I started off at the University of Cape Town, studying engineering and doing a mechatronics degree. By the end of my second year, I realised I didn't want to be an engineer for the rest of my life. So I took a gap year, sailed the Cape to Rio race, ended up in the Caribbean and stumbled into working on superyachts, in an engineer's position. 

Play is basically creativity with rules. Innovation is really about being creative within well-defined constraints, rather than thinking out of the box. There are phases to innovating, and the structure of play is about defining the rules as you move through these phases.

When you're looking at lean startups or lean thinking, it means so many things to different people. A lot of people just think it means 'lean' as in not fat, as in spending less money. But if you actually look at where the word comes from, it originates from the Toyota production system, which was around lean manufacturing.

At Playlogix I worked with a lot of entrepreneurs, we did corporate innovation and, ultimately, we met our bread and butter off of building technology. We had developers and designers, and we were actually sort of building software.

The lean iterator model is effectively a five-step process from discovery to ideation, exploration, creation, and scale. 

In comparison, being problem-focused means that you want to find solutions at every step of the process - everything becomes a hypothesis to solve - and you have a stronger product at the end of it.

A minimal viable product is a launch version of a product with an elementary set of features to gain customers with the least effort while learning about their needs.

One entrepreneur I worked with came to me to build a domestic worker marketplace. This is an example I love using, and one of the ones that it stuck with me. The first question I asked them was, how many domestic workers have you placed? To which the answer was, none. So I said, before we build any technology for you, go and place some domestic workers.

If you want people to use your product, simply solve a problem for them. It's up to you to figure out the simplest, most cost-effective and timeous solution to this problem, and how to get paid for it. Identify your product's secret ingredient, what you can do to get people using it, and create tangible milestones to add undeniable value to your audience.

It's important to know the value your product can offer your different market segments. Getting your pricing right means ring-fencing value, it makes it easier to keep a handle on things. Tech platforms that offer different tiers of pricing for their various users get it right. They start with a well-built freemium and add pricing for added functions.