From Idea To Execution: Staying Ahead Of The Innovation Curve For Small Business Success (with Special Guest West Stringfellow)

Ever wondered how top companies like Amazon and PayPal stay ahead of the innovation curve? Join us as we delve into the mind of West Stringfellow, a visionary who has spearheaded groundbreaking products at these tech giants.

What's Covered:

• West's journey in launching zero-to-one innovations at industry leaders.
• Strategies for driving market disruptions and achieving significant revenue growth.
• Insights into product innovation and digital transformation for businesses of all sizes.
• The importance of fostering a culture that embraces change and innovation.

Tune in to uncover the secrets behind successful innovation and how you can apply them to your entrepreneurial journey!

West Stringfellow is a product and technology visionary who has launched zero-to-one innovations at Amazon and PayPal, led transformations at Fortune 500s like Visa and Target, and accelerated startups with Techstars.

He has over 20 years of experience, from an innovation and product management executive to a successful founder and entrepreneur whose startup was acquired by a Fortune 50.

Driving innovation that results in market disruptions and massive revenue growth has been the hallmark of his professional and entrepreneurial life.

Today, West empowers entrepreneurs and businesses of all sizes through coaching and consulting, sharing his expertise in product innovation and digital transformation.

With 5 patents to his name and a wealth of international experience, West is here to share insights that can help you revolutionize your approach to product and technology.

📌Learn more about Wes:
Find a wealth of open-source resources designed to empower entrepreneurs and innovators at  https://howdo.com/

🤝 Connect with Wes
https://x.com/west_creates 

🌟Join the WAITLIST for The Faithful Founders Collective at https://reinventing-perspectives.kit.com/231f666d82

💛 Thank you for listening in! 😀

P.S. Don’t forget to leave a review! Much appreciated.

Transcript

West Stringfellow: [00:00:00] my mission is to teach entrepreneurs and innovators how to innovate. Right now we have a, I call it a failure challenge. Around 90 percent of startups fail, around 70 percent of transformations fail, and 50 percent of new businesses fail.

Generally, it's because of a couple simple things. 

It's time to reinvent. 

Priscilla Shumba: Welcome to the lessons of entrepreneurship, the journey of reinvention. Today, I have a special guest for you. I'm here with the West Stringfellow. West, I'm so excited to talk about what we have in line for the audience today. But before we get into it, please tell them who you are and what's your mission.

West Stringfellow: Sure. My name is West Stringfellow. Thanks so much for having me, Priscilla. I appreciate it. So my mission is to teach entrepreneurs and innovators how to innovate. Right now we have a, I call it a failure challenge. Around 90 percent of startups [00:01:00] fail, around 70 percent of transformations fail, and 50 percent of new businesses fail.

Generally, it's because of a couple simple things. , the products don't have a good fit with customer problems, so they didn't work backwards from the customer to figure out what should actually be built. They're not marketed or communicated effectively, and then they're not put in the market in a way that's compelling versus the competition.

So they don't have a good competitive strategy and. Traditionally, these things were really complicated, took a lot of time to do. Now with AI, they're easier than ever. Stuff that used to take months of research and teams of people to do can now be done in days or hours if you're good at it. I'm excited to try and help folks get great at using AI to accelerate growth in their business.

Or find new opportunities for new businesses. And so I've already open sourced everything that I learned from innovating for 20 years in big companies like Amazon and PayPal. then as well, I have documented what I've learned from my entrepreneurial journey. I was able to build and sell [00:02:00] my own startup and built a Techstars startup accelerator.

I'm applying everything that I've open sourced to AI.

Priscilla Shumba: I'm so excited for this conversation. I actually feel like I didn't give you a good enough intro because, there's so much that you've done in your career and so much that you've seen and been at the forefront of change and technology and innovation. So, as an innovator, a person who's come up with products and worked for some of the big names, the enduring names that we all know now, Amazon, PayPal, Visa, Target.

You're the founder and CEO of Howdo what that's about, and then we'll jump right in.

West Stringfellow: Sure. How do is two things. It's right now, an open source curriculum that helps everyone through the four pillars of innovation and transformation. Innovation is one of those words that's been used so much. It's meaningless at this point. But in simple terms is just doing something new.

So if you're doing a new process or you're launching a new product or a new brand, or you're pivoting [00:03:00] your company or you're transforming your company, that's innovation. Most folks stumble on innovation on a couple of simple things. First is culture, innovation, because it's about change.

A lot of business has been made very comfortable for people, which is great. We want business to be comfortable. We want everyone to be happy, but the reality is change is uncomfortable. So in order to facilitate change, I walk through some of the steps, then some of the mindsets that people need.

So the first pillar of innovation is mindset, getting your mindset right. And that's a growth mindset, looking at continuous learning. Innovation is all about, every day we got to learn something new, either from the customer, from the competitor, and especially in the era of AI technology is changing daily.

So we have to consistently learn Throughout that change, we need to be focused on the customer and customer obsessed. We need to use data to make our decisions all of those are taught for free in HowDo's mindset pillar. The next is building a plan again, most [00:04:00] entrepreneurs don't build a plan there's a lot of Frameworks out there like lean startup or design thinking that don't really advocate for building a plan.

But if we look at why companies fail, it's generally simply that, if you had a plan, you would have a clear value proposition that can differentiate you from your competition. You would have a better way of communicating your value proposition to your customer and therefore creating a relationship with your customer and solving their problem explicitly.

And so I walk people through how to build a plan using data, working backwards from the customer rather than taking our idea and putting it into market and trying to find a customer or prototyping it and trying to find a customer. The way that I articulated is very much the way that Amazon does it, which is, let's look at the customer.

Let's figure out what their problem is, and let's walk backwards towards how can we solve that problem for them in a way that's affordable, where we can reliably grow revenue, where over time, we're able to reduce costs, where we can [00:05:00] in the early and mid stages, at least mitigate risks and how we can empower our employees to be successful on this journey so that ultimately we delight the customer.

That's the point is delighting the customer. And so walk people through how to build a plan. And then I walk people through how to use the tools. broadly speaking, there are three tools. Build, buy, or partner. Most entrepreneurs and innovators tend to focus on build. We're going to create a new product, create a new brand or service or something like that.

I walk folks through Product management best practices, because that's generally in, at least in Silicon Valley, how folks come up with ideas of what to build and then articulate what needs to be in the product so that developers can build it or so that it could be operationally materialized, like brought to life.

But then, it's funny. So many entrepreneurs overlook buying things and, Bill Gates, when Microsoft became [00:06:00]successful, it wasn't because, I mean, they had some really good software. I'm not trying to take away from what they built, but their big breakthrough was they bought DOS and then they relicensed it immediately for about 1000 times more than they bought it for.

And so that was when Microsoft became the thing that we know today. And, that kind of repackaging of ideas. Steve Jobs did that with the mouse with the graphical user interface. Larry Ellison did that with sequel. A lot of the big iconic companies that we see today are repackaged ideas from other people.

And so. Buying I. P. And relicensing it or redeploying. It is a very successful way to become a successful entrepreneur. And people tend to overlook that. So I walked through how to do M and a and then partnership is also something that people overlook. I was very successful with my entrepreneurial journey, and I feel really lucky for that.

So, so lucky. And a lot of that success was because I had a great partner in target, early on , they saw my startup and said, Hey, why don't you come build that in [00:07:00] us? I became their first entrepreneur in residence and that kind of a partnership structure benefits the big company because they get the.

Resource efficiency and agility of the startup, and it benefits the startup because they get the horsepower and the data and the customer base of a big company. So, partnership is something that's overlooked. And so I walked through corporate venture capital, accelerators and incubators, which is how startups can partner with big companies.

The last pillar. So, there's the culture and kind of mindset pillar, the plan pillar, the tools pillar. And then there is the team pillar because nothing can be done without a great team. And so we walk through how to attract talent, build the right culture, build the right environment, retain and develop that talent so that you can have the team that's capable of bringing your vision to life. 

Priscilla Shumba: I'm amped for this conversation. I'm going to ask you to go back and break down all those things. Cause this is really exciting. You talked about your story with Target and to the entrepreneur that's [00:08:00] listening, that's Oh my gosh, you are such a wealth of experience and you've done so many things.

And sometimes the audience is so early and they're trying to understand like, how did you go from. Who they are, people starting out with an idea to, Target maybe take us from, you have this idea for a startup and then how do you get on Target's radar?

Because it's almost like the stars are aligned entrepreneurs want to know that kind of stuff.

West Stringfellow: That's why I say I was lucky. The stars were very much aligned, but I would say this and I mean this sincerely, I feel like the alignment in the universe comes from just effort, from 1997 to 2003, I sat in server closets for 7 years and just learned how to do databases.

One of those. Data taxonomies. One of the data types that I learned was really important to Amazon, and I didn't know that. I was just doing what I needed to do for my job, but I got the opportunity to integrate with Amazon I worked for a marketplace seller. They sold used books.

Books is Jeff Bezos's [00:09:00] baby. That's why he started Amazon. And so I was a specialist in book metadata, which, in 2003, there were not a lot of specialists in book metadata. And so when I integrated with Amazon saw some opportunities for them to improve how they were integrating with marketplace sellers.

I communicated those opportunities and it ended up being that they agreed and they hired me. So after seven years didn't think I would ever have a real career or any kind of opportunity. I got into Amazon and I realized for the first time, like there's this environment where people value ideas, no one in Amazon, at least when I was there, no one cared what your.

was what your hierarchy was. Everyone cared if you could use data to prove there's an opportunity to better the customer experience. And so I launched their first billable web service, their digital video platform ran their fraud program some really cool things.

worked my way up as a product manager at Amazon, and then I was the vice president of innovation and e commerce for [00:10:00] Visa in Europe, and there I proposed building a competitor to PayPal, which was Visa's first B2C product.

Before that, they had always gone through banks. They'd give the customer a card through a bank. And coming out of Amazon, I was like, Oh, my gosh, if you could just integrate with the customer, think about all the data you could get, think about all the value you drive, and they like that vision. And so we built what eventually became VisaPay.

Their payment platform. And then from there, I actually was in Australia and I did consulting with Woolworths and helped graze online and then ran product and PayPal there. And then ultimately scaled at PayPal to run innovation for them globally. And then the platform for PayPal globally.

Then I was a chief product officer at Rosetta stone. And then again, a big commerce. And on that journey, every place I would go, I would try to find the biggest opportunity that was not solved for the customer. And the biggest opportunity that we could either grow revenue or reduce costs for the business.

And I would try to, in the first 90 [00:11:00] days, come up with a plan on how we were going to do that. Solve a customer problem, capture a customer opportunity, and grow revenue, reduce costs. And by doing that, everywhere I went in the first 90 days, I always got a real quick orientation around the opportunities in the business.

And then a real quick orientation on how to navigate a business. Cause if you want to figure out how to get stuff done, try to change things and you'll start to see all the antibodies come out in the business. So I say all that to say that by the time I got to trying to build my own company, I had a lot of experience, a lot of failures and some successes.

And Along that journey, I keep rigorous notes all the time. I'm obsessive about it. I have the last count, like 7000 pages of Google notes, if I see something that's an idea. I'll structure it into the notes. And over time I start to see themes and patterns in the ideas that I have.

And for me, it's not like I sit around pontificating and thinking, what's the next thing? [00:12:00] It's more like I rigorously read every morning the tech journals tech blogs, financial news, and then. From that reading, I spend 20 to 30 minutes and I synthesize what I came up with. It's like, all right, here's why I see the economy going.

Here's why I see therefore the customer going. And therefore, here's why I see potentially things changing over years of doing that. I noticed a pattern and that pattern was lots and lots of people were becoming influencers on Instagram and YouTube. Most of them wanted to sell products and few of them could.

And so that's one side of the market. That's the demand side on the other side of the market. . I was a chief product officer at big commerce. I was in Australia for a while for that. I saw that there were platforms that would provide e commerce services to businesses, but that there was no one providing e commerce services to influencers.

And I thought that was really strange,, when I looked at the marketplace, there's so much money to be made helping influencers [00:13:00] connect with brands. And when you go talk to influencers and you ask them, why are you not connecting with more brands? Which is what I did. I went and talked to a bunch of influencers they were like, well, it's hard to find brands.

When we do find brands, they want us to sell something that I don't care about, you'll have a, twenty something female influencer who really cares about fashion or really cares about food. And then she'll get a brand that wants her to advertise tires or, something that's completely unrelated.

first off there's demand. These influencers want to. monetize their voice, monetize their audience. There was a problem in that they couldn't monetize the audience. There was a gap in the market in that the people who were providing services like e commerce platforms, weren't looking at influencers.

And I thought, all right, well, let's try to close that gap. So I came up with a really precise idea of how to do that technically experientially, the user experience and user interface. Tested value propositions with influencers. I paid some to [00:14:00] interview them initially. Hey, can I give you, it depended upon the influencer, but it was anywhere from 100 bucks to 1000 bucks for 30 minutes of your time learned a lot from that.

And then I took that a deck said, here's what I think the problem is. Here's what I think the solution is. Here's my experience in this world, e commerce and marketing based upon my career history. And here's the research I've done that proves that there's something there. And I started shopping that around Silicon Valley.

And as I was running around to different venture capital groups one of them, who's a good friend, Said you need to talk to Target. They were just in here like yesterday and they're looking for ideas like this. You should talk to Target. And I thought to myself, Oh my gosh, that is like the last thing I want to do.

I want to go talk to venture capitalists and do the whole Silicon Valley thing. But They were like, they were very forceful. They're like, why would we ever give you money if you're not willing to talk to someone like target? And I was like, oh, that's a really good point. So I went and talked to target and [00:15:00] they immediately just immediately were like, wow, this is something we're really interested in.

We spend a lot of money on influencer marketing. So I asked them a ton of questions in that meeting. What do you spend money on? What are your pain points? What's not working? What could work better? All the questions that I could use to get the information that I needed to align what I thought my idea was, what I knew the influencers needed with what Target needed.

Went home, optimize that pitch in the next meeting. I went in there and I'm like, here's how I'm going to solve your problem. Here's how this piece of technology can solve your problem. Here's what I need to build it. Here's what I commit to you. Here are the terms that I think that we could come to agreement on where low risk for you.

If I don't deliver, you're out, nothing reward for me. If I deliver stuff happens. And , that kind of negotiation worked. 

Priscilla Shumba: I'm going to ask you to track back a little bit because you said you were looking at the value propositions when you were going around talking to influencers. So to someone who's listening who's not familiar with, okay, [00:16:00] what is he talking about when he's saying he was looking at the value propositions?

Maybe you can give some examples. 

West Stringfellow: Great question. A value proposition is a simple sentiment or phrase that personifies the value that a customer takes from a product from an experience from a brand, from a service, something like that. For example Nike sells shoes, right? But there's a lot of companies that sell shoes.

And so the value proposition that Nike sells is not just a shoe. That's a product. The value proposition is also the brand. If LeBron James is associated with the shoe or, Nadal or any of the major athletes are associated with the shoe, that shoe's worth more. And so the value proposition that Nike brings to the customer is a branded shoe.

they make it experiential. So if you go into a Nike store or you buy the shoe online, they create an experience [00:17:00] around that branded product. And the experience, when you're a part of it, shopping for it, it heightens your awareness. It heightens your engagement. I remember they used to have an incredible store in downtown Seattle.

And you would walk in there , they had this 30 foot tall TV. It was right when they launched the Tiger Woods line. And they had this short little five minute documentary that talked about how Tiger Woods couldn't play on a lot of the courses in America. But then ultimately, Won on all of those courses and people would stop in the lobby of this store and watch this five minute documentary and then immediately right behind that was the Tiger Woods line that they just launched.

And so they would walk over there and buy something. And that experience was part of the brand, made the product compelling, which, that is a value proposition. We're going to create combination of a brand, Service experience that comes [00:18:00] together to create value for a customer such that they're willing to pay for it.

And so when I talk to influencer, I say to them, what's your problem? They say, well, I need to make more money. That's generally what the first thing they said. I need to make more money. If I stopped right there. I could have been like, all right, I'm going to go get you a loan or here's a credit card, like what's the money thing.

But I kept asking. So like, how do you want to make money? Well, I want to make money by monetizing my audience. Who's your audience? These are the people I speak to. Why do they listen to you? Generally, what they like to hear is blah, blah, blah. How would you like to make money by talking to them? Well, if I could do this, or if I could do that, they started telling me exactly what they wanted as a value proposition.

I just kept asking, what is it? How do you want to do it? Why? Why? Why? A million times and asking that enough. What I started to hear was. I know what works for my audience. The [00:19:00] influencer would tell me, I know what works for my audience better than any brand can tell me. And if I could just give my audience what they want, I know it would sell.

And when I started to ask them, okay, how do you do that? How do you want to give that to the audience? They would tell me, I want to pick up my phone, select a product, put it in my post and push it to my audience. Okay, there's the product I need to build right there, and I asked 10 influencers and each one of them said something similar to that, not exactly that, but something similar.

And after listening to 10 of them, I was like, Oh, I know what the product needs to be. They have literally told me exactly what they need to do. And so I'm going to write that down using their words, right? I didn't come up with it. I recorded our conversations and I use their words and then I created a pitch, just a little pitch of a value proposition.

And I went back to them and I said, what [00:20:00] if I created an app that you could pick up and. You could pick any product that you wanted and you could associate it with any photo or video that you have, or you could make a photo or video for that product and you could push it to your audience and your audience could engage with the content.

and buy the product. Like I couldn't get through that sentence before they were like yes, that's the thing I want. And it's like, all I did was listen to them, structure it in a way that is a value proposition, tell it back to them. they loved it. And so then I started getting more out of them okay, so what does that experience need to look like?

When are you going to do it? What would you call that? What brands make sense for you? Just working through all that stuff with the customer and they designed the product for me and Because of that, when we actually went to design the product after I raised the money, we sat down with influencers.

30 of them and put paper in front of them. And we had little cutouts of apps and little cutouts [00:21:00] of buttons, like add to cart or upload image or whatever. And said, Hey, Help us design this. Take the little button for add to cart and put it where you want to see it on this little paper app.

And so we did that and then we'd go mock it up. We draw it and then we'd come back and say, Hey, does this look like what you wanted? And they're like yeah. But this and that and this and that. And we'd ask for corollary experiences. We'd say, have you seen this somewhere else that would be helpful for us to understand what would be helpful for you?

And they'd be like, oh yeah, this one time. And they pull up an app or, oh yeah, this other experience. And. Through doing that, iterating with the customer for weeks, we ended up designing something that , when we showed it to them, 98 percent of them understood it without any information or instructions. just showed them the app and they go, this is exactly what I'm looking for. , we didn't tell them what it was. We didn't tell them how to use it. We just showed it to them and they went, that's what I [00:22:00] want. That kind of iterative product, design value proposition definition, it just reduces the risk because the customer's leading you to the solution. 

Priscilla Shumba: That's brilliant. , I thought of all the things where you get an app and even though it's, what you need. The thought of having to learn how to use the

West Stringfellow: Exactly. Yes.

Priscilla Shumba: you forever it's brilliant in so many ways.

And I like that you show how much you use data , to create that. And I think probably. That uniqueness you have because of your background and then you said you shopped it around in Silicon Valley

Just brushed through that. I'm gonna need to come back and say to the person who's how do I shop it around in Silicon Valley?

Okay, maybe you can break that down for us

West Stringfellow: Sure. I was really lucky , in my life in that, when I started in technology in 1997, No one was good at it. So, but what was great about that is it made networking very easy. [00:23:00] And so I constantly networked. , from 1997 to when went out to try and raise capital in 2014.

I would talk to venture capitalists as often as possible at coffees, at lunches, at dinners, at networking events, at conferences. All of my friends who were successful entrepreneurs, I'd ask them, where do you go? Who do you meet? How do I do that? I was constantly out meeting people and creating foundational group of people who I thought I could call upon if and when I needed them.

West Stringfellow: And I never called them. For, I mean, literally from 1997 until I needed them in 2014 I didn't call anyone. Then when I knew I had a really good idea and I was willing to stake my reputation on a conversation with people who I trusted with people who I'd worked with or with people who I'd met and known for years, I reached out to them and I said, Hey, I've never asked for anything, but I need your help, please.

I need to get in touch with either this [00:24:00] specific venture capitalist because. Their thesis, a lot of venture capitalists publish what they invest in. And they're really like venture capitalists are a great source of information. you're not following venture capitalists, I would highly recommend it.

they were an open book, many of them, and they have great data, great intelligence, great customer insights, great technology insights. I love reading their stuff. But. I've been doing that for years. And so had a hypothesis of well, there's probably five people who will get what I'm ready to talk about instantaneously.

The second I walk in the door, the second they see the slide, they'll be like, Oh, yeah, I get it. There's probably 10 or 15 people who I'm going to have to walk through the idea, but they'll get it. And it's aligned with what they care about. And then there's an infinite number of people who just don't care.

They're investing in energy or they're investing in FinTech or whatever. I needed people who cared about marketplaces, who cared about social media, who cared about [00:25:00] influencers, who cared about retail. And so I curated that list. I looked at through my network as to how I could get to specific people or I knew people directly.

And then I just. Literally called folks. , I'm thinking about an idea. I think you might be able to help. Would you be willing to meet for a coffee? And then we go to the coffee and I'd show them the deck and I'd be like, here's how I came up with the idea.

Here's the research I've done. Here's the idea. Here's how my background and experience helps me believe that I'm credible. In this topic that I know what I'm talking about and can build it. And therefore, would you be willing to facilitate an introduction? And that led to introductions.

And then with the venture capitalists, it was just a call. It was like, Hey I think I have an idea. Would you be willing to have a conversation? And some said yes. And some said no. Most said no and that's normal. This is the game, but I was really lucky in that one of the ones that said yes [00:26:00] said, target was just here.

You should go talk to them. 

Priscilla Shumba: There's so much that I'm taking away from this conversation that people don't speak about. Nowadays there's a lot of just start and don't have a plan and just get into it. I mean, if you look, online, where most people look for inspiration and ideas of how to approach entrepreneurship.

But I think the perspective you bring of having that data, even your practices of reading certain magazines, looking for ways to be on the lookout of like, where is the future of this and this going, whatever space you're in. And I like that you said you're obsessed with writing down things,

West Stringfellow: Yeah.

Priscilla Shumba: I mean, I love that.

You're always seeking out information. When do you get time to distill all the information that you've got? Or is it because you're constantly looking for information that you. can go forward without having to go back to all the things you've distilled.

West Stringfellow: No, that's a great question. I tend to manage my reflection relative to where I am in the journey of building an [00:27:00] idea and have a little bit of structure. Just let me explain. So if I'm trying to come up with a new idea. I'll go to my research and I'll do keyword searches, I'll search for a technology name or let's say, for example, if I'm helping a company I'm consulting with them and they have a specific business idea or a specific competitor or a specific customer technology, whatever, I'll go to my notes and I'll , Google drive search and find that or I keep them in slack.

I keep them all over the place for different reasons. But I'll find what I know and then I'll build an uber document with all the information that I know. And now with GPT, I just dump it into actually I use Claude, but I dump it into Claude and say synthesize this for me. And I have a big prompt that walks through specifically how to do that.

Now, I've noticed that Claude, It's not great. Sometimes it misses some pretty key insights. So I then also tend to read Uber document that I just did. can share one with you. I just pulled one together for AI. It was 280 pages. [00:28:00]But I just took everything that I curated about AI, dumped it in a document, read it, and then took little pieces of it and started saying clustered things around forecast for capabilities, clustered things around existing startup ideas, clustered things around venture capital investment private equity and wall street investment, customer requirements, competitors.

And once I did all that, I can then start parsing it out into logical kind of stories that I tell myself. And I write the story to myself. And that's a discipline that I got at Amazon. It's a bit time consuming, but if you can explain it to yourself. using data, then you can explain it to anyone.

And most folks don't go through that discipline of just writing. it's not bullet points. It's not a PowerPoint. It's a narrative. It's a story. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. There are characters like the competitor is a character. The investor is a character.

The customer is a [00:29:00] character. But once I have that information down, I can go talk freewheeling to anyone. I don't need a brief the data. Sometimes I need to look back at it and be like, was it 68 percent or 63%? In terms of the data, but I know what I'm talking about. And that kind of conversational fluency is what builds the foundational pillar for all innovation, which is credibility.

If you want to raise capital, if you want to sell your vision, if you ever want to sell yourself for anything in this world, you have to be credible. And there are people who are credible with confidence. Some folks are legitimate, but there's a reason we call con people, con men, because it's confidence, man. And so there's confidence. And then there's credibility. And I tend to try to index towards credibility, which is a lot more boring find it fun. I mean, for me, it literally, it's what I do for fun, but it's a process of research, right? I take what know as I have, I structure them into the relevant points.

I write a story, [00:30:00] I read it to myself until it makes sense. I edit it. And then once I'm done with that process, I can go anywhere and talk to almost anyone about it. And then I do that. I practice that nonstop. And so if I'm going into a market, I'll meet with the customers. If I can, I'll meet with the competitors, I'll meet with investors.

And these are just, I reach out to people on LinkedIn, on Twitter and just say, Hey, can I have a conversation with you? Sometimes I incentivize them if I need the data. And then I also do it casually if I'm in a bar or I'm in an Uber or a Lyft, or I'm sitting next to someone on a plane, I'll try to figure out what they do.

And then walk it back to what I need to study. So let's say like been helping a lot of folks with AI recently. And so let's say there's a specific use case around AI that I'm helping folks with. If I'm sitting next to someone on a plane, I'll be like, Hey, what do you do? What do you love about it?

, what's challenging about it? And then from listening to them, I'll start thinking, okay, This is what their world is. Here's what I know about AI relative to my [00:31:00] customers world and the problems they're trying to solve. How can I connect those dots? And I'll just try in real time. I'll be like, what do you think about this idea?

have you thought about what this idea would do for you? And some of them are just like, no, I don't think about that. And I don't care. That's great data. I'm like, all right, , that type of person doesn't care about this. , I know that now I put that in my notes and that's part of the story, , by doing that, just, Like I said, I love it by doing that all the time.

It's just become practice for me. It's a discipline and I tend research. Like I said, every morning, I get up. And , I read the headlines of Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times Bloomberg. I read seven or eight blogs get delivered to my inbox.

And then I have a competitive intelligence inbox. It's a totally separate email that gets about like 2000 blogs. And. I search those every time I need to know something incremental, [00:32:00] let's say starting a new customer. I'll go search through all of that which is real fast. It's just collecting.

It's the hard part. So if you sign up for a lot of blogs, dumping it in email when you need to search it, you just query it, right? And then I have slack. I curate articles from the Morning reading into slack channels that are clustered by topics. So this morning, I think I put seven articles in robotics.

A couple in data in terms of the biggest problem with AI right now is data. And then a couple in AI and so if I need to go reference the articles, I'll just Download the slack channel, dump it into a little subroutine that I've written that goes and crawls the websites for those articles, pulls them, dumps them into AI.

And then I can query the AI, basically train the AI off the articles. And so like for me it's an advanced process, but for anyone else, it's just taking the notes, dumping it into a place that works for you. It could be simply as Writing it on paper. And then [00:33:00] developing the discipline of when you have questions and you're stuck thinking so many people, I suffered from this for ages and I probably lost years of my life sitting and just thinking about what's the solution as opposed to diving into the research.

And trying to find, has someone thought about this before? Is there information that could get me there? And so sometimes if I'm stuck, I'll just start reading. I'll start asking questions of the data and I'll start trying to find answers that exist, 70 percent of the time I find an insight that helps me move beyond that blockage and make progress.

And especially in innovation, that's the hardest thing is moving from insight. To action for us to act is innovators. We to have that insight on what to act on. And so the research really helps me in the moment. And then, strategically, if I'm going to have to build a strategy, build a pitch, raise capital, sell something that data is priceless.

Most people go into [00:34:00] a pitch or a sales meeting or any sort of strategic conversation. really focused on what they prepared to talk about. And that's great. That is exactly what everyone should do. I've found it really beneficial to think beyond that. And at Amazon, they pushed us to do that. So, we had to write a document that said, this is exactly what I want to do.

And then we had to write frequently asked questions, which is like, Who thinks of that? But with GPT and with Claude, we can think of that. Now we can upload what we want to do. And we can ask a simple question. Pretend you're the audience. What questions do you have? And then GPT and Claude will give us all the questions that we didn't answer.

And those are the questions that we also need to think through. And then when we go into the room, rather than simply pitching our idea. We're able to be conversationally fluent around the concept. [00:35:00] And that is what establishes our credibility.

Priscilla Shumba: Oh, this is incredible. I'm going to tell you a really shameful story right now, Wes. So, I was in South Africa it must at least be 10 or 12 years by now, and they had an initiative by Bloomberg where they came in and they provided us all the tools, including the portal, and gave us the free training of like how to use Bloomberg and whatever.

But you know what was missing? That training that you just discussed at Amazon. We were given everything and we just didn't know what to do with it.

And so we did nothing. We enjoyed, being at the conference and learning about Bloomberg and that was as far as it went. And I think maybe if you could give someone who's listening who is like me at that time, and a lot of people who were, even if the information is presented, you don't even know how to engage with it.

Just goes over your head. What would you say is one little practice that they can begin to do to have that inside of the way you were taught how to [00:36:00] think. I think that's what you were really taught Amazon, if I'm correct.

West Stringfellow: Yes. And absolutely. I think it depends upon your purpose. I think if you're trying to learn for yourself Versus pitch someone else. If you're trying to learn for yourself, try to define to the extent that you can all aspects of an idea. So if we talk about AI, that's so broad. It's just almost meaningless.

Try to get really specific about what an AI is relevant for you. And let's say you have access. Let's say to a Bloomberg terminal. If I could get access to a Bloomberg terminal. Oh, my God, I would never leave my computer. would try to figure out, you Where in Bloomberg Terminal is AI relevant to me?

Where can I get it back to what I need to think about today? And I tend to look a little bit outside myself into what other people who are better than me, because most people are are practicing and thinking about. And then I use that to then inform my initial research. So it doesn't all have to come From within.

A lot of times I get prompts from other people outside who are experts who are luminaries [00:37:00] who are looking far. And I say, okay, they're all looking this way. Maybe I should look that way too. And think about how that relates to me then once they get a direction, the press release.

If you think about a press release as a format of a document, it's a wonderful communication piece. And this is what Amazon teaches you to do, is to write a press release. It's called a one pager. And I'll send you the template for it. It's been open sourced and so it's been publicly disclosed.

I'm not the one disclosing it, so I'll share it with you , but, if you think about a press release, it does a couple things. It establishes in very clear, concise communication who you are, what you're going to do, why you're going to do it, when it's going to happen, what it means to the customer, and how it's going to happen.

That is a very hard thing to do. And so if you're trying to think about even for yourself, write a press release for yourself in five years. Write your vision for yourself as a professional, as an entrepreneur, right? One for your company, right? [00:38:00] One for your product, really think through what it's going to take to get there and use customer data to do that.

Use the data of let's say you want to be an entrepreneur, use data of what venture capitalists would need to see, like the business metrics, your addressable market, your revenue, your growth, your Kager, your profitability, your margins. If you're in a specific sector, use the specific sector metrics use.

The customer metrics, what matters if you're in a B to B environment, what are the numbers that the customer cares about that they need to see in the press release to care about and then use the research that you have to inform that. So that you can actually build a compelling vision and a compelling story.

And then once you document the FAQ, the frequently asked questions, and then run through all of those, at that point you have a fully formed idea in your head. Writing a pitch deck is. Pitching it is easy, but getting that structure is [00:39:00] very hard. And so I do it for myself all the time.

I practice it. I know this is going to sound weird, but if I'm shaving or some sort of inane activity where my brain can just go elsewhere. I'll think to myself like. West Stringfellow just launched a new innovative platform that teaches all entrepreneurs and innovators how to innovate without having to pay for anything as well.

He offers services, I'll practice that in my head. And I try to get it better and better and better. And I'll go through the whole press release. I'll walk through how I do it. I'll walk through the numbers and I've memorized that. And now if I sit down next to anyone who's interested, I can just say it.

And they get it. And every time I practice it in my head, it gets a little better. Not every time. Sometimes it gets way worse and they go on terrible tangents and then they come back to better. And then same with the customers. Sometimes I get in front of a customer and I try something new and it just explodes.

But. I had for a long time, terrible fears of public speaking, [00:40:00] terrible fears and used to have to take medication to stop trembling just to get on stage and speak. and when I had the opportunity, I went to the second city, which teaches improv like standup comedy improvisation.

What I learned there. Which is real important because I think a lot of people are very self critical , especially if we're trying something new. So you sit down in the Bloomberg terminal, you don't know what to do. Maybe you try to write a press release from that. It's really frustrating because you don't know what to do.

Maybe you haven't done it before. What I learned from improv is that like failure is part of the process, in improv, you can fail in a second and it's wonderful because you're in this community and they're like, I just go again and it's a super low stakes game to play with yourself is to just realize that you're going to try to write a press release.

It's not going to work. It'll be lame. I do that all the time. I write something. I'm like, Oh my gosh, that is so happy. No one is seeing this right now, but it's reducing the stakes within ourselves and then using templates that work for us. I think [00:41:00] the press release and the frequently asked questions format works, the abbreviation for is the PRFAQ press release frequently asked questions.

I think that format works, but. Do what works for you. All of us have different brains and the more I get to consult with folks, the more it's fun to see how people think about things. I found Amazon's narrative structure to be particularly effective. But other folks prefer pitching.

Other folks prefer like Sequoia's pitch deck format, or they prefer their own bespoke format. I know a lot of people who just like to, Video themselves or to record their voice then listen to that and ruminate that way, but I think it's really just starting to engage in the process of reading of documenting of thinking and then refining what you're reading and documenting and thinking about into something that you can communicate and then consistently practicing that communication.

of your mouth, not in your head, out into the world with strangers and being ready to [00:42:00] have people just be like, I don't care what you're talking about. And making that normal for yourself because if you're ever going to try to raise money, that's 70 to 90 percent of what you're going to hear. If you're ever going to try to pitch something to your bosses.

Initially that's 70 to 90 percent of what you're going to hear. The number of times before I figured it out, the number of times, seven years I spent going into people's office, Oh, this is broken. We got to fix it. And, and my boss is shut up and go away. You're bringing me a problem.

I don't need this right now. Whereas I got to Amazon, I started realizing like, Hey. I think in three years we could create a customer experience that would completely unlock the ability for people to get data around marketplace, which could drive sales, which could, you know, just the difference in approach and communication.

My boss was like, that's a good idea. We should talk about that more. Here's where your idea sucks. Here's where it needs to be better. Here's what I want to see, come back and make it better. [00:43:00] And then just doing that for a decade at Amazon visa target PayPal, all these big companies, and then also at a bunch of startups and also with venture capitalists and then having to do that with wall street, a bunch too.

It's just over time, you just get used to that and you start to realize that Each different group has a different story they want to hear different facts they want to hear and it's all about optimizing your ability to communicate what's relevant to the person listening to you, your customer in a way that gets them engaged and convinces them. 

Priscilla Shumba: This is amazing. I didn't even get to ask you the things I thought I was going to ask you because I think you've given us so much value and really a perspective that people should really take on. And, but I can't let you go I wanted to make sure that I get a story about patenting. Cause I know you've got five patents. 

West Stringfellow: Yeah, I think I've filed 12 patents and I've gotten five. So, the first thing to know about patenting is it often doesn't work. The best way to get a good patent is to get a [00:44:00] good lawyer. And that's not a great answer. It really is not a great answer.

I wish the answer was better. But in my experience. They can do two things. The first thing they can do is help you determine whether or not what you're building is novel. That's the primary question that a patent reviewer, someone at the patent office is going to ask. Is this a completely unique idea?

Is it totally novel? And so they're going to look at, is it derived from other things that are patented? If it is, Maybe it's not novel. Maybe it's the next obvious thing. And so lawyers do great due diligence on that. It's not necessarily cheap, but it is The most efficient way that you can ensure you're going to get a patent is doing that due diligence now You can do that due diligence yourself.

You absolutely can and with AI it's easier than ever, you can go most countries have open source patents So you can just go see what's patented You Learn to query the database that is a skill in and of itself is learning to query it download the patents, upload them into [00:45:00] GPT or Claude and then ask questions of those patents, ask, is this derivative?

That's the big thing. Is it derivative? Is it novel? If you can establish it's not derivative and it is novel. high probability or higher probability, the second thing is really think not about what you're doing, but about what you're doing means long term, a lot of people focus on, I'm solving this specific thing right now.

And , that could be patentable, but , let's assume that's successful. Let's assume that the thing that you're solving right now is successful. Play it forward five years. Play it forward 10 years. Don't make it just a product. Maybe make it a platform. Maybe make it a suite of products.

Start thinking about what happens if 100 million people use it. It's going to look different than if 10, 000 people use it, right? Now that 100 million people solution, that's probably more novel. [00:46:00] 10, 000 person solution. That's probably a newer idea because it's bigger. It's at scale. It doesn't exist at scale today.

That might be the more patentable vision and at that scale out there, if you get that patent, that's what you should be shooting towards, right? If you're going to build a product, you're going to build a platform. If you're going to build anything, The first step is almost always, in my experience, at least, and statistically in the broader market, the first step is almost always wrong.

What's right is the kind of evolution, long term goal. For example at Amazon, we launched digital video in 2006. I was on the launch team for that. No one watched Amazon digital video until 2014. And it wasn't really a big deal until 2000 and 20. So, very long ramp time, but the patents that were filed in 2006 made a huge difference in 2020, right?

And it's setting the [00:47:00] vision for the product. The vision is almost more important than your first step. It's definitely more important in raising capital. If you have a great vision that talks to a big market, talks to a lot of customers, talks to a lot of capabilities. That's where investors like to invest.

And in patents, same thing. Patents, if it's a big vision, if you can show that it's going to affect hundreds of billions of people, and then you start designing the technology, you start designing the idea at that level and then work backwards to where you are today. That bigger thing is much, much better investment in intellectual property protection.

Because if you patent what you're launching with, you'll probably change it minutes to hours to months after you launch. And then that patent not so relevant anymore. 

Priscilla Shumba: , thank you for that insider wisdom there. I'm so grateful for this conversation.

West Stringfellow: Yeah, me too. Thank you for allowing me to do this. I really appreciate it.

Priscilla Shumba: I want everybody to hear this conversation. I think it's really going to change the way people think about things and to the [00:48:00] audience, please, if you want to know more about what West is doing and then more about AI and really get into this thinking world, where I think entrepreneurs sometimes, all execution and very little thinking.

And, Thinking and execution is where the power really is. Please go to howdo. com. Wes, let me know. I know you're so busy. Are you on Twitter? Where can people get into this world that you're in?

West Stringfellow: . I'm on Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. I'm not very active because busy, but I'm dedicating time for the next eight weeks to run through all of how do's courses open source, aligning them to AI so everyone has the foundation can do this thinking you can use the tools.

And so all those channels I'll be active on. 

Priscilla Shumba: I'm excited for this. 

Thank you for your time and thank you for being so generous with your journey and with your experience. Thanks Wes.