His brow tenses and releases as he twiddles blades of grass between his thumbs.

As usual, he's deep in thought.

His hair is long — even a little matted; a brown beard cloaks his jawline.

Steve Jobs is tall, skinny, slightly manic and clueless to his future impact.

Decades before adopting his signature black turtle neck — he opted for flip flops, a white t-shirt and jeans.

When not taking typography classes, eating fruit or designing video games – he's devouring books about Eastern religion.

One of his favorites on the subject is Be Here Now by Ram Dass.

Who is Ram Dass?

Ram Dass was a spiritual guide who helped bring Eastern religion to the Western world. He was a Harvard professor at one point, an early LSD distributor at another, and ultimately one of the most followed men in America.

Jobs gravitated towards Ram Dass and his teachings; so much so that in 1974 he decided to visit India with his friend Dan Kottke.

Why India?

Ram Dass's guru was a man referred to as Maharaj-ji or Baba Neem Karoli.

As a follower of Ram Dass, Jobs knew he had to meet the man who influenced him the most.

But to his surprise, Maharaj-ji had left his body just months before they arrived.

Before returning to the US however, Steve and Dan stayed and listened to the teachings of Baba while exploring the places he frequented the most. Jobs felt such a connection with the guru that he began to have a profound spiritual awakening.

And he's not the only one who felt this way; a few others who've visited India in search of Baba Neem Karoli include:

• Mark Zuckerberg
• Julia Roberts
• Daniel Goleman

But where did the name come from?

As they continued their trip, Dan began to notice Steve's obsessive nature take hold of an idea during their deep meditation sessions.

Upon their arrival in the US, Steve wasted no time taking action on that idea by founding Apple less than a year later and hiring Dan as the first employee.

As an avid fruitarian himself, Steve knew he had to inquire about Baba's favorited fruit before leaving India. And let's just say it wasn't an orange.

It's reported that when Jobs was dying, the only thing hanging on the walls was a picture of Maharaj-ji, his beloved Guru.

Imagine all the online interactions you have within a week:

• Slack or Meets messages
• Client Meetings
• Text w/ Friends
• PowerPoint Collaboration
• Google Doc Editing
• Trend/Tech Research
• YouTube Surfing
• Twitter Checking
• Idea Sharing
• Excel Revisions
• Client Workshops
• SharePoint Updates
• And the list goes on...

The point being we do a lot online each day.

A few of our interactions are productive, a couple negligent, and some are neither.

But where does it all go?

Into the ether for most companies.

Digital exhaust can pollute your team's atmosphere with distractions, send them into hunter-gatherer mode for past artifacts or arrest your best minds with copying & pasting efforts.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

The exhaust can instead be captured, stored, and repurposed for future work.

How?

You need a place for it.

A place where suggestions go to be judged and the best prosper.

A place where articles, trends, and new tech finds a home audience.

A place where ideas can be built and scoped instead of talked about in a chat.

A place that doesn't take itself too seriously.

You may believe SharePoint, Notion or a Slack Channel is that place for you and your team.

But if you're serious about capturing the digital exhaust that may fuel your next breakthrough innovation, you'd get the proper tool for it.

That's Amble. And that's why we built it.

We were tired of our ideas dying in rich text editors.

We were sick of hunting down that one thing.

And most of all, we were exhausted from rework.

If you're ready to capture your team's digital exhaust and use it to propel innovation forward, then you need Amble.

This is how we help ordinary teams accomplish extraordinary feats.

Orgs will purchase shiny new objects without thinking twice.

But most of the products they're paying for are just burning company cash.

Why?

Because there's no user buy-in.

Products like Monday, Jira, Asana, Notion, SharePoint and others are only useful if you use them.

But most of the time — the once promising new tool is left to gather dust.

The problem being the tool is a vitamin instead of a pain killer.

It's a nice-to-have instead of a must-have.

To put it simply, it's just not sticky enough.

"The cold truth is that the best products don't always win. Many times it's - the products that have the ability to keep users coming back and using them without conscious thought and using them out of habit are the ones that keep us coming back." - Nir Eyal, Author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Here's how we're solving for this with Amble:

Amble is really two products in one: it's a knowledgebase tool that populates your workshops and a workshop tool that feeds your knowledgebase.

This is no accident; we intentionally designed the knowledgebase to be a byproduct of the workshops.

Why?

Because although you can manually enter trends, ideas, pain points, goals and much more, we faced the music early on and accepted that nobody is going to do that unless you're paying them to.

But, they do get paid to run workshops. And they do get paid to meet with clients.

So, if a tool like Amble makes it easier for them to do the work they have to do — chances are they'll keep coming back to use it.

Ultimately you have to figure out how to make your product sticky.

It can be the most powerful tool in the world but if there's no user buy-in — it won't work.

This is how we help ordinary companies build extraordinary products & services.

"Information isn't knowledge until it's shared and understood."  

But what about using that knowledge?

Isn't putting it into action just as important as understanding it?

Maybe the quote should read:

"Information isn't knowledge until it's shared, understood, and useful."

We live in the information age: a buffet we didn't ask for but can't stop devouring.

So for a company to thrive in today's market, it needs systems in place for transforming chunky information blocks into diced, concise bits of knowledge.

What's required is an information kitchen that can marinate, cook, and construct the raw ingredients into something delicious and financially edible.

Most businesses don't struggle to organize their information; they have tools and processes in place for that.

But organizing information doesn't transform it into knowledge.

So what does?

Context.

Context is what's needed to make information useful.

After spending years using software products that organized our information but didn't turn it into knowledge, we decided to build something that would.

With Amble, we can see clearly how different bits of information are connected which provides context and thus knowledge on how to use them.

Information + Context = Knowledge; this is the winning formula for the information age.

Don't stress too much with organization; it ultimately comes second to context.

This is how we help ordinary people do extraordinary work.

In the midst of holiday mayhem at the airport, I noticed a woman in distress because her two packs of expensive gummy worms were stuck inside a vending machine.

"Do you need any help?" I offered.

"Yes, ugh — I'm so frustrated right now. I bought the other pack trying to get the first one out and now, now I don't know what to do."

I approached the machine, shook it a few times and then started messing with the handle until finally it released the worms.

She smiled and thanked me repeatedly as she walked away.

Chances are if you're reading this, you've already hit a "so what now?" moment in your product or service lifecycle.

Similar to the lady who had gone all in—twice—on the gummy worms, you may have doubled down on your idea with your time input or financial backing.

But don't worry or panic in the face of a so what now question; it's actually a good thing.

We know building a business can be a daunting task, especially for those who are just starting out or who may be unsure of what they're doing wrong.

That's basically the whole reason we made Amble — to help with the frustrating aspects of building something.

Pivots, sometimes big ones, are a requirement in the journey.

They're often necessary to extend the runway on your product or service vision.

They come in the shape of taking on new work or simply assessing all the ways you can redistribute or reframe your offering.

Maybe you're so heavily focused on one channel that you're missing out on others.

Or sometimes the world isn't ready for what you're currently building but a different version of it that's staring right at you.

The one tool we always turn to when we're feeling stuck is our strategic vision dashboard; a place where we can reassess the ways we're currently positioning our products and services.

Here we can analyze all income opportunities, type of work required, engineering hours, monthly revenue, and much more.

This high level overview empowers us to zoom out and assess what our next steps should be and then prioritize from there.

As an end result, we have a clean summary of all the ways we can make money through strategic pivoting.

Whether you're a solo builder or working as a team — getting stuck is simply part of the process.

Shake that vending machine, mess with the handle and do whatever else it takes to get unstuck and tackle the so what now question with veracity and grace.

This is how we help ordinary people build extraordinary things.

Innovative pursuit isn't a hail mary down field.

It's little passes and first downs that lead to a score.

Unfortunately innovation is a buzzword often associated with grand, game-changing ideas.

But the key to true innovation is found in the small, everyday observations and improvements we make.

Pragmatic innovation is about being consistent in our approach to finding and implementing new concepts.

It's about looking for opportunities to improve and evolve, rather than waiting for the next big thing to come along.

By focusing on innovating each day, we can be better positioned to understand and meet the needs of the future.

But simply having a focus on innovation is not enough.

In order to truly benefit from pragmatic innovation, it's important to have systems and tools in place that support and standardize the process.

Many companies and founders lack this sort of daily innovation routine, which can leave them behind the curve when technology surpasses expectations.

Innovation is not a game of chance, but one of consistency.

Those who focus on innovating each day will be the ones prized with discovering what the future needs.

By being pragmatic and implementing systems that support a consistent approach to innovation, we can be better equipped to drive progress and stay ahead of the curve.

It's tempting to get caught up in the excitement of building a new product.

It's like the honeymoon phase in the relationship; the possibilities are endless and the love is fresh as spring water.

And all you want to do is put your nose down and start building or hiring people to build it.

But it's important to remember that even the most innovative technology won't be a success if nobody wants it — making it critical to scope and validate your idea before you build.

With Amble, you can decide on things like distribution channels, target market, user personas, features and much more before you ever spend a penny on development.

This allows you to focus on the core elements of your product: what it solves, for who, and how you're going to reach them.

Leveraging Amble's knowledge blocks ensures your product is solving a real problem for a specific group of people, and you have a plan in place for selling to them.

Avoid the mistake that many first-time founders make of building something that nobody wants.

Check out our public instance to start scoping and validating today: https://www.ambleideation.com/makers

This is how we help ordinary people build extraordinary things.

Recent advancements in no-code technology and artificial intelligence have revolutionized the way we build digital products.

With these tools, it's now possible to create complex and sophisticated software without writing a single line of code.

This has greatly accelerated the development process, allowing us to build products faster than ever before.

The rise of no-code technology has also changed the way we approach product development.

In the past, the focus was on figuring out how to build a product.

This often involved hiring specialized developers, learning complex programming languages, and spending months or even years building a product from scratch.

But now the focus has shifted from how to build to what should we build.

This is where Amble Ideation comes in.

Our new SaaS tool is perfect for indie hackers and aspiring entrepreneurs looking to quickly and easily ideate, plan, and build new digital products.

With Amble, users can capture and organize their ideas in a central hub while leveraging a graph database to connect ideas, goals, trends, features, problems, and more.

This makes it easy to see connections between different concepts and quickly turn them into a cohesive product plan. With an abundance mindset and the speed of Amble, you can quickly test and iterate on various ideas and strategies at once.

As Steve Jobs once said, "You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

Now you can have all the dots in one place, making it easy to connect them and discover the next big thing.

Something stirred inside.

Dopamine flooded my network.

I couldn't sleep; I was onto something.

In the quiet hours of the night I etched away at a home page; customizing the colors, fonts, adding a background, sections — all the things I envisioned a user seeing upon first glance.

It was in this moment I first realized the joys of building — a rush I've been chasing ever since.

"You built that?" asked my college roommate.

(I couldn't resist showing him the next morning.)

It wasn't much but it was enough to become hooked; just a simple website for one of my app ideas.

"You've been talking about this for a while now, it's cool to finally see it come to life," he said.

Campus Cater Coming Soon loomed in big, bold font at the top of the digital space.

It's one thing to have ideas but it's another to take action on them.

Much of our resistance comes from the notion that if we start we have to finish or if we take any action at all we must see it through.

But this isn't true; not with business ideas at least.

Plus, it's strategically bankrupt to think this way.

Built is not synonymous with completed.

In the development of any product there's an MVP stage, a V1, a V2, alpha, beta etc..

What's needed for building is a starting point.

I have an idea, now what do I do?

Luckily with Amble, we never have to ask this question.

With the custom templates, we know exactly how to get started.

This allows us to immediately take action on our ideas and focus on the answers not the questions.

There's no need to wait, talk about it, sleep on it or throw it in an excel sheet or slack channel to never be seen again; instead, we can do something as soon as the thought enters our brains.

The widgets are already there, they just need populating  — empowering us to start building right away with confidence and ease.

And the joys of building is what will keep us coming back so building needs to be enjoyable.

No resistance, no commitment; just the ideas and the many & mini-trips they take you on.

This is how we help ordinary people build extraordinary products.

You may be thinking:

Oh no — not another translucent blog about innovation.

I don't think I even know what that word means anymore.

It's always cornered by equally lofty buzzwords like digital transformation and artificial intelligence.

And you'd be right.

The word has become so diluted and commoditized that it almost holds no meaning.

Innovation is now a tasty accent on a project proposal or a term that sprouts in the land of contracts and deals.

But it's much more than just a fancy word. It's a cardinal virtue that reflects company culture.

We talk to visionaries everyday during feedback calls and they usually say the same thing:

"We've got a lot of knowledge and experience but don't know how to use it."

This typically translates to we have a bunch of random trends and project artifacts but they're too trapped and scattered to do anything with.

And you can't innovate if innovation is only a word. It must hold weight and catalyze action. And that requires a systematic approach and company-wide definition of what it is and how you plan to pursue it.

So we decided to dig up five of our favorite quotes that speak to the heart of in·​no·​va·​tion | \ ˌi-nə-ˈvā-shən  \

Definition of innovation

1: a new idea, method, or device : NOVELTY

2: the introduction of something new

1. "History is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse" ― Chuck Palahniuk

What's your why? Innovating just because it's something to do makes your pursuit no more conscious than the bees that make honey or dogs that fetch sticks. Innovation should always be about creating something bigger than yourself.

2. "Dreamers are mocked as impractical. The truth is they are the most practical, as their innovations lead to progress and a better way of life for all of us." ― Robin Sharma

Let your mind wander. Dream up a new world — a better one. It's not against the rules. In fact, it's a prerequisite for any good innovation.

3. “Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”
   ― Robert A. Heinlein

Is there a better way to do this? Start there. The vision doesn't have to be fully fleshed out. It begins as an observation that grows into a hypothesis and eventually, a solution.

4. “Innovation is saying "no" to 1,000 things.”
   ― Steve Jobs

Life is short. And you won't innovate in every industry (unless your Elon Musk). So choose your pursuits wisely and become comfortable saying no.

5. “It isn't all over; everything has not been invented; the human adventure is just beginning.” ― Gene Roddenberry

Lastly, get excited; get pumped. No matter what it is you do for a living, there's always an opportunity to innovate. Look around you. Ask questions. Notice problems. Offer solutions. This really isn't rocket science. It's a willingness to open your eyes a little wider than most to see what others don't. As the late Steve Jobs said:

6. "The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it."

Like a couch potato who watches motivational videos but doesn't go to the gym or a talented musician who listens to music but rarely plays, these quotes aren't going to do it for you. They may inspire but they won't take action. That's up to you.

So instead of talking about innovation and using the term to impress others, let's start to cultivate it in the way we approach our day to day.

This is how we help ordinary people become extraordinary innovators.

"Hey, do you know where that PowerPoint is we made for *client name*?

"Not sure, why?"

"I think a lot of it is probably relevant for *new client name*.

"Oh, yeah, I have no clue where that would be."

It's time to send over a statement of work.

"This is by far the most frustrating part of my job."

"Same, documentation is the worst."

"Yeah, and it's the same deliverables almost every time, why do we have to keep rewriting these things?"

"I don't know; probably because we can never find the old ones and extracting deliverables from a PDF sucks."

It's time to scope a new product.

"Okay, so what information do we need to fill out?"

"What do you mean?"

"Like user personas, target market, unique selling prop, features...all that type of stuff."

"Ah, yeah, do we have a template or something for this?"

"Maybe in Miro, but then we'll have to move everything over to Jira anyways so might as well just try to do it in there."

It's time to create a marketing strategy.

"We had so many good ideas for this a few months ago when it was first announced, what happened to all of those?"

"I think they're probably in that google doc we made for this."

"Yeah — almost not worth digging through that again; let's just send out a slack message and have the team reach out to the stakeholders."

It's time to conduct a client workshop.

"Do you feel like these are even that effective?"

"Not really; the trends, pain points, and goals we bring up feel too vague."

"Yeah, we need to understand use cases in order to actually help them."

If you've had or heard any of these conversations then you may need to implement a structure to scale.

A structure to scale is a system that leverages past efforts to optimize new work.

Although the inefficiencies may seem marginal and minuscule — they add up.  

And you may be thinking: yeah, we just don't have the time to tackle all of these.

But the truth is they're all symptoms of lacking scalable structure; fix that and you fix them all.

Organizations centered around growth know this, and are scalable from the jump so there's no holes in the ship when new clients and employees come aboard.

A structure to scale ensures your processes are repeatable, effective and most importantly — scalable.

Reach out for a demo today and we'll show you how our tool can help you save time, money and resources.

This is how we help ordinary companies scale in extraordinary ways.

One breezy Sunday morning I spotted him picking up trash scattered around the building and parking lot from the night before.

He was off the clock, it wasn't his job to pick up litter, but here he was doing it because he knew it needed to be done.

Rivers was a bartender who acted like an owner.

Towering above most with a chest-length auburn beard, he was hard to miss.

"Hi, I'm Rivers, what's your name?" he'd say while removing his cap and extending his hand in a I'm-so-glad-you-decided-to-come-in-today sort of fashion.

His restaurant philosophy was simple: the guests are your employers and your table section is your business.

If he was taking care of your group or serving you at the bar you felt like you were hanging out with a new best friend you'd just met at random.

Rivers' relationship with the restaurant ended for unclear reasons but on a recent jog I saw a sign up for a new establishment opening:

Old Man Rivers Table & Tavern Coming Soon

Unfortunately for the world, most of us are renters.

We join a company, get as much out of it as we can while contributing where needed and then onto the next.

There are however some innate owners who take immense pride in whatever they pen their name onto, and you should hire as many of them as possible.

But there's also another way to create more owners in your organization.

Company culture dictates what employees do when the boss is not around.

If your company culture is built around rewarding those who go the extra mile or think outside of the box, then you'll have a lot of hardworking creatives on your team.

Inversely, if you praise the ones who get their jobs done quickly while sticking to the script, you'll have many speedy machinelike folks on your side.

So how do you create a company culture that encourages ownership?

1. Provide them the right tools to explore opportunites for the business
2. Set up systems in place that incentivice ownership over their work
3. Make it a top headline when someone does something well

Renters aspire to act like owners whenever they see ownership in action.

After witnessing Rivers picking up trash in the parking lot, I started to do the same.

Not because I had to but because I wanted to. I wanted to do my job and then some, not for anyone else but myself.

If you want to create more owners on your team, Amble can help you take the first step.

Reach out for a demo today and we'll show you how you can transform your renters to owners and your owners to innovators.

This is how we help ordinary organizations grow in extraordinary ways.

Sun Tzu, Alexander the Great, Hernán Cortés, and other influential leaders demanded their armies burn the boats as they advanced into new territory.

Being aware of the power in a no turning back point, they used this statement to solidify a willful leap into the future by their subordinates.

They knew those who were hesitant to eliminate a flight option would not thrive like the ones who were embracing the new.

Strong business leaders know this as well and leverage it to steer their team and company in the right direction.

The initial exploration is often catalyzed by struggles looming in the motherland such as dwindling resources or clients. Other times everything is tranquil but the visionaries know there's better out there and cannot ignore the call of innovation.

Many companies are exploring new technological territories while still docking their boats near shore just in case they decide to leave and return to the old way of doing things.

But in order to truly embrace all that the future has to offer ⁠— the match must be struck and the outdated processes set aflame.

We hear all too often about those who didn't adopt new tech soon enough and got swept away in the gusty winds of the analog age.

They were afraid to burn their boats and paid the ultimate price with their business.

As you sail the seas of innovation, be sure that you and your crew are ready to burn the boats the moment you find a place worth settling.

This is how we help ordinary people innovate in extraordinary ways.

The words innovation and building are often times conflated.

But they don't always co-exist.  

You can think of innovative pursuit as a hammer.

There's the face and then there's the claw.

Without the wedge, you can't take out the old rusty nail.

And without the hammer, you can't put the new shiny one in its place.

Although instinct advises us to knock away at something new, it's best to first look at what already exists.

Not to copy or try to make it better but to deconstruct it into smaller pieces.

But before you throw on your demolition gear, take a look at the product as a whole and ask yourself:

• What is this at its core?
• What purpose does it serve?
• Why would someone or some team be moved to build it?
• What's aesthetically pleasing about it?
• What are some of its turn offs?
• And most importantly, what makes it special?

After you've done this, it's time to grab your hammer and start removing those nails.

"Oh they did this really well, what if we did something similar but instead changed this?"

"This is why it's not working, let's run the opposite direction."

These valuable insights are hidden behind the guise of the whole and without breaking it down to its core components would remain invisible.

This is more times than not the first step towards an innovative breakthrough.

The next step is of course recombining these pieces into something new.

To do this, ask yourself:

• How may these different segments be connected?
• What makes sense logically?
• What wouldn't make sense?
• What am I trying to build and for who?
• Why would they want this?
• How do I make it special?

And just like any good handyman or carpenter would advise, it's best to plan out the project before sticking in that first nail.

This is how we help people deconstruct the ordinary to create the extraordinary.

I was a twenty-year old food runner when my manager handed me a notepad and pen and said, "Write down all of your ideas here."

No one had ever asked me to do that before.

No teacher, no previous boss or manager.

She was the first.  

So what did she know that I didn't?

Or more importantly, what did I know that she didn't?

To this day I'm not sure but if I had to guess it would be this:

Between speedy dashes table to table, the Chef's bellowing cry for hands and the varying frequencies and pitches of voices after a few drinks, I was seeing what others weren't.

I wasn't a server, bartender, fry cook, chef, or general manager; I wasn't in the middle of it all with my own set of responsibilities.

I helped who ever needed helping:

If the server was behind on drinks, I refilled them.

If the cook was low on onions, I went and got more.

If the food needed running, I ran it.

This allowed me to see the restaurant's moving pieces as one greater whole.

And I did in fact have some good ideas on how to make it better. But if my manager hadn't given me the permission and outlet to express those ideas, I never would've.

Handing your employees a notepad and pen tells them you don't only value them as co-workers but also as co-creators. It grants them ownership of their environment which incentivizes ideation and the pursuit of positive change.

This in turn lays down the the foundation for a healthy and fruitful internal innovation process.

Luckily you don't have to actually go out and buy a bunch of composition notebooks for your team (you can if you want but they probably won't use them).

Instead go with something digital like Notion, Roam, Slack, or of course—Amble—the solution we built just for this.

But whatever tool and method you go with — make sure to listen, consider, and give feedback. That's what will keep them ideating and your business growing.

This is how we help ordinary people pursue extraordinary ideas.