845: Tech + innovation for SCALABLE growth w/ Danny Nathan

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Hey, what is up?

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Welcome to this episode of the One Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

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As always, I'm your host, brian Lofermento, and we've got a guest today.

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I already love this guy's energy.

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He is going to really open our eyes about all the possibilities when it comes to growth.

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And one thing as I dug into this guy's work, what I really respect is that we are the people of ideas.

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As entrepreneurs, ideas are never at a shortage, but Danny, today's guest, is someone who takes those ideas and actually turns them into tangible growth.

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So let me tell you about today's guest.

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His name is Danny Nathan.

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After 20 years of product and technology experience, danny has developed a habit of helping companies create new products and services and launch new ventures.

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In the past, he's been called a product person, a UX person, a designer, a strategist, a marketer, a creative and a few other choice names like the cleaner.

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This guy will do whatever it takes to foster growth.

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Danny has led product build and launch efforts at an international scale.

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He's run countless design sprints and he's founded multiple companies of his own.

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He's applied all of his expertise to a variety of companies, ranging from pre-seed startups to Fortune 100 corporations.

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He's got a really awesome client roster, like American Express, dyson, general Mills, getty Images, legendary Pictures and so many more.

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We're going to learn a lot, so I'm not going to say anything else.

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Let's dive straight into my interview with Danny Nathan.

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All right, danny, I'm so excited that you're here with us today.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thank you for having me.

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I'm excited to be here as well, especially with the energy this morning.

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It's a good Tuesday.

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Heck, yeah, listeners don't know this.

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Obviously, this will air when it airs, but you're the first interview of the day and, danny, it's always a little rough for me the first interview of the day but you have helped lift my spirits, so let's get this party started by you taking us beyond the bio.

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Who the heck is, danny?

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How'd you start doing all these cool things that you're up to?

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Oh, wow, let's see.

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I started my career in advertising and realized very quickly that the most fun I was ever going to have working in advertising happened during ad school and I wasn't particularly satisfied with it.

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And so I kind of took it upon myself to create a crash course in all things digital and what digital meant to working with brands and how brands can interact with customers and things of that sort.

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And that led me to an opportunity at an innovation consultancy here in New York called Poke like Poke where I really kind of cut my teeth in the world of digital and was introduced to the world of entrepreneurship and startups and, of course, working with a bunch of amazing corporations, some of which you rattled off a moment ago during the intro there, and it's just sort of been a roller know, a roller coaster.

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Ever since I've been holding on tight.

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Um, I left poke to start my own company.

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Uh served as had a product for a variety of different startups.

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In the interim, um did a short stint at legendary pictures where I met a really awesome group of people.

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That uh became my partners and co-founders at my next company and then eventually that led to the formation of Apollo 21, almost three years ago exactly.

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We just rolled over three years, about a month ago, and so that's been my pursuit of late.

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And Apollo 21 is focused, as you said, on helping companies solve problems using technology and helping organizations utilize venture-driven growth and new venture opportunities to create scale and reach more people.

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Yeah, I love that overview, Danny, especially because I know, having been in the game as long as I have and you have, we know that all of these things when you listen to podcast episodes, they sound linear.

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They certainly were not.

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You had all those twists and turns along the way.

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But what I really like is that overarching theme throughout your entire career and obviously heck three years with Apollo 21.

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Congrats on that milestone.

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That's huge.

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But what I really love about your career arc is that it's always followed growth and scale, which I feel like are two words that we throw around so much within the world of business and when we layer tech onto that.

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It's so sexy to talk about these things, but why is it?

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What is it about?

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Scale and growth?

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That has really always resonated with you and made you say this is my passion, this is where I want to serve businesses and people.

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I sort of fell into it.

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I didn't I didn't pursue the ideas of growth and scale as kind of a career path.

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It's one of those things that is just, as you pointed out, has become kind of a thread throughout my career, and so a lot of my efforts have been focused on helping companies launch new products, bringing new business lines to market, things like that.

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And when you really dig into the kind of business need that underpins growth and venture building and the creation of new products, when push comes to shove it all kind of comes down to growth and venture building and the creation of new products.

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When push comes to shove, it all kind of comes down to growth and scale and companies trying to figure out how to become more successful, how to reach more customers and more people, and so that's really just kind of become an underlying through line throughout everything that I've done over the years.

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Yeah, Danny, I want to ask you this really early on in our conversation here today because obviously, as the entrepreneur to entrepreneur podcast, a lot of listeners are saying, yeah, danny, I want to ask you this really early on in our conversation here today because obviously, as the entrepreneur to entrepreneur podcast, a lot of listeners are saying Brian, ask Danny about these huge, awesome businesses that he's worked with.

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And I can't help but think when I think about that client roster that you've had the chance to work with, whether throughout your career or on your own ventures, and I almost it's kind of what I teased at the top of the episode is that we all have ideas Like.

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No entrepreneur has a shortage of ideas, and I'm sure the same is true, if not 10 times more, at big businesses.

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What is it about?

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The ideas that actually cross the finish line and make it out into the world?

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You've helped usher those ideas across those finish lines.

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What does it take?

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What's the differentiating factor between ideas that forever remain ideas and those that actually launch?

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I mean.

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My pat answer to that, Brian, is execution, because, of course, execution is everything in a world where we're all full of ideas.

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But to dig a layer deeper into that, a lot of it especially when you're talking about large companies and large organizations comes down to top-down support, and so we talk a lot at Apollo 21 about the ideas of venture-driven growth and what it takes to foster innovation, particularly within larger organizations, and it's one of our hallmarks.

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We love working with bigger companies to help bring innovation to life, and the guiding light that we have there is a set of a few principles that we ask these organizations, and particularly the leadership, to sign off on before we ever get started on a project, because without that top-down support from the executive level, you're destined for failure.

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Folks have to be able to commit the resources, to understand the timeline and to understand that innovation and growth and bringing new products to life isn't something that happens overnight.

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It takes time, and when you talk to particularly larger organizations and those that see how quickly startups move and young ventures move, they want some of that magic and we try to bring that to the table for them.

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But at the same time, there is the reality of being in a larger organization and I always kind of mentally picture really big organizations, almost like really big ships, where they kind of gain momentum as they move through the water and turning isn't as easy as just kind of spinning the wheel like you do in a car.

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It takes a little time to create the change that you need so that you can direct that big of a boat organization into the direction that you're looking for.

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Yeah Gosh, I love that visual analogy of the boat turning because it is so true and it does show that at different stages we have our own unfair advantages.

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How quick and nimble is a car when it comes to turning versus those big cruise ships?

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So I love that analogy.

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Yes, but there's also the flip side of that, brian.

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That's also super interesting, and what I think a lot of larger organizations either don't realize or struggle to take advantage of are the unique differentiators that they have at their disposal.

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The level of talent and resources and even, to your point, just the number of ideas that are floating around within large organizations, give them a huge advantage over what we tend to think of as startups, and part of what we at Apollo 21 try and bring to the table is helping organizations capture that value and capture the opportunities that those resources represent so that they can take advantage of them in ways that, frankly, most startups only dream of.

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Yeah, danny, I'll tell you what.

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I'm a big stickler for the words that we choose, and I can tell in talking to you here today that you're very intentional about these words and it reveals so much about the way that you think about these things.

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You said this word combination foster innovation.

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I love that because it applies a verb to innovation, that innovation is not just something that magically happens.

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What does fostering innovation look like?

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Fostering innovation.

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For me, it kind of comes down to what I was talking about just a moment ago.

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It's more than just a statement of we want to be innovative or we support innovation, and you know you hear a lot of companies talk about innovation.

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It's one of those buzzwords that you kind of can't help but just hear all of the time.

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And to me, an organization that truly tries to foster innovation and figure out how to grow those opportunities within its own walls are differentiated by the level of support that you see from the highest levels.

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So when you have an executive team in a C-suite that understands the value of innovation and the opportunities that it brings for an organization and the way that it can imbue itself across the culture, it really does have to be fostered and ushered and kind of like cared for throughout the organization so that you have these almost like parental figures that are helping to guide the growth of that culture and the belief in innovation and the opportunities to execute, to try and, to be frank, to fail.

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Talking about words, failure is one of my favorites and it's one that a lot of people are scared of that I try to embrace and everything.

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Yeah's one that a lot of people are scared of that I try to embrace and everything.

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Yeah, I love that.

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As a lifelong soccer player, I really picture when you talk about fostering innovation.

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I picture the best soccer coaches on the sidelines.

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They know how to bring those things out of us.

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Those things live inside of us Relentlessness, fire, passion, aggression.

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They live inside of us.

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But it's really, really those coaches you talk about the top down and the the parental approach to it.

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Those coaches are able to get those things out of their team.

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So I love the way that you view that.

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I have to ask you this because it came up in all the research I did about the way that apollo 21 works is it's a word that you use frequently which is solving complex problems to unlock that growth and innovation.

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Talk to us about those complex problems, because a lot of people listening to this will think sometimes I've got simple problems, sometimes I've got complex problems, but we all have problems.

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Danny, take us there.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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You know it's interesting.

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One of the things that I find in the work that we do at Apollo 21 is that it's always different but there's always kind of an underlying similarity.

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And to me the underlying similarity is how do we solve complex problems.

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And so you know, as I look back across the clients that we've worked with over the last few years, they've run across a really broad selection of industries.

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We've worked with folks in the remote guarding and video security space.

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We've worked with folks in the Western sports space so think cowboys and rodeos and rodeos and hats and all of that stuff.

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One of our clients right now runs a commercial kitchen out of which they operate about 30 different delivery only restaurant brands and obviously they all have very different problems.

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Thinking about how to approach connecting professional bull riding fans to the athletes is a very different problem to tackle than figuring out how to make a commercial kitchen as efficient as possible.

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But the underpinnings of each of those efforts is the idea that technology can be utilized to help solve a problem be utilized to help solve a problem.

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And so often we find that the work that we're doing is focused on streamlining internal operations, putting technology in place to guide how people get work done and to streamline the types of communication that they're utilizing to pass work around an organization, for example, and whether that's literal in terms of you know, being in a kitchen where a dish is getting prepared and passed to the next person to get packed, or whatever it is.

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Or looking back at one of our clients who's a financial services organization that came to us and basically had very little documented process.

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They came to us and said we're drowning in emails, can you help?

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And to make a long story short, what we discovered was that they were drowning in emails because their process was when you need something, email this person, and obviously that gets a little overwhelming at scale.

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And when you've got 50, 60 or 100 people emailing the next person on their list every single time they need something, you can understand why they were drowning in emails.

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And so that simple question of we're drowning in emails, can you help us turned into an entire internal operations platform that dictated kind of how their process unfolded, how communication was managed, who had access to what clients, what data, etc.

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Etc.

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And so that's kind of the complex problem solving is figuring out how do we take a simple symptom like too many emails and understand the underlying issues that are leading to that problem and then come up with a solution that we can execute within a reasonable time period, to kind of help solve that problem.

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Yeah, danny, I'll tell you what.

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As a total tech junkie, I love the fact that you view clearly technology as the solution to real life business problems, whereas where my head goes is I always think about maybe generations older than us, maybe people who aren't as into tech as us, who probably think back to all those times that tech was a further problem for them, where, you know, we see so many companies applying all these different bandaid solutions where they end up with 30 different softwares trying to make them all talk to each other.

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They probably don't, so there's probably more manual stuff that goes into it.

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You've given us that real life example of communication, emails being one area that you can fix that problem with better tech solutions.

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So talk to us about that notion of technology being the solution rather than the problem, especially because I'm sure you've seen many real life applications where it was posing a problem because there was no underlying strategy behind it.

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Absolutely.

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It's interesting that you're picking up on that too, brian, because there's kind of one important part of that which is technology can provide a means to a solution, but often is not the solution itself and itself.

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And I often tell people that one of the unique differentiators for Apollo 21 is that we actually view the technology as secondary.

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The technology is a tool that we use to solve the problem, but if you can't define and understand the problem clearly, then you can apply as much technology as you want and get nowhere.

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So it really has to come down to the combination of understanding a clear-cut business need or customer need and then figuring out how you can solve that need.

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And I think it's important to realize that while technology, at least in this day and age where we're all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket, has some bearing on the solution in large part because it is the mechanism through which we communicate and transact and learn and make decisions it still has to serve that underlying need in order to be in the position of solving a problem.

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And, um, you know, it's interesting that you point out kind of technology with a, you know, an older generational crowd as well, and I see this with sorry mom.

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I see this with my mom all the time, who you know calls randomly and says the TV is doing whatever.

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I don't know how to fix it.

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And you know it's interesting because the transition from technology as problem to technology as solution is heavily age-driven and it depends a lot on what you've grown up with and how you sort of approach and understanding of the thing in front of you that allows you to utilize that technology.

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And so, again, that's part of what makes it so important to understand the problem and the person who's sitting on the other side of that problem, because how you go about solving it for my mom versus a client might be very different, even though they both utilize technology.

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Yeah, really well said.

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I can still relate to that, because my parents always call me with exactly that problem and, danny, my first question to them always is what did you do?

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What did you do to make this happen?

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See, my first question is always have you tried turning it off and back on again?

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See, my first question is always have you tried turning it off and back on again.

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I love it, but I think that that's so revealing in the way that you answered that, because you said it out right there, which is technology is actually secondary, then, and what you were more interested in talking about there is understanding the people and understanding the problems, and I know that that's part of what you do.

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That's so special about Apollo 21 is you get deeply embedded within the companies that you're working with to truly understand their teams, their operations, their problems, all of those things, so that you can build a solution that works for them.

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Which leads me to the big question of what types of questions do you ask?

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What are the areas that you're assessing when you walk into a business?

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Because I always say that people like you, danny, you have an advantage because we can't read the label from inside the jar, we can't see things that are staring right in front of us because we're in it, whereas you can walk in and, from an objective standpoint, say, oh my gosh, this is the thing.

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So where do your eyes go?

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Where's your head go?

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What are the questions that you're asking to make sense of this stuff?

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It's different every time, which is part of what's so exciting about what we do, is that every time we start work with a new client, there's something new to learn, and it's both the excitement and the difficulty of what we do.

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As an example, understanding the world of rodeo over the course of 4 to 6 weeks is not the easiest thing to wrap your head around, especially if you don't come from a world where that's a central thread through your life, and so the questions change.

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But largely it comes down to where is the pain and where is the emotion for the person who is going to be using this.

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And so, you know, if we think about, if we, if we start the conversation with the assumption that you know, eventually we're going to end up using technology to solve a problem, there is a use case behind that, and that use case might be business oriented, it might be customer oriented, you know, it might be kind of user experience driven, or it might be driven by business, financial needs, things like that.

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But in all of it there's always a pain point or some moment within the process that elicits emotion, and that's one of the first things that we try to look for is where is the person that's there, you know, that's sitting on the other side of this getting frustrated.

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Where are they throwing up their hands?

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Or where does that giant smile hit their face Throughout?

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Whatever process it is that we're trying to streamline or make easier to understand so that we can focus there and help solve that one particular point.

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We've all been there where I don't know you're trying to sign up for a new service and the onboarding is terrible, or whatever.

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It is, where you hit that point in the process and you go oh my God, really, come on, guys, did you not think about this?

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And that's the moment that we look for, because that's where the opportunities are in my mind.

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Yeah, which I think is really revealing for all of us who are listening to this here today is viewing our businesses, our processes you picked out on onboarding.

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These are things that we can go through, not as us, the business owners, but as our potential customers and clients, and I think that's such an important perspective to have that, danny, you get to bring to so many different businesses, which, I agree with you it's why you have one of the coolest jobs in the world.

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I always say that I have the coolest job in the world getting to talk to awesome entrepreneurs like you, but I love hearing your perspective on all these things and I feel like kind of the elephant in the room in any tech conversation here in 2024 and beyond is, of course, ai.

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Ai is changing the game for businesses in so many different ways.

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It's making things more accessible than ever before, while also presenting some of its own challenges in various ways.

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But talk to us about how AI is factoring into not only the work that you're doing, but where you see tech going for businesses at a more macro level.

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Yeah, AI is a really interesting thing to think about, especially today, Brian, and we've seen so much change so quickly that it's almost impossible to wrap your head around how quickly the world is changing and gravitating towards AI.

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And when we think about business use cases, one of the things that I see a lot is companies want AI.

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They want AI because it is the conversation point du jour.

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It's the hottest new tech that's out there.

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But in spite of decades of big data pursuit and the realization that we need to be storing every little user action, about every person that visits our product service website, whatever, a lot of companies are still not prepared in terms of the way their data is structured or how their data is stored or how disparate it is across a variety of different sources, so that they can make use of it in a fashion that really allows them to leverage UI or UI, excuse me AI for unique and interesting use cases, and so a lot of what we end up focusing on is thinking about opportunities for automation and where we can utilize simple if this, then that kind of structures to help streamline what companies are doing and how they're doing it as we work to build out the data infrastructure that will allow them to utilize AI in ways that they're kind of envisioning, based on what we're seeing online in terms of chatter and what.

00:21:55.180 --> 00:22:05.262
Of course, we want AI to be based on decades of movie magic and things like that that have kind of guided our view of what it should be.

00:22:06.226 --> 00:22:17.320
Yeah, listeners, I want to call this out for all of you because, obviously, as we tune into the show five times a week, we start hearing incredible guests like Danny, all talking about AI and in different capacities.

00:22:17.320 --> 00:22:29.000
But, danny, I'm going to call this out for listeners is that one overarching theme that I've been hearing from amazing entrepreneurs like yourself and people who are far wiser and informed than a lot of us in these regards is you can't help.

00:22:29.000 --> 00:22:42.731
But when you talk about AI, you also talk about data, because that is going to be an intersection that is going to unlock answers for so many businesses of literally all sizes, from Fortune 100 companies to your local pizza shop.

00:22:42.731 --> 00:22:48.593
I think that there's data that we historically maybe haven't made sense of, that AI is going to be able to pick up on.

00:22:48.593 --> 00:22:56.587
So when we talk about AI, of course ChatGPT can simply do a little bit of research for us, but there's way more powerful things that we can glean from it.

00:22:56.587 --> 00:22:58.794
So I love those perspectives from you.

00:22:58.974 --> 00:23:10.618
As an industry expert, I almost feel bad that I'm asking you this question this late on in our interview here today, because it's the one question I knew I wanted to ask you today, and that is coming back to the actual name of your business, apollo 21.

00:23:10.618 --> 00:23:16.686
It does certain things in my head, but I also know that your proprietary technology foundation is called Mission Control.

00:23:16.686 --> 00:23:19.674
So I'm sure that we can tie these two questions in here today.

00:23:19.674 --> 00:23:25.921
But what are the origins of Apollo 21 as a company and as a name and as your values?

00:23:25.921 --> 00:23:28.386
And then, how does Mission Control factor into that?

00:23:28.386 --> 00:23:29.548
Because I'm sure they're related.

00:23:30.410 --> 00:23:31.332
Yeah, awesome question.

00:23:31.332 --> 00:23:32.053
I appreciate it, bryce.

00:23:32.053 --> 00:23:37.488
So you've kind of asked three questions in there and I'll start at the beginning.

00:23:37.488 --> 00:24:16.076
So, as I mentioned, I recently, in my last job, was working as head of product for a video technology company based in LA and basically about two years into that effort, we took on some outside funding from a family office and one of the stipulations of that funding round leader that was deployed across some of these other companies to help them do ultimately what we now do today at Apollo 21.

00:24:16.076 --> 00:24:29.911
And so I spent about a year doing that and finally a couple of the folks from both the family office and some of my partners at my previous company kind of tapped me on the shoulder and said you know, you seem to be pretty excited about this.

00:24:29.911 --> 00:24:33.875
Do you want to think about, you know, taking an opportunity to go and focus on this?

00:24:33.875 --> 00:24:41.038
And so that led to the creation of Apollo 21, which was born about April of 2021.

00:24:41.358 --> 00:25:10.659
And of course, you know, when naming a business, there's all sorts of kind of greenfield opportunity to think about what you want to name it and how that name is going to both define you and follow you over the years that hopefully you're going to be around, and so you know I'm a big fan of space exploration, both from you know the kind of final frontier aspect to borrow from Star Trek, as well as the.

00:25:10.659 --> 00:25:21.507
You know the sort of design standards and the kind of cultural impact that NASA and space exploration had, you know, over the decades.

00:25:21.507 --> 00:25:31.942
And so as I was thinking about starting a company that is focused on helping organizations build new ventures, you know, obviously the idea of moonshots came to mind.

00:25:31.942 --> 00:25:37.144
You can't think about startups without thinking about unicorns and moonshots and all of those fun terms.

00:25:37.144 --> 00:25:53.548
And I started doing some research about the old Apollo programs, and what I learned was that Apollo 17 was the last Apollo mission to fly, but 18, 19, and 20 were all scheduled and then ultimately cancelled for financial reasons.

00:25:53.548 --> 00:26:34.655
And so, given that we were starting in 2021, and the idea that Apollo 21 would have been the next Apollo mission on the docket, just sort of created this really nice alignment in my head around companies today taking moonshots and the idea of revisiting these attempts to go further in life and in business and to explore, and so that led to the naming convention around Apollo 21, which then, of course, the brand level has trickled down to much of what we do, including the naming around our foundational technology, which is mission control, and mission control effectively.

00:26:35.416 --> 00:26:36.798
I describe it as a box of Legos.

00:26:36.798 --> 00:26:56.557
It's a bunch of pieces of functionality that aren't really a SaaS platform but give us the ability to spin up platforms focused on internal tooling and data management and operations and analytics and insights and, ultimately, ai integration and the use of AI to better understand those data sets.

00:26:56.557 --> 00:27:35.265
And we often use that kind of pile of Legos to put together something that then becomes the operational platform for our clients, and we've used it many times over now for anything from basic CRM functionality to a platform designed for the management and execution of rodeo events, to the process management platform for the financial services company that I talked about earlier, and so it's really this kind of amalgam thing that we can shape to create whatever we need for our clients.

00:27:35.265 --> 00:27:45.474
But because we have that foundational technology, we're able to get those platforms built usually about twice as quickly as we would than if we were starting from scratch.

00:27:45.895 --> 00:28:03.920
The idea that usually these platforms that grow out of this box of Legos form sort of an operational or an internal facing toolkit that was where the notion of mission control and the idea of where do I go when I need to understand my business and my data at a glance kind of came to life.

00:28:03.920 --> 00:28:07.090
And so mission control, apollo 21,.

00:28:07.090 --> 00:28:19.750
You know, you'll notice we've actually turned it back a little bit on our website and things like that and just sort of let colors and names speak a little bit more to the space theme than perhaps we did previously.

00:28:19.750 --> 00:28:25.089
But you'll still catch, you know, our little spaceman icon hanging out in the corner and things like that.

00:28:25.089 --> 00:28:29.625
So it still follows the brand around much of what we do.

00:28:30.188 --> 00:28:39.678
Yeah, I love that overview, Danny, especially because, as the son of an immigrant mom, for me and my family coming to the United States in 1969, that was the year that we put a man on the moon.

00:28:39.678 --> 00:28:46.688
So that's such an important thing that for my family and my mom's family who came to the US they saw oh my gosh, look at all the possibilities.

00:28:46.688 --> 00:28:52.876
So the fact that that's still driving so much of when it comes to us being visionaries and dreamers in the world of business.

00:28:52.876 --> 00:29:02.692
You extrapolated it out, which I love, that we do that in business conversations to life, to humanity, to society I love the fact that that so deeply plays in your mission and your vision.

00:29:02.692 --> 00:29:09.250
And when you talk about mission control, what really strikes me is that you talk about it as a foundational technology.

00:29:09.250 --> 00:29:15.138
Here is the foundation that we can then build on in adaptable environments like rodeos.

00:29:15.138 --> 00:29:16.661
I love how much you've used rodeos.

00:29:16.724 --> 00:29:28.088
A dude sitting in Brooklyn, new York, using rodeos as the example here for so many business use cases, I learned more about rodeos over the course of a year and change working with our client than I ever had, and I grew up in Texas.

00:29:28.169 --> 00:29:40.759
I mean, I grew up going to the rodeo and still had no idea what I was looking at, and so that's part of the fun of what we do, though, is we get to learn about things that we would never otherwise be focused on.

00:29:41.119 --> 00:30:14.212
Rodeo doesn't really play a role in my life in Brooklyn, as you've kind of pointed out, but learning about it has been so fun, and seeing what people are passionate about and how it drives them is always such an exciting thing, and so whether we're talking about you know rodeo and the events that underpin that and how it brings people together, you know, particularly in the Western areas of the country or thinking about you know how we make kitchen operations more efficient, this kind of comes back to the problem solving, or the complex problem solving that we were discussing earlier.

00:30:15.035 --> 00:30:17.167
When push comes to shove, it's all the same thing.

00:30:17.167 --> 00:30:19.934
You know everybody's got a problem that they need to solve.

00:30:19.934 --> 00:31:04.886
A lot of it comes down to communication, efficiency and understanding of what's happening either with customers or within a kitchen, or how processes unfold to serve a business need and to serve a customer need, and so it's always exciting to think about new and interesting passions that may not resonate for me personally but obviously resonate for large groups of people, and it's so exciting to become involved in that, to understand sort of what drives other people and to think about how we can help businesses create touch points that drive that passion and how technology can be used to help people connect with those passions.

00:31:05.729 --> 00:31:09.657
Yes, really well said and well articulated, danny.

00:31:09.657 --> 00:31:12.673
I want to echo that because I think it's something that we do.

00:31:12.673 --> 00:31:32.298
That's so dangerous as entrepreneurs, as business owners, as people is when we go down that path of convincing ourselves that we are so uniquely different from anyone else or anything else that we don't have the same problems and we can't leverage the same foundations and frameworks in order to find solutions, then we really trick ourselves into believing that there isn't a way out.

00:31:32.397 --> 00:31:42.215
So neither you nor I knew that we'd be talking about rodeos as much as we have here today but I think it's actually the perfect illustration that, as you said, it's all the same when we really get down to the roots of it.

00:31:42.215 --> 00:31:45.894
Business is not rocket science, so I love that we can weave those in.

00:31:47.145 --> 00:31:48.692
In spite of the naming no, it is not.

00:31:51.085 --> 00:31:59.717
Yes, I think it's so powerful, though, for us to realize that business is really about matching products and services with customers and clients who need them, and I think the more we complicate that, the more we set ourselves up for failure.

00:31:59.717 --> 00:32:03.194
So, danny, I'm going to ask you this question that I ask at the end of every episode.

00:32:03.194 --> 00:32:13.814
I don't know how you're going to answer it, because you've dropped so many nuggets of knowledge on us here today, but what's your advice for listeners tuning in, knowing where the entrepreneur to entrepreneur audience is?

00:32:13.814 --> 00:32:25.588
They're all different stages of business growth from people waiting on the sidelines they're more like the idea people who haven't taken action to the seven-figure, eight-figure SaaS owners who tune into this show, which I so appreciate.

00:32:25.588 --> 00:32:28.188
All of you listeners, danny, what's your advice for them?

00:32:28.188 --> 00:32:31.353
If they're tuning in saying gosh, danny's given me a lot of food for thought.

00:32:31.353 --> 00:32:33.877
Where do you want to see them start taking action?

00:32:39.105 --> 00:32:42.733
Oh, I love this question because it comes right back to the word that I threw out earlier but didn't really get a chance to dive into much, which is failure.

00:32:42.733 --> 00:33:00.186
My biggest piece of advice and kind of my personal mantra is I frame it as fail beautifully, which to me is just kind of a reframing of the idea that in order to succeed we have to embrace failure, and ironically it hasn't come up much today in our conversation.

00:33:00.186 --> 00:33:01.730
But this is something that I talk a lot about.

00:33:01.730 --> 00:33:07.351
You have to kind of move beyond the idea that failure is a bad thing.

00:33:07.551 --> 00:33:18.398
We're taught from a young age and it's kind of ingrained throughout our school years and things like that that failure is bad, a failing grade is negative.

00:33:18.398 --> 00:33:23.316
If you fail, then you haven't accomplished the thing that you set out to accomplish.

00:33:23.316 --> 00:33:30.359
And where I kind of take a contrarian view to that is the opportunity for learning.

00:33:30.359 --> 00:33:46.287
So failure is the manner in which we learn, and without kind of applying that learning to the idea of entrepreneurship, the idea of getting started, the fear of failure will always stop you from pursuing the thing that you're after.

00:33:46.287 --> 00:34:04.468
And so if you can shift your own mindset out of the idea that failure is a negative thing and start to view failure as an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to understand what doesn't work and an opportunity to understand what might work for your business and what might work for your customers.

00:34:04.468 --> 00:34:13.994
Then all of a sudden, that reframing becomes almost a guiding light that you go okay, where can I fail next, so that I don't fail in that same way again the next time around?

00:34:14.724 --> 00:34:18.634
Yes, really well said, and I think you hit the nail on the head.

00:34:18.634 --> 00:34:24.114
It's been conditioned in us since we were children that failing is bad, but the older I get, the wiser I get.

00:34:24.114 --> 00:34:25.126
It's to your point.

00:34:25.126 --> 00:34:28.492
I think that failure is not only not the opposite of success.

00:34:28.492 --> 00:34:30.958
I think it's essential on the road to success.

00:34:30.958 --> 00:34:33.753
So I love that you highlighted that for us here today.

00:34:33.753 --> 00:34:42.144
You've dropped so many of those nuggets of knowledge that I know that listeners are going to be keen and eager, especially since we dropped so many conversations about your actual brand itself.

00:34:42.144 --> 00:34:48.634
So drop those links on us for listeners who are eager to go deeper into your work and all the cool things you're up to with Apollo 21.

00:34:48.634 --> 00:34:50.146
Where should listeners go from here?

00:34:50.989 --> 00:34:56.778
Yeah, come visit us at Apollo21.io, and everything kind of branches out from there.

00:34:56.778 --> 00:35:03.387
We're pretty active on LinkedIn.

00:35:03.387 --> 00:35:07.577
We're not super active at the moment on other social media because we've been focused on solving complex problems using technology and launching new ventures.

00:35:07.577 --> 00:35:10.530
So if you're interested in that, please check it out.

00:35:10.530 --> 00:35:25.474
I also run founders dinners in New York City once a month where I gather up five founders or senior level tech people who, with no agenda, just want to meet other like-minded folks over a great meal and see where the conversation takes us.

00:35:25.474 --> 00:35:46.461
And then actually this week I'm launching my first roundtable workshop as well, which will be a virtually hosted Zoom-based event where we tackle problems, live for a small group of business folks and entrepreneurs to see how we might be able to help them solve their own complex problems.

00:35:47.065 --> 00:35:48.610
Yes, I love that, Danny.

00:35:48.610 --> 00:35:57.786
You are someone who really practices what you preach and you also are out there to further embolden and enable other businesses and business leaders to actually grow.

00:35:57.786 --> 00:36:00.153
So I love that you're so active in this space.

00:36:00.153 --> 00:36:03.391
You so share our mission, which is why we're so grateful for you coming on the show today.

00:36:03.391 --> 00:36:05.135
Listeners, you all know the drill.

00:36:06.286 --> 00:36:10.574
Find in the show notes down below a link to Danny's business website, which is Apollo21.

00:36:10.574 --> 00:36:11.375
That's the number two.

00:36:11.375 --> 00:36:13.318
The number one Apollo21.io.

00:36:13.318 --> 00:36:18.878
I'm going to especially shout out that Danny actually doesn't just talk about all these things in theory.

00:36:18.878 --> 00:36:22.396
He actually has real life case studies on his website.

00:36:22.396 --> 00:36:29.755
So if you want to see the way that all of these things enable real business growth, tangible business growth, definitely go check out Apollo21.io.

00:36:29.755 --> 00:36:35.592
You'll find that link down below, as well as a link to Danny's personal LinkedIn.

00:36:35.592 --> 00:36:38.786
If you want to get all this business goodness that Danny is putting out into the world, definitely connect with him on LinkedIn.

00:36:38.786 --> 00:36:43.905
Otherwise, danny, on behalf of myself and all the listeners, thanks so much for joining us on the show today.

00:36:44.726 --> 00:36:45.367
Thanks for having me.

00:36:45.367 --> 00:36:46.188
It's been a ton of fun.

00:36:46.188 --> 00:36:46.728
I appreciate it.

00:36:47.730 --> 00:36:53.317
Hey, it's Brian here, and thanks for tuning in to yet another episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

00:36:53.317 --> 00:36:57.260
If you haven't checked us out online, there's so much good stuff there.

00:36:57.260 --> 00:37:06.494
Check out the show's website and all the show notes that we talked about in today's episode at thewantrepreneurshowcom, and I just want to give a shout out to our amazing guests.

00:37:06.494 --> 00:37:15.302
There's a reason why we are ad free and have produced so many incredible episodes five days a week for you, and it's because our guests step up to the plate.

00:37:15.342 --> 00:37:17.327
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00:37:17.327 --> 00:37:18.931
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00:37:18.931 --> 00:37:22.425
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00:37:22.425 --> 00:37:33.371
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00:37:33.371 --> 00:37:41.864
So thank you to not only today's guests, but all of our guests in general, and I just want to invite you check out our website because you can send us a voicemail there.

00:37:41.864 --> 00:37:43.228
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00:37:43.228 --> 00:37:47.056
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00:37:47.056 --> 00:37:49.248
Initiate a live chat.

00:37:49.248 --> 00:37:58.664
It's for real me, and I'm excited because I'll see you, as always every Monday, wednesday, friday, saturday and Sunday here on the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.