Nick Jain is the CEO of IdeaScale.com. This is a free software for teams of 100 or less. They actually serve global companies to help them generate better ideas, get feedback from customers, and help their team contribute ideas for growth. This is a fascinating concept, and you are totally going to love this conversation. Listen to this episode, and then start using their free version at IdeaScale.com. Learn more about Nick at his website.
Experts Speak
A FREE Ideation Software for Your Business with Nick Jain
[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to the Experts Speak Podcast with Michael D'Alon. Each episode features a leading expert who shares helpful insights, practical tips, and memorable stories that will inspire you, educate you, and help you enjoy more success, freedom, and purpose in your life. For the next few minutes, enjoy listening to Experts Speak with Michael D'Alon. And welcome to another episode of Experts Speak. I am Michael D'Alon. Today, I'm talking with Nick, Jane, not Nick. Man, thanks for taking some time out of your very busy schedule to hang with me and be on my podcast. Thanks so much for having me on your show, Mike. Well, you're welcome. It's going to be great. So Nick is the founder, CEO of IdeaScale. And it's a-- well, it's a software that he's created that really helps with ideation and helping you come up with ideas faster, better stronger and implementation. So I know just a little bit about it, and I really am intrigued by what you've come up with and how you apply it to large companies, small companies, and everybody in between. So let's dive into this whole thing, Nick. Tell me, I mean, you're a young guy. How in the world did you get doing what you're doing today? Sure. So let me actually start with our software, by the way, completely free for teams less than 100 people. So for those listening out, you should check us out. But yeah, so look, I'm not the founder of IdeaScale. It's been around about 15 years. I was hired as a CEO to help IdeaScale go from a midsize company to a globally impactful company. So it was founded by two guys about 15 years ago now. So 2009, when initially came out of President Obama, when President Obama said, hey, government needs to get into the 21st century, when that's where, like, AI.gov and electronic medical records. And as government was starting to get more innovative, our two founders said, look, if government is going to get more innovative, they probably need some cool technology to do so, right? Especially in the 21st century. So we originated out of the government's desire to be innovative, and government continues to play a huge part of our client base. But we've now served a lot of private sector organizations, Pfizer, Comcast, big oil companies, finance companies. You name it. Anybody who wants to be innovative kind of comes to us because we're the gold standard in what we do. OK. All right. So and that's amazing. Thanks for that background. And I didn't know if you could use government and innovation in the same sentence, but you did. So we'll have to go back. And thanks to us. So all right. Tell me-- let's boil this down to a third grade level for people like me. What is IdeaScale? First of all, let's just talk about that. What is this thing? OK. So it is a software that sits on the cloud where everybody can submit their ideas for how to make their organization better. Other people can vote a down vote, up vote ideas, comment on ideas, and the best ideas float to the top. So the third great example I would use is it's TikTok for ideas. Instead of funny dance videos, it's a social network for ideas on how to make your organization better. And that can be things as silly as what's next. Should we have in the company fridge? All the way to what should our new product be? Or what should our new strategy be for our billion dollar organization? OK. And this is all within our organization as far as the voting and things, right? Well, you can choose. You can make it entirely inside your organization, or you can make it entirely global. So for example, the way we build our own software is we use our own software, and we ask anyone in the world, hey, what should IdeaScale's new killer feature be? Or what features do you think suck and should be killed? So you can go to ideas.ideascale.com, submit ideas for how we make our software better. And anyone in the world, you can be a student, an employee, a customer, whatever you want. Or you can vote on others' ideas or say, like, hey, Nick, your idea is pretty good, but let's tweak it a little bit, whatever you want. And again, it's an organization's choice, whether they want to keep all their data internal or make it kind of a public community or public social forum. Oh, very cool. Dude, I'm already seeing ideas around business owners who are leading and coming up with ideas-- so for instance, I was at an attorney conference, oh, I don't know, three or four weeks ago, right? And the speaker was talking to all the attorneys and said, here's what's going to happen. You're going to go back to your firm, and you're going to have eight ideas, and you're going to talk to your team and say, here's what we're going to do, and the team's going to go. And so, idea scale could be a way where the attorney could come back and put some ideas in their idea scale software. And the team could say, oh, that one sucks. This one actually has some merit. This one, is that-- am I getting that kind of? Exactly, yeah. Everybody puts their ideas, because look, if I gave you a bunch of ideas right now, you're probably too busy to think about it right now. You've got other things on your hand. If I put them in a kind of a nice piece of software, you can come back later one day when you actually have the brain capacity to think about it. You're having a glass of wine on a Friday night, or beer, or whatever. You're like, oh, let's pour through Nick's ideas, or John's ideas, or Amy's ideas, whatever they are. And that's how the larger organizations work well, or not just larger organizations. People get lots of cool ideas, figure out which ones suck, and which ones are awesome, and then go do the good ones. And that obviously is a-- that's a complex process, especially if you're doing it through paper. And obviously, in 2021, or 2024 now, I keep losing track of time. In 2024, there's very little you should be doing with paper, right? Right. Well, not only paper, I was thinking back when I was in corporate America at a ministry, we would bring together meetings with eight, or nine, or 10 people. And after a while, I started counting the number of people in kind of estimating the pay and saying, you know how much this meeting is costing? And you just-- I don't know that exercise. It's a miserable exercise. It just makes you so sad. It really does. And you're like, isn't there a better way? Well, maybe idea scale is a better way to get all this down. And maybe even going from-- I mean, I'm an idea generating factory. OK, I come up with more ideas than anybody can. But for me to put things in there, vet them out a little bit, and say, OK, we're going to have a meeting on the top three things. And let's talk about those and let's make a decision on one and go, or something like that. Is A-way I see your software absolutely benefiting small to medium-sized businesses? Yeah, again, it gets the good ideas to the top, right? And the cool thing is, what you define as good is not just how Michael thinks about a good idea, but it's your team, your organization, your ecosystem, saying, like, hey, imagine you're a small hardware store and you're thinking about what new products you should be housing, right? You have some ideas for what products you should be housing. But really, you know who has better ideas? The people who actually are coming to shop at your store and they're like, hey, you need an air hammer, get rid of the old cloth-- what are they called, clothwood hammers, right? Get an air hammer. You may not think about that because you've just, you know, grown up in the clothwood hammer era. Right, right. Well, you know, it's so-- it's very fascinating because so many times I think-- I see business owners failing with air quotes, right? Family, because they come up with an idea that they think is really cool and they put work behind it and the market just yawns and says, don't not look in for that, don't want that. Whereas if we use idea scale and open it up to the market, right, get some feedback. Yeah, no, that's exactly tapping the brains or the-- the technical terms, you're tapping the collective intelligence of your ecosystem. But without getting to academia, yeah. Like, your customers know more about what they want than you ever will. That's a fundamental fact. Whatever you're building or doing in life-- and that's true in government too, right-- the people who are sitting in line at the DMV probably know more about how to fix the DMV than the people filling out the paperwork. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. You know, a recent example that we have all probably left with. I was going to say DMV, yeah. That's a great example of government. But whether it's government or whether it's your own business, right, there's always things that can be tweaked to better serve our end user, our client, our customer, our prospect. And it ties into making offers, right? We make all kinds of offers. And we go, well, that one didn't work, well, why not? Well, maybe we're not matching that offer with the needs of the market. And you've got a software now that people could use to go, tell me what you want, and maybe I can create it. Yeah, I'll give a fun example from, like, a huge-- one of the biggest fast food change in the world, right? Someplace you probably even in the past month, right? Someplace most Americans have probably eaten in the past month. I won't name them, but you could, you know, big fast food chain. And they went out and they were like, let's go ask our customers for what our new cool menu item should be. And so they got thousands of submissions from people around the world saying, hey, here's the new type of burger or fries or chicken burger, whatever. And then they did it. And guess what? That's a lot better way to figure out what your customers are actually going to eat, because they're the ones who asked for it and voted on it and said, put this on your menu, right? It's a lot better than your chefs. As you said, like just putting offers out there, tossing 100 ideas at a wall and seeing what sticks. That's really expensive and slow. It's so much easier just to ask people what they want and give it to them. Absolutely. Yeah, and I forget who it was. It may have been Marshall McClellan years and years ago. Somebody wrote a book in the book. They said, find a need and fill it. And that's pretty much what business is about. And it's so simple. And what you've created is a software platform that probably does a whole lot more than what I'm saying. But it's a way to find the needs of your audience, let them have feedback, and then go fill that need. And you're probably going to get some traction with that because you're awesome, right? Yeah, no, exactly. We haven't gotten into all the bells and whistles. But the core thing is, engage with the people who care about you or who can make a difference. Again, again, that can be your employees, your customers. Engage with them. And it turns out most people want to engage with you, right? If you're shopping at your local hardware store or you're buying a drug from Pfizer or showing up at the DMV, wherever your use case is, most people do want to provide their opinion or their voice. People like talking, people like saying what they feel. And so you should listen to them. Simple as that. Absolutely, absolutely. OK, well, bells and whistles. I'm sure your software does a little bit more than what I've described. What are some of the fun bells and whistles that you guys have baked into this that would just make my jaw drop and go, OK, I really need to go check this thing out. OK, I'll list the practical bells and whistles and the special bells and whistles. OK, the practical are, look, an idea lives through kind of three stages in slight. Number one, it's collecting a whole bunch of ideas. Good or bad, just getting ideas from all over the place. Number two is figuring out which ideas are actually good, right? Sorting through the good and bad stuff. And number three is turning into ideas are great, but you kind of have to put them into the real world. So our software does all three. That helps you collect the ideas, sort and rank the ideas, and then actually implement the ideas. And then the fourth thing is it makes it a social activity. It gets people excited and engaged because their voice is being heard. Whether you're a customer or employee, we always hear about disengaged employees or disengaged customers. Turns out a really easy way to engage people is listen to them, actually ask them what they're feeling. So those are the basic bells and whistles, right? And then the fancy stuff that a lot of organizations care about from a technical side is like data privacy and security. Because some of our customers, for example, have super secret stuff in them. So firstly, all their data belongs to them. It never belongs to me. Secondly, from a security perspective, the cool thing is you could take my phone, my computer, and you cannot get into my customer's data because even as the CEO of the company, I don't have access rights. And that's something, you know, especially people care about for their secret data, right? And whether that be personally identifying information, such as, you know, your social security numbers, your health statuses, or hey, you've got a new killer app idea, a new killer product idea that you don't want your competitors to know about. You kind of, you want to trust your software companies, and not just us, but like, you want to trust good software companies that they're not, you know, selling your data or accessing your data or peaking at your data. And the good news is we can't, and we've got insanely high security standards here. - Yeah, and that's really good because I, you know, I think of, well, and I assume it's true, Coca-Cola's secret recipe is hidden in a vault in Atlanta and only seven people on our diversity. That kind of security is what's needed to protect a brand or an idea, or Kentucky Fried Chickens, you know, famous seven recipes, and that's really what you've created is this, this very secure vault. And you're not, you're not on it, but a lot of my audience is old enough for Get Smart, the original TV series, right? And the beginning, I mean, he went through like 20 doors and all kinds of things to get to where he needed me. And that's what I hear you saying is that your data is safe and secure, which means you now have freedom to ideate and to think, and I want you to talk about the, how your software helps with ideation, and does it do all the ranking itself? Or, I mean, if 20 people chime in, your software does all the ranking and everything and say, well, it's a 4.2 on a 10 scale, or I mean, is that kind of what it does? - Well, so there's, let's start with the two things, right? Like number one, how do you come up with ideas? And you come up, people come up with ideas through one of kind of three methods. It just in general, I'm not talking about your software. Number one is they come out of it out of the blue, which is not actually true. You came out of it based on your life experiences and something you may have seen on the subway today or while thinking about, well, you know, listening to something already. Number one, you come out of it out of the blue. Number two is you come up with new ideas because you see others ideas and say, hey, if I combine Michael's idea A and Janet's idea B, you combine them in a cool new way and that's how you get idea C and that's your idea. And number three is you kind of co-pilot with somebody and that could be another human being or nowadays with AI that you can be bouncing an idea back and forth. So that's how ideas come. And our software enables you to do all three of those. Like you can see others ideas, combine them into a new idea. You can just put your own idea down on paper, I'm not on paper on digital paper, or you can work with an AI to bounce an idea back and forth. Okay, so that stage one is like, how do you come up with ideas in the first place? And then stage two is figure out which ideas are good. And that can happen kind of in two ways. Number one is the hard way, which is just, or sorry, there's three ways. Number one is you look at just what's been voted up versus voted down, right? Just look at what other people are saying. That's called a revealed preference where someone's just telling you, hey, I think your idea is good or your idea is bad, right? You count the number of votes. Number two is what's called a hidden preference. So sometimes people don't want to vote on something, but they're looking at it a lot. And so this is a notion of like impressions of views. You may not like a YouTube video, but YouTube's algorithm knows that, hey, you like cat videos and I like chihuahua videos for whatever reason, right? Even if I've never voted on my personal Google YouTube account, I've never uploaded a single thing in my life, but YouTube still knows because it's looking at what I'm watching and it's realizing that these are the things that are cool to Nick. And you can add that up across, you know, thousands of users or millions. And then the third way is for an objective kind of senior human being to make the decision, right? Where the boss or the, you know, the CEO says, look, okay, here's these 20 ideas. I'm going to make the decision on which idea is best. I may or may not consider the votes or consider what the kind of the algorithms are saying. I'm just going to make a decision because I think this fits the strategic priority of the organization or it's what I have budget for or this, you know, I think something is inappropriate or for my line of business. So those are kind of the three ways you figure out which ideas are good. Number one, again, to iterate, it's what the human beings vote up, vote and down vote on. Number two, it's what the algorithms say are, here's the most interesting ideas, the hidden preferences of people, which they're not willing to tell you, but they actually do believe. It's what's in their brains or their behavior. And number three is like a senior person can make a decision on, hey, this is the idea that I'm going to based on my wisdom and judgment, believe is the best or a group of best ideas. - Okay, that's fascinating. Okay, so let's bring this down to, in case my audience is not getting this, let's bring it down to a mid-sized company, high six figure revenue, maybe seven figures, right? They're doing, it doesn't matter what industry they're in, consulting of some nature. And they could come to your software and they have a team of 10 people, right? Or they have an audience of the world and they say, okay, I'm thinking about adding this or doing, I want to do a mastermind group, right? Do you feel that a mastermind group would fit with what we do and how we provide, would that be of value to you? And then they could put that idea out to the community, whether it's internal or external, or I'm assuming both, and get some feedback to go, yes or no, or what would you want in a mastermind group if we do this, right? - I think, yeah, so I think our software is better for the second half what you said, like what would you want in a mastermind group? If you just want, if you have one idea and you just want people to vote on it, yeah, you can do that in our software, but a survey software is better. If you just have one question, is should we do a mastermind group, or should we add a chicken burger? Survey, pure play survey software is probably a little bit better at that 'cause that's all it does. If instead you want to make the question more open-ended such as, hey, we are going to do a mastermind group, what features or what sessions or what speakers would you like involved in that, that's an open-ended feedback system, right? As opposed to just say yes or no, are you going to show up or not? Go get an event, bright ticket, or a, our sister company is question pro, it's a survey company, right? So our software is better when you're going to ask people for open-ended suggestions, ideas, feedback, and that open-ended, those open-ended suggestions can then be iterated on or voted on, rather than you just asking them one simple question. Again, you could do that in our software, but candidly, there's other better software out there to do if you're just asking a very yes/no question. - Yeah, yeah, and I appreciate that because it's good to know what our software is good for and what it's not good for, but, and I love the open-ended aspect because I think most people in life want to be heard and understood. And in business too many times, we don't give them a forum by which they can be heard and understood in safety, right? And I think what I'm hearing is you've created a software system, a platform where that can now become part of your company culture, internally, externally, where you're eliciting feedback from people to say, I want to hear what you think because I think your thoughts are valuable and they're going to add and make what we're doing better. Is that kind of a good summary? - It is, now I'll actually just add one thing that you just made me think of that I don't think it's special, but it kind of is actually in retrospect, is you can submit ideas anonymously. So you can say stuff in your own name, right? Or you can say, hey, this is kind of controversial. I'm going to say, I'm going to say something that kind of disuses the boss's pet project. I want to just submit it anonymously. And that's okay, you have the choice. So in fact, when I use our own software, sometimes I submit stuff under my own name and sometimes I submit stuff anonymously because I don't want ever, it's a controversial idea and I want people not to vote for it because the CEO submitted it, but because it's a good or bad idea. - Absolutely. - And that by the way is really good where people can, as you said, feel safe and sometimes anonymity, which as we are thinking about elections coming up, anonymity is kind of powerful when you don't have to tell your friends or your spouse who you're voting for. People care about that 'cause sometimes they're not voting the same way as their friends or their spouses or their parents. - Yeah, absolutely. And I've seen this in corporate America when I was there is you get that bandwagon thing, you know? Well, my two buddies are going that way. They said, yes, on this and maybe they know more than I do, so I'll just vote yes. And it's like, no, no, we want to hear from you because it only takes one person who thinks differently to make a shift and go, wow, that actually makes a lot of sense, right? But if you never share, it's never going to change and you've made a platform where people can actually share, this is really cool, wow. - Thank you. - How do people, and all right, and let's go back to your first opening statement, free for companies with 100 people or less, unpack that and-- - Or teams of, or teams of less than 100 people within a larger organization. Basically, if you're less than 100 people in some way, shape, or form, software's completely free for you. - Wow, okay. So there's no reason a company can't just go and start using your information. - Yeah, you've got some ideas to go.com. There's a get started button free at the top. Takes less than 30 seconds set up. No downloads, it's entirely in the cloud. No different than accessing your Gmail. In fact, you can access it with your Gmail, you know, login if you want, right? Click sign in with Google. You're up and running in 30 seconds, and you can be inviting people and ideating. I think our time to being useful is like 90 seconds. - 90 seconds, that's-- - Yeah. Longer if you want to set up like fancy super bells and whistles and have software talked to other software, but 90 seconds you can get like a huge proportion of like the core thing, talking to people, getting their ideas, and inviting people, getting them in your community. - Wow, that's cool. Okay, where does somebody go to do that? - Okay, you go to ideascale.com. Ideascale is spelled like you kind of see behind me. And there's a big button at the top right of the screen, the website, that says get started free. Click get started free, and like five clicks later, you are off to the races. - You're off ideating, which is great, because I mean, I just had this idea, and I'll probably go do it for our next quarterly planning. We run on, you know, traction and 90 and all that stuff. And I thought, why don't we do something like this and say, okay, during this portion of our meeting, we're gonna take 90 minutes. What should we be talking about? What do you think are the top three things we should be talking about? Send that out to our leadership team and get some feedback, instead of me saying, well, this is what we should be talking about, because I run in a tunnel, right? That would be one use of this software. I can't wait to-- - Yeah, and you can use it both as a continuing thing, like just a general place we're talking about ideas, or you can have it with a finite time limit, like, look, I want these ideas in advance of our quarterly meeting. So for example, when we were building our 2024 product roadmap, we said, or sorry, 2025 product roadmap, we asked employees, look, let's put in all of our ideas in advance of this big planning meeting, and then we'll actually have the 100 best, we'll have these 100 ideas in probably the top 10 or 15 of what we're going to discuss, and they are going to be what we're going to do in 2025. So we literally use it for what you just suggest, ourselves. - That's awesome. - Yeah, I'm smarter than I think, no. That's great, no, I just think-- - Oh, perfect, sorry. One thing, so one of my colleagues loved to joke that you should be drinking your own champagne, it's kind of analogous to never trust a skinny chef, right? So we're big believers that, hey, if we're not using our software, then we probably don't think it's actually valuable, but we use it not as a marketing gimmick, but 'cause it's actually really useful. - 'Cause it actually works, right? And it's hard to find great software that works that is absolutely free to groups, teams of 100 or less, that's amazing, because you guys, in one reason you guys can do that, 'cause so the question that everybody's asking, well, how can you do that? Where do you make your money, right? So explain, where do you guys make your money? - Sure, so my customers are large organizations. These are think again, like Pfizer, US Post Office, Transportation Safety Authority, the folks in blue shirts at the airports, right? So they're my paying customers, that's how I run my business, right? And thankfully we've been in business a long time, we are very profitable, but the reason we offer the software free is kind of for two reasons. Number one, our mission statement as an organization is to support innovation worldwide, and we realize that innovation also happens at smaller organizations. So if we actually believed in our mission, then we should be giving our software free to those who can't afford it. And then number two is obviously we hope that as people love our software and they grow into more successful organizations, they'll remember that we were there for them when they were younger and smaller. So that's how I make my money, and I'm very transparent about it, it's for the large organizations, but there's no cash. I'm not selling your data at the small end, I'm not accessing it, it is your data, and you, you know, if you decide to use my software for a couple months and you hate it and leave it, you can download all your data, delete everything and you're gone, and your data is yours. So I'm not, I'm not making a single penny off of smaller organizations. In fact, I'm losing money 'cause I have to pay for all the electricity and server costs and stuff. - That's awesome. Well, thank you from small business, back to you and Nick and IdeaScale for doing that 'cause that's amazing. To be able to help us get better. Well, you're welcome. And I want, yeah, I just really want to encourage my honest, ideaScale.com. It's gonna be in the show notes so you can link right to that. You're gonna be able to link to Nick and follow him as well. Because it's a cool, it's cool. It's just a great, amazing, it's like brainstorming on steroids all online, getting your team together, get reaching out to your community, finding ways to ideate better, faster. I'm just gonna shut up 'cause I can't think of any other way to say yay go except go to ideascale.com. Nick, man, thank you for being the CEO of this leading this global organization. Thank you for taking the time to be on my little podcast to share your big ideas with my audience. I really appreciate it. - Michael, thank you so much for having me. It's truly been an honor and thank you for inviting me. I appreciate the opportunity on my side as well. (upbeat music) - Thanks for listening to Expert Speak with Michael DeLong. If what you've heard today was helpful to you, reach out to our expert guest and see how they can serve you to bring you more success, freedom, and purpose in your life. (upbeat music)