Last week we spoke to Co-Founder and CEO Meti Basiri of ApplyBoard, a genuine unicorn. It was pretty cool - not gonna lie. And you know it was a live episode because I even got a little star-struck. What does one say to a paper billionaire?

For our show today, Chris and I deep dive into some of the biggest points made by Meti. Are 25% of all unicorns founded by immigrants? Is dealing with work colleagues the same if they also happen to be your brother? How common are unicorns anyway? All this and more on today’s episode of Startup Different.

For our first episode of Season 4 we met a unicorn. We weren't trippin', but there was a collision involved - the Collision Conference held in Toronto Canada this year. We interviewed ApplyBoard CEO Meti Basiri live at the show. 

Meti founded ApplyBoard with his two other brothers. After facing many challenges and obstacles on their own study abroad journeys, the Basiri brothers saw an opportunity to break down barriers and democratize education. Together they created ApplyBoard to make their dream to educate the world a reality. Now ApplyBoard is estimated to be worth over $4Billion. 

And we're off! It's season 4 of Startup Different.

In our fourth episode of the Big Data for Small Companies series, and the finale of season 3, Tom McDonell of HazTrack Inc. is here. Tom is the CEO at HazTrack Inc., an industrial IoT startup based in Calgary and Saskatoon. HazTrack helps Oil and Gas and Waste Management companies run their operations more efficiently with best-in-class hardware and software. He's here today and we're looking forward to going deep on data.

Everyone knows that business decisions are best informed by good data. But, when you're a small startup, good data is hard to come by, especially if your market is in its early stages of development. Enter the data brokers! You can just buy data about your market, and you'll be on your way to startup success... Because I'm sure all the data you buy will be super-accurate, right? Let's fire up the spreadsheets and talk about how buying data can help and hurt your startup!

Picture this: It's 9:45am on a Monday morning. You're gathered with your senior team, including your co-founder. You’ve got a big decision ahead of you and unfortunately you and your co-founder are at odds as to the best path forward. What do you do? 

Because you're a different leader, you lead your company by consensus, meaning that you need to convince your co-founder. No strong-arming, no voting and no name-calling; instead, you need to find and utilize data effectively to help show them the light. On today's episode, we go at how Chris and I would break our deadlocks by introducing data.

In the early days of many businesses, including ours, data is at a premium. You want to take a data-driven approach to decision making, but because of frankly low system usage, or a product that may not have a ton of data you're at a loss as to how to "find" data.

But data is important. Having a healthy feedback loop with material data sets is crucial to your success. In episode 9 of season 3, and the first episode of our "Big Data for Small Companies" series, we tackle how to find data and build feedback loops for your nascent product.

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.