The Startup Different Podcast

To conclude our series on product innovation, we invite co-founders of Bujjify, Rohit Jinka and Rekha Anem to the show. Their lives took an extraordinary turn with the arrival of their daughter, Reva. Enter their company: Bujjify. Bujjify is a child development and parent education company dedicated to promoting healthy and well-rounded development for children from birth. Their PlayRigs are toolkits created based on decades of research and inspired by the Montessori philosophy. They are tailored to specific infant age and developmental milestones. They’re here to talk about how they innovate their product and take on the big guys.

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 and college campuses. In our third episode of the Innovation Station series, we'll unpack what it takes to innovate and create an entirely new market.

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 because “we don’t have the time”. For episode 2 of our Innovation Station series we’re throwing the roadmap out the window!

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 had some misfires. In this episode we'll discuss how MVPs can launch your startup to success, or totally flop.

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, VMWare, Dell, and Air Watch, having positions and consulting projects with clients in the commercial and public sector space that have taken her across the globe and within the 50 states. She’s been a CRO, COO and CEO and she’s with us here today.

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 more, even the intention of trying to "get it all" can counter-intuitively set you back.

In episode 2 of Season 3 and our Negotiation Elevation series, we cover what actual negotiation "success" ought to look like.

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. Rather than focusing on them, it’s time to focus on you. For better outcomes, try preparing yourself first.

In the first episode of Season 3 and our “Negotiation Elevation” series, we tackle how preparing ourselves for a negotiation is one of the best ways to ensure a positive outcome for you and your business.

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 of Season 2 and of our Employee Shenanigans series, we address employee burnout and how we managed a near-coup d'etat of our business.

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 passion bus to startup glory station.