1942 – Unconventional Tactics for Achieving Business Success with Apollo 21’s Danny Nathan

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.

0:51Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you.

1:05With us right now, it's Danny Nathan. Danny, you are a product strategist and a designer, and you are the founder and CEO of Apollo 21. You're found on the web at Apollo21.io. Danny, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here. Yeah, so give us an overview of what you do with Apollo 21. Yeah, absolutely. I like to tell people that Apollo 21 sits right at the intersection of a management consultancy and a product design studio. So we design and build usually technology oriented products, but always with some sort of strategic bent to them, we work with a lot of our clients to help understand what their operational problems look like or what their goals are in terms of growth and innovation and figuring out how we can help them foster an entrepreneurial real spirit and a culture of innovation within their own walls, and then bring those new products and new ventures to life.

2:05Yeah. And so what would be some examples of products that you've been involved with? Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting. You know, a lot of folks ask if we have a specific industry or vertical, and the reality is that we are kind of agnostic in that regard. We tend to focus very heavily on solving problems. And so we have applied that practice across anything from remote guarding and video security to financial services customers. We've done a ton of work actually in the Western sports space. So think cowboys and rodeos and all that fun stuff. And we've worked with some folks in the restaurant space.

2:43So really, our bread and butter is helping people figure out how to solve problems and how to cultivate innovation. And we do that across just about any area of focus or vertical. So someone who would be an ideal client for you would be someone who says, I have a brilliant idea and I've got money. Yes. I mean, that would be the ideal client for just about anything in this world. But to put a finer point on it, usually we end up with working with folks in the C-suite and generally they come to us for one of two goals. So the first is we have a very clear problem. We know it's a problem, but we don't know how to apply technology to solve it.

3:25So with those, usually what we'll do is spend some time evaluating what the problem is, really understanding what the symptomatic problem is versus what the causal problem is. So as an example, we've had clients come to us and say, help us, we're drowning in email. And obviously, there's a lot of reasons that somebody might be drowning in email. What we found with them is that it was a complete lack of predefined process. Everybody who was hired was told, hey, when you need this email, Bob, and when you need this email, Jane. And so Bob and Jane were getting inundated. And then the second path of work that we often find ourselves focused on is new product and new venture building.

4:05So we work with a lot of particularly larger clients to build out internal venture building operations. And we do that by kind of demonstrating the process for a first project through. So often we will help companies bring a new product or a new venture to life. And then based on their experience, we will then work with them to establish the practice internally. Yeah. So what are the pieces that you bring to the table again that might be really challenging for someone to be able to do on their own? It really comes down to a couple of key areas. So one, we have a full team of software engineers and designers and things like that.

4:40And as I mentioned, a lot of our clients don't come from a technology background. And so those are teams and capabilities that are not inherently existent within their business. And then the other thing that we bring to the table is a very clear cut process and a ton of experience around product development and new venture building. And so, you know, we've honed our own approach to those activities over a number of years. and my entire leadership team and myself have all been kind of in the entrepreneurial hot seat for quite a while, both through our experience at Apollo 21 and prior. And so bringing that experience to the table and helping people who haven't been through the venture building process or who are working in an established organization that has found product market fit and are looking for opportunities to scale, but perhaps are so far beyond their startup years that the practices and ideas that really underpin how startups and new ventures are built today either weren't around or they just haven't kind of had the practice in those areas in quite a while.

5:45And so we bring a lot of experience to the table in that regard. What are you excited about from a technical standpoint? I'm sure, again, you're seeing a lot of really cool innovation taking place. You get to participate in that. But what gets you most excited about emerging tech over the next year? I mean, the most patent obvious answer, Josh, that you just can't ignore today is AI. I mean, we might as well just throw it out there and get it on the table and get it out of the way there. Obviously, the capabilities around AI are growing so massively quickly over the last 18 months, two years that it's utterly impossible to ignore.

6:25And it is so exciting to see what's happening there. Beyond that, however, we get a lot of clients that come to us and say, we need AI, obviously. I mean, AI, AI, AI, help us have AI. And the reality, though, is that a lot of companies aren't quite prepared for AI or at least aren't prepared to deploy it in the way that they have it in their heads. So we've been trained for decades that AI means robots that we can talk to that will do your job for you or, you know, whatever sci-fi vision you want to throw at it. And while a lot of that is beginning to come to fruition these days, and it's really exciting to see, a lot of companies have been cultivating a data lake and, you know, harnessing their data for years, but haven't figured out how to take that data and make it actionable to make it really useful in the context of AI.

7:14And so often what we'll do is step in and help them think about AI on the one hand and then sort of automation on the other and help kind of create a little bit of separation between the two so that we can implement basic, simple, if this, then that automations, which can have huge impacts on business even today, regardless of where we are with AI. And it gives us the opportunity to have an impact on their business while we also learn about their data structures and lay the foundations for future AI work. Yeah. And I can't, I don't think, I think very few, let me just say this, I think very few of us can comprehend what the world could potentially be like in two to five years at the rate at which AI is evolving.

8:02Are there any ethical things that you've thought about or considered that, you know, I know this isn't necessarily your area, but just, you know, in terms of, well, let me just ask it this way. In terms of navigating thoughtfully and leaders that are in a position to make decisions and they don't want to be too haphazard in this, right, because there could be risks if poorly implemented. What are some of those risks or concerns? Or maybe, again, maybe it is ethical. I don't know. Yeah, absolutely. No, that's a great question. And I think you've sort of hinted at this. It's impossible to be a leader in an organization today that is focused on implementing AI and understanding what it can do for your business without taking the ethical and privacy-related considerations, kind of keeping them in mind.

8:57And so, you know, I think that a lot of what we're seeing really does come down to data privacy. Where is my data going? How is it being utilized? Obviously, with the rate at which OpenAI, for example, is accelerating things through ChatGPT, that's a lot of people's first touchpoint with AI. And it's really tempting to just start throwing things into ChatGPT so that you can begin to understand what the future of working with AI might look like and feel like and what it might do for your business. And the problem with that is that when you start passing data to a third party service like that, it's pretty difficult to understand exactly what they might use it for, how they might reference it, where it might show up in the future.

9:41And so there's this fine line around what type of data do we need specifically around training for AI and helping AI become better at what it does and what it can do for us and for our businesses, while also bearing in mind that if we're dealing with proprietary data, if we're dealing with any kind of PII or anything like that, you want to be incredibly careful about where that data goes. And so one of our core focal points as we start working more and more with AI is ensuring that those AI efforts can be sandboxed into private repositories, for example, that won't take our clients' data and hand it to OpenAI, won't intermingle it with other systems where they have less certainty around where it's going.

10:28And then, of course, you have to look at how AI is coming to bear across all of the tools that we use on a regular basis. I just saw some conversation cropping up that Slack has now made it effectively an opt-out choice as to whether or not your data is used to train their AI. And so starting whatever it was today, everything that you put into Slack might theoretically get used for training on their data, and you have to actually take steps conscientiously to prevent that from happening. And so keeping up with where those opportunities and pitfalls are happening is really just half the game. And, you know, understanding where you need to be careful and where you need to maintain an awareness and take action as companies are figuring out how they deal with your data for their own AI efforts.

11:19Yeah. Hey, what is Apollo 21 Ventures? So I mentioned that we're a combination of a management consultancy and a product design studio and actually ventures is sort of the third arm of the business. That is our venture building operation where we both work with early stage founders to help them bring new products and new companies to life. And then we also incubate and launch and grow companies ourselves. So as an example, a little over a year ago, we launched a venture called Meeting Cost Calculator that does exactly what it sounds like it does. It helps managers understand how their teams are spending meeting time and what the value is that they're getting out of it and what the cost implications of rampant meetings are.

12:04As we've gone through the pandemic age and into the world of remote and hybrid work, it feels, and certainly anecdotally, we're hearing that a lot of companies are just slapping more and more meetings on the calendar. And so we decided that it was time to create a tool that helped them understand exactly what that meant for their organization. And the most impactful metric for us to do that with is dollars and cents. Yeah. So is there – do you have an application process? Who would be ideal for that? How does that journey work? Today, that's relatively simple. You can reach out to us and we'll start a conversation about what your project or idea is and figure out whether it's a fit for us.

12:46That being said, we are in the process of developing our own, what I refer to as a pre-accelerator program. And so if you look at a lot of the popular startup accelerators like a Y Combinator, a Techstars, or any of the other hundreds that are out there, most of them are geared towards founders who are at least some distance down the road of creating their own product service company startup etc and where we want to differentiate things is with an extremely heavy focus on validation and lean customer development so really helping founders to be evaluate the efficacy of their idea through robust user research and understanding whether or not the idea that they have is something that people will pay for what the market size for it is, et cetera, with the idea that that effort will then set them up for success as they begin to apply to things like a Techstars or a Y Combinator.

13:42And so as soon as we open up the applications for the first cohort of our pre-accelerator program, that will be up on our website and on our socials pretty heavily. But we're hoping that we'll have applications open in the next couple of weeks here, certainly by the time this airs. That's great. Hey, so tell me about your background that brought you to this point? And how does that kind of flavor your values and kind of mission around the work of Apollo 21? Yeah, absolutely. I've had a bit of a roller coaster career. And so I started in advertising, realized very quickly that the most fun I was going to have working on the creative side of advertising was behind me in school, and that I wasn't really enjoying the realities of the corporate advertising world.

14:27And so I took it upon myself to figure out how to move into a world that was more technology oriented. And really my biggest issue with the world of advertising was that I felt like we were doing a lot of screaming into the ether. We were encouraging brands to spend tons of money on television spots and newspaper ads and things like that, which will give you a little bit of a sense of how old I am as well. And we were ignoring the opportunities for technology. And And so right around 2007, I managed to make a move into a company that was more of an innovation consultancy and really laid the groundwork for my exposure into what it means for brands to utilize technology as a key touchpoint with their customers, what the opportunities are in terms of how brands and companies can interact with people in a way that is more of a value add and less of a screaming into the ether, as I said, type of experience.

15:24And that has sort of guided my career since that point. So since 2007, my personal focus has been on helping companies build products, build ventures, and understand where technology can play a role in the ecosystem for them. And if you look back at that era, I was cutting my teeth in that world as social media was becoming a thing right around the launch of the first iPhone. And so the last decade and a half or so have immensely shaped the way that we publicly, everybody uses technology and has really guided my thought process and my thoughts around what good user experience design looks like, what good design in general looks like.

16:15And then as I got deeper and deeper into that study, what I found was that my interest grew and grew from first thinking about user experience design and how do I use an app or a piece of technology and more broadly into how do we build a company that upholds similar values and the idea of providing value for customers in the same way that I was thinking about it from a UX perspective. Yeah. All right. So Danny, the website for Apollo 21 is apollo21.io. To our friend that's listening, you know, maybe they're researching you, they're researching, you know, either venture opportunities or just, you know, again, product and, you know, tech development.

17:02But where would someone go from here if they want to learn more or they want to start diving in a little bit more into how Apollo 21 may be a good help for them? Yeah, absolutely. Our website is a great starting point. We have a ton of case studies outlining the past work that we've done for other clients. We have a number of white papers and a bunch of articles that help espouse our kind of view of how this work gets done and what our process looks like. It also runs through our operating principles. We have three key principles that underpin most of the projects that we work on. And so getting an idea of all of that information through our website is a great starting point.

17:41And then beyond that, you can find me on socials at blah, blah, blah, slash among many. It's pretty much my handle across the board. And then, of course, Apollo 21 is also active on socials. And if you're really interested or you want to learn more, I would highly encourage you, please just reach out. We are always happy to have conversations with people and always excited to learn about the ventures and startups that people are building and what their goals are with those. So please don't be shy. Danny Nathan, again, founder, CEO of Apollo 21, your website, Apollo21.io. Danny, thank you so much for joining us.

18:18Thanks for having me, Josh. It's been a lot of fun.

18:26Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

19:07I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed.

19:49I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.