Episode 16: Brett House - Building While Everyone Else Talks

Brett House has spent 25 years watching products fail — not because they were bad, but because the organizations launching them weren't ready. As a VP at Nielsen and product strategist at some of the most important measurement and intelligence companies in the industry, he kept seeing the same gap. So he built something to close it.

High Signals is a GTM launch readiness company. Signal & Noise is his new media company. And Brett is currently mid-launch on both — which he openly admits gives his readiness diagnostics a certain poetic credibility.

Quinn and Brett go back to the Nielsen days, when HDco helped launch one of the industry's first precision audience platforms. This episode picks up that thread and runs it straight into AI, agentic workflows, quantum computing, and the question every founder eventually has to answer: what are you actually building toward?

Genuine, fast, and surprisingly funny. With a cameo from Naila's baby and a detour through London food culture that nobody regretted.

Find Brett at hisignals.com and signalandnoise.ai, or connect on LinkedIn.
Subscribe, share, and visit nownearfuture.com.

Transcript

Welcome to Now, Near, the Future. I'm Quinn Harrington.

Naila (00:08)
and I'm Naila Mir. Today's guest has spent his career studying why things either land or don't. Products, platforms, campaigns. The moment when all the work meets the market and you find out what's actually true.

Quinn (00:25)
Brett ⁓ spit inside some of most important measurement and intelligence companies in the industry. And then quietly, while the rest of us kept attending conferences and writing LinkedIn articles about transformation, he went into stealth mode and built something.

Brett House (00:43)
love this intro, this is terrific. Yeah, can we get a drum beat? Can we get a drum beat and some music, some mysterious music as the plot builds?

Naila (00:44)
Brett House. I love that.

Quinn (00:49)
⁓

There is intro music that goes to it if you've seen any of our other episodes. All right, continue Nyla.

Naila (00:53)
Yeah

Yeah, yeah. So

that's good when you talk about building, it's Brett House. And I said it correctly, ⁓ founder of High Signals. And now apparently you're also the founder of a new media company called Signal and Noise, which is...

Brett House (01:14)
SignalAndNoise.ai,

yes.

Naila (01:18)
We're going to hear more about this. So welcome, Brett. How much sleep are you? Yeah, good. So you're busy, huh? Are you getting some sleep or not?

Brett House (01:22)
Great to be here.

Yeah,

yeah, that's I do. I saw that question in the prep and I thought, man, the first thing that came to my head was my sometimes feels like my my head is exploding. ⁓

Yeah, because you have the launching two businesses is, ⁓ you know, it's everything is kind of split in half. It's two versions of QuickBooks, two versions of online banking, two business plans, two partnership plans. I mean, it's a lot of work, but ⁓ it's it, you know, I keep telling myself, but you own it.

Quinn (01:44)
It's insane.

Brett House (02:00)
Right. And to me that that ownership and and it's like there's nobody to blame if it fails but me and my co-founder for signal noise. So it really drives me and it's because I've always thought of myself on the kind of in the product strategy side as as a builder. And this is really ⁓

Quinn (02:08)
Yeah.

Brett House (02:21)
like that's what I'm doing. building things and playing multiple, wearing multiple hats, which is a fascinating, sometimes frustrating and hard. ⁓ Cause you know, I'm not a first, a CFO to start, but you've got to kind of act like a CFO. I'm not a, you know, chief product officer to start, but you get to act as a chief product officer. And so it really does broaden your aperture, which I, which I thoroughly enjoy, but you've got to be, you got to be industrious and have a huge amount of energy. And Quinn knows me, we go, we go back a while. The energy sometimes

Naila (02:34)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Brett House (02:50)
Sometimes it's too much to handle for some people. I'm bouncing off the walls over here!

Naila (02:54)
I feel the energy.

Quinn (02:55)
All right, well let's

go back to ⁓ the origin then. So we were in the room together when the industry changed. It's a memory that we both share. ⁓ I want to start where we started, Nielsen. You were a VP when HTCO was brought in to help launch the digital marketing platform. For people who weren't there, what was that moment like and why did it matter? What was

Naila (02:59)
you

Quinn (03:21)
Was there resistance in the room when you trying to sell precision audience targeting to buyers who'd been running on GRPs and gut feel their whole careers?

Brett House (03:30)
gosh, this is an interesting story. So just to give the audience some context, I was part of an acquisition by Nielsen, a company called Exolate. so people that listen to signalannoise.ai, the ad tech, mart tech space, sort of know this well, but you might have a slightly different audience. ⁓ Exolate was a data marketplace. They'd basically building almost like a cookie farm for audience segmentation and audience targeting across the programmatic web. And programmatic, they kind of were part of that programmatic rise.

Quinn (03:38)
Yeah, exhalate. That's right.

Brett House (04:00)
in advertising real-time bidding. And then they evolved that into a data management platform, which basically added capabilities, segmentation schemas, a whole bunch of stuff. They started building an audience graph or an identity graph by bringing in other devices. Point being is, I was part of that sort of early days of sort of programmatic.

growth and it got bought by Nielsen and we became what eventually was the Nielsen Marketing Cloud. But when we first joined, ⁓ there was a lot of

glossing over of eyes when you know, I remember I was in one of the marketing teams over there or meeting with them. I was kind of running product marketing, go to market and strategy and commercial strategy for our what had become kind of a business unit, but I was with the PR team and they had a huge communications org. I 25 people because they were doing a lot of what I call crisis communications at Nielsen because they were constantly under threat from the likes of comscore and

Naila (04:59)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (05:02)
People claiming that television is a linear channel was going to eventually be surpassed by digital and that was a big conversation so they just sort of fight off all of the the mosquitoes sort of you know nipping at their hide and People in the room just you know when I tried to explain What programmatic media was what audience building was where we collect our data how it's how it's delivered into platforms ad serving platforms demand side platforms to actually deliver ads that you see in your mobile devices that you see

online, know this again early days, people just you know I remember one of the responses I got from the comms team they're like is this kind of like leads lists and I'm like I'm like like a spreadsheet of just names and emails and I'm like you just did not understand anything that I just said and what I learned from that experience was really how to simplify

⁓ How you're talking about it and that once you get outside of your sort of at the ad tech world that I'd come from ⁓ It doesn't always translate to people that are in different walks of life different industries ⁓ traditional linear industries, which Nielsen was you know a largely a linear measurement company for linear television ⁓ And so you really have to simplify it and break it down to its kind of basic components Versus getting hyper technical and to me that's where I've really leaned in from a career perspective is how do you take that?

product expertise and translate this in a way that is meaningful to the commercial organizations and it's also meaningful to the market. And so that was was big learning.

Quinn (06:33)
Yeah, you know that video that

we created, that 10 minute video, ⁓ that was you and I trying to ⁓ decipher some of the technical speak into a visual presentation people could understand. yeah, I mean, to create videos like that, that are essentially product launch videos, the editor really needs to understand the

Brett House (06:48)
Yeah, what it meant to the end client, why it was valuable to them in a simple way.

Quinn (07:02)
the technology, you know, maybe not how it's built, but what is the benefit? How is it going to change the way people work? How is it going to change efficiency? You know, future proofing, things of that nature. So I think that's it's still one of the best videos that that I've created. ⁓ And I think in large part it was because of the the energy and also the budget. Thank you that you gave me to.

Do something really eye. Yeah, well the new star budgets.

Brett House (07:32)
Well, we did some good ones at New Star as well. Yeah, yeah.

Naila (07:35)
Not the content!

Quinn (07:37)
my god. It was like Brett was like, I don't care Whatever it costs and I'm like, okay you want 3d Original animation and he's like, yes, I was like, okay we one video

Naila (07:42)
Wow.

Brett House (07:49)
Yeah. You know, it's part of that

Naila (07:50)
week.

Brett House (07:51)
premium positioning when you're sort of a high tech technology company. You can't show yourself as low tech.

Quinn (07:53)
Yeah.

One video we did for Fabric,

Naila (07:56)
Yeah.

Quinn (07:58)
which was New Star's overarching umbrella brand for all other technology. One of those videos was 45 seconds and we spent 160 hours on motion graphics.

Brett House (08:13)
160 hours. Yeah, and fab and fabric was a take not to get technical but there's a publisher token solution that basically allowed

Quinn (08:14)
160 hours.

Brett House (08:20)
⁓ You could take multiple data signals, identity signals around a person in a household and connect them into one identifier, which they call a token that could be then served into the real-time bidding programmatic media ecosystem. So basically, you're basically backing what is like a, like think of like an ID that has a bunch of numbers and letters associated with it. But behind that,

and it's sort of encrypted behind that is things like hashed email, ⁓ household, right? It connects to an identity graph where you can actually get down to the person's devices, the people in their house, who they are, but it's all captured in sort of an anonymized token that you then use to kind of represent, to simulate that person or those people when you're trying to target them in digital media. So that kind of stuff is radically technical. ⁓

Naila (09:05)
Right.

Mm-mm.

Quinn (09:09)
Yeah.

It is.

Naila (09:13)
It is.

Brett House (09:13)
And

trying to communicate that to the sales org, they're like, what's a publisher token? What does this mean? Oftentimes, ⁓ it required us to bring in, in this case, was Steve Silver, a good buddy of mine that was our head of product, to bring him into these conversations that the sales and customer success folks felt, and oftentimes some of the marketing folks, not me, but because I'm a little bit more product oriented, ⁓ had problems going into depth about. And so when you get question number two from client A, and suddenly they're looking

Naila (09:39)
Mm.

Brett House (09:43)
down an empty elevator shaft, the elevator is already left, it's on a different floor, You know, facing, you know, having vertigo, they're like, call the product team! That often is the biggest blocker when it comes to commercial product rollouts, right? Is that divide, that knowledge divide.

Quinn (09:46)
Hahaha

Naila (09:47)
You

Well,

Yeah, well that happens with internal. So I'm all about internal communication and more focused on employee. And I work with IT and I work with finance and the things that they speak, no one understands. So we have to really break it down to the employee. What does it mean for me? In fact, if it doesn't mean anything or no impact, don't bother communicating. Why are you doing this? But we have to use some of the marketing tactics for it to make it engaging. But yeah, that's my job.

Brett House (10:16)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Naila (10:31)
but internal, not client facing.

Brett House (10:33)
Yeah, well they're

saying now is the time it's the rise of the English major. I was a comparative literature major, which is slightly different, but similar. that these, skills, those liberal arts skills that were so sort of looked down upon.

Naila (10:41)
You

Brett House (10:47)
When I went to college, everybody was like, get a computer engineering degree. Learn how to program. And guess the first space, the first job definition that was completely replaced by AI, it was those hard skills, those computer engineering and computer programming skills that you thought would make you sort of ⁓ invaluable going forward and irreplaceable. Now that was the first thing that was replaced. You don't need programmers anymore because Claude and other solutions do that so well. So the English skills,

Naila (10:51)
Yeah.

does it.

Brett House (11:17)
and

the communication skills are critical. How do you actually simplify this stuff to allow people to get on board with whatever you're doing?

Naila (11:24)
And we had in our previous podcast, we've talked a lot about how it doesn't, you can do some of the writing, but it doesn't have that human ethics, moral kind of aspect that you need the behavior part within communications and engagement. So it can't really replace. Yeah, exactly. Quinn.

Quinn (11:25)
Yeah.

Brett House (11:41)
Yeah.

Humans need

to orchestrate and govern the outputs, right? That's critical.

Naila (11:47)
Exactly.

Quinn (11:48)
Yeah, and that's really where

things are going is more of a managerial curator, head of aesthetics, head of human connection, things like that, where the agentic agents will be executing on our vision. So yeah, I've been sounding the warning sign to... ⁓

Naila (11:51)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Quinn (12:14)
my alma mater, Flagler College down in St. Augustine, Florida. And I was in a board meeting for the Visual and Performing Arts group and we had a little breakout and I was like, listen guys, I know the traditional design skills are important because it helps a student learn what's good and develop their own sense of taste. But from an execution point of view,

I don't know if we'll be designing logos in three or four or five years.

Brett House (12:45)
Three to four to five years, I'd say three to four to five months. ⁓

Naila (12:47)
Mums.

Quinn (12:48)
No,

I'm it. No, it's it's not that far.

Brett House (12:49)
You don't have to design logos right

now. Like I could go design, I can go get 150 logo designs and pick one of those in about 38 seconds. I did it for iSignals, right? Point being is that the life cycle, the innovation life cycle is dramatically compressed to any technology innovation life cycle that we've seen in our lifetimes in human history, right? They're saying that AI innovation life cycles, this is just take this as a sort of directional versus factual, but is approximately

Naila (13:18)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (13:19)
So they go through massive innovation overhauls, almost like in what would take a human 365 days to pivot. ⁓ AI does that pivot in less than 60 days, right? And so...

Quinn (13:35)
Yeah, that whole

thing about what was that, the theory that ⁓ computing power doubles every 18 months, that's much, much shorter now.

Brett House (13:43)
Yep.

Naila (13:44)
Hmm.

Brett House (13:47)
Yeah, and eventually we're just gonna have it all out in space powered by the sun. It does, it's like we don't need to completely terraform our world with servers, right? ⁓ And that's gonna change, it's gonna change in our lifetime too. not to get too theoretical, but we talk about this a lot on Signal of Noise, is that...

Quinn (13:51)
Nice. That makes sense. That does make sense.

Naila (13:51)
My god.

Quinn (14:01)
Right.

Well, we will

definitely get into that into the future segment. So Brett, you've worked with some of the most sophisticated data and measurement companies in the world. Nielsen, Newstar, TransUnion, MediaRadar, Exhalate. ⁓ What did you keep seeing that made you think nobody has actually fixed these problems that high signals address?

Brett House (14:10)
Yeah.

That's an interesting point. you know, there's the solutions that those services deliver, you know, to the end buyers, which typically are brands and or agencies. And there's certainly there's a lot of breakage there in terms of how we manage data, how we manage ⁓ advertising workflows, etc. But with what I saw with a lot of these technical companies, and it's not only technical companies, but especially the B2B SaaS, ⁓ Abtech and Martech is I saw a lot

of breakage ⁓ when it comes to how these companies effectively bring product solutions to market. And the sort of thesis behind High Signals was, or is, that innovation is directly correlated to big innovation events, which are supported by product launches, is directly correlated to company growth and value generation. We did an analysis, I stole this from my old CMA HUT Media Radar, but we did an analysis.

⁓ Indicap Capital, was our ⁓ private equity owner of their entire portfolio. We literally did an X and Y axis around growth, which was aligned to innovation events or product launches. ⁓ I'm sorry, was product launches versus ⁓ which was on the X axis and on the Y axis was growth rate. Right. And some companies were over in the top right quadrant, meaning they had a significantly larger number of innovation events or product launches and had grown.

⁓ in an almost equal way right up to the right quadrant. Where we were was not in the ideal place, but there's a lot of tech debt and data debt that we were going through. But what I realized is that's a pretty important analysis to understand. And I've seen that a lot ⁓ across these organizations that you mentioned, Exelate, Tenielsen, New Start, TransUnion, is that I saw a lot of breakage with companies being able to bring these innovations to market effectively. ⁓

in a governed orchestrated way. Now there's a whole GTM sort of, it's a customer life cycle, but from the moment you commercialize something, ⁓ a product launch for example, that you're bringing to market, from the minute you push it out the door, ⁓ it has these, it has effects on the customer, on the end customer, right? You know, from the first touch point all the way through the delivery.

of that service by the customer success or account management team. And so that's your sort of GTM life cycle. know, High Signals didn't set out to solve all of those problems because there's organizational issues, there's data governance issues, there's strategic issues. But what we did set out to do say, like, get the governance and the strategic plan right in a scientific way at the beginning of the process. ⁓ And that means understand, you know, across a few dimensions from, from

narrative and positioning to ideal customer profile and sort of use case applications by persona type to offer it to kind of sort of packaging and pricing get all of those things right and do it in a way that isn't going to require an army of product marketers or to hire out an external agency a brand agency or otherwise right and I saw a lot of the like in the early days of ad tech

A lot of companies, and I think you mentioned this in ⁓ the notes, was a lot of companies would put out a press release and a LinkedIn post, and that's what was equivalent to a product launch. a large percentage, and I share some of this in some of my commercial materials, of launches, think over 50 % of launches, fail to meet their goals, because they're not really setting in place the correct foundation and governance layer. ⁓

that

in exponentially faster time than you've ever been able to do in my career or anybody that we know's career, right? And that's with the help of AI, right? And if you can feed AI real-time market information, real-time competitive information, all of your product information from collateral to roadmap to specs, even CRM data, you can start to leverage the power of that predictive intelligence to ⁓ do scenario plans to test how is this going to resonate based on the competitive

Naila (18:43)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (18:46)
that based on the market realities with this particular buyer versus this type of buyer, it could be industry category, it could be persona. That type of power is something that oftentimes the product teams, maybe the product marketing teams would just sort of guess at, say we think this is gonna be the buyer, and then they start to test and learn.

around product market fit, what, know, somebody from ⁓ a woman named Sarah Martinez, who's the chief commercial officer of a company called Tracer said to me ⁓ after a communication around high signals, she said, product marketing has always been a people and a process bottleneck. And I thought that makes a lot of sense and, adding automation to the testing and learning process so that you're going to market with something that's been battle tested against digital simulated focus groups, you know,

where it's going to interrogate your assumptions and come back with recommendations that are really powerful.

Naila (19:36)
Hmm.

Quinn (19:37)
Yeah.

Naila (19:39)
Hmm.

Quinn (19:40)
We just finished up a video with Nielsen IQ. Kenny, the head of marketing for North America, was charged with creating a launch video for their new Agentech tool. So what Nielsen did is they created a GPT based on like 30 years of

household data. then so then they created individual agents that could respond to queries. So one of the things we were looking to promote was the beauty products ⁓ or alcoholic fizzy seltzer drinks. And so you could go in and say, you know, to a particular agent, what do you find desirable in ⁓

you know, seltzers, you know, and the response was, you know, I like clean packaging. I like unusual flavors. When I, you know, share this at a party, I want my guests to be impressed. I'm willing to pay a little bit more for something that looks higher end. And then so Nielsen created some fake products based on the Celsius brand, but they just changed the name to

something else, I can't remember what it is at the moment. And so they created seven designs and they tested those designs against ⁓ their custom GPT. And so now they've opened this up for their clients to be able to do the same thing. And so you're able to get that market research based on Nielsen's, know, thousands and thousands of, you know,

pages of data over the past 30 years. And so I think what's different and unique about that is that, you know, at the time, that household data was the gold standard of, you know, that panel data was the gold standard. And today it's like now they've created an engine around that so that you can query 30 years worth of information and get a real time response. It's pretty darn cool stuff and sounds a lot like what you've been working on.

Brett House (22:03)
Yeah, I for a consumer use case, yeah. And the engine behind the launch accelerator has a B2C use cases that we don't support, but we support all the B2B use cases. It's exactly, it's in a way that you create, it's...

Quinn (22:05)
Yes.

Yeah, tell us more about the launch

accelerator because some of the stats you gave me like 69 % of buyer see inconsistencies across commercial teams, 73 % punish irrelevant GTM in real time, half of all launches miss targets. That sounds bad to me.

Brett House (22:32)
Yeah, yeah. I think what I summed that all up into is go-to-market compression, right? And right now you're seeing a lot of... ⁓

you know, people are not only the decision cycles shrinking ⁓ and your competitors that are are tech forward are starting to shorten their decision ⁓ cycles. Like it's just a perfect example of this is OpenAI responded to ⁓ Anthropix. I think it was Claude 4.6 Claude code 4.6 with an immediate ⁓ announcement to market within 24 hours of the announcement that came from Claude. And that is real time predictive intelligence. That's that's some

Quinn (23:00)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (23:11)
getting slipped a sales deck that they saw one of the anthropic people gave to a client, which would in the traditional would take months. But that type of responsiveness is the speed of tech. And unfortunately, the speed of people isn't quite at the speed of tech. And so to me, that's what we're kind of solving for. How do you actually compress the strategic decisioning? Ensure that you're testing it against, to your point,

Quinn (23:14)
Yep.

Right.

Brett House (23:41)
simulated or synthetic in a sense data, right? It could be synthetic focus groups synthetic buyer profiles We're prototyping this right now for a couple of clients in for high signals itself and the outputs are tremendous in terms of how Quickly you can get to basically scientific level Quality, so there's a quality component. There's a velocity component, right and and you're you're really de-risking

Quinn (23:44)
Yes.

Brett House (24:11)
your product launch event, or your company pivot, you're making a pivot market. Because you know that this is going to have a huge potential impact on... ⁓

revenue ⁓ on your board's perception of you, on the public's perception of you, of clients' perception. So I think those three things, it's sort of like the quality of the launch that you can go to market without sort of, in a very nuanced way, the velocity in which you can turn these things around. And then at the end of the day, that's gonna have an impact. It's gonna have an impact on both the costs associated with typically doing this, hiring teams, hiring agencies to come in and work for months, consulting firms that spend tens of thousands of

to provide a recommendation that's not particularly actionable, right? To me, that's where the competitive set, and you see it with OpenAI and Anthropic, is really gonna come in and eat your lunch if you're not ⁓ really transforming your own business with some of these capabilities.

Naila (24:58)
Mm.

Quinn (25:09)
Wow. Well, I think he's definitely a go ahead. Go ahead, Naila.

Naila (25:09)
That's exactly it.

No, I was just going to say, we're a small business. Like I'm a small business providing services. And I'm now sitting here listening to you. like, my God, what do I need to do next? This virtual CFO seems really good for me because I need one, you know? So I think at the end of this conversation, I might have a plan, hopefully, on how I can bring my products to market or services to market.

Brett House (25:30)
Yeah.

Yeah.

You have to sign up for a Claude Pro account and start leveraging some of those agentic team build capabilities, right? That's ⁓ super powerful. And it's allowing non-technical people to do stuff at a speed and quality that, ⁓ know, Sam Altman was quoted as saying what there's going to be a single person billion dollar business in the next like three to five years. And think about that. Like, how is that possible? So I wanted to really, when I thought of

Naila (26:03)
Hmm.

Brett House (26:10)
high signals, I'm like I could stay at sort of a traditional ⁓ monolithic B2B SaaS company ⁓ that's under a ton of threat from the market, right? And just SaaS companies in general are being threatened because of AI and agent capabilities and some other things. And I think there's gonna be a tidal wave of companies that need to pivot.

Naila (26:29)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (26:36)
And they need to pivot fast and they need to train their organizations on how to effectively speak to these things to deliver value to their end customers. And you just can't do this with a team of three product marketers and some demand gen people and et cetera. And I've noticed that there's a lot of breakage. If you don't get the beginning part right, you don't really have a replicatable system. Your product launches end up being really just campaigns.

Naila (26:59)
Mm.

Brett House (27:03)
They're not like a systemic approach that's always learning and always on and always updating, right? ⁓ Because that type of information is critical. What happens if you have a new emerging category threat that's gonna eat into your market share for a relatively successful product launch that you just did? How do you respond to that in real time, in the time of tech? And oftentimes it takes teams six months to figure something out, right? Before they get anything to market. And so that's what we're trying to solve for.

Naila (27:25)
Mm.

Quinn (27:29)
Yeah.

Awesome. You want to tell us a little bit about your launch readiness diagnostic?

Naila (27:33)
Amazing.

Brett House (27:38)
Sure, we track eight dimensions ⁓ across sort of what I think of our core and this comes from my ⁓ 25, I'm stop counting eventually, the 25 year experience that I have to go to market product launches. I can't go any more than 25, right? Like, what's the second to 30? Yeah, well, you don't wanna say it though, you just say 25 and you stop there. 20 on LinkedIn, 20 on LinkedIn. No, so yeah, so we have a launch readiness diagnostic that we provide to our clients.

Naila (27:50)
Yeah.

you

Quinn (27:56)
I'm at 30.

Hey, I'm proud of it.

Naila (28:01)
You

Brett House (28:08)
that looks at eight dimensions. it's sort of market narrative and positioning, ⁓ ICP and sort of use case clarity. And it ranks these things on five, like a five dimensional scale, offer package pricing, product readiness and reliability, operating model and governance, field enablement readiness, launch orchestration and execution plan, and then a measurement and feedback loop. And so we're asking very specific questions that say, hey, how comfortable, how confident are you in these particular areas?

we give a specific example so they know when I'm talking about market narrative positioning, this is how it's being defined in the survey. And we do this across functions. So across the product teams, the marketing teams, the sales teams, and the customer success or account management teams, and then some of the executive stakeholders to gather a kind of an objective view of how ready they really are, right? And we use that lead score, that launch, I'm sorry, that launch readiness score ⁓ to basically

figure

out the complexity of the product as well as the prioritization of the solution that we're going to deliver. And so we'll dive into certain areas if we realize they're particularly strong in certain areas and not strong in others. And that helps us adjust literally how we price the initial strategic playbook that we deliver to clients. yeah, so that's kind of the genesis of that was to really be kind of an informed objective

Naila (29:30)
Interesting.

Brett House (29:38)
quantitative and qualitative measure. We also go in as consultants, sort of think of us as like productized consultants to ask questions of the client and to gather some additional inputs. All of this stuff gets fed into our launch accelerator ⁓ to help it decision and start to scenario plan against how they should, ⁓ what kind of plays they should run across some of the same categories.

Quinn (30:01)
Yeah, kind of reminds me of the old

Clout score, you know, but in terms of product launch readiness, where Clout was like, what is your like, what is the influence you have in social media?

Brett House (30:10)
Yeah, yeah. What was the conster exactly?

yeah. Yeah.

Naila (30:21)
Mmm.

Quinn (30:22)
Yeah, I

think that's gone away, but that was a fad. Well, we went a little bit long in this segment. Do you want to go around the room?

Naila (30:25)
So this is, I know, yes,

we do want to go around the room. I was going to come back to whenever you talk about your companies and the solutions that you have, it goes for any size business, right? It could be a small business or it could be a big business.

Brett House (30:44)
Yeah, that's an ICP question. Ideal customer profile. Yeah, we typically are not dealing with ideal customer profile.

Quinn (30:49)
What's ICP?

OK.

Brett House (30:52)
⁓ Yeah, and we typically ⁓ focus on companies that are a little bit ⁓ beyond sort of early, super early stage with, you know, founder and one or two employees like where we are. But it's the 30 million dollar companies that are trying to scale to 50, 70. And then we go all the way up to kind of large mid-market, which could be a four or five hundred million dollar business that is maybe doing a pivot or has a specific product launch. They may be SaaS going, starting to adopt agentic AI.

Quinn (31:08)
Gotcha.

Brett House (31:22)
and they need to train their organization. So it's not limited to the very small. But I think once you get into enterprise, you're dealing with a much greater level of scale and complexity.

Naila (31:31)
Okay.

Quinn (31:32)
Yeah, that's right.

Naila (31:33)
Okay.

Quinn (31:35)
Yes, absolutely. I like that target audience. mean, that's really kind of where Nyla and I are at. What's your biggest client? Nyla? No, Nyla.

Naila (31:36)
Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, ICP.

Brett House (31:46)
me? ⁓ yeah,

sorry.

Naila (31:48)
⁓ my biggest client is a mine, it's a mining company. And currently one of the comms projects that we're supporting is around embedding and getting the whole business to understand the AI and the strategy of AI. So yeah, that's my biggest, and we do a lot of other stuff, but yeah, that's my biggest client right now. Yeah. Quit.

Quinn (31:50)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (31:53)
Interesting.

Yeah, ⁓

there's a lot of AI education plays. I just got off of the guy named Zeve Wexler that runs a company that does a lot of AI education. We have someone contributing to Signal and Noise, Krish Raja that does a lot of that because that readiness and being able to equip your teams where teams will say, I use AI, I can use AI. Oftentimes, especially with a mining company, you might have to start with the simplest of use cases. You can double, you can 2X, 3X, 4X your output in this particular area.

Naila (32:15)
Mm-hmm

Yes.

Quinn (32:32)
You

Brett House (32:41)
or stop doing these repetitive tasks with this basic first step before you get into some of the more advanced use cases. ⁓ But that's what I always encourage people to do is just get involved. You prompting a free version of ChatGPT is not effective use of AI. yeah, that is...

Naila (32:49)
Yep. Yep.

Quinn (32:59)
No, it's not. That's that's Bobo stuff, you

Naila (33:00)
Thank you.

Quinn (33:03)
know?

Brett House (33:04)
Yeah, that's your

first step. It's like setting up deep learning exercises. And it's not incredibly difficult. can set up, but you do have to pay for the pro versions of these LLMs, like Chat2PG Pro or Clog. And just start doing some deep learning exercises where you're saying, hey, I want you to do, you describe a complex task with multiple steps. And then the whole agent, how do you create an agent is just the next step of that.

you're completing these six steps and you're gonna do this repeatedly and you're gonna provide this output to me on a daily basis, right? And once you train it and optimize it and provide the right amount of material, it's incredible what it will do. And the accuracy and quality of the outputs is just mind blowing, mind blowing.

Naila (33:50)
I know. Yes. Quinn,

Quinn (33:54)
It

is.

Naila (33:55)
I'm learning from Quinn, but now that I'm on this project, I'm learning more, a lot more. So yeah, let's see how it goes. I don't know. I get scared, but I'm not scared kind of. Yeah. Are we, are we still around the room? Because we had a question for Brett around, you're currently in the middle of a launch as well with your, with your company.

Quinn (34:09)
Yeah, we gotta do around the room.

Naila (34:18)
You've got high signals, you're piloting with clients and you just launched a media company and we're talking about readiness. So how does your own launch score right now in your...

Quinn (34:31)
Mmm.

Brett House (34:32)
Yeah, so I'll give people the criteria. So the launch readiness,

the gymnastics scores ⁓ five levels. So it's a one to five and one being not ready, two being foundational, three developing, four ready and five highly ready. And then we measure that across those eight dimensions that I talked about. Nobody's gonna be perfect across all of them. My aggregate score, I actually ran this for myself because I used my own company as a pilot into our software to see how the scenario planning would.

Naila (34:50)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (35:02)
suggestions and recommendations for everything I'm doing in market. And I came back with a 2.45, which I'm a startup, right? So I came back with a foundational

Quinn (35:08)
God.

Yeah.

Naila (35:16)
Okay?

Brett House (35:17)
borderline developing ⁓ and you know, but I had to be honest. had to, couldn't be biased in what I was ranking like, you know, because the questions are specific and it's like, well, be honest with yourself. And as a startup that's, you know, launched in December, right? ⁓ You know, you would understand that I would be at a developing stage right now. And so it does, it does give you sort of an end in sight to say, Hey, here are the areas that I need to improve. And I've started to work on some of those and actually prototype

Quinn (35:22)
Yeah, you're right.

Brett House (35:46)
this

the launch accelerator there's already not minor pivots and tweaks and tunes to how I'm ⁓ bringing this to market. I just got off with a lead ⁓ generation service that I'm working with.

And they're like, your first message going out in LinkedIn isn't quite hitting, right? And so you look at, well, what is that message saying? Is it not meeting the sort of needs as like kind of almost an elevator pitch of the people that I'm trying to communicate with? How do I tweak that and make it just super easy to understand before you get into the complex details? And so that's the kind of stuff that you have to continuously pivot and optimize. And that's the process I'm in right now.

Naila (36:21)
Mm.

Quinn (36:28)
I look forward to you ⁓ next time we talk to you. You'll be at a 3.5.

Naila (36:32)
Quinn, what's happening with you? Are you launching anything?

Brett House (36:32)
Yeah, yeah, let's go.

Quinn (36:34)
Alright, so yes.

Always, always. Still working on my Brandlove workshop, which is a two-hour workshop for small to medium-sized businesses to help evaluate what's working, what's not, get insights, and then you'll get a proposal. So that's our lead product now for companies that want to work with Harrington Design. ⁓

It's replaced the old fashioned proposal process where you spend a day or two putting a proposal together and you never hear back. So it's like a $1,500 workshop. And for small to medium sized business, it's an incredible value. And if they balk at that price, it's like, well then you definitely are not gonna be qualified to work with us because that's just a drop in the bucket. And so we've had some success with it. ⁓

Naila (37:27)
Yeah.

Quinn (37:33)
We're working on a whole new strategy that's gonna be a lot of fun and I hope it's gonna roll out in the next couple weeks.

Naila (37:41)
Nice.

Quinn (37:42)
Yeah. Also, I'm going to London.

Naila (37:45)
Yay. Exactly. That's what I'm busy planning right now. So if you're doing around the room.

Quinn (37:48)
Yep. Yeah, Nila's planning the

London trip. You know, for people who've watched the podcast before, but maybe it's just your first episode, Nila and I met about 10 years ago in London. I shot her for an interview for Nielsen. We talked for like maybe a half an hour and then that was it. And then I reached out to her like, I don't know, 10 years later and she actually responded.

I sent her a little clip of her 10 years ago and she's like, oh my God, I was so young. But yeah, we became friends and launched this podcast and now I'm going to going back to London to visit with her. We're going to record a live podcast there, do a photo shoot, have some good meals, you know, a little adventure.

Naila (38:22)
I swear, literally.

Brett House (38:37)
You need to go

get her a good curry.

Naila (38:40)
That is the plan. So she's going to come to my house. So why take her to a restaurant when I can bring her home for a good Pakistani meal, right? So that's on the plan. Yeah.

Brett House (38:42)
You gotta get a good curry.

Yeah, nice.

Quinn (38:50)
Yeah, her mom's gonna be

cooking and I'm so excited to get the recipes that Naila's been promising me for the last, you know, six months.

Brett House (38:52)
Yeah.

Naila (38:55)
Listen.

Brett House (38:56)
Yeah, the

I was we were there a little while ago. It was a year and a half ago, two years ago. And I brought my my two boys when that's 18 and 16. So he was I think they were 16 and 14 at this point. We did a London Paris trip. And I just remember I've always I've been to London many, times, but I always recollect, you know, 20, 25 years ago, you know, and how bad the food was. And so I often talk to the English folk about about that. they're like, well, yeah, that's because the English are

the cooking anymore.

Quinn (39:28)
hahahaha

Naila (39:30)
could be this.

Brett House (39:30)
⁓

I hope that's not controversial, but it's because there's huge immigrant populations that have come in and the people that are doing, whether they're West Indian or Pakistani or Indian or ⁓ French, in Taiwanese, I went to a terrific Taiwanese gastropub. ⁓ yeah, and like I've had terrific Spanish food. So they're bringing all of this other cuisine that sort of moved you from fish and chips and you know. ⁓

Naila (39:46)
my God, yes.

I do love my fish

and chips.

Brett House (40:00)
beef roasts.

Quinn (40:01)
They boil

potatoes, you know.

Brett House (40:01)
Yeah. And it used to be like fish and chips and shawarma. That was like the two options. ⁓

Naila (40:06)
still

Quinn (40:07)
wow. Wow.

Naila (40:09)
sure am I still there for people who are drinking late ⁓ fish and chips is definitely there if you're going to a pub curries is the number one I think nearly I think the number one preferred food so yeah there's but we've got some great

Brett House (40:12)
Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's the national food. Didn't curry get ranked

like the national food of England, which is just so interesting. ⁓ Yeah, so yeah, the food scene in London has just, in the last 25 years, exploded. It's much more like a New York City, like the best food scenes in the world are New York City, ⁓ London, and Tokyo. I don't even think Paris.

Naila (40:28)
crazy yeah

Quinn (40:28)
Wow, that's awesome.

Naila (40:33)
amazing.

Brett House (40:45)
I think Paris Pales in comparison, I think it's because of their mono focus on Parisian and French food, which is fine. But it's hard to go, you can't really broaden your aperture too much. You get some Bedouin foods, there's some good Vietnamese, there's just not a lot of, it's like, hey, it's great to have French food over and over. mean, how many times can you eat foie gras? But the dynamic mix of cultural influences in England and in London and New York is what gets me excited.

Quinn (40:52)
Right.

Naila (40:52)
Mm-hmm.

Quinn (41:15)
Cool. What about you, Nailah? What are you up to?

Naila (41:15)
Now you're getting Quinn excited.

Planning your trip. That's what I'm up to and far. Yes, please.

Quinn (41:21)
Okay, all right, enough said. Let's move to the near section. let me introduce Brett first, properly introduce him.

Brett House (41:21)
Hahaha!

Quinn (41:29)
Brett House is the founder of High Signals, a GTM intelligence company built on a simple radical premise. Most product launches fail not because the product is bad, but because the organization launching it isn't actually ready.

His launch readiness diagnostic benchmarks readiness across eight dimensions before a company commits budget and credibility to a launch event. His launch accelerator uses agentic AI powered scenario planning and buyer simulation to pressure test narrative, ICP targeting, which is ideal customer profile, competitive plays and field enablement and delivers a full launch playbook in as few as three weeks. He also just launched signal and noise AI.

a new media company making him, at this precise moment, both the expert on launch readiness and a founder mid-launch. That irony is intentional and it's gold. Before all of this, VP at Nielsen, where Quinn and Brett first crossed paths when HTCO helped launch Nielsen's digital marketing platform, one of the pivotal moments in the industry shift from panel-based guessing to precision audience intelligence.

Nielsen, Newstar, Media, Radar, Exolate. I mean, you've worked with so many different companies and Squork AI, ⁓ know, the client list isn't, you know, Brett's name drop. It's a timeline of how media measurement has evolved. He has been building high signals and stealth. This may be one of his first public conversations about it. ⁓ So yeah, I mean, it's funny.

Naila (43:05)
That's a lot.

Quinn (43:09)
Brett will disappear for a couple years and then he'll ping me on LinkedIn and ⁓ When I transitioned to Quinn ⁓ He even made the extra effort to say Did you used to be Jeffrey and I'm like, yeah, and he's like, ⁓ okay So then he put two then he put two and two together Yeah, that was he put two and two together and then you know, ⁓ you know next thing, you know, we're working on another thing together, so

Naila (43:26)
I

Brett House (43:28)
That was very early on.

I don't think you updated your, like, there's no updates outside of just the name. Right? think I've even been, yeah, yeah.

Naila (43:38)
This is amazing.

Quinn (43:42)
Yeah, it was a very soft launch. was just like, you know, it's here. So deal

with it. ⁓ All right.

Naila (43:50)
Didn't have the launch playbook

did Jaquin?

Brett House (43:52)
Yeah,

yeah. The launch reddit in his playbook.

Quinn (43:53)
No, just I made one post on Instagram

and it says, call me Quinn. And it had my new picture, you know, with the pink and all that. And that was my that was my launch. So. All right. So should we move to the near section?

Naila (44:05)
guys. Nair!

Yeah, so while we're talking about...

Brett House (44:11)
Apparently there's going to be

some post-production in this conversation. There's going to be some post-production work.

Quinn (44:16)
⁓ yeah, there always is. So

I insert sounds and all these different things. What's my near sound? Let me see if I can find that.

Brett House (44:21)
Yeah.

Naila (44:32)
wedding.

Brett House (44:37)
I need to some sound effects on signal of noise.

Quinn (44:40)
I will help you with that.

Brett House (44:43)
Nice!

Quinn (44:44)
Yeah.

All right. Go ahead, Nilo. That's your cue.

Naila (44:47)
Yeah.

So did we, did we talk about the, launch about the playbook launch that you're planning to launch in three weeks? Is that it? Is it still part of the plan?

Brett House (44:59)
Are we talking about signal and noise? I'm sorry, are we talking about high signals?

Naila (45:04)
High, is it high signals?

Quinn (45:07)
There's two companies, signal and noise and high signals.

Naila (45:08)
Yes.

Brett House (45:11)
And so Signal & Noise is the media company.

Naila (45:11)
so which one is got?

Brett House (45:15)
⁓ And I can tell you a little bit about that and lot and high signals in the launch accelerator have already effectively launched to market and so right now I'm in sort of heavy business development partner mode to kind of build that out I'm also piloting the solution with a couple of clients as well as my own Brand because I've spent a lot of time building out kind of all of my own core go-to-market ⁓ Things from field from enablement field enablement me being the field although I'm starting to build out a team around that

Naila (45:23)
Yes.

Yes. Yeah.

Brett House (45:45)
And so, you know, everything from packaging to pricing strategy to narrative and positioning to competitive plays, who are we competing with, what category are we in? So all of that work has been done. And now I'm sort of tweaking and optimizing that using my own, basically eating my own dog food, using my own tech to really improve. In fact, I'm going through, I went through one document, which was an output from the tech that was 35 pages long. And it was the most succinct 35 pages I've ever read. And it has everything from objection,

management to persona plays if I'm talking to a CMO versus a product leader. ⁓ So that sort of stuff is sort of mid flight right now and we're piloting with additional clients. And so I'm starting to have a ton of conversations to take.

Quinn (46:30)
I got some

advice from one of my ⁓ longtime colleagues about building this podcast and he said, essentially, it's like building the airplane while you're flying it. And that sounds a lot like, yeah, it sounds a lot like what you're engaging in. You know, with the rationale that says, you know, it's iterative, launch and then improve.

Brett House (46:42)
Yes. I've heard that more than once.

Naila (46:43)
Right.

Brett House (46:57)
Yeah, yeah, and you have to have a certain amount of...

I think discipline around that initial launch and I probably am a little obsessive compulsive about it in terms of the amount of, mean, hundreds of pages of material that I've created at PNLs and in business strategies and competitive analysis and, and in sequences, sales conversations, objection management. And I've done that all over like two or three months. ⁓ you know, the power of AI helps you to coach and get through some of this stuff. Now I took all that raw material and fed it.

Quinn (47:03)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (47:31)
into our launch accelerator engine to say, is this on? Where am I missing? Where do I need to optimize? And so I think that's the process of being more scientific, you because you could put your finger to the wind around product market fit around, you know, product, we like to say product founder fit, right? And that's where I really leaned into this area because, you know, I've been in the go to market and product strategy and commercialization sort of space for 25 years.

Naila (47:51)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (48:01)
So to me it was a natural extension of that leveraging some of these incredible capabilities that we've got at our fingertips right now.

Naila (48:10)
Yeah, you talk about, you went out, I was at uni, leave off for 15 years, but still in communications. And we're talking, I left in 2017 and the words they would use speed to market, speed to market, speed to market and how we get there. You need to have a founder's mindset because why are you waiting 10 months for something? Why don't you launch it and then see what happened? You know, so this is all coming back and we didn't have what we have now, right?

Brett House (48:36)
Yep,

yep. it's sort of, we call it, we call it the gimo at MediaRadar. Good enough, move on. But what is good enough has been redefined, right? The good enough that's coming from people and teams and junior associates and things like that, manually is not good enough in today's world, right? You will be so quickly outpaced. And again, it comes down to how are you coaching, training, setting up agents in AI to be able

Naila (48:41)
GIMO.

Yeah.

Quinn (48:48)
Right.

Brett House (49:06)
to basically increase your compute capacity as an individual. It's a multiplier effect. In one of my buddies in the industry, he's a founder of a company called StealthX, name is Drew Burdick, said that it's not just about 10xing yourself, it's about 30, 40, 50, 100xing you. I'm probably 20 or 30.

Naila (49:11)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (49:36)
you know, he's a little bit further along on that journey, but it really is a compounding effect and it's incredibly how powerful it was. And so that's when I said to myself, this is an opportunity for me to jump on this bandwagon, to build something and to move quickly. So that's really the impetus behind launching high signals.

Naila (49:56)
I know you talk about SAS and I seriously don't know. I've heard what SAS is, but I don't know what that means. And B2B, software as a service. And my friend keeps talking about this. So she's a finance person who has now got into AI and all of this and is building platforms and talking about SAS. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Should I just invest instead? But I have no idea what these...

Quinn (50:05)
Software as a service.

Naila (50:25)
these mean? what these, why did you get into this segment? Like, is it because of your 20 something years experience? Did you see a future? Did you?

Brett House (50:36)
Yeah, because

I've been in this sort of technology, but I had a startup back in 2000, literally out of it.

in New York City, in Stuyvesant, New York City, where we were early. And Software as a Service is just a platform that you're providing to some end user that typically is charged on a ⁓ seat model. There's sometimes flat rate models. Log in and they can access dashboards and other capabilities for a specific end purpose, right? ⁓ You know, think of it as your classic, you you log into HubSpot, you log into Salesforce. Those are all traditional SaaS platforms.

Naila (50:57)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (51:13)
Those platforms, you know, oftentimes ⁓ have become larger over time, kind of monolithic in the way that they're structured and size, super complex if you've ever used like a CRM like Salesforce, incredibly difficult. It takes sort of power users to be able to manipulate. So you have to have a Salesforce administrator, know, within your organization because of the complexity of the platform that nobody but almost an internal product leader that

is specialized in Salesforce can manage. Those days are ending ⁓ with agentic workflows. ⁓ know, that guy that I mentioned at SelfDex, he's like, don't log into platforms anymore. Everything he's got set up agentically with through APIs, which are just direct connections into all of his platforms. And he's literally conversationally communicating with an agent to access data and information that lives in a bunch of different places. Right. And so that's the power of where you don't even need

your data unified into kind of a data warehouse type of environment. It can live in different platforms as long as your agent has direct connectors into those various platforms. You never have to go into a traditional UI again. You can ask the agent to run analyses, to deliver reports, to build dashboards. know, not everybody in the world's at that speed. I this is a developer that I'm talking about.

and founded like a development company. But it's becoming that much easier to access for the average person. And one thing that he said that really resonated with me, he goes, the new coding language in the world, it's called English, right? So I said, well, what about Mandarin? I mean, is it Mandarin? Do think they're coding in English? I think they're probably coding in Mandarin.

Naila (52:59)
You

You

Yeah.

Quinn (53:08)
Human language, that's the new coding.

Brett House (53:10)
Yeah, it's a conversational human interface that there's code behind it and the agent is sort of interpreting what you're saying and then the build from a code perspective on behalf of you. And to me, that is just going to democratize product development. ⁓ And it's also going to change how we do our jobs. ⁓ Yeah. So I think it's just a fascinating space to be involved in.

Naila (53:31)
Mm-hmm.

Quinn (53:38)
Naila, if I could jump in here just real quick. I know this is your segment. ⁓ So getting back to that video that we created for Nielsen about the future of consumerism. ⁓ will be, mean, chat GPT shopping has already launched, but in the near future, we will have agents that act on behalf of us that...

Naila (53:39)
Yeah, please. No, no.

Quinn (54:06)
take care of our everyday commodities, our groceries, our household needs, shopping. so doing that in person, you won't go to the Target app. You'll put in a list of, or actually the agent already knows what you eat, how much food is in your fridge, when you're gonna need replacements, and they'll go out and shop for you, find the best prices. Put ⁓ items from,

Walmart, Target, know, ⁓ Best Buy, all in a cart, and then deliver it to you automatically, either via like a drone or a robot. so, it is, it is, and this video, I'll have to send it to you ⁓ once it's cleared, because I think it's still internal. ⁓ But we created the whole video with AI, and it's pretty fucking amazing.

Brett House (54:48)
That's a gyptic commerce for you. We talked about that in a podcast that I was...

Naila (54:50)
Mm.

Bleep.

Quinn (55:06)
I

I have to tell you, when we started this project in December, we were fumbling around with Geo, ⁓ V.3, ⁓ Sora, some of these other wrapper platforms, trying to figure out how do we create a continuous character. And so the first go around, we really couldn't do it. And then we ended up updating the video.

a month and a half later and the technology had already improved to the point where it's like, here's how to create a consistent character. You can have multiple characters that interact ⁓ and they'll always wear the same clothes or have the same hairstyle. You're not gonna get all these deviations and such. so ⁓ that's one thing that is in our radar in the near future is that the

The value of live production is diminishing almost to the point where the software has gotten so good. Like a lot of times I can't tell what's real. And I'm a professional videographer and photographer and I look at this and I'm like.

Naila (56:15)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (56:15)
Yeah, did.

You've got a good radar for AI slot.

Quinn (56:23)
Yeah,

mean, it's beyond good enough move on. It's like, holy shit, this is a revolution and looks like you're bringing the same thing, you know, ⁓ in your space, which is exciting.

Naila (56:29)
you

Brett House (56:36)
Yeah, yeah, it's your decisioning abilities and your ability to version and test and learn.

Quinn (56:39)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (56:42)
at a speed and leveraging these data sets, right, that are just exponentially beyond what an individual or even a team or an agency could do. It just helps you really make science-based decisions rapidly and test and learn a bunch of different, you the optionality just increases tremendously. And then it comes to you, think of the old world, the old agency world where they're like, we'll go back, we'll come back to you in three months or two months with three options.

Naila (56:58)
Mm.

Quinn (57:10)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brett House (57:13)
And the teams have gone off and they've done their workshops and their brainstorming sessions and they've come up with creative options. Imagine if you could take that and multiply that process, that human led process by 10,000 and come back in 48 hours. ⁓ That's the capability that we're seeing. We're able to turn around ⁓ decisioning. You have to feed it the right information. It has to have the right learning sets. ⁓

Naila (57:29)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (57:39)
It's still, once you feed it the right information, you connect this to some real-time data feeds for us. That's the type, that's the scale that we're talking about, which does increase, it's a velocity play, but it's also a quality play. And I've been blown away by some of the outputs of like, oh, I should be pivoting in that direction, or I should be packaging my product in this way, and I didn't think about it that way, because I hadn't analyzed the 500 different options there were.

Right? Because as a human, I just wasn't capable of doing that, right? Through some Google searches. So.

Naila (58:11)
you

Quinn (58:12)
All right, have

time for one more question in near and then we got to go around the room.

Naila (58:17)
⁓ okay, I was gonna go to Across the Pond, but...

Quinn (58:20)
So I crossed the pond, that's what I meant to say.

Naila (58:23)
Yeah. Okay. So it's about giving advice to other people. So if a company was launching ⁓ in 12 weeks and they're doing a major launch and they're listening to this podcast, what's the question they should be asking themselves that they almost certainly haven't asked yet? So they're about to launch in 12 weeks.

Quinn (58:44)
That's the same question I wanted to hear

an answer to, so well done.

Naila (58:48)
Okay, cool. Okay, cool.

Brett House (58:48)
that they

have not, so the question that they have not asked themselves yet. Right?

Naila (58:55)
Yes, yes, and they're about to

launch in 12 weeks.

Brett House (59:00)
Yeah, yeah, and it might be ⁓ the five dimensional chess. I mean, you could say a lot of stuff around other stuff, but it's that sort of ⁓ that five dimensional chess of knowing ⁓ how your competition is going to weaponize their own ⁓ product launches, either in response to what you're doing or ⁓ new entrants to the market. And can you have some sort of predictive read of where that's

Naila (59:16)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (59:27)
you know, what's going to happen from a competitive response perspective, as well as a new entrant perspective, because if they're not, ⁓ once they can't be planning in a vacuum, right? And you really do need to be just like that example that I gave earlier around Anthropic and OpenAI responding within 24 hours, right? Anthropic or OpenAI was ahead of the curve in terms of competitive response. And if they didn't do that, they would potentially lose market share.

right, and they would lose, ⁓ share a voice sort of in the media ecosystem just for being out there. So I think it's that ability to predict ⁓ how your competition

is going to respond. ⁓ And then also, do you speak to, if they're not thinking yet about how they speak differently in a much more nuanced way across the different buying groups within their clients that they're targeting, right? Whether it's product or rev ops or the CMO, right? Each one of those audiences might be thinking of you and your set of solutions in a different way. They have different psychographics, different use cases and needs. ⁓

different functional requirements and they might have a different competitive set in mind when they're considering you versus a competitor. So you really need to know at a very nuanced level because oftentimes product launches are just spray and pray. ⁓ People talk about ABM, that's campaign thinking. That's not how am I...

Quinn (1:01:01)
accounts based management.

Brett House (1:01:03)
Yeah, account-based marketing, right? Which is like, I'm going at each account with a very specific message. Great in theory, but oftentimes fails in practice, right? So I'm going at Unilever, but now I'm going at Unilever and you can start to slice and dice that in a super nuanced way of like, I'm going after the marketing team and this specific profile within the marketing team. But the buyer group also includes the procurement team and the rev ops team. And they've got these specific profiles. How do you actually

Quinn (1:01:05)
Marketing, sorry.

Naila (1:01:10)
count please.

Brett House (1:01:33)
nuance, your position, your package, your approach to those specific audiences.

Quinn (1:01:39)
am really interested

in this because this is what Naila and I do. We have our ideal customer profile and we look within a company to see who do we reach them and how do we reach them with the right message. mean, that's basically how I've managed to stay afloat for 25 years because like

a big company like Nielsen or CoreLogic, ⁓ which I picked up last year. ⁓ There's multiple business units within. so take CoreLogic, for example, I was working with the head of mortgage ⁓ to create a series of ⁓ videos for them. And then I got intro to the insurance division, which is basically like another giant company that

is within CoreLogic, now Kotality, they rebranded, but there's just as much business or more within the insurance business as there is in mortgage.

Brett House (1:02:48)
Yeah, and imagine if you could take your core deck, your core presentation that worked within team one and pop that into a learning engine, and this is what we can do with Launch Accelerator, and say adjust this for specifically the person I'm meeting. Not just the function, not just the industry category, it's the same industry category in this case, but you could say we're meeting a ⁓ CMO that is a male of this age group, this background, you can feed it all of the, basically the entire profile of that

Quinn (1:02:53)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Naila (1:03:04)
you

you

Brett House (1:03:18)
person and it will adjust some of your messaging within the deck to provide recommendations of hey you should probably start with slide you know this particular slide this is this is gonna be a conversation killer slide number two that type of recommendation stuff is at our fingertips and you just have to to be able to leverage it so that's some of what I'm trying to lean into that that that speed to decision and

Quinn (1:03:18)
Mm-hmm.

Naila (1:03:28)
Nice.

Quinn (1:03:40)
I don't know, maybe

Naila has a friends and family, maybe Brett has a friends and family discount.

Brett House (1:03:47)
For logic accelerator? Yeah.

Quinn (1:03:49)
For us.

Naila (1:03:51)
Hint hint!

Quinn (1:03:54)
dropping hard hints here. Okay, that was great. Do you want to go across the pond, Naila?

Naila (1:03:55)
Yeah. Okay.

Across the pond, yes, and I have 15. Let's go.

Quinn (1:04:02)
Yeah, hold on, let me hit the sound. ⁓

Naila (1:04:09)
Lovely. Okay. So across the pond, as you know, I'm, we do, I've got, I've literally got 14 minutes. ⁓ So yeah, I'm based in London, of course, and you're based in America. And I always like to know what's working, what's not working, similarities, differences between the two regions. So when it comes to launch failures, ⁓

Quinn (1:04:12)
We're going have to make this quick.

Okay, we'll cruise through this.

Naila (1:04:36)
Are there any differences between a European market and a North American market? We're not going into Latin American. But do you see any of those like failures or similarities in the failures? Is it cultural?

Brett House (1:04:51)
Yeah,

I think...

Yeah, there's a localization play obviously when you go to specific ⁓ countries, right? ⁓ You know, the Brits always would tell me, know, the presentation needs to be adjusted, right? It's way too salesy. It's way too over the top, kind of Yahoo American. ⁓ Not to mention the American English, right? So there is a nuance. That's a localization play. It's not just a language. Obviously, it's the same language, but it's more of a cultural adaptation of how you're

Naila (1:05:14)
You

Brett House (1:05:23)
speaking to market. ⁓ I get the sense that like direct response sort of like hard selling doesn't work particularly well in England because Americans like we have this kind of Yahoo cowboy spirit, you know, where we just come, you know, invading territories. ⁓ so so our language, our diction and the way we present sort of that. That's some of the feedback that I got just as a very nuanced way. But I would say fundamentally and then when you go to other countries like France or

Naila (1:05:36)
You

Quinn (1:05:48)
That's interesting.

Brett House (1:05:53)
Italy, I've noticed that there's ⁓ differences in terms of sequencing, messaging, ⁓ diction, obviously translation that comes into some different languages that you have to kind of be aware of. And there's some cultural inputs that I think can help ⁓ solve against that. That, you know, it's not just a translation play, it's a cultural ⁓ translation play, which is different than just a language translation play.

Naila (1:05:57)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Brett House (1:06:23)
So I think that's probably the most. And then I think you just have to look at, what are you releasing in a particular market? And what is the market reality? What's the buyer need state? What's the buyer need sophistication? Is it the same type of buying groups that buy this type of product, a software product, for example? Because different countries are different areas on the maturity curve, especially when it comes to high tech solutions. ⁓

Naila (1:06:23)
That's interesting.

Brett House (1:06:53)
Netherlands is very high on that scale and England's very high on that scale But when you get down to Italy not criticizing Italy You might be in a different place in terms of what they're who the competitors are in the space and how sophisticated they are So again, it comes down to that simple fact of how do you adjust your positioning in your language so that those specific audiences? Understand it ⁓

Naila (1:07:01)
Yeah.

Quinn (1:07:14)
I told you, Nala, he's a wealth of knowledge.

Naila (1:07:16)
I am, I wanna ask more questions, but we're running out of time. Like I was gonna go on to more. Yeah.

Quinn (1:07:21)
time. Well, we'll have

to save that for another episode and bring Brett back for season three. ⁓ Pretty much. ⁓ All right, let's move into the future. The future. All right, Brett, we're at the part of the show where I get to ask the questions I've been saving. You've got the tagline growth engineered. I want to know what that means in 10 years.

Brett House (1:07:27)
Is this a two episode series at this point?

Naila (1:07:28)
Yes. ⁓

Brett House (1:07:48)
In 10 years. Wow.

Quinn (1:07:49)
Yeah, this is crystal

ball time. mean, you are like the font of knowledge. I'm sure you've already, you know, have a 10 year plan in place.

Brett House (1:07:52)
Yeah.

Yeah, maybe a three year plan, but a 10 year plan is a whole nother. ⁓ Yeah, I think in 10 years, we're going to have, think quantum computing is going to be mainstream. ⁓ And quantum computing is going to, you think AI is fast right now with server farms, right? In the, the, in the sort of ⁓ all the infrastructure that we're building, you know, around the world. ⁓ Quantum computing is going to multiply that by ⁓ more, it's going to really change the face of computing. So that's.

Quinn (1:08:00)
Okay.

Brett House (1:08:28)
my prognostication in 10 years. are going to, I do think we will have... ⁓

know, energy and server farms and in space, I think it's going to take up a lot less space because quantum computing is going to be able to do incredibly heavy computation with much less hardware, ⁓ right, versus what we have today. So I think there's going to be a, you're going to see an even greater acceleration, right? You think the acceleration is, you know, people are talking about the risk to humanity and the future of earth and all these things. ⁓ In 10 years, in our lifetimes, we are going to see ⁓ that even accelerate even further.

Quinn (1:08:48)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (1:09:04)
beyond anything we could imagine. So, you know, how does that affect? I just think again, it's more of that compression decisioning power. I think the nature of work is going to change a little bit. You're going to see a lot of people moving, having to move up the value chain. And I always give it, I give an old example with England. And I say, remember when Margaret Thatcher, lover or hater, ⁓ came in, you know, along with Rommel Reagan of the United States, but she came in and she said, we need to shut down the coal mines, right? And it became a huge

Naila (1:09:14)
Yes.

Yeah

Brett House (1:09:34)
social disruption in England because thousands and thousands of people, potentially tens of thousands, lost their job because she was saying we need to move into the next phase of sort of industrial revolution and change and development and we need to let go of the old and move into the new. There's going to be some of that pain I think with AI and then...

the advent of quantum computing ⁓ is only going to accelerate some of that stuff. And so I think people are gonna have to quickly become ⁓ super educated with how they leverage this to compound their own effectiveness. And it may in effect give us a lot more leisure time, right? Yeah, so it's, yeah, hopefully, right? Where you've got stuff, do it, exactly, exactly.

Quinn (1:10:12)
Yeah. Yeah, when universal income comes around. All right. Last

Naila (1:10:13)
hopefully.

Hahaha

Quinn (1:10:23)
question ⁓ for you. And then we'll go into the rap. So Naila can eat. And this is more of a personal one. What does success look like for you? Not for high signals, not for the clients, but you personally?

What are you actually building towards?

Naila (1:10:44)
Nice.

Brett House (1:10:44)
That's

a great question. You know, I'm building towards... ⁓

Yeah, I'm building towards a ⁓ future where I've got sort of independence and control of my own destiny, which I think is one of the reasons why I had that sort of, it was the founder calling, which I'm not sure how much of a choice that was. think I had to move in this direction. And it was an effort to sort of reinvent myself, to get on what I see as a tsunami of change that's happening. It's a new industrial revolution, right? And I want to be at the...

Naila (1:11:08)
Mm-hmm.

Quinn (1:11:08)
Mm-hmm.

Brett House (1:11:20)
the front of that, riding the surfboard on the tsunami versus being completely smashed by it. ⁓ I've typically embraced change. To ⁓ embrace change and to have that sort of flexibility and don't be hardened and calcified in my old ways, I think to me is what ⁓ is a personal journey. It's a professional journey. It's a technological journey. ⁓ I've always been someone that's been

Naila (1:11:26)
Love it.

Brett House (1:11:50)
about always on, always learning. It really keeps me in my toes and it keeps me inspired to keep building what's next versus just sitting and being comfortable in a cubicle at a typical nine to five job. And I think to me that's what really gives me as hard as it is. And I heard this quote a long time ago that a startup and a founder, it's kind of like ⁓ chewing on glass while staring down an empty elevator shaft. There's this constant fear of death. heard another founder say that it's

like being on a pirate ship and walking out with pirates behind you, you're out on the plank, and you're looking down at ⁓ shark-filled infested waters, right? ⁓ So there's nowhere to go. You feel like you're under a ton of pressure. ⁓

Naila (1:12:24)
God.

Brett House (1:12:36)
It's it's fun and exhilarating and I think it's it's sort of necessities the mother of invention and to me That's where I really like it was like hey like I come up I always found that I've come up with my best Solutions when I'm under the most pressure. It's like I'm what why is all of this coming? ⁓ you know, I have a quote all that is good comes from pain

Quinn (1:12:57)
Hahaha

Naila (1:12:58)
⁓

no.

Brett House (1:13:00)
And it comes from, let me tell the audience what that means. It really comes from, I'm a cyclist, a road cyclist, so I get on one of those little crotch rocket road bikes, like the Tour de France bikes. ⁓ And you do realize that you learn the most when you have a painful experience. You're like, something is wrong, I need to optimize, I need to tweak my form or change my equipment. To me, that's kind of what startup's about. It's like you've got to tweak and tune and constantly optimize and it keeps you just,

Naila (1:13:04)
You

Brett House (1:13:30)
It just keeps me, there's a feeling of independence and really being alive that I embrace about it. As hard as it is.

Quinn (1:13:36)
I think that's a wonderful way to end this. also, Nihilus Baby is going absolutely berserk in the background. So we're going to have to go to the rap because this is real life. You know, this is real life.

Naila (1:13:36)
Nice.

Lovely. Wrap it up. Yeah.

Can you hear her?

Brett House (1:13:48)
Hahaha!

Naila (1:13:50)
Do you

Brett House (1:13:51)
Yeah.

Naila (1:13:52)
want to ask Brett the question about where we can find Herman?

Brett House (1:13:53)
We have families.

Quinn (1:14:00)
⁓ Yeah, okay, so ⁓ Brett for founder, CMO, GTM, ⁓ no, I'm not even gonna get into that. ⁓ Tell us where people can find you on the interwebs.

Naila (1:14:08)
Hahaha

Brett House (1:14:15)
On the interwebs you can find me at www.hysignals.com.

⁓ I'm also on LinkedIn. I post a ton on LinkedIn at both High Signals as well as Signal & Noise, my media company, is SignalAndNoise.ai, ⁓ also on LinkedIn. ⁓ Or you can reach me at Brett.house at HighSignals.com. But you'll certainly see me, if you follow me on LinkedIn, I post a lot of ⁓ others' thought leadership, a lot of executives talking about some of the biggest transformations happening in tech and advertising. So, certainly happy to connect.

Quinn (1:14:49)
Awesome.

Excellent. ⁓ So that wraps this episode of Now, Near, In the Future. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube. Follow us at Now, Near, Future on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, or visit nownearfuture.com.

Naila (1:14:52)
Great!

And if this one landed for you, meaning the episode, share it with whoever in your team is responsible for the next launch, consider it a gift or a warning.

Quinn (1:15:22)
Stay curious and keep dreaming.

Naila (1:15:24)
See you in the future!