Problem Solvers

Raj Mehra had it all: a personal reason to build, a hot new technology, a sector ripe for disruption. Then he put his product in front of real users and watched them fail to use it. So he did the hard thing. He listened. What he learned wasn't just a fix. It was a completely different company. This is the story of Sage Healthcare, and it's also the story of what it takes to break up with your own idea.

0:00 – Intro: the "forbidden love" of founders and their original ideas

1:36 – Meet Raj Mehra, CEO & co-founder of Sage

2:33 – What Sage does today (senior care tech platform)

3:14 – The origin story: his grandmother's fall

3:57 – The original hypothesis — building a voice app (Alexa/Google Home era)

5:24 – Building the "expensive paperweight" before validating with users

7:56 – The co-founders join, and the decision to finally talk to users

8:56 – What they learned: hardware was outdated, but voice wasn't the answer

11:44 – Feeling relief, not defeat, when the original idea didn't hold up

12:46 – Finding the middle ground: off-the-shelf hardware + exceptional software

16:39 – Taking the product to market — first customer deployments

17:00 – Solving the hard technical and life-safety challenges

19:27 – Using design sprints to navigate every major crossroads

20:36 – Filtering ideas through the "North Star": does it improve care?

22:15 – Advice for early-stage founders navigating a new market

23:57 – Advice #2: knowing when the technology is actually ready

26:15 – Where to find Sage, and closing thoughts
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Jason sits down with Sebastian Wernicke, data scientist and author of Data Inspired: Building an Organizational Culture of Inquiry for Lasting Transformation, to talk about why "data-driven" companies so often end up trapped inside what they already know instead of discovering what their customers actually need. They get into the sports car company that ignored its own sales numbers, the one question that reveals whether your company can actually handle being wrong, and how Jason's own newsletter taught him he'd built himself a very comfortable cage.



Timestamps

0:00 The Hit Song Formula That Failed

0:27 Welcome to Problem Solvers

0:38 Why a Song About Pop Music Matters to Your Business

2:45 Meet Sebastian Wernicke, Author of Data Inspired

3:06 Why Data Feels Like Comfort (And Why That's a Trap)

4:52 Two Ways to Use Data: Optimization vs. Innovation

5:06 Google's "50 Shades of Blue" Experiment

6:38 Data-Driven vs. Data-Inspired, Defined

7:46 The Sports Car Company's Weird Stereo

10:25 How Do You Know Which Outlier to Trust?

13:19 Use Data to Support a Bold Guiding Policy, Not a Safe One

14:20 The Medical Device Company's Real Diagnosis

16:29 Jason's Own Data Trap: A/B Testing His Newsletter

20:59 Error Reduction vs. Loss Aversion

22:24 Can a Junior Analyst Challenge the Boss in Your Company?

26:03 The Book: Data Inspired
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Before he was Deep Pocket Monster, Pat Flynn was the face behind Smart Passive Income. Eighteen years later, he's ready to pour everything into Pokémon, but he's not willing to abandon the community that built him. So he made a call most founders never make. Liz Wilcox, an email marketing expert with her own exit story, joins him to explain what happens next.
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A few years ago, Jason rediscovered his love of Pop-A-Shot, the arcade basketball game. What he didn't know was the whole story behind Pop-A-Shot's sudden renaissance. Tony Stucker, the CEO of Pop-A-Shot, joined the show to unpack the brand strategy behind the turnaround and what it takes to extract new growth from a legacy asset.
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Jason once got an edit back covered in red, all caps, like he'd been screamed at on paper. He swore he'd never do that to anyone, but it turns out most of us are still getting feedback wrong. Caroline Webb, author of Leadership Intelligence, breaks down the one shift that makes people actually hear you. It's simpler than you think, and it starts with what you say before the criticism..

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