See the show notes for this episode: S 01 | Ep 63 From Idea to Impact: How to Make Your Innovations Actually Stick | Show notes
0:00:00 - Alex Shevelenko
Welcome to Experience-focused Leaders. I'm delighted to introduce you to Nick Jain, a CFA and the CEO of IdeaScale, an innovation software company that serves everyone from NASA to federal government agencies across the country to McKinsey. Nick, welcome to the pod!
0:00:25 - Nick Jain
Alex, thank you so much for having me here today. I'm really excited to be here.
0:00:29 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, I brought up CFA because I love the contrast between being a certified financial analyst, a mathematician by training, and yet leading an innovation software company with consulting services, where you're helping what I could argue are probably not the most innovative companies. Organizations, by their size and complexity, become more innovative. So, guide us on the journey from quantitative to innovative.
0:01:01 - Nick Jain
Sure, I want to push back a little bit. I don't think just because someone is quantitative, they can't be innovative. You know, mathematicians have been creating crazy math for centuries. A lot of innovations happen in science, so people can be mathematically oriented and still do cool stuff.
0:01:19 - Alex Shevelenko
Point taken, point taken. I don't want to offend my mathematically inclined friends. Yeah, not just mathematical science.
0:01:27 - Nick Jain
Most of science is innovation, right? Biological science, whether you’re talking CRISPR, new algorithms, or whatever it is. So, look, my background for the first half of my career... I would break my career into three chunks. The first part is my educational phase. I was really focused on becoming an academic mathematician or physicist. I didn't go down that path, but that’s what my degree is in and what I did research in. The second part of my career, I went and worked on Wall Street as a professional investor, doing private equity and hedge fund investing. That's where the CFA came in, because it's useful to have that extra qualification to show that you actually know how finance works.
0:02:00 - Alex Shevelenko
I thought we were chatting before—was that where the poker came in? Is that the part?
0:02:06 - Nick Jain
Sort of, yes and no. I started playing poker in grad school. We used to run a bunch of very indebted business school students, and we were playing for $0.25-$0.50—small amounts of money, a lot of beer, and a lot of pizza.
The third part of my career, over the last four or five years, I've become a professional CEO. This means that private equity firms, founders, and venture capitalists hire me when their companies are ready for the next stage of success. That could be either a company that needs a turnaround, a company that's doing well and is ready to reach the next stage—the billion-dollar stage—or a company that's doing well and is ready to scale to that next level. I've run a trucking company, a shoe company, and now I have the pleasure of being at IdeaScale, which, as you said, is the largest innovation software company on the planet.
0:02:58 - Alex Shevelenko
Wow. So let's dig into innovation. What do you feel are the biggest obstacles to bringing innovation, in particular, to mid- to large-size organizations? Let's assume that startups and small businesses, which have to survive, are innovative by default. But once companies start becoming successful, success is, to some degree, an enemy of innovation. SaaS, to some degree, is an enemy of innovation, right? What are you seeing as ways to unlock that, especially in today’s day and age, where danger is lurking around the corner for almost any organization—whether you're a Department of Education in the U.S., a midsize organization with competitors, or a Fortune 500 company that may not stay on the list over the next couple of years?
0:03:50 - Nick Jain
You're absolutely right. Smaller organizations face two key challenges that large organizations don't. One is hunger, as you mentioned. If you're small and not innovating, you're basically going out of business pretty fast. So startups have to be innovative, or they're dead.
Large companies, on the other hand, are sitting on billions of dollars in cash. They could survive for a long time before they actually get put out of business. So, number one, the hunger dies once you become large and successful, both at an individual level and at an organizational level. The second challenge is that even if you're hungry, bureaucracy sets in when you grow. Bureaucracy means that there are many layers between, let's say, the CEO and the people with the great ideas. How do those great ideas reach the CEO? Communication breaks down.
You have to go through many more checks and balances. You need to talk to the finance team and the marketing team. Whereas, if you're a small team of 10 people sitting in a room, your finance person, your marketing person, and your product person are just 10 feet away from each other—one Slack channel away from one another.
0:04:50 - Alex Shevelenko
So at that time, they could be the same person.
Nick Jain
Exactly.
0:04:54 - Nick Jain
The left side of your brain is your marketing, and the right side is your analytical side, or vice versa. I always get those flipped. So, at large organizations like this, bureaucracy happens, and they lose their hunger. The way to solve that is solvable, at least in part. There are three things that every organization needs to do if they want to be innovative.
Number one, they need to have what I call the "three-legged stool of innovation." You’ve got to have people who actually want to innovate. Not everyone wants to show up and do new things. Some people want to show up, work nine to five, and go home, and that’s okay. We need those types of people in our lives too.
0:05:31 - Alex Shevelenko
Number two, and just to be very clear, you don’t want to have super innovative accountants and CFOs, right? Because that can lead to certain, you know, embarrassing situations. Maybe "efficient" is a better word than "innovative."
0:05:49 - Nick Jain
Innovative accounting can mean either sketchy things, like Enron, or it can mean new accounting standards. There are newer and better accounting standards. A fun example is, and I’ll give you a very nerdy accounting example, that actually is a good innovation.
Up until about three or four years ago, or actually, let's say 10 years ago, anybody who did software or research—let's say you're developing a drug or you're developing software, stuff that doesn't result in a physical good—wasn't accounting for valuable intellectual property anywhere. That valuable piece of software or intellectual property wasn’t on your accounting statements, which is crazy. If you own the intellectual property to Microsoft Windows or some new drug, that should be on your financial statements somewhere, and it really wasn’t.
So, the accounting standards have changed over the last 10 years or so to say, "Hey, if you built a really cool piece of software or you built a drug or you have some intellectual property, you can actually put that on your balance sheet." So, innovation does happen in accounting too. But I mean, there’s bad accounting, and then there’s innovative accounting.
So, that’s number one: you need the right people. You need some percentage of people in your organization who want to innovate, and the right number tends to be about five to 10%. That’s the bare minimum before you tip over that threshold into being innovative.
The second thing is you need the right processes and incentives.
A good example is that many organizations, when you come up with a new idea, your boss says, "Shut up, go do your work." That’s like slapping you. If that’s how your organization is set up, guess what? If you slap somebody every time they innovate, they’re going to stop innovating or coming up with creative ideas. So, a lot of organizations actually have negative incentives and they also don’t have positive incentives.
If you come up with a great idea that makes the company a billion dollars, well, guess what happens? They give you a pat on the back, maybe a small bonus, and the company makes a billion dollars. That’s why people leave to go to growing startups or smaller organizations—they know they won’t be penalized for trying new things, and they’ll be rewarded when things go right.
And then the third thing is you need the right tools.
0:07:48 - Alex Shevelenko
We'll come back to this one, right? Because this probably applies to everybody, to every organization. Okay, so how do you create the right processes to encourage and recognize innovation? Yeah, we'll come back to that in a second.
0:08:01 - Nick Jain
But the third one I just want to touch on quickly is tools and technology, which is obviously where my company plays. The analogy I’d like to use is: imagine you’re a world-class athlete, you're a great runner, you have the motivation, and you want to become an athlete, but you're not allowed to wear shoes when running. If you had access to tools, a gym, or a trainer, you could improve.
A lot of organizations, even when they have the right people and have incentivized them correctly, say, “Go sit in a room by yourself and come up with new ideas,” but they don’t provide the right resources. Whether it’s money, technology, software, or whiteboards—whatever it is—you need tools and technology to create. Pablo Picasso without a paintbrush probably wouldn’t be known. Right? Someone had to give him a paintbrush at some point in his life.
0:08:51 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, I think let’s... So we’ll come back to the second point. Let’s dive into the third, the tooling part. Obviously, it’s near and dear to me as well. In parallel, I’m running a software business that’s about spreading innovative ideas. So I think I would distinguish the parts about coming up with ideas and getting some consensus and volume, and tooling around letting the best ideas rise to the top.
Then, okay, let’s say you have the best ideas. How do you communicate them across your entire organization, or to your partners, customers, or investors? Let’s say you’re trying to say, “Hey, we’re going to be the one AI startup that rules them all,” or whatever it is, right?
Then, I think the second challenge is the tooling around how you get your innovation to spread—how you let the best ideas win. It’s both about packaging the ideas and getting them out there. And we definitely see remarkable things where companies that are allegedly selling innovation are showing up with analog, old-fashioned tools for delivering their message.
You’ve probably studied this in business school, where there’s incongruence between your body language and what you're trying to say. You know, like, "Look at how exciting and innovative we are!" while people are falling asleep.
The same thing happens in their communication toolkits. They say, “We’re super exciting, interactive, and multimedia,” but then hand over a flat white paper that’s written in the same style as Winston Churchill's white papers from a hundred years ago. So anyway, that’s a phenomenon we see, and it’s kind of shocking in the communication part.
I think you’re a step earlier in the chain, right? You’re asking, how do you source great innovation from your customers and get the ideas going? What do you see as the bottlenecks for people running the race without the shoes? What are the most typical issues they face?
0:11:08 - Nick Jain
I think there are three things that happen in between where innovation doesn't occur, specifically on the tooling side. Number one, there's not a great way...
0:11:17 - Alex Shevelenko
Before you go into that, you’re definitely working with McKinsey.
0:11:20 - Nick Jain
I can see that you’re going with the three-for-everything approach—that’s kind of the McKinsey style. Yeah, I’m an ex-McKinsey guy. Actually, unfortunately, McKinsey is no longer a customer of ours, but I began my career there.
0:11:34 - Alex Shevelenko
Three is three—that’s great. Let’s dive into the three issues around coming up with innovative ideas.
0:11:42 - Nick Jain
I’ll toss in three plus a bonus, just because you called me out on my McKinsey “three.” So, look, the first issue is, in terms of where large organizations fall down with tools and get bottlenecked: Number one is collecting ideas. If you have 10 people in a room, it’s easy to sit together over lunch or coffee and share ideas. But how do you get them all in one place? If you have people in different physical locations, remote workers, different languages, and some people who are shy, how do you gather all the ideas?
Number two: Once you get all the ideas in one place, how do you figure out which ideas are good and bad? There are bad ideas, good ideas, and great ideas. When you have 10,000 ideas sitting in front of you, you have to sort them in some way. One method that many organizations have used is having someone whose job it is to judge those ideas—someone like Caesar with a thumbs up or thumbs down. This might be the CEO or the chief product officer. He or she would be evaluating ideas all day, but then they become the bottleneck because there’s only so much time they can devote to seriously thinking about an idea. They might think, “Ah, Alex sent this idea. I don’t like Alex, so I’ll just kill the idea because I don’t have time to deal with it," or for some other reason. So, that’s number two.
0:11:08 - Nick Jain
I think there are three things that happen in between where innovation doesn't occur, specifically on the tooling side. Number one, there's not a great way...
0:11:17 - Alex Shevelenko
Before you go into that, you’re definitely working with McKinsey.
0:11:20 - Nick Jain
I can see that you’re going with the three-for-everything approach—that’s kind of the McKinsey style. Yeah, I’m an ex-McKinsey guy. Actually, unfortunately, McKinsey is no longer a customer of ours, but I began my career there.
0:11:34 - Alex Shevelenko
Three is three—that’s great. Let’s dive into the three issues around coming up with innovative ideas.
0:11:42 - Nick Jain
I’ll toss in three plus a bonus, just because you called me out on my McKinsey “three.” So, look, the first issue is, in terms of where large organizations fall down with tools and get bottlenecked: Number one is collecting ideas. If you have 10 people in a room, it’s easy to sit together over lunch or coffee and share ideas. But how do you get them all in one place? If you have people in different physical locations, remote workers, different languages, and some people who are shy, how do you gather all the ideas?
Number two: Once you get all the ideas in one place, how do you figure out which ideas are good and bad? There are bad ideas, good ideas, and great ideas. When you have 10,000 ideas sitting in front of you, you have to sort them in some way.
One method that many organizations have used is having someone whose job it is to judge those ideas—someone like Caesar with a thumbs up or thumbs down. This might be the CEO or the chief product officer. He or she would be evaluating ideas all day, but then they become the bottleneck because there’s only so much time they can devote to seriously thinking about an idea. They might think, “Ah, Alex sent this idea. I don’t like Alex, so I’ll just kill the idea because I don’t have time to deal with it," or for some other reason. So, that’s number two.
0:15:40 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, I think, since we've been talking about government a little bit and the, obviously, the Department of Government Efficiency, run by Elon, among other folks, that’s going to come up. It kind of brings up this idea that all of us in the tech industry have seen: look, since the X (formerly Twitter) post-acquisition, even if you’re not superpowered, you’ve seen a dramatic volume of product improvements on the platform, especially since many people have left as employees. We’re seeing that there are exceptions to the rule, where there are crazy entrepreneurs with some sort of execution engine that’s out there doing the impossible and increasing the volume. There’s still focus, right? Like, we’re not saying they’re not focused.
0:16:41 - Nick Jain
All right, I don’t think it’s all Elon Musk. He has obviously done extraordinary things, but I don’t think it’s just because he is individually a genius. It’s because of the way he runs his organization. All of his organizations are privately run, where he is the sole decision-maker. And when you have, for better or worse, an autocratic style of leadership, you can get stuff done faster. Right? Whereas, when you have to go through most CEOs of publicly listed companies, they have teams they must work with and boards they report to. They can’t arbitrarily say, “Do this.” For example, when under Twitter...
0:17:19 - Alex Shevelenko
But Tesla is no longer private.
0:17:22 - Nick Jain
Yeah, but he still has disproportionate power. In fact, there was that lawsuit where he controlled...
0:17:27 - Alex Shevelenko
What you're saying is that when you have a strong locus of control and you’re relatively competent, you can...
0:17:35 - Nick Jain
You can do things quickly. And those things can be bad things, by the way, right? The joke is that, under certain autocratic governments in the past, in various parts of the world, stuff gets done faster. Unfortunately, sometimes it's really horrible stuff. In the case of Twitter, they laid off about a third of their staff within six months of Musk buying the company. That would have been impossible when Twitter was a public company. Even Google and Facebook, as they've gone through some of their layoffs over the past two years, have done tiny, tiny ones.
0:18:04 - Alex Shevelenko
Imagine if Google came out and said, “We’re laying off a third of our staff.” That would be...
Coming back to the point of what you can do, right? Because I think I, and probably a lot of our audience, share this mindset: "Hey, I’m innovative, I’m ambitious, and I want to do a lot of things. I can’t do everything, so I need to focus, but I do want to do more than I thought was possible." I think we want to achieve more than just marginal improvements—we want to see when there's a possibility for 10x growth and achieve that. How do you see that happening? Whether it’s using
I could say what we're trying to do is we basically have a very simple matrix, which ends up being like, "Hey, does this have 10x potential? High impact potential across key dimensions that we care about?" That could be user experience, author experience, etc., for example. And then the cost to create. I think it's a very simple framework, and everyone can grasp it. People aren't as offended by an idea that's really expensive to create but has relatively marginal impact across a number of dimensions. It's still a good idea, right? But the economics just don’t work.
So, we’re able, with a relatively small development team, to produce outcomes that make our product at least compelling in the market. But it’s a journey, and you have to think about which ones are the 10x potentials. Then there are always the infrastructural ones—those where the risk is too high if something goes down. So those aren’t 10x ideas, but the negative impact could be very significant. Therefore, you invest in de-risking the experience for your customers. Those are the trade-offs we live with. What have you seen other successful agile organizations do, using your software, in terms of making the right choices?
0:20:11 - Nick Jain
The framework you laid out—the benefit versus cost—is a classic cost-benefit or ROI (return on investment) framework. Then you mentioned risk. I would frame the risk element slightly differently, asking: what is the probability of the impact materializing? The impact could be a negative one, like your servers going down, or, say, you facing an asbestos lawsuit. Or it could be the probability that this great new product doesn’t actually generate those 10x benefits you want. So, the more modern ROI framework is cost-benefit and the probability of success.
Now, you’ve got to think in three dimensions rather than the classic two-by-two matrix. That’s exactly the framework we use, and it’s what best management theory says well-run organizations should use. Many do. There are two amendments or suggestions I’d make. The first is that individuals should use it. When you, as an individual contributor or CEO, are thinking about what to do today, use that same framework. Think, “Hey, it’s going to take me six hours to do this. Is it going to be beneficial to the organization?” Apply that same framework to your own allocation of time and resources as an individual, whether you’re junior staff or the CEO.
The second point is that the analytical framework we just discussed—risk, reward, benefit, cost—is something many organizations don’t pause to think through before embarking on something. It’s often, “This sounds good,” or “It came from Nick, who sounds really eloquent with words.” Decisions are often made for political or soft reasons rather than hard analysis. Hard analysis forces us to do two things: First, it forces us to engage with the facts rather than feelings. It’s important, when making decisions that affect thousands or millions of people, to base those decisions on facts and data. Second, it forces us to pause. Too often, we make decisions quickly. Sometimes, it’s beneficial—even if you’re not getting analytical benefit from it—to think through an ROI framework. It forces you to pause, double-check your assumptions, and take things a little slower. Good innovation tends to, on average, happen thoughtfully. The best innovation doesn’t come from eureka moments in the shower.
0:22:38 - Alex Shevelenko
Interesting. So, we all think it’s the intuitive kind of “aha” moments, right? That’s kind of the cultural zeitgeist, and those are good, but the research shows that those moments don’t have as much impact as we think.
0:22:54 - Nick Jain
That’s not necessarily the case. That’s just one of the entry points. The research shows that the eureka moment is incredibly, incredibly rare. Even then, those eureka moments typically only happen after you’ve been thinking about something really hard for a long time, and the last puzzle piece falls into place. But those eureka moments don’t happen if you didn’t spend the 999 hours before thinking about it. We credit the eureka moment because that’s when it all falls together and the idea or the genius crystallizes. But in fact, the research shows it’s the 999 hours—or the 9,999 hours—that you put in before the eureka moment happens where all the actual creativity and innovation really took place.
0:23:41 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it. What’s your point of view on harnessing that pattern matching? The moments where, okay, look, as a founder, it’s probably easier for me to do some pattern matching because I’ve been struggling with a problem for a long time. How do you enable people who don’t have access to that history to start tapping into this collective wisdom? How can they either have more eureka moments or at least identify the right ideas that are more likely to succeed from the volume of ideas out there?
0:24:34 - Nick Jain
Sure. So, at an individual level, there’s very little you can do to teach someone pattern matching other than giving them experience. And that experience can come through life experience, formal education, etc. For example, I studied physics, so I have pattern matching in physics—not because I redeveloped all of humanity’s physics over the last 2,000 years, but because a large portion of that knowledge was taught to me. Now I have pattern matching in this domain of expertise because I studied it. I also have pattern matching in carpentry, from years of doing housework.
So, at an individual level, if you want to develop those pattern matching or knowledge skills, it’s simply through time, education, and life experience. Now, at an organizational level, there’s a much more interesting solution to this.
The cool thing is the notion of what’s called prediction markets. These markets show that if you can take large numbers of people—who may not each be experts or know much about any one thing—but each of them has a small bit of information from their life experience, when you add up all those small bits, you get very powerful results.
That’s why prediction markets—like predicting which politician will win—are often more accurate than survey results. That’s why crowdsourcing works. That’s also what we do. The idea that you can take small bits of knowledge, each of which is sitting in different people's heads, and gather it in one place, is incredibly valuable. For example, open-source software works because even though I may not understand how the entire Mastodon system works, I could be an expert in one small function of it. Even if I’m not reading the millions of lines of code, I can still contribute meaningfully in a way that benefits millions of people using Mastodon.
0:26:39 - Alex Shevelenko
I think this makes a ton of sense. So, let’s say we’ve figured this out, right? We’ve crowdsourced ideas and created a welcoming environment where we’re not shutting down ideas. In our company, we have a celebration day where people celebrate their ideas, accomplishments, and new things. We’re trying to encourage this sort of culture of bringing ideas up.
I have to catch myself, like you said, when I think, "Hey, I had that idea two years ago," or whatever, and there’s all that pattern matching. You have to stop yourself, you know? Not react to it. Let people feel like they’re contributing, and sometimes they really do have a new take. You have to create an environment where people are excited about participating. We’re naming features and things like that after customers, after employee suggestions, so it’s fun to do that. Now, let’s say we’ve built this thing, right? And now it’s time to bring it to market—product marketing, and to some degree, company marketing around core initiatives and innovation. Where do you think innovation falls short with some of your clients when they try to take ideas from your platform and bring them into the wider world?
0:28:02 - Nick Jain
Sure, I think two things happen. First, a lot of people—or a lot of organizations—fail when taking an idea, a good idea, and putting it into the real world. Number one is, they often pick what is "good" based on some arbitrary definition that someone senior has made or what feels right to them, rather than thinking about all the feedback and value they’ve gotten from crowdsourcing. One common issue is that everyone in the company and all our customers are asking for X, but I, Nick, am a genius CEO. Therefore, I’m going to select Y based on my intuition and ignore everybody else. People willfully, unfortunately, ignore all the information their employees and customers have given them because they think they know better.
0:28:54 - Alex Shevelenko
Because they think they’re all Elon Musks, basically, or whatever. They think, "I’m a pretty smart guy."
0:28:59 - Nick Jain
But am I the next Steve Jobs? Maybe, maybe not. I’m not going to start with that assumption. Let time bear that out. Maybe in 40 years, the world will revere me like the next Steve Jobs, but I’m not going to start today with the assumption that I’m smarter than the millions of people who are my customers or employees. That’s number one. People override, and this is not just true in innovation—it’s true in many aspects of life—where people use their intuition to override evidence. That’s a really bad framework for making decisions.
0:29:31 - Alex Shevelenko
And there are psychological mishaps in our brains, like fundamental attribution error and other things that work against us here. Got it?
0:29:40 - Nick Jain
Yeah, we’re not machines, right? We are evolutionary beings designed to be emotional. You may know it’s bad to get into a fight at a bar, but if you’re drunk and mad, you might get into a fight, even though logically you know it’s a terrible idea. You’re going to jail, or you might hurt your fist, or whatever. So, that’s number one, where people override information. Number two is, they become wedded to a good idea. So, let’s imagine all the research and facts say that it’s a good idea. You go put it out in the wild, you’ve built this new product, you’ve run a marketing campaign, and you’ve done everything right, but the world says, "No, we don’t like your product."
People become overly attached to their innovations, ideas, and initiatives, rather than realizing that any new idea is ultimately an experiment. And that experiment can fail, even if you did everything right—and that’s okay. New innovations should always be treated like experiments until they are successful in the wild, and that’s okay.
If you put out a dozen experiments into the wild, and 11 of them fail, but one becomes a killer product, great! You are now like Rovio. Rovio failed at a lot of games, but they made one game—Angry Birds—that made them billions and billions of dollars.
0:31:02 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, I want to say something here that maybe is because you only had two points, so a third one is begging to be mentioned. I’m not a McKinsey alum, I’m an Oliver Wyman alum, but I’ll throw that one in.
0:31:14 - Nick Jain
By the way, that’s where my wife is, so we’re aligned on that.
0:31:22 - Alex Shevelenko
I feel that too much value is placed on the idea itself and not enough on how that idea gets distributed and communicated to the desired audiences. Sometimes this leads to false signals. For example, you can communicate an idea really well, but if the idea itself is poor, you’re just creating buzz around a bad product. We’re seeing many AI startups that know how to spend venture money to create buzz, but the core product isn’t strong, or the buzz wears off. That’s not real innovation—it’s just a strategy to get the next round of funding. And that’s happening a lot. In other cases, good ideas may not be fully baked, but they’re communicated terribly.
These ideas are often "me, me, me" centric, where the focus is on the company and its vision, not on the customer’s needs. A lot of companies assume that if they put something out there, it will work. But communicating isn’t just about putting things on paper; it’s about understanding how the recipient is receiving it, how easily they can act on it. Some companies—especially in the enterprise or large government sectors—are really behind in getting their ideas out into the world in a way that gives them a fair chance. What are you seeing from the best companies in terms of communication? And what are the worst companies doing wrong when it comes to communicating their ideas?
0:33:42 - Nick Jain
It’s funny that you mention consumer companies doing this well, because you’re absolutely right. Consumer companies realize they are selling to individuals, whereas many B2B companies mistakenly think they are selling to other companies when, in fact, they are still selling to human beings within those companies. At the end of the day, the receiver of all information, whether informational or emotional, is a human being—not an LLC. Many B2B companies lose sight of that.
This is something we’ve struggled with as well—how to effectively communicate with our customers. I don’t think we’ve mastered it, but our approach is to do a few things. First, we don’t assume we know the answer from the start. We don’t know how our customers will respond to different messaging, so we try various things. We run webinars, write white papers, and recently started doing podcasts. We don’t know what will work ahead of time, but we experiment and learn from the results. Some things fail, and we shut them down. That’s the first step: trying things out.
0:34:59 - Alex Shevelenko
You measure, you trial, and then you measure whether it’s working or not.
0:35:03 - Nick Jain
Yes, we try many things in parallel, each a low-cost failure experiment. For example, we might run a paid advertising campaign with eight different variations of imaging, along with other forms of content like organic SEO, podcasts, and videos. We try all these things, and within each medium, we experiment with different types of content. A funny example: we ran a full hour-long webinar about a major new product release. It had a decent turnout, but we also created a shorter four-minute video with the same product guy, just a quick, upbeat message about the key points. The shorter video outperformed the long webinar, even though we didn’t advertise it—it had more views, more hours watched, and more engagement. This taught us that our customers don’t want long-form content. We made the wrong assumption that an in-depth, educational webinar would be well-received. In reality, something short and snappy worked much better.
0:36:37 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, yeah, we made the wrong assumption. Here’s an interesting thing we see from a lot of data, because you're a B2B company: we see that companies want to consume content, but they don’t have the bandwidth to watch two-hour-long videos or hour-long webinars. However, they like the idea that the long white paper or the in-depth webinar exists. It shows that there is depth behind it, and they appreciate having the shorter version, like the four-minute video, as a summary. From there, people can choose to drill in if they really want to. It's been a really interesting pattern, and I think the world wasn't like that before.
0:37:29 - Nick Jain
The world...
0:37:29 - Alex Shevelenko
This is the age of information overload.
0:37:31 - Nick Jain
You don’t have the bandwidth to read everything. I don’t want an article on a new programming language. I want the executive summary, and then I’ll go read the documentation later. Not just on a programming language, but on anything really—I don’t want to read the full documentation.
0:37:40 - Alex Shevelenko
Still, it gives you the trust that it's not just some superficial summary that doesn't exist. You want to know that the documentation is there, and if you do decide to look at it, it will be efficient. Yeah, and that feels like it solves for novelty—being able to not feel overwhelmed by it, making it easily digestible, and not intimidating. But then, there's a separate need for trust. New ideas are risky because they may not be accepted by the mainstream. I may stake my time, my career, or whatever on the line. So, it’s a really weird balance, and I’m curious how you’ve seen this—both in marketing but in general. You know, there’s the high-level summary, and then the substance to dig into underneath. Does that feel like a recipe for building and introducing innovation while maintaining trust?
0:38:39 - Nick Jain
Trust, so we’re getting into an area outside my expertise here, because I don’t have hard evidence on what I’m about to say, and I always like to qualify that.
I think many people are actually perfectly comfortable with the short summary and don’t even need to know that the greater documentation exists. I think a small proportion of people gain comfort from knowing that the documentation or video exists, and an even smaller percentage of people will actually ever go read that in-depth documentation or watch the two-hour-long video lecture. So, I think the vast majority of people are just fine with short-form content, and that could be either because, psychologically, that’s how our brains are wired, or it’s because we’re used to dealing with information in the information age—where we’re used to 12-second Vine videos or 30-second TikToks. Or, as you pointed out, we’re just overloaded with so much information that we have to budget our time much more consciously than we did 20 years ago, when we’d sit down for an hour and actually watch an hour-long TV episode.
0:39:49 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, interesting. Our data shows that short form is easy to digest, but it just doesn’t stick. People watch a bunch of short-form videos on YouTube, but they just move from one to the next without stopping.
As I said, this is outside my area of expertise, so I might be dead wrong, but it's interesting to hear the initial part. We are all consumers, right? It’s interesting. It would be great to get more thoughts from innovators, because I think, particularly in innovation, the answer may be different than in other disciplines. Like, where you’re selling more mature products. But yeah, I love the general experimentation approach. That's the right one, right? Because I think whatever I’m saying, or you’re saying, could just be data for one specific situation. You have to find the balance, by the way.
0:40:48 - Nick Jain
The importance of running experiments is that we may discover the perfect solution tomorrow, but if we’re not running experiments, a year from now we’ll miss whatever that next new thing is—whether it’s in product, marketing, HR, or whatever it is.
0:41:06 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, and I think the other thing is that we’re sometimes stacking the wrong mathematical models and misapplying them.
So, there's the model of a funnel, which is broadly correct. There’s some kind of funnel in an organization adopting things, going from awareness to digging in. But in reality, it's more like quantum physics, with people bumping around and going back and forth. You need the summary information for senior-level people, but the person implementing needs to know the substance—they need to know what they’re going to implement.
The challenge is that even the same individual, at a different device, at a different time of day, or at a different stage in their buyer journey, will need different information. So, we’re trying to come up with simple mathematical models, but they don’t work as well anymore. Figuring that out is an interesting challenge. I’d love to continue exchanging ideas. How do you not only come up with the best ideas and get your organization to buy into them, but also actually get those ideas implemented?
Nick, what other nuggets or takeaways would you want to leave our audience with as we wrap up on the hour here?
0:42:26 - Nick Jain
Sure, I’ll just do a quick plug for my own company and software. Our software is completely free for teams or organizations with fewer than a hundred people.
So, whether you’re an individual entrepreneur or part of a team of 99 people at a billion-dollar organization, the software is completely free. I’d love for people to check us out. It takes 30 seconds to set up, and it’s entirely web-based—no downloads required. It’s a world-class piece of software. We’ve been in business for 15 years, so we kind of know what we’re doing at this point.
0:42:53 - Alex Shevelenko
Ideascale.com. Yes, sir, Ideascale.com. Nick, where can the audience find you personally? Can they connect with you or follow your thought leadership? This has been a lot of fun, even in groups of three, which is obviously digestible for us. I’ll remember some of these nuggets. Where can people continue to follow your insights?
0:43:16 - Nick Jain
Two ways. If you want to get in touch with me, the best way is on LinkedIn. My name is Nick Jain, and I’m usually the first search result. Feel free to message me—I respond to literally every message I get.
Secondly, I’m creating a lot of fun, stupid projects from raw code, just to mess around with stuff and prove it can be done without using fancy software. Literally just a black screen and code. If you want to check that out, it’s nickjain.com.
0:43:41 - Alex Shevelenko
Awesome, Nick. It’s been a great pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing how to be more innovative. I feel like I’m going to be full of potentially implementable ideas, but more importantly, I’ll spread that to the rest of the team and our customers. So, thank you. Thank you for your insights.