I had lunch last week with Dan Cohen, CEO of Prospect 11 Labs. I wanted to catch up after his exit from Mindgrub in May. He has recently started a new company called Prospect 11 Labs, which is a boutique consulting company that helps organizations scale by focusing on the intersection of people, process, and technology.

My history with Dan started when Mindgrub was still in Catonsville, before the App/Virtual Reality. My initial interest in Mindgrub was viaPlace, which was a geolocation based mobile framework founded in 2009 - before there was geolocation there was my world of local B2B.

If Todd Marks was Bono, Dan was the Edge; he kept Mindgrub in reality while Todd focused on virtual reality. I also was enamored with his academic and professional background - Princeton and Georgia Tech.

Before drilling into the downloads he laid the framework of our lunch: "In 2017, every company has to be a data and technology company. And now that content marketing is marketing, every company has to be a media company as well." This was preaching to the choir.

Here are some of the important downloads that Dan shared:

Download #1 - Data and Technology Siloed

As companies evolve to this new (for some) data and technology driven mindset, many don’t have the internal DNA to scale these competencies effectively. This leads to marketing and sales teams driving data collection/analysis, and IT or engineering teams building an organization’s tech stack; with little collaboration to let one hand knows what the other is doing - or needs.

This can lead to misplaced investments in technology, that either don’t get used (wasted cap ex), or technology doesn’t scale quickly enough and your highest performers waste time on redundant data entry (burn out)

Having everyone on the same page with the orgs Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), allows for appropriate implementation of tech in lock-step with process/change management to effectively meet changing demands of a growing business.

Download #2 - React Native - An Approachable App Strategy

Once the right CRM/ERP/CMS solution for an organization is in place, with appropriate operational workflows, then an entire ecosystem of products can be built quickly and easily to support very specific tasks. Web and Mobile applications that used to take 4-6+ months to build (and $100k+) because they’re pulling data from a few different sources (API integrations are very expensive!) can now be slimmed down and take 1-2 months a pop when pulling from a single source of truth.

This has become even more streamlined by the prominence of an actual high-performing cross-platform development framework in React (and more specifically React Native for mobile development). Mobile applications that used to take many months per platform to develop, now take just weeks for Android and iOS apps combined. This reduces cost and timelines by orders of magnitude, without the loss of performance and user experience from previous generation tools.

Proof is in the pudding with huge companies like Airbnb, Instagram, Skype, Tesla, Bloomberg, Soundcloud, and many more (https://facebook.github.io/react-native/showcase.html) using the technology to build their apps.

Prospect 11 Labs

Over the years I’ve grown adept at bridging the gap between operational viability and technical feasibility. This came from my academic experience in Operations Research (focused on optimal decision making based on stochastic data-driven analysis), my professional experience operating two startups through high-growth stages (each made Inc 500|5000 lists after my first three years there - judged on previous three years growth), and personally building products and product teams.

That led me to start Prospect 11 Labs, which was created to help companies rocket through an inflection point where their current people (org structure), process (operational workflows/logistics), and technology (digital products/tools) are no longer meeting organizational needs. It is extraordinarily difficult to mature each together, so that you get the most value out of each. Prospect 11 Labs provides the insight, plan and actual development(!) to allow companies to achieve just that - Keep high performers focused on moving your business forward, leveraging highly functional products and process to make their lives easier.