This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around competitive and market intelligence, and my guest is Jonah Lopin, Co-founder and CEO of Crayon, a market intelligence software company based in Boston. Jonah started his career as a strategy & operations Consultant at Deloitte where he led projects for Fortune 500 clients in the Manufacturing, Consumer Business and Healthcare industries. After that he worked at eBay and UNICEF. In 2007 he joined Hubspot as the 6th employee, and served as Vice President of Customer Operations as they grew from 0 to 50M$. In 2012 he co-founded M80 Labs Inc, and from there he co-founded Crayon to solve the problem virtually any business suffers from: a lack of competitive and market intelligence. This triggered me, hence I invited Jonah to my podcast. We explore the challenges many organizations face in making informed decisions based on market intelligence that’s often incomplete, dated or completely absent. We also review the flaws in the business software industry in providing solutions to the wrong problem. Here are some of his quotes: “The belief behind the business where we believe strongly is that businesses should be as good at understanding and acting on everything happening outside the four walls of the business as they are at understanding and acting on all of their internal data When it comes to these, like fundamental questions about your market, and your competitive set, and your brand, and your customers, and what's happening outside the four walls, the business, many companies just have never had a good way to get insights there. Marketing's not about arts and crafts anymore. And it's about data and science. And that was really true. But we never helped our customers apply that data driven execution to what was happening outside the four walls of the business. And so, you know, we would help our customers generate tons of sales leads, but we never helped our customers figure out how do you close those.”

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

That the opportunities to create new categories are for grabs, as long as you ask the right questions

That too build a credible software business you need to move far beyond ‘the Shiny Object’ syndrome and solve the ‘complete problem’.

How persistence to stay laser focused, stay in the fight, and making progress each and every day will be paid with remarkable results

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