The Startup Different Podcast

In the innovation space, one of the most challenging things to accomplish is to create a new market. You'll need to do something completely differently that challenges established trends. For us, this was AppArmor; it was one of the first ever mobile safety apps. Nobody had ever heard of a "safety app" and it challenged the established ways of providing public safety on university an...

Product roadmaps should be the steps to realizing a strategic vision for product innovation over the coming 18-24 months, but too often they become anything but. They are often just a list of features to be built into the product. And the product planning meetings associated with the roadmaps are just exercises of pushing back timelines of existing priorities and a means to dismiss newer ideas bec...

MVP… Most Valuable Player? Must Vacate Property? Millennial View Point? Nope! For our first episode of our Innovation Station series we’re talking about the "Minimum Viable Product - MVP"! It has long been hailed as the best approach to product innovation. The recipe is simple: build-measure-learn with a dash of rapid iteration. It has worked incredibly well for us. But we've also ha...

We round out our series on negotiations with a chat with Hope McIntosh-Trigg, CEO of MCG, a business consulting firm focusing on Technology & Digital, Sales, and Strategy. Hope has a ton of negotiation experience. She has amassed a 20+ year career in the technology sector in tech-operations, consulting, sales, marketing, and business strategy with tech giants such as Honeywell, Compaq, HP, VMW...

Plug your nose; we're talking about negotiating on price and the popular stigma around it. Turns out, haggling on price and negotiating on price are very different things. In Episode 3 of Season 3 and our Negotiation Elevation series, we tackle why talking about price is awkward and how we can shift to a constructive negotiation from a hostile price haggle.

Is taking all you can get in a negotiation actually good for you or your business? Most people would tell you that yes, you must get everything you can. They may even argue that that is the point of the confrontation. But it's short sighted - pushing to get everything in a negotiation will leave your opposition in a rough place, souring the goodwill you may have created with them. What's m...

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that in any negotiation, you fixate on your counterpart’s strategy to get the most out of you. It’s a natural thought - a negotiation is very much a confrontation and frankly you don’t want to be duped. But confrontations aren’t always bad - yes, they have the potential to be destructive, but more often than not they have a greater opportunity to be constructive....

One of the worst things a business can do is burn out employees. While there are many cascading negative effects of burnout, there are times when you and your team need to burn the midnight oil. Still, if you or your team are going into work tired from the day before, you can bet that it's going to slowly eat away at your market position, profitability and company culture. In our final episode...

Sometimes employees can be stubborn. And whether or not that's a bad thing, really depends. In some cases that stubbornness is actually disguised passion. There's something they're good at, they understand, and know could help move the company forward - if only, those pesky founders would listen. It's time to swallow your pride, give your employees autonomy, and ride the employee p...

It's a beautiful Tuesday morning, and you're just stepping into a semi-annual review with one of your favorite employees. You're excited to recap all the progress the employee has had over the past six months, and eager to plan out what's next. What you don't realize is that your employee has some huge expectations, and you're about to get blindsided. Welcome to the wild wo...

Welcome to Episode 9 of Season 2 and the first episode in our latest series "Employee Shenanigans"! Today we’re talking interviews - and specifically how tough they can be to properly evaluate candidates. We’ll share some of the hiring best practices and toughest lessons we learned.

It's Episode 8 of season 2 and the finale of our Startup TakeOff series! We conclude the series by getting at "Employment Remorse"; that is, helping your new employees buy into your super-early startup. You want to believe they’re as "into it" as you and your Co-Founder but they’re going to take some convincing. Oh, and don’t forget about their family or friends either.

So far in our ongoing Startup Takeoff series we've touched on a number of myths around launching your business. But the Funding Myth - that you need funding to get your business off of the ground is so pervasive that we’ve opted to give it its own episode. Today we'll cover the myths of early funding and help you understand if funding will help - or hurt - your business.

So you’ve gotten your fledgling startup going. You’re at a co-working space, starbucks in hand, and wondering if this is "it". Is this really what all the hype is about? And cue the doubts: "Is this a good idea?", "am I the right person for this?", "what am I doing here?" There's glamor in starting a business, but it can fade in a real hurry. In our seco...

Welcome to Episode 5 of Season 2 and the first episode of our Startup Takeoff series. Today we tackle the psychological barriers to entrepreneurship. The first biggie? Breaking the mold and starting your own company can feel unnatural and intimidating. You might think you’re not cut out for entrepreneurship. But here’s the thing: entrepreneurs are made, not born. You are an entrepreneur and you ca...

Oh boy. Cue the existential crisis. You’ve successfully brought two companies together except for one nagging detail: you. Turns out you successfully made yourself irrelevant to the operations of the business and now it’s time to walk away. It’ll be one of the toughest walks of your life. Listen to more on this episode of the Startup Different Podcast!

You've just had a life-changing event - you sold your business and locked in your financial freedom for the rest of your life. But you're not off the hook yet - you've got to navigate the complexities of taking your company and merging it with the acquirer's firm. In this episode of the Startup Different Podcast, we'll cover what it takes to bring two companies together. https:...

Everyone has heard of companies being acquired, but do you know the actual steps of the acquisition process? In part two of a four part series, Dave and Chris will discuss their actual experiences of being acquired. From initial communications with potential buyers, teasing out a letter of intent, due diligence, to closing the deal, we'll discuss it all.

From the outside looking in, getting your company acquired is pretty mysterious. Basically all founders want this, but they don’t really know how they’ll get there. In part one of a four part series, we’re going to go into how you actually get your company in a position to be acquired. We’ll discuss our real world experience of selling our company, and compare it with data on when and how most sta...

For the season finale of season 1 we opted to run right at explaining the Lean Startup's MVP process and how we used it to iterate and improve the Startup Different Pod. Rather than talking about an abstract business concept, learn how we built, measured, and learned key concepts for podcasting.

As a founder, you'll have an idea about where you'll want to highlight your product to prospective customers. Whether that's social media, trade shows, or inbound tactics, you'll have a hunch as to the how and where you'd like to meet your customers in the market. Here's the thing though: What's best for you isn't always what's best for your prospective customer...

We thought we could be like NetFlix. Or at least, we wanted to be one of the most disruptive businesses out there. We wanted to build a winning culture, when really what we needed to do was build a culture around how we wanted to work. It was a painful learning moment. Avoid our mistakes, and learn how to build a great startup from day one in this episode.

I know. You want to believe you can do this all yourself. Maybe you've got industry experience, maybe you know how to build a product - hell, maybe you could do it by yourself. But do you want to? In this episode we'll discuss the pros and cons of co-founders. We'll also discuss some of the unique challenges and benefits of starting a business with a sibling.

Some companies think that strong customer service means great people that a very polite and respond to requests quickly. Wrong. People do not equal (!=) customer service. To scale your business, you need to add customers without adding more people. And besides, if a customer needs to reach out to your customer service team, you've already let them down.

If you're running a B2B SaaS company, you'll inevitably land a "big deal" that requires your team to step up and go above and beyond your current product offering.  In this episode, we'll give you some tips to keep those projects from going off the rails and sinking your company.