias (25:37.41)
And it's not that might, you know, I don't say might is right. There's a saying in here somewhere, and I learned this from Guy Kawasaki when I first had a chance to meet him when I was in Silicon Valley for my first startup. He says, eat like a bird and poop like an elephant. And what I say to people is, okay, this is in my head and you know good if it's in my head, but I think you're wrong. And here's why I think you're wrong. And here's what I think you need to go away and do next. And I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm just saying I think you're wrong. Now,
Sometimes entrepreneurs are, you know, they're still convinced they have desirability figured out and that's like Brandy talks about. We then go, okay, great. If you think desirability is solved, let's go talk about viability. Like how much money have you made selling this and all of a sudden it's crickets. And that's when we help them, I think, understand if people aren't paying for it.
You need to go back, and sometimes we describe this as slingshotting. You need to go backwards to then go forwards faster. And I think, you know, Brandy's really good at trying to guide them there and let them get there on their own. And I don't know if I'm as patient as Brandy is. And I just go, you're like, you're so wrong you don't even know it. And we try to say, OK, I'm not saying you're wrong. I just think you're wrong. And I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just telling you what I would do if I was.
you. And sometimes people are good with that and sometimes they're not so good. But that's okay. I think being honest and candid and giving them that guidance from the two of us and others on that panel, the sooner they hear that they need to go backwards, the less likely they are to waste time. And sometimes it's years and a ton of money pursuing something that we know doesn't go anywhere. And I think we care enough.
how people are version of the truth. Unfortunately, there's not, I'm saying not everybody, but there's not a lot, but I think that's hard to come by, right? It's rare.
Brandy Old (27:39.886)
We always like to ask the question of, do you want to be right or do you want to be successful? So we can run some experiments to prove you're right and it's not going to help you build a business or we can find out where you're wrong so that you can grow a successful business. And I think that framework sometimes can be helpful to pull an entrepreneur out of their idea because it's your baby. It's something you live and breathe all the time. It's hard to look at that and go, I could be wrong. And I've invested X amount of time and dollars into this. I have to keep going.
Craig Elias (27:47.258)
Thank you.
Craig Elias (28:08.57)
I think one of the things Brandy's helped me get better at is I ask how honest of feedback do you want me to give? So before I give completely honest feedback, I go, OK, on a scale of 1 to 10 or 1 to 12, how honest do you want me to be with the feedback? And I think that helps. Because when they say, I'm OK, throw it all out there, then I think they're much more open to hearing stuff they don't want.
Brandy Old (28:31.31)
We should do like a spice -o -meter on our feedback for it to see how spicy our feedback can be.
Craig Elias (28:36.442)
I'm going to go.
David J Bland (28:41.592)
Yeah, I often, you know, I'm in a situation where I have to get feedback and I try to use, you know, different thinking hats, like the bonus thinking hats. I'll do like, this is, this is what confusing to me. So I'll ask like clarifying questions or I'll say, this is something you could try, you know, that I see is missing. Or then obviously I have to get some feedback. I was like, this is what looks wrong, you know, like you're explaining all these different revenue streams that don't have a source, like where are these revenue streams coming from? Like this, this seems like you're, this is wrong. And, and so,
Craig Elias (28:52.826)
Thank you very much.
David J Bland (29:11.546)
That does help me a bit, like kind of capture it. I do explain it before I get feedback that way. I'm like, look, this sound, I'm gonna give feedback. Someone's gonna be clarifying, someone's gonna be stuff to try, someone's gonna be stuff that's wrong. Take what you need. But I was thinking, I was just thinking this forward, you know, something you mentioned I thought was really fascinating. It always comes up as a symptom of, my ads aren't working or no one's signing up on my landing page, you know? And those are kind of these symptoms of,
probably have the wrong value proposition, or if we even have the right value proposition, we're targeting the wrong customer. And so I think jumping to those activities really quickly sometimes, you do have to kind of go back again, because it's like, I don't know why no one's using this or why they're not signing up. And you have to start doing that kind of reverse engineering. And I'm trying to help prevent that waste of just, hey, let's spend some more, a little bit more time earlier. So we have.
Maybe words of the customer we can put in the landing page or words in the customer we can put in the ad and we know what kind of demographic we target. So I do think sometimes when they're coming to you and they're explaining, this just isn't working or et cetera, it's kind of a deeper problem that you need to kind of uncover with a lack of understanding of the problem and the customer.
Brandy Old (30:28.366)
Absolutely. I just had a beer with my friend Jessica, who is mentoring a Calgary startup and she had some Google Ads. And she talked to her and she said, these aren't performing, I'm not doing well. Jess has been in marketing for eight years.
And she told me they were some of the best conversion rates she has ever seen for ads in the digital space. So sometimes there's also this factor of an entrepreneur just not knowing and having a higher level of assumption. And I think you talk about this, David, when you're starting about those measurements, right? Of, of I'm 80 % successful. Well, is that a standard? Is that actually achievable? And so there's kind of this also question at that early stage that really adds in that, that sticky spot.
Craig Elias (30:46.106)
Thank you.
Craig Elias (30:51.706)
Sometimes there's a little bit of time.
Craig Elias (30:56.346)
Thank you.
Craig Elias (31:04.73)
This is beautiful.
Brandy Old (31:11.694)
entrepreneurs of I don't even know if I'm gonna be right because I don't know what a successful ad looks like. And this entrepreneurs problem was that they had that had it in front of the wrong landing page. So they were sending people to their website, but not to their product page. So people were getting lost on the website. And it wasn't that their ads were bad. It was just that the navigation wasn't quite where it needed to be. So there can be many factors that go into it. And it's often just getting a second set of eyes of people that have been there before to help you figure out where it is that you could tweak.
Craig Elias (31:25.018)
Thank you.
David J Bland (31:45.08)
Yeah, thank you for sharing that. It's so much of just having somebody give you feedback and say, I think this is actually not so doomed. You just need to tweak this thing. So it's like I want to often say I'm trying to stop people from getting too excited or too depressed in the process because it is there's definitely highs and lows. So we've talked about sort of the early days, how you start testing this entrepreneurship program, how you've sort of grown that organically over time.
Craig Elias (31:45.722)
Thank you.
Craig Elias (31:53.178)
Thank you.
Brandy Old (32:01.966)
I think.
David J Bland (32:15.256)
and how the demand has been more like a pull than a push. So people reaching out to you. So where is this all headed? What are you all working on next or over the next, you know, six to 12 months?
Craig Elias (32:27.674)
Yeah, so I mean, a couple of things that we haven't touched on yet was part of what we also included. We started doing some testing around how do we take what we were doing and how do we find a way to do it on a more regular basis, but also leverage the voice of other people. So we created something called Founder Fridays. And we started with, because the feedback we got was, this is great, but you just do it in the summer. You've got this kickoff weekend and you've got this innovation rodeo.
The MVP Mondays are okay, but I'm either not there or I'm past this. So we started doing something called Founder Fridays and we started by trying to interview Brad Feld, the founder of Techstars. And he said, I'm too busy, I can't make it. And he gave us Ian Hathaway. And they wrote a book called The Startup Community Way. So we said, let's run an experiment. Let's just do an interview with Ian and see how many people sign up for this idea of how do we do something on...
Fridays and we had in the province alone 685 people signed up. We had 100 copies of his book. They were gone in 106 seconds. So we then started about six months later this process called Founder Fridays and every month we pick a different author and we read the book and interview them and we actually mentioned. So the reason that I know the pages in your book so well David is that's part of what we do is we go hey you don't read the whole book start on page 38 where you can do this.
We've now done, I think, 33. We're now getting ready for the next series. And one of the things that we have found entrepreneurs struggle, and the reason they're not interviewing total strangers is they can't find people to interview. So we've started something called Help a Startup Out. Brandon, do you want to tell me about Help a Startup Out?
Brandy Old (34:16.11)
Yeah, so Help a Startup Out was mostly an initiative that we started looking at to try to connect entrepreneurs with the right type of people to interview. So they'd start with their friends and family and then they'd get stuck or they'd go to the train station and then they'd get stuck. So we have this giant community from Founder Fridays and MVP Mondays of mentors and advisors and other startups that want to help startups. They're signed up to mentorship.
pages and things and they want to get engaged and our early stage startups don't know how to ask for help. So our kind of initial idea with Help a Startup Out was to start an email page where startups that had figured out their specific types of customers they wanted to interview could get ahold of us and we'd send it out to our list and people that fit that demographic or new people could answer the call and join an interview.
Craig Elias (35:13.05)
And to test this, we're actually going through a Tech Star startup weekend in a couple of weeks to actually run our own hypothesis through this whole process, right? Because sometimes, you know, we, even Brandy and I might have a little bit of confirmation bias, how do we find a way to put total strangers on our team and how do we go run this idea through this whole process? And as we think about this, originally, we were like, we don't know if it's going to work. And then,
I think for me, two things happened. One, when we interviewed Tony Alrick on the Jobs to Be Done framework, and we learned about not just the functional needs that people have, but also the social and emotional needs. And we're like, hang on a second. And the social and emotional, there's something here. And right now, we're getting ready to interview, well, Brandy is tomorrow, Jonah Bacon.
And he's talking about the same thing. What are the reasons people join a community? It's not just functional. So how do we find a way to understand that?
Brandy Old (36:17.934)
we got stuck in a feasibility trap ourselves. We kind of modeled this after Peter Schenckman's Harrow help a reporter out. So we called them up.
We asked him we did an interview with him We talked to you a couple expert stakeholders to get started and the number one thing we kept hearing is like Unless there's a poll for the side of people that want to help do the interviews. This is never gonna go anywhere So then we went okay Well, how do we build something that's gonna work and how do we do all this focus and we kind of? Ran into this very interesting problem where we ran around for I don't know a few months trying to figure out what to do with this idea Rather than focusing on our customers, which was very interesting. So he then you know
Craig Elias (36:29.53)
Thank you.
Brandy Old (36:58.832)
You know, the experts as it were, we fall into these traps of trying to think about that. And when Craig and I were talking about it, I went, hold on a second. What are some alternatives? Like Kickstarter exists. There's crowdfunding, right? There's all these kinds of spaces. Go fund me. People just give people money to help with initiatives. So some of these potential biases and assumptions we have in our mind can kind of prohibit us from moving ahead, which is very interesting. So it's...
something that's hard to avoid even when you do this every day.
Craig Elias (37:31.482)
And when I think about this, I think about a saying a while ago when someone said I would never do a marathon on 10 days notice. And I'm like, tell me I can't and I'll show you I can. I ended up beating my brother by 25 minutes. And Brandy talks sometimes about sometimes when we do things in spite just to prove people wrong. And sometimes that could be a good motivation, but you need to go away and gather the data. And that's what I'm looking for.
David J Bland (38:00.952)
Yeah, definitely. I remember going to an early book launch with Eric Greece and he was talking about post lean startup, how the one concept that people hadn't really bought into was this idea of a long term stock exchange or something as a longer term view without sacrificing short term. And I don't want to say he did it out of spite, but that's certainly one of the drivers of why he went off and helped build that after the lean startup. I was thinking that when you were talking about this, it sounded as if you
are doing almost like a concierge experiment where you're gonna manually connect people who need to find people to interview. You're just gonna go through your list and kind of go into that detail a bit more because it feels very manual or maybe I misunderstood.
Brandy Old (38:47.822)
Yeah, so I mean, there is that side. If we have some folks that maybe put their request out through the email that don't work. We're working with Adam Berk on this and we are well connected, right? So in our network we have.
lot of folks and we kind of have been testing this over the last few years on our LinkedIn where we get entrepreneurs that come and ask us for help. I had a student of a business advisor in town that's taking her bachelor's in product development and she wanted to interview some Canadian startups for an undergrad thesis but she didn't have any contacts so I put a link LinkedIn post out to try to find the right folks for her to connect so that's something we've kind of been
noodling on, I guess, in that sense. And I'll maybe let Craig talk a little bit about the form and the structure of what we actually are hoping hasso can function as on that piece.
Craig Elias (39:39.45)
Yeah, so I think David, the way I try to explain it is that we've got, it's a two -sided exchange. So on one side, let's say we've got 10 ,000 people, just general public, who have done stuff on Kickstarter, GoFundMe, have either attended a session and said, you know, a checkbox, I'm going to help a startup out. When we give away the books, that's one of the things, we have a checkbox, would you be willing to help a startup out? So we have this list of people who...
would receive an email. So let's pretend you're on the list, David. So you're one of 10 ,000 people. Brandy comes one day and says, hey, I solved this problem. These are three things I want to know, or three things about my target customer, ideal client profile, ICP. We use bifurcation to figure those things out. So I would then take Brandy's email and say, hey, Brandy's looking for someone who has this problem that happens to be
a single mom with one kid and is under the age of 35, and then you might just be on that list and meet that criteria. You're like, I want to help the startup out. So I'm not filtering this to anybody. Everybody gets it. And then what happens is if you're the one of the people that would like to help out, there's a form you would go to. The entrepreneur is set up where they collect your contact information, and now they can phone you and do the interview. So it's right now completely unfiltered, unmanaged, but
One of the things that Adam is trying to get us towards, and I'm not against, but I want to test first, is do we want to have people tell us a few things about themselves so we don't have to wait for someone to email back to be able to close that loop? So I don't think we're there yet, but at some point, based upon our experiments, that's something we might encourage people to include on a voluntary basis and be able to gather some data and see who does it and how well it actually makes a difference.
David J Bland (41:34.136)
Yeah, I think that's definitely, it'd be interesting to see how the tests go and the traction and whether or not people are having fruitful conversations. I think to some extent, if you look at bigger picture, you do have people that pay for these kinds of services, but they're usually bigger companies. And at that point, they're often doing like usability testing and things like that. So when I've ever had to use those platforms to help people, I always kind of felt like I had to hack them a little bit.
but I think that's something definitely worth exploring. So it seems as if your journey was, okay, let's get people to at least value testing, not just build and go off and try to sell it. And now that you've made so much progress there, you're at a point where you now have people are like, yeah, I wanna do this, but I just can't find the customers I need to talk to.
And so now it feels like you're moving a little forward and now you're trying to solve that problem.
Brandy Old (42:33.55)
Absolutely. We're going to see how that functions. It's always one of those fun things where, you know, as soon as you solve a problem, another one is born. So I think what's cool about this process is we don't necessarily have a solution in mind of, you know, an AI bot or a platform that would be an all in one stop shop for entrepreneurs. We're really just iterating our way forward based on what our community is asking for, which is really rooted in that desirability side.
Craig Elias (43:04.378)
And I think, Brandy, if you and I had done this when we first met seven years ago, we wouldn't be doing this today.
Brandy Old (43:10.222)
No.
David J Bland (43:15.224)
Yeah, we certainly learn from experience over time as well. But it's amazing. I love how you're really being thoughtful about this. You're trying to help entrepreneurs understand this process, but you're also testing your way through it, which as we all know is really hard, even if we are experts in it. Sometimes that works against us. So I really thank you for sharing your story. Brandy, if people want to learn more about you and what you're up to, where should they go?
Brandy Old (43:37.486)
Yeah, great question. They can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Brandy Olds. And they can also find me on the Alberta Innovates website. I'm a TDA, so I do business advising for Alberta -based businesses and help them get access to our non -dilutive grants and connect into our community and miss those confirmation biases so that they can scale faster.
David J Bland (44:00.696)
Thank you. And Craig, where would people go to learn more about you and what you're up to?
Craig Elias (44:04.89)
Same thing, LinkedIn. I mean, I want to give Brandy some credit. So Brandy got on LinkedIn when she was like 17 years old. I'm like, I don't think I got, I got on LinkedIn on day eight, but I think when I got on LinkedIn, I think I was like 36 or something like this. So yeah. And then here's the other thing I think we both do really well, which I think is good for other people to think about is that Brandy owns a domain name called brandyold .com. I own craigelias .com. So worst comes to worst, just type our name in and put a .com at the end and watch what happens.
David J Bland (44:35.032)
to raise my hand there too. I also have davidjbland .com. I always put the J in because it makes it sound like more interesting. But I really want to thank you so much for hanging out and sharing really openly with how you're trying to empower early stage entrepreneurs and empower student entrepreneurship, but also being very thoughtful on how you're testing your way through it. I know I'm a fan, so I'm sure people who have listened to this will also become fans and hopefully reach out to you. So I just want to thank you both for your time and yeah, thanks. Keep helping people test their ideas.
Brandy Old (45:04.398)
Thanks, David.
Craig Elias (45:05.466)
David, a pleasure.