Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur)

People overlook this often. Sometimes people are not buying your product because it's only half of a solution. David Ricketts, who's a Harvard professor of innovation, uses the example of mac and cheese. Kraft macaroni and cheese dinner. So Kraft had figured out powdered cheese to support the war effort, but you can't really sell powdered cheese on its own. And then they found the sales guy who was putting the powdered cheese and a box of macaroni together with an.

Elastic, literally combining them. And now you'd buy it because it was ready to make dinner. I think a lot of us don't look at our product and say, how is it being used? Today, my guest is Alistair Croll. Alistair is the author of Lean Analytics, which was one of the most influential early books on how to use data in helping you build your startup. He's also a multi-time founder, runs conferences all over the world on data, AI and technology and government, and most importantly to me, convinced me to leave a nice cushy job to start a company over a decade ago. then helped me build that startup and eventually sell it to Airbnb, and in many ways was one of the most central figures in my life that led me to doing what I do now. And lucky for us, Alistair is about to release a new book that I am very excited about. It's called Just Evil Enough, and essentially it's a study of loopholes and how to get people to pay attention to what you've built, which increasingly is the hardest part of launching a startup. Alistair shares 11 specific strategies for finding subversive ideas to get your ideas out, how to shift your mindset to think more subversively, why it's so essential for startups and founders to think this way these days, plus dozens of examples and stories that make this advice very real. This episode is for anyone having trouble getting anyone to pay attention to your product or anyone thinking about starting a company to get your mind starting to think this way. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Alistair Krull. Alistair, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

It's awesome to be here. It's awesome to have you here. We've known each other for a very long time. You helped me with my startup back in the day. And when I heard you were writing a new book, especially one called Just Evil Enough, I knew that I had to have you on here to talk about it. I thought it'd be good to start with just the story behind this book. Why did you decide to write this book? Why does this book need to exist? Thanks, good question.

So the reality is that I'm a product manager and I've been a product manager all my life, even as I've been running events, I've been working on the products behind them. And I've worked with a ton of startups thanks to Lean Analytics, which I'm sure we'll get into a bit. And the product managers are in many cases missing the point. Like my sense is when you talk to a product manager, they're so consumed to the next feature and what to do. And that's the kind of concrete objective thing. I think many of them are doomed because they ignore go-to-market strategy. They ignore distribution of their peril. And the reality is that the only thing that matters is do you have an unfair advantage? Have you figured out a way to capture attention and turn it into profitable demand? and that's an afterthought or not even a thought. So, you know, the more startups and the more founders that we can remind that distribution matters and that subverting the norms and getting the system to behave in a way that gives you an advantage is important, but better.

To give people some examples of the kind of stuff that you write about in this book and kind of set some expectations of what we're going to be talking about. What are some of your favorite examples of companies that are today I don't know, huge, awesome people love them, but maybe early on did some stuff that wasn't either people don't know about or a little subversive.

And I think that's an important point. It's not that they did something evil. It's that they did something to use a system in a way its creators didn't intend.

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So like an obvious example is Netflix, right? Netflix started out, they needed broadband. They didn't call themselves postal flicks. They called themselves Netflix. Clearly they wanted to use the network. But a lot of people forget that Blockbuster had streaming first. Streaming wasn't a good play at the start of the online video industry because the penetration of broadband in the US was very limited. So Netflix got the US postal service, they misappropriated the US postal service and turned it into an on-demand, very high bandwidth, but very, very high latency broadband network by sticking DVDs into envelopes. And like Blockbuster missed that completely. That was the key. It wasn't, can I stream video? It was, can I get all of North America to receive a video in two days and use a website to order the next one? And so, I mean, that's an obvious example, but there are other tactics. I love the story of Whitney Hess when she was launching Bumble. She used the tactic we call the top shelf tactic, where she put up these posters in universities that basically said the university, as if it was made by the university, that basically said, no Facebook, no Instagram, no Snapchat, no Bumble. Well, that's, you know, she's exploiting this medium called university walls, which are a really unregulated platform for distributing your message. But she's also sending this subversive reminder to people that she's one of the four top applications that the university doesn't approve of. Nobody told her she could do that. Is that evil? No.

Is it clever? Hell yeah. I love these examples. Just to kind of even make this clear to people, a lot of founders have some kind of growth strategy. They have a sense of how they're going to grow their product. It's going to be, okay, we're going to win on SEO, we're going to win on paid growth. What I'm hearing from you is it's not enough to just like, here's the lever, here's the engine that's going to grow our business. What you're finding is that most of the successful companies we know about or or the most successful, found not just a way to grow, but they did something subversive.

And often it's something unprecedented. A lot of these tricks are now known, right? There was a time when things like an invite list, where if you invite someone, you get an earlier spot in the invite. There was a time that was the first time, you know, the Dropbox model of when you invite someone, you both get more storage. That was cool the first time. If it works, it just becomes marketing. If it doesn't work or it becomes illegal, you stop doing it, right? But so the key isn't like, go do those things. By all means, do the things that work. The key is to go find your own. And I think that finding that go-to-market strategy, that unfair, unprecedented, we call them zero-day marketing exploits, is as important as building the right product feature, you know, having a seamless onboarding process and so on. And so my co-author Emily and I, It turns out we'd both been obsessed with this stuff for the last 10 years. And so we met and started comparing notes, and Emily lives in Ireland. And so she has a whole list of examples I hadn't heard and vice versa. So it was really fun to kind of even between Europe and North America, there are tactics that have worked there.

That are untried in the North American market. Awesome. And the book is called Just Evil Enough. And I know it's important to you for people to understand it's not like be evil. Do evil things, it's just evil enough. Just a tiny bit of sliver of do something that people don't expect or.

That'S taking a risk. There's a reason for that too. When, by definition, your startup is like a disagreement with the status quo. And the status quo was created by those in power, so they're naturally not going to like it when you don't play by their rules. They very quickly label you as evil. And so the name's kind of tongue in cheek. It definitely gets people's attention. But the rules and the lessons in there, There's a line that we didn't quote in the book from an old song by Chris de Burgh. I think we didn't want to pay royalty rights for it. It's called Spanish Train. At the end of the song he says, and far away in some recess, the Lord and the devil are now playing chess. The devil still cheats and wins more souls, and as for the Lord, well, he's just doing his best. And I found a lot of times people on the right side of history believe their causes are so just that they let them speak for themselves as opposed to realizing they have to fight for them. And we think it's pretty important that even if you are coming at it for a position that you believe is very valuable and useful, you still have to recognize that you're going to have to get the world to behave in a different way if you're going to win.

As we were starting to record this, I didn't actually know this until just a few minutes ago that the title of the book and the concept originated with when we were working on my startup and advice you gave me. Can you talk about that? Because I didn't actually know this.

Years ago, you and I were part of a startup accelerator called Year One Labs, and it was built on this new idea called the Lean Startup. Ben Yoskovitz, I think, one of the other founders with whom I wrote Lean Analytics, had fallen in love with this new, you know, Lean Startup methodology. So Ben was kind of obsessed with this idea of the Lean Startup, right? This new book from Eric Ries that said that the goal wasn't to lock yourself away in a garage for a year and build something nobody wanted. You should get out of the room and test it and so on. and a lot of the accelerators at the time were you come in for 90 days and you kind of polish the work, the product and hope it sells. So we said, no, let's do it in a period of a year. And so I think we convinced you to move to Chile, Montreal in February from San Diego from web metrics. December, right? I just remember it blew fast in, in February with the frozen eyebrows. Canada is as cold as they say, folks, and As far as I remember it, LocalMind was this product that would let strangers answer questions about a place. So, for example, where's a good place to get coffee in Times Square? And you guys had tested whether strangers would answer questions by geofencing tweets and then asking strangers a question and seeing what percentage would answer. And it was like 95% of people would answer, which was great. And then you found the problem was, that people weren't asking questions and you kind of hit a roadblock. And we were suggesting that you fake asking questions on the platform so people could get a sense of what it was like to answer questions. And as far as I remember the question, we had a conversation about whether this was evil. And you said, I'm not evil. And I think I said, I'm not saying be evil. I'm saying be just evil enough. And that always stuck with me because It is so important to understand the boundaries of what you can do if you are essentially disagreeing with the status quo in order to prove that your idea is better. So I've always talked about this idea of not being evil, but being just evil enough to provoke the change that's required for your product or startup to be successful.

Thanks for sharing that. I do remember that actually. The other phrase I remember from that conversation was that someone said we're being Boy Scouts. We're being too much of a Boy Scout. And that really helped us think a little more.

I think that might have been Ray LooK. Yeah, it sounds like Ray.

Oh man. And what's interesting is once we started doing that, sending questions to people in location that were from the app itself, we realized we could collect data about what's going on there. So it's just like passive data about what's happening in a bar and restaurant. It's kind of like what I don't know if you get this in Google Maps. Google Maps does this now. When you leave a place, they're like.

What was it like here? Through the year? Yeah, where's the bus crowded? So I was talking to Scott Belsky about Behance. I know you've had him on before. We were both speaking to tech stars in New York a little while back. And he said that for the launch of Behance, he reached out and asked all these influential designers to join his platform. And they said no. And then he said, oh, okay, pivot. Hey, I'd like to do an interview about you for my platform. And they said, oh, sure. And they, and he said, By the way, is it okay if we go and grab your design content for the blog post? Oh yeah, sure. But the added advantage of that wasn't just the social proof of having all these famous people on the platform. It was that people who then followed could see how these famous people had done their templates. And then, so it gave the new users a sense of how to behave when they got there. So in your case, you know, asking questions yourself shows people the kinds of questions to ask. And it's obviously one of the good.

Strategies for fixing a cold start problem. Okay, so say at this point, people are convinced, okay, I need to think about some way to think a little more creatively, be just evil enough with the way I'm thinking about growing my startup and my product. Let's talk about how to actually go about doing this. Say a founder or product person is just like sitting down, okay, I want to think of some ideas. What are some steps that you recommend folks go about to come up with some ideas?

The underlying idea of the book is that you've got to get the system to behave in a way its creators didn't attend. That's a hugely important idea. But to do that, you need to understand, I mean, your startup is a disagreement with the status quo. So you gotta recognize what is the status quo, right? The first thing that we talk about is this idea of system awareness. To be aware of the system you're in and understand it. And then to find a novel approach within that system. And then, and this is often really difficult for startups, to be disagreeable enough to be willing to do something others either can't or won't. So we think of subversiveness as a skill you can learn. We spent a lot of time like understanding it, talking to neuroscientists and talking to finding examples throughout history. It comes from system awareness, novelty, and disagreeability. One of my favorite examples of system awareness is a Stanford prof named Tina Seelig. And she gave the Stanford Engineering Entrepreneur class $5 in seed capital, five days to figure out what to do, and two hours to do it. And then each team in the class would come back for three minutes and present to the class and say how they had turned that $5 into the maximum revenue. It's a great idea, right? So most people, if you ask them how to do that, they're gonna go out and they're gonna, you know, buy a lottery ticket or they're gonna buy some lemonade ingredients and set up a lemonade stand. Some of these students, I mean, they're Stanford graduate students, they're pretty smart. Some of them went and got bike pumps and they offered to test people's bike pressure for free and then pump it up for like some money. And it turns out they made even more money when they asked for a donation.

They did pretty well.

They turned their five bucks into like 200 bucks. Another class did a slightly different thing. They went to restaurants and stood in line at fancy restaurants and got the pagers and then sold their space in line during premium lunch hours. They made about 250, right? It's a good exercise. I mean, talk about a thing you want to find out if your team can innovate. Try this with your company, whether you're a big company or a small company. I guarantee you people will suddenly realize how hard it is to go to market. The winning team made $650, $605 somewhere in that range. You know what they did?

I'm curious to hear.

What would you do?

Oh my God, I can't even.

So let me recap, because this is important. You got $5 in seed capital, you got five days to plan, two hours to execute, and then you're going to present your findings in front of this class, the graduate class of Stanford Entrepreneurship for three minutes. So I listed four things there. The winning class sold its three minutes to a company that wanted to recruit Stanford grads. It's brilliant, right? They made an ad. And like, what are you going to say as the professor? Okay, yeah, well done. Because they recognized the system they were in. They took a step back from what they were told they had, and they looked at what they actually had. So I think that's a great example of like system awareness, seeing the big picture of what you're in. Once you see the big picture, now it's time to mess with things. And this is the second thing, which is like novelty. And, there's a great example, Gymshark, which is a pretty big athletic leisure, athletic wear company in Europe, not so big in North America. So they're great with messing with social media. Right around the time that Cameo came out, they had a bunch of B-list celebrities wish a guy named Jim Sharq a happy birthday. And then they, of course, put, I think, like three or four weeks later, Cameo added 6,000 words to their terms of service for consumer videos. But, you know, this way, Jim Sharq had all these celebrities wishing Jim Sharq a happy birthday. That's like, hey, we noticed that our name was a homonym for some guy and people in North America don't know who we are. Is that silly?

Sure.

Even reverse graffiti. There's companies that would start to spray signs on the floor, like the British intelligence agency did a recruiting ad spraying it on the sidewalk. Because there's no law against cleaning up, so they just got a spray hose and wrote stuff. I don't think these sound like silly ideas, but even Coinbase. Coinbase bought a 60-second Super Bowl ad where they bounced a QR code around the screen for 60 seconds. Is it stupid? Yeah, I mean, they were ranked the worst of 64 Super Bowl ads, but they got 20 million hits and their servers fell over. So that's a novelty thing, right? Just like seeing a thing that's different, zagging when everyone else is zigging. So if you're aware of the system and you find a novel way to do it, that's like two-thirds of the.

Way to being subversive. A lot of these sound like they're kind of these one-off marketing stunts where you probably drive, like Coinbase, an example, you drive a bunch of traffic to your site, It's awesome. You do really well. And then it kind of fades away. I kind of call these things turbo boosts where you like, you can just boost growth for a little bit and then they go away. Is there thoughts you have around just like a value of something like that versus you also need to figure out a way that grows your product sustainably, like, you know, paid growth engine or SEO or something like that.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah.

There are lots of examples. So, so I'm giving you kind of funny examples for this, but the companies that do well are the ones that Use this kind of thinking to change their value chain. So think about furniture for thousands of years, furniture was something that you described and then someone built and then they delivered to your house. I mean, that was furniture. And then IKEA went, Hey, if we flat pack this stuff and change the design, we can put it in containers, people can build it themselves at home. So they took the value chain of furniture creation and they They messed with it. In that case, they delegated one of the stages of furniture creation to someone else. That completely changed the furniture industry. So that's not like a one off thing. And so the trick is to find these kinds of approaches that are fundamental to your business model. And for that, you have to kind of look at how do you differentiate, like what do you do for reframing? How do you change the manner in which the product's delivered? Who's doing it? Who provides certain steps and so on? And so we get into that a little later once we get beyond the idea of subversiveness.

Awesome. Okay. So what I love about this is this advice is helpful both for your actual long-term growth strategy and also to just drive spikes of growth when you're looking for ideas there.

For sure. And, you know, that's one of the distinctions we draw. Some of these sound like growth hacks. I'm not a big fan of growth hacks. A growth hack traditionally is sort of product agnostic. So when you move your mouse off the screen and it pops up a little window saying, Hey, why are you leaving? There was a time that was cool. Now it's just like that mouse doesn't care what kind of website you are. We like the term zero day marketing exploits because it's the difference between like a script kitty and a proper hacker. In this case, it's kind of like the difference between a growth hacker and someone who is genuinely trying to subvert the dynamics of the industry they're in. And that takes a very big Perspective. I'll give you another example that I love. There's a researcher named Zachary Hambrick who did some work with sailors as the Navy was trying to restructure how it hired. So he gave the sailors this dashboard, had four quadrants. One corner was like a fuel gauge, and when it got to a level, you had to press a button. One was add two numbers together. One was like some word thing. One was press a tone. And in the middle was a scoreboard. And so your job was to monitor these four consoles and try and maximize your score. So as soon as it needed your attention, you'd attend to it, right? And then unbeknownst to these sailors, about halfway through the test, he changed the scoring so that one of the four quadrants represented 75% of the points. So now doing the math would get you more points. And some of the sailors changed their behavior. They recognized this one thing was contributing more and they hammered on it. They did really well. Other sailors did what they were told, super conscientious. Now, the Navy has always recruited in the military, people who do what they're told and are super conscientious. Turns out the people that don't do that, we call them disagreeable. We say they're sloppy. But there's a difference here between people who are playing the game right and people who are questioning whether they're playing the right game. One of the things I love as an example of this is poker. In poker, there are rules. The rules tell you which cards win, which hands are stronger, whose turn of play it is. But the strength of your cards isn't how you win in poker. If that's how we played, it would just be a game of statistics and it would be incredibly boring. You win by bluffing, you win by subterfuge, you win by looking for your opponent's tells, but we never talk about that in business school. There's this woman from the 1600s in, her name is Julah Dew Martins, and she was married to the king of a city-state who went to war. She was left behind to guard the castle. So the enemy shows up, and the castle's pretty well fortified, and she realizes they have about two weeks worth of food, and then they're gonna get captured. So she rounds up all the flour in the castle, she bakes a bunch of bread, she goes up to the parapets, and she throws it over into the awaiting army and says, you look hungry, let us know if you need some more food. and the army leaves. That's a very valid strategy, but we don't talk about those kinds of strategies. Was it evil?

No.

Was it clever?

Yeah.

The coat of arms of this town is like two crossed loaves of bread. But we don't talk about that kind of thinking in business and in startups enough. And I think I'd like to normalize this kind of disagreeable thinking. This idea that, and I know from listening to your Evan Lapointe podcast that you're high on agreeable thinking. I'm here to tell you you need to embrace some disagreeability, Ledy.

I'm glad you're here to help me there. This also reminds me of my chat with Rory Sutherland, who's extremely good at this. And one very tactical piece of advice he had is like, spend a lot of time on doing the things everyone all agrees on is the smart thing to do. And then once you've done that, set time aside to do the things that are very irrational and crazy. Thoughts on that just as a way to find time.

I love Rory, in fact. Emily and I are meeting him in London for dinner. He read the book and said some very nice things about it.

I love that.

I think Rory's example of the wine list, which you've probably heard, the wine list is a system. I can't sell you a gin and tonic for 50 bucks because you know how much it costs to make one, but I can sell you wine for any price because you don't know, you can't make it that way. But when someone shows up at the table with a wine list and hands it to the most powerful looking person at the table who opens it and says, red or white, you have now all consented to order wine. So just like the wine industry and the wine in a restaurant is a system, and you're beholden to it. I think Rory, more than maybe anyone in the world, I asked Emily who her perfect, who would she want to read this book if it was in a world, she said Rory. I think more than anyone in the world, he just sees the world through these system lenses that are incredible.

I love this idea of zero-day exploits that you've mentioned a couple of times. Is there anything else there just as a way to think about how to come up with clever ideas to grow your product and business?

I would say once you've got the subversive mindset, which again is like system awareness, novelty and disagreeability, then you have to kind of scan the market. And we have this framework called the Recon Canvas that splits the market up into the product, the medium and the market. That's another hot take of mine is I think the product market fits overrated. You have to actually think about product medium market fit. marketing textbooks were written in a time when the medium was one way, one to many paid broadcast. That's completely changed today. It's any to any. It's perfectly valid to build an audience first, then figure out what to sell it, then make the product.

Right.

But we still talk about product Market fit. Two companies are the same product sold to the same Market. One wins and the other doesn't. It's often because of their medium strategy. And the medium is both the platforms you're in and the Norms of that platform. so we, we hit this thing called the, the Recon canvas that helps you scan across the product, the market and the medium. If you want inspiration for some clever ideas, I think Burger King is better than almost anybody at this stuff. When they launched their mobile app, the thing you want for your mobile app is you want as many installs as possible and you want geolocation turned on. So they said everyone can have a free Whopper. Just order it from the app, drive to the store and pick it up. But the catch is, you gotta order it from a McDonald's parking lot. That's genius, right? They also edited the Wikipedia page for the description of the Whopper and then made all the home speakers go read it by making an ad that said, Hey, okay, Google, what's in a Whopper? They do a whole bunch of things, but a great example of their understanding of the medium. In 2019, they started liking all these posts from influential posters from 10 years before. and they offered no explanation. And people are like, Hey, Burger King, why are you liking my old posts? Because the reality is if someone likes your post from 10 years ago, it's either a bot, a stalker, or you're about to get sued. It's probably one of those three things. And so Burger King starts liking these things. Now, if Burger King had just liked that person's latest post, they would have missed it. Someone likes one of your posts, you have enough followers that it may get lost in the noise. But if it's something from 10 years ago, because of the mechanics of the platform, you'll see it. Burger King says nothing. Influencers start getting upset. What's going on? What's going on? And then finally the reveal. They say, Hey, we've been liking some things from 10 years ago because sometimes the past is great. You know what else is great? Funnel cake fries and we're bringing them back. Millions of free impressions. Not just because they understood that they had a funny message, but because they understood the mechanism of the platform that by liking something from the past, someone would notice it. So understanding the mechanics of the platform, The norms of the platform, what are done there, is so important to go to market strategy these days, but we think it often gets overlooked. So to answer your question, I think scanning for opportunities across product, across market, and across medium, and we spend a lot of time in the book talking about how to do that.

So let's recon canvas. I know it's hard to visualize a canvas grid thing, and we'll link to it in the show notes, but just to help people get a better sense of what they're gonna be thinking about to scan the market. There's kind of three columns, is that how you describe it?

Yeah, so the Canvas actually has three rows. That's because there's an objective, a collective, and a subjective way to look at the world. And then it has a section for product, which we defined into the features and the messages, a section for the medium, which is the platforms and the norms, and then a section for the market, which is the attention you capture and the actions you create. And so it's a really good sort of checklist when you're putting together your go-to-market strategy, make sure you've thought about.

All of those, what winds up being 18 squares. And the idea is you look within each of these cross sections to see if there's an opportunity to do something subversive.

Right. You go into each square and you say, what's the status quo here? What's the normal behavior? What we've considered unorthodox or unusual. We have like five or six case studies for each of those rectangles.

There's like 160 case studies in the book.

There's a reason it took so long to write.

As you're talking about Medium, I think of a recent example of a really clever marketing stunt slash subversive tactic. This company Runway that does basically, it helps you track your company's runway and finances and things like that. They did this really clever strategy where they sent all these influencer types on Twitter a package that it arrives and it's a bag with a lock on it and the lock says this will open in three days. And there's a countdown that's counting down and you can't look inside until this lock unlocks. And so everyone on Twitter is just like, what the hell is this? We got this lock. I don't know what's inside. I don't know if I should break it open or just wait. And the way I think about this is when someone gets their mail, they in theory open it immediately to see what's inside. And so they found a really clever way to make it a moment, like a launch event, where everyone unlocks it and then starts tweeting, oh my God.

I got this sweet bomber jacket and all this swag and Runway's doing something awesome. Yeah, it's forced unboxing. When Ben and I wrote Lean Analytics, we came up with a strategy to announce the book. We found about 15 people that we knew who would talk about it and say nice things, Al Malik, Eric Ries, Tim O'Reilly, and over a period of about seven days, we sent each of them a scheduled message with a click to tweet message. So each of them, about every 12 hours, one of them would tweet something about it. But each of those things had an analytics tag, a Google Analytics tag in it. So it was like UTM campaign equals Eric Rees, campaign equals Tim O'Reilly. So now we knew who was doing it, right? Julian Smith and so on. So every 12 hours, it'd be a new thing, a little more lift, a little more lift. And then when they were all out there, we started comparing them to one another. Well, you know, more people are clicking Julian's, but more people are are pre-ordering Tims, and then these guys started competing with one of them. So that's our second hack. And then the third hack was we documented all this, and then we wrote a blog post explaining how we hacked the launch of Lean Analytics. That was proof that we knew how to do analytics. So I think, you know, there's a certain amount of credibility and brand building that comes from how you do this. You're sending a message to the market. Burger King is sending a message to the market. It's pretty cheeky. you know, that it's the underdog, which is very consistent. Liquid Death has some hilarious marketing campaigns. And we can't tell you how, there's a bunch of things people told us that we can't actually attribute, but they do not go ahead with a campaign or an ad unless it gets 50% disapproval. That's like their North Star metric. 50% of people hate this.

That's awesome. I love that just as a heuristic or how to know if your thing is subversive enough. Is there anything else along the lines of just someone's like, okay, I want to think of ideas to come up with really clever subversive ideas, get people's attention. You've talked about this recon canvas that basically gives you a whole bunch of areas to look. Is there anything else along those lines?

Well, I mean, the real meat of the book, once you get beyond the recon canvas and this subversive thinking stuff, we looked through probably three or 400 case studies about 160 minutes into the book. and these aren't just case studies from business. They're also things like Genghis Khan and Dula Dude Martins, Neville Maskelline, who was hired by big Telegraph to stop the spread of the radio. Like, there's some crazy stories out there. Billy Butlin, who convinced the British to pay for all his theme camps so he could become a holiday camp king in England. What we found was these 11 tactics that keep showing up again and again. as patterns or meta patterns. And so you can't steal the tactic, but you can apply that tactic. So if you can figure out how to get this disagreeable mindset, and then you can scan your market, your product and your medium for these vulnerabilities, and then you can apply one of these tactics. That's a very good method for like coming up with a set of candidate go to market hacks or zero day exploits. And then we have some rules for how to kind of prune through them.

And figure out the good one. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risk. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/plenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/plenny. salesforce.com slash Lenny. Let's talk about these tactics. I love that that's where you went. I know that it's gonna be hard for people to remember, here's all these 11 ways. I know the book gets into all these things, but can you just either run through them real quick or just go through them?

I'll give you a quick one. Okay. Salesforce.com is a classic example of bug into feature. Salesforce had a crappy product at the start of the internet. It was using this thing called Ajax that kind of made the web interactive a little bit if you reload it often enough. But it turns out that that also made them really simple. They were competing against these companies like Vantiv and Clarify and Remedy that cost millions and millions of dollars, took years to install, whereas they could be installed with a URL. And so they took their weakness, which was we are very low feature, and they turned it, their bug, their weakness, which is we have a very limited feature set, and they turned it into an asset, which is we are simple. In fact, Salesforce's logo for all was no software. despite the fact that they have their own programming language. So that's a good example of looking at your weaknesses and turning them into strengths. And that pattern shows up again and again.

Before you move on to the next one, just to highlight that one, I love that one. So basically the idea there is think about what's a limitation? What's actually, were you behind or potentially worse than your competitors? And then think about how can we turn that into a benefit?

And often it's not that you have to turn it into a benefit, it's that it's already a benefit for a target market you have ignored. So like, if your product takes a lot of time to configure, maybe there are like prosumers out there who are white labeling that stuff. Oh, okay, that's a new segment, right? So it's this whole strategy. Product managers, I'm a product manager. Our tendency is to wanna make the product just one more feature, right? And the reality is your product may already be a perfect fit for a market you're ignoring. In fact, one of the tactics is called buyer upgrade. Buyer upgrade is where you are already selling the perfect thing, you're just selling to the wrong person. Mr. Clean's Magic Eraser started out as melamine foam for aircraft insulation until the company noticed that people were wetting it and using it to clean stains off things. And it turns out there's a much better market, which is people want to clean stuff. Here's an example that I've sort of apocryphal example. I was talking to a company that was selling drones invented for bridge inspection. I mean, bridge inspection is actually a really dangerous job. There are people who are continuously exploring the bridge for cracks and stuff. And the city council doesn't really want to pay for it. It's a cost. And if they find something wrong, well, you know, they have to fix it. Who does care? Well, it turns out to insurance companies. So if you go sell to an insurance company and you say, look, just don't sign off on bridges unless they have this drone. You have a hundred percent close rate with everybody who needs insurance for their bridge. So that's a good example of sort of figuring out how to upgrade your buyer. And there's a great example of this. Hitachi makes a personal massager. You may have heard of this device. Hitachi was not selling a lot of these personal massagers, but it turns out there's a very specific use case for these personal massagers that the Japanese management company did not want to mention. And so they partnered with a company called VibraTech. with the only condition being that VibroTex is not allowed to mention that the product is made by Hitachi. So sometimes the buyer upgrade is like getting out of your own way. But that's a tactic that people don't often think about. We're sort of stuck with our target market. There's a sense of we were wrong when you acknowledge that a different market wants your product.

Amazing example. So the tactic here, just to kind of mirror back is if your product isn't working for people you're trying to sell it to today, maybe there's a different market that loves it and you don't have to change anything about what you're actually building. It's just a different target market. Or even a different buyer. Different buyer at the same company essentially.

In fact, at Coradiant, we used to make this web performance analysis thing and it took me years to figure out we should stop selling it to operations and start selling it to the marketing department. And then I learned to say analytics shows you what people did. We show you if they could do it. Within three months, Fidelity, Salesforce, and LinkedIn had bought our biggest product. Just because I learned how to explain it to a different customer.

Great example. What else?

So access is another one. Now, this sounds obvious, right? Do you have access to something other people don't? And you gotta be careful here. Generally, you know, rich white dudes like us have access to people that others don't. But it's important to mention that this is a tactic because often people have some kind of access. Jessica Scorpio, when she was launching Getaround, which was a car rental by owner service, she had access to one of her VC's friends who had an early Tesla Roadster. So she brought it to CES and she let people drive it around and it got lots of attention and it also proved that you could get fancier cars on the platform. The masterclass founder of masterclass went to school with Justin Hoffman's daughter. Use that access. I mean, it's not necessarily there, but if you've got access, like take a step back and say, what can I do that other people can't? in my personal network? Do I have access to a resource at a different price? Oftentimes that's the thing that gives someone.

An advantage, but we're kind of ashamed to admit it. In the example of Runway I shared, I think one of the levers the founder had is he knew a lot of fancy people.

And so he's like, Hey, I'm gonna send you some. Can I have your address? Oh, for sure. And I mean, before Bumble with Tinder, Whitney was traveling around with sororities because she was a sister. She'd give a talk at a sorority, about her startup, and then she would get all the girls to install it, and then she'd go across the street to the fraternity and say, hey, all the girls are on this app. So, you know, that's an access strategy. Another one, bait and switch. This is a common strategy. Bait and switch can be evil unless the buyer is delighted with the thing you've switched them for, or you also deliver the thing you promised.

Just evil enough.

Yeah. So a classic example of this is Tupperware. Tupperware promoted dinner parties in post-war America where women were being told to go back to the home after having helped out in the war effort and weren't very happy with that. Tupperware came to market. There was a huge number of people out there who wanted to run their own businesses. So what they, the bait was, hey, come to a dinner party and the switch was, oh, by the way, become a part of this multi-level marketing scheme. There's a company called Energage. that does HR software. It's pretty hard to get people excited about HR software. So they launched this thing in conjunction with local newspapers to promote the best workplaces survey every year. Use their tool for surveys. Now, every company's employees want to, every company wants its employees to fill out the survey. So they have the survey, you fill it out, and then the newspapers publish the best workplaces. They get to sell ads to those companies. And then Energy Age gets to call the companies and say, Hey, I've got all this data on your employees. Wouldn't you like to see what it says? So that tactic of like, maybe the thing you're selling isn't exciting, but can you sell something that is and then use that initial transaction to switch to.

Something that you actually wanted to sell them? And the key again is they actually have to be excited about this thing that they, they came up out of nowhere.

And either the bait has to be free, in which case they can't complain. Or the bait has to be, you have to also give them the thing you promised, or they'd be so happy about the thing you switched them with that very few complain and you can resolve those complaints equitably. And we make that point, like, here's how to actually not be a con man.

Great. All right, what's next?

Combination is a big one. People overlook this often. Sometimes people are not buying your product 'cause it's only half of a solution. David Ricketts, who's a Harvard professor of innovation, uses the example of mac and cheese. So Kraft had figured out powdered cheese to support the war effort, but you can't really sell powdered cheese on its own. And then they found the sales guy who was putting the powdered cheese and a box of macaroni together with an elastic, literally combining them, and now you'd buy it because it was ready-made dinner. So I think a lot of us don't look at our product and say.

How is it being used?

There's an example, like 1-800-Mattress in the States. They used to have this thing where what's the one thing you care about that should be added to your product if you are trying to sell product mattresses to New Yorkers?

Delivery install? I don't know.

No, removal. It's really hard to get rid of a mattress in New York City, right? Some people would like, oh yeah, we'll take away your old mattress. So you just look at the value chain and you go, wait, I'm in the business of delivering and selling mattresses. One step before you in the value chain. Get rid of the old mattress. But if you just change your product and slide the value chain over by one block, we include mattress removal. People barely, they, they're like, oh yeah, these guys are gonna replace our mattress, right? I don't want a new mattress. I want a replaced mattress. And it's that kind of mindset. So what can you combine it with? Often it's just before or just after the product that dramatically simplifies the offering for the consumer.

These are great. All right, what else?

There's a great one called arbitrage. Arbitrage is knowing something other people don't. And obviously you can achieve that by lying to them. You can achieve that by finding out sooner. There's all kinds of ways you can commit arbitrage. One of my favorite examples, this came to us from a guy named Rob Pasarella in New York. There's something called the Shap Optical Telegraph. so in, I think, 16th century France, obviously the speed of messages is very important for the war effort. And so the French set up this optical telegraph. There's a bunch of towers. You could see each tower from the other, and they had these gigantic stick figure semaphores that they would pivot to send messages. So basically you'd sit there and you'd look, and when that semaphore moved, you'd write down the message and you'd send it to the next one. And so this way a message could travel across France at like 500 miles an hour. way faster than a horse. It's great. So of course, because if there's an advantage here, some bankers figured out how to pay off the Shap telegraph operator to introduce an error in the message in Paris, which would allow the person in the stock market in Burgundy to like know what the Paris markets are doing before the news got there and trade on it. So can you find that that is too evil, but can you find out in advance of something. There was a, like early on in the days of certain social platforms, the analysts were all trying to figure out were they actually seeing growth. And it turns out that in some of the early social platforms, you could look at the number of the message or the number of the user's account in the API, and you could infer growth from that. I mean, the data is right there. Is that illegal? Not really, it's right there, but it's certainly an advantage. So what can you find out early that others can't? Now, a more concrete example, this is Farmville. So Pincus and Zuckerberg were very good friends, and Zuckerberg told Pincus that apps were going to be allowed to post to users' timelines. This is why Farmville grew almost overnight. At one point, it represented a massive proportion of Facebook's revenue is that Farmville would post these things saying, Hey, Lenny, Alastair needs your help getting some grain for his cows or they're going to die. So there's a good example of knowing something before other people did.

I also think about the high frequency trading and the arbitrage they found of just moving closer to the data centers and just buying land right next door to where the trading...

There's actually a case of the Nikkei terminals, which computed the Nikkei index, They weren't getting the Nikkei index from Tokyo. They were getting it and it was being computed locally on the terminal. And someone figured this out so they could compute the Nikkei index from the source stocks rather than waiting for the terminal to tell them and they could beat the market for like a significant amount of time. Rob also told us, I think it was him, he said, A hedge fund is an organization formed to discover something that will be illegal and do it until it is.

Yep, makes me think about billions, which feels a lot of evil.

Absolutely.

Cool, so let's do a few more.

Okay, aggregation. This is a pattern we see over and over again where one player in the market takes data from many places and then modifies it in some way. That could be that they are using it for affiliate links, that's pretty easy or selling the data, not that interesting. But one of my favorite examples, and I actually helped put together a case study at HBS when I was teaching there with Sircat Datar about a guy named LP Maurice. And I think you might know LP, he's a Montrealer. He had a company called Busbud. So Busbud, LP was traveling the length of South America and he was trying to find bus schedules and they're almost impossible to get. And so he, when he got home, he decided to make an app so you could order kind of like kayak for bus rides, which doesn't sound that exciting, but bus tickets are a multi-billion dollar industry. And so he got people around the world to send in these bus schedules. He put them all in one place. And then he went to the bus companies and said, Hey, how about you let me sell bus tickets? None of them wanted to hear from him. So what he did was he used automation to create thousands and thousands, I think it's millions and millions of pages of bus tables, properly structured JSON data. And he had to automate this thing.

I think he actually had to get.

Like three separate Google Analytics accounts to manage all the data because it was beyond the capacity of one of them. And then the search injects for search engines, this is like Catmap, like well structured data that's not available everywhere else. So now he becomes the default destination because he's aggregated the data for a particular kind of data, bus ticket data. And then he allows you to go in and say, I want to go from here to here, shows you the route, but the bus companies still aren't going to pay him money. So he puts a button on this is buy my ticket and sends them to those companies. And then the next time he calls the companies, he goes, Hey, have you noticed on your analytics that like 20% of your traffic is coming from me? We should probably talk. Now they're willing to trade. So aggregating data, consolidating it, putting the bait out there, like the catnip for the search engine or whatever, and sometimes this can be done badly. One of the examples we think is too evil is get satisfaction. Get satisfaction was a complaint site on the internet. Where you basically, you know, they went and crawled the internet for all the complaints about Sony, and then that's the first place you're going to complain about Sony. And then they'd extort Sony and say, unless you buy from us, we're going to tell the customers you don't care about them. Probably too evil.

You shouldn't assume consent. But that pattern of aggregation shows up time and again. It's interesting there's a trend across all these examples you're giving, which is you're solving actual problems for people in different ways, and you're finding a new way to solve that problem or help them be aware that you're solving this problem. Like in this case of the bus schedules, like people really want that information. like Google wants it, but also people on schedules that are easy to read. And you've just found a really interesting.

Way to- Almost every one of these tactics looks awesome in hindsight. I mean, some of these are very basic things. So one of the most basic marketing tactics, and Rory can talk about this better than I ever could, is reframing. When you look at positioning, you're looking at two dimensions, right? Let's say for toothpaste, you have the dimension of sex appeal. you know, fresh breath lasts all night. That was Colgate. And then you have the dimension of clinicality, which is like four out of five dentists agree that was Crest. So in the early toothpaste Wars, you had Colgate versus Crest. And you were either brushing your teeth because you want to be sexy or brushing your teeth because you want it to be healthy. And then Along Comes Toms of Maine. And remember, this is 1970s. You got your tofu from a health food store. Dr. Strange love. has lines about fluoride being a government conspiracy. And so you show up and go, oh, we're unfluoridated, we're natural. We'll tell you the ingredients on the label. You've given a segment of the market a different, better way to think about the value you offer. Reframing isn't just about competing on existing dimensions. It's about giving the customer a different set of dimensions. And that won't happen for the whole market. But it'll happen for one of those segments. And in this case, the framing was orthogonal. If you are a hippie natural person, you reject clinical science and you reject traditional beauty norms. So you're orthogonal to both, like you're perpendicular to both sex appeal and healthcare. And so it's a perfect position. And Tom's of Maine used that, and obviously two years later introduced a formula and got into grocery stores, or in pharmacies. So being able to reframe things, I mentioned liquid death, but when people talk about positioning, they often look at the dimensions there and say, how do we compete on those? Or they go, hey, we're really good at this thing, let's make that the dimension. The dimension only matters if a lucrative, reachable target market thinks that it is the dominant criteria for deciding about the product.

And is reframing one of the tactics? Yeah, reframing would be one of the tactics for sure. Okay, awesome. And is it interchangeable with positioning or do you think of those two things as separate?

So we actually think that positioning is simply where you are on a grid. Reframing is drawing the grid.

Got it. I have an awesome episode of April Dunford, who's I think also Canadian, yeah.

Yep.

Where she goes deep into positioning. I think she'd probably disagree with you, because I think to her it's really important that when you're positioning, you're thinking.

About your competitors and how you're different. I would argue that you can position against your competitors. It is far better for someone to choose you instead of rather than over your competitors. When the electric car came out, the traditional framing for electric cars was range and sustainability. And then Tesla started racing them against Bugattis. And for a certain segment of the market, meaning like rich coastal VCs, faster, better performance was a new way to think of electric cars. Before that, if you look at the ads from the Prius and stuff like they didn't mention acceleration time. They like explicitly didn't put it in there. So Tesla came up with a, a much better dimension for a certain target segment. And I agree, April's absolutely right. If you're in an established competitive market where you're bidding for RFPs and B2B, but if you want to, if you're disagreeing with the market, you're probably disagreeing with how it scores value.

You're talking about fluoride. Briefly, my mind went to I'm trying to decide if fluoride is actually good or bad for a kid.

There's so many debates out there for- As a British person with all my.

Teeth, it served me very well. Okay, that's my current position. It feels like a good thing.

There's so much stuff out there. Ah, no fluoride. Well, let me talk to you about regulation. So regulation is like a thing people often don't think about. In Germany and in Austria, you have organ donor cards where you get to approve whether or not someone gets your organs if you're killed in an accident. German and Austrian populations are almost identical. Austria's opt out. You're going to deliver your organs when you die unless you explicitly say you don't want to. In Germany, you have to opt in. They're not donated unless you explicitly do so. Germany has 12% organ donors. Austria has like 99.6. So all your growth hacks ain't going to get you from 12 to 99.6, right? So there are way, it may be important for your business to change the regulations, either to allow what you're doing or to compel people to do the thing that's currently optional. But a lot of startups don't look at regulatory change as a viable strategy, and yet it can be. It's also a great way to find loopholes. I love the story of Parklets. So for a while, urban agitators would build these little two hour long parks in the parking spot in front of their coffee shop, and every two hours they'd take it away and put it back. 'Cause the law didn't actually say it'd be a car that was parked there. And then there's this guy in England who said, I want to make a little park in front of my house, but the law says it has to be a car. So he built a park on a car. And then the local town government said, you're gonna have to take your car in and get it smog checked once a year. So it's not gonna last. So he bought this historically, this historical van that was not required to be smog checked. And so he just has a park in front of his house that's the back of a van parked there. Loopholes happen all the time. We think they're funny, we think they're clever, but there are a lot of cases where you can find a loophole and use that to do something possible that wasn't otherwise possible.

Okay, let me see how many we've gone through so far. So I'm just gonna go through the list so far and I'm curious if there's anything else. Okay, so turning bugs into features. upgrading, buyer upgrade, access, bait and switch, combination, arbitrage, aggregation, reframing, and regulation, I think was the last one you shared. Yeah. And then earlier on we talked about.

Misappropriation with Netflix misappropriating the US Postal Service. And then the last one is sliding the window. And sliding the window is a bit more nebulous, but it's about the Overton window and the realm of what's considered acceptable. A lot of companies have strategies that rely on a certain segment of the market being okay with something that wasn't. So we talk about some examples of like the normalization of gay marriage through Will and Grace and things like that in there. There's a good example of this. There's a company in England, I think it's called Bodyform, that was the first to use red liquid in ads for female hygiene products and tampon products. For a while, it was literally illegal to use red liquids in those ads. And when they finally did it, all the women were like, and this is, I'm telling Emily's version of the story, one of the nice things about having a female co-author, you get to see a whole other perspective that isn't normally part of a lot of marketing conversations. But Emily's point was like, every single woman let out a sigh of relief. Like finally someone said the quiet part out loud. And there is a tremendous advantage to understanding that one part of the market is already has an Overton window that's different from the mainstream market, and then you can appeal to that and they will respect you for it.

Amazing. So these are 11 very concrete ways to think about ways to get above the noise, get people's attention, be a little subversive. And there's always this talk about like thinking from first principles and thinking outside the box and being innovative and creative. And I love that you I have put together here's like the 11 ways that people do it. How do you suggest people use this? Is it like get a room, get some people together, brainstorm, and go through this list? Any advice on just like how to operationalize coming up with ideas knowing that they have this list?

Yeah, I mean, it's this is somewhat magic. Like it takes a lot of time. It's a skill you can learn. It's a muscle you develop. I would say spend some time thinking about how to be disagreeable. Understanding the system you're in, then use the need for novelty and disagreeability to temporarily let yourself think like a super villain. We have some tactics for this, ignoring the guardrails, embracing absurdity, not pulling your punches on wording. I've had people go, oh, I can't possibly do that in my marketing. Remember Blair Witch? Remember the Blair Witch Project? They literally killed their actors. Well, not literally, but according to the web, like they had people out there trying to find the actors. They listed them as missing on their movie page. Like, you know, they starved, they did literally starve their actors. They actually underfed them and they played weird scary noises outside their tent at night and gave them conflicting information. They got so much attention because they were hyperbolic about how they positioned things. And Wes Cow talks about like the spiky point of view. I think those are super important. There are some other techniques that we found. There's this really interesting innovation formula called TRIZ, which is a combinatorial way of overcoming obstacles by combining unrelated fields. There's something called construal level theory, which is how you bring distant ideas closer to change how you think about them. So we go through a lot of the sort of neuroscience of how to pick good exploits and brainstorm properly. And then finally, I would say we talk a lot about like pre-mortems, figuring out how things might go wrong, asking counterfactuals, you know, is the opposite true? Would this be better if I did it a year ago or a year from now? What does a smart coach conclude given the same information without you sharing your conclusion? So there's a lot of techniques for like, how well can you test this? What would convince you if you were wrong? This is kind of like deep canvassing yourself.

I know the book's not out yet. I'm curious if you've worked with a startup or if a startup's kind of applied these tactics, if there's a story there of something that's emerged out of a company you've worked with thinking this way.

I will tell you I've worked with four startups using this and every one of them has found a go-to-market strategy. It's been awesome. You know, I suspect that Emily and I are both going to get a lot of consulting requests after this just because it's really interesting to implement this. We did a workshop at Startup Fest, which is Startup Fest is a big conference in Montreal that I've been running with Sil Telio for a while. We did a workshop this summer and people actually had like workbooks they were completing while we did it and stuff. It's definitely applicable. And two, I want to throw out to Wes and Gagan here at Maven that they asked Emily and I to put together a course, which we haven't launched yet because we haven't finished the book yet, but it basically forced us to rewrite the book to make it much more applicable. less about anecdotes, more about frameworks you can use. Yeah, I think we will have done the right thing when I go to product management meetings and instead of people talking about their feature, they're alluding to their zero day marketing exploit. But the dumbest thing in the world is to talk about. So like that's the thing you want to not tell anyone about. But if you don't, if you're talking to an investor and that you don't have a zero day go to market exploit that creates attention and turns it into sustainable, lucrative demand, you are probably going to fail.

This makes me think about a tweet I just saw about how with AI, it's so much easier to just build stuff, to just build a quick app that the skill and the success, the chance of success start to shift more and more to distribution and growth. because it's so much easier to try stuff. So I love that you're giving people a guide.

Well, I mean, it's, I do a lot of work in digital government with this conference called Forward 50. And last year I told people, like, when you're launching a battleship, you can't push a software update and change the hull. Like, it's shipping. And so you take the risky parts and you put them at the end. And as a result, you write the spec up front, and then you do the plan for testing and all this other stuff. But the entire pattern, every pattern we have in the Western world for mass production of something, whether that's software development or shooting a movie or building a battleship, you do the easily changed stuff upfront, right? You can change a feature in the spec in a day. You can change it in the code in a week. You can change it in production, if at all, in a month. And so thinking about what's scarce and what's abundant, what's hard and what's easy generally informs the process that we use to deliver any product to market. And we do not step back and say, what has technology done to change the relative risk and the relative fungibility of each of those steps? So if I'm building software, it may now be easier to use an LLM and Figma to build 10 prototypes, show them to citizens in government, see which ones they like, and then document the one that works. Because now documenting the thing well that works is the risky part. That's actually the harder part because that's what's going to get passed by legislators and stuff. So just because we used to write a spec in the right code doesn't mean that's how we should do it. And I think for any organization, reevaluating the processes that you assume are correct based on what technology has made hard or easy, that's how big companies fail and small companies win.

How are you leveraging these lessons and tactics in getting your book out and getting your book out to the world?

Well, if I told you, so I'll give you an example. Early on, we did a survey to kind of find some stuff out about pricing and customers. And we said, look, if you answer this survey, someone will get a free hour-long consulting Zoom presentation with us, right? You can use it for your conference or whatever. We don't care. Problem with that is you are disincentivized from sharing that survey with other people. 'cause you want as few people on the survey as possible. So we created two teams, Team Orange and Team Black, and we said we would choose the survey winner from the survey that had the most people submitting to it. And it immediately caused people to go, I'm Team Orange, you should vote Team Orange, right? Yeah, you look at the problem, you find a way to move around it. I will say that we have built a technology for the readers to be able to see case studies. So each of the case studies in the book has a QR code next to it that takes you to a webpage that has much more content, but also like the video of the ad or the links to the resources. So we have a list of places where you can find weak signals to start looking for exploits. There's a page for that, which we can keep updating over time, like new Intel. Let's just say that those case studies.

Do some special things.

Like there's a tech stack behind the case studies. And it's one of the reasons that we couldn't just go with the traditional publisher because Traditional publishers don't like it when you have a QR code. They don't like it when you own and retain the intellectual property rights to the book. And so in order to mess with the world a little bit and practice what we preach, we had to actually go through a fairly unusual publishing structure.

As maybe a final note, I think it's again, I want to come back to you want to make it clear. You're not actually saying, do evil things, do things that are going to hurt people. Maybe just share that, that sentiment again, because I think It's easy for sure.

And we actually devoted an entire chapter to this called Don't actually be evil. There are certain things like abuse, like assuming consent and acting without approval, lying or using dark patterns, breaking the law or even the intent of it, ruining your reputation, which is usually bad. Those are all bad things and we say don't do them. There's some pretty egregious examples. There's a company called Afterlife that was crawling obituaries. And so then when you'd search, you'd find out that someone had died and like, FUneral home operators were getting flowers for people five years after the funeral. And these guys were charged in criminal court. Like they were using, like, that's pretty obviously bad. But there's these other nuanced examples. You know the Chrysler PT Cruiser? It's a terrible little car, right? It's the worst car. Did you know why that car exists? So the PT Cruiser was actually built for a very specific reason. It wasn't built to sell cars. In America, every car manufacturer has to meet fuel efficiency standards for its car line and its truck line. And it turns out that Chrysler's trucks were terrible on fuel. So what happens is the automakers decided they would make this terrible little car called the PT Cruiser that's technically a truck according to like the definitions of a flatbed truck and like there's certain things about it. removable back seat or something. I don't remember it is. But what it did is it brought the average fuel consumption of Chrysler's truck line below the federal guidelines so that it could continue to sell bad trucks. Is that illegal? No. Is it too evil for us? Absolutely. And so I think there's lots of examples that we provide of, like, we try to draw an Occam's razor. Don't ever assume consent. Don't act without permission. Don't punch down. Don't break the actual law. Don't use dark patterns and so on.

I love that you have touched on that, Matt. I'm glad that we came back to that point. Alastair, is there anything else you want to share with listeners or leave listeners.

With before we get to our very exciting lightning round? Well, they should all buy the book, obviously. I mean, it's dumb not to ask. You can go to buy.justevil enough.com if you're interested. But more importantly, we really want to hear examples of this. This stuff is just fun to talk about. Like every one of these stories is hilarious. We really wanted the book to feel like part frameworks and useful text because Lean Analytics was very prescriptive and that worked really well. But also partly like going to a cocktail party and sitting next to a fascinating person with weird stories to tell that you kind of learn from. And if we managed to navigate those two, then we're happy. So if people have examples of subversive thinking they want to share with Emily and I, we'd love to hear.

And what's the best way for them to share that?

Well, justevilandoff.com has a website there. We have a few things that are surprising that I think people will see in the next few months as we open them up. I'm A Croll, and Emily is Emily Jane Ross on most platforms. So those are probably the best ways.

Okay, cool. We usually get to that to the end, but I'm glad that people now know. I feel like this episode's gonna get a lot of people's minds buzzing. I'm excited to see how people use some of these ideas. But with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Alastair, are you ready?

I am.

First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

Dan Davies has a book called the Unaccountability Machine that I have literally made an entire conference theme out of this year. It's fantastic. Jonathan Haidt's the Righteous Mind, which really made me lose faith in reason and rationality. And I got to say, the best marketing textbook ever is Dan and Chip Heath's Made to Stick.

Is there a recent favorite movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

The first movie I have ever watched a second time on the second night is David Fincher's the Killer, which came out on Netflix with Michael Fassbender. It is the absolute embodiment of self-awareness.

I just loved it. Is there a favorite product that you've.

Recently discovered that you really love? this sounds silly, but yeah, I bought this like $100 folding second screen for my MacBook. They're like a hundred bucks now and they power off a USB-C cable that also is their HDMI thing. I find myself much more productive with a second screen and being able to put one in my laptop bag that's the same size. There's a bunch of different brands, but yeah, just $100 second screen LED that plugs into USB-C on your MacBook.

Is there a brand that you like best that people can search or it doesn't really matter?

I don't remember which brands. And honestly, I mean, this is another thing we didn't really talk about, the reality of branding on Amazon. Like brand names don't matter anymore. It's like someone threw up on a keyboard and that's the name of the company now for half the products you.

Buy on Amazon because that's not how you actually choose the product. Like there is value to a brand, but it's much less so like you, if you don't know the brand, you Yeah, you don't worry about it as much as you used to.

I think Anchor, ANKR, is a good example of a company that was just one of many power companies, but they did their packaging right and their products right, and now they're a well-known name. So it takes real work to escape that trap.

Interesting. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in work or in life?

My company, which is just me, is called Solve for Interesting. Because all my life, when I've tried to solve for fame or for safety or for wealth, it hasn't gone as well as when I've just solved for what's interesting. But I think the motto that informs things the most that I work on these days is it's amazing what can get done when nobody cares who gets credit.

These are both great. Final question. We worked together for many years back in the day in Montreal on my startup. I'm curious if there's another memory that comes to mind or a story or something that you think back to during that time when we were working together on this tiny little startup back in Montreal?

I think we went tobogganing down a giant hill, didn't we? Didn't we go up to Laurentian's to my mom's cottage and we like, with Eva?

Yes.

And we went tobogganing down a giant sled, like you got into this big inner tube, was that right?

I think so. And also the two words I learned on that trip are tobogganing and took.

And definitely, I think, you know, as with everything else, you really kind of live life large. So when you got to Montreal, you just left in with, you know, full in. And I was just so happy for someone who was from San Diego. And, like, I moved from San Diego to Montreal. It's kind of how we met down there. Moving to Montreal is a lot, and it's a different language. It's a different culture. As Colbert says, it's Europe with normal toilets. And I think it was just, it was so great to see you kind of jump into everything that it had to offer for your time here. And I love the fact that you've just kept doing that. It's great. Thanks, Alastair.

My memory of that is I arrived at the airport, I landed in Montreal from San Diego where it was very warm into a winter. Ben, who you mentioned, took me straight to a department store to buy all my winter gear, like an actual jacket and shoes for the snow. and stuff for my kitchen.

And so there is one other thing we don't put in the recording.

Yeah, okay.

So Year One Labs, we used a hackathon to bring people in rather than the usual application form. And I don't know if you remember, it was Sean Lynch who has done a bunch of product stuff, but was the head of Google Cloud, came up and we all built stuff on this new Google Cloud platform that they wanted some users on. And we gave a bunch of the different startups a weekend to build something. And I think you went out with someone and built a thing that used four square check-ins to figure out where people had been before they went to a restaurant and where they went after. Yeah. On Friday, you said, this is our plan. You went off and did it. And then on Sunday, we all did these presentations and you got up and went, so our product lets restaurant owners know where they'd been before. where their customers have been for, where they go afterwards. Here's our beautiful slide deck. We have a working prototype and oh, by the way, we sold it to three companies. And Ben and Ray and Ian and I went, yeah, they're probably in. And I don't know if I remember that correctly, but that story's in my head for some reason.

I definitely remember building that. I don't remember us selling it to anyone. I imagine maybe we got some folks using it, but the whole idea there was, I was just always thinking about how do people find out about your product? How do people find out about your restaurant? And I was just like, well, where do people most come from before they go to your restaurant? And so maybe find that place and then go advertise there. Some more people come to your restaurant.

Yeah, it was people analytics. And that was like at the time Foursquare was new, but all three of us afterwards were like, Dude, even if that's a bad idea, he can make.

51 more of those and one won't suck. It all worked out. Alastair, what a journey. Thank you so much for being here. What a special episode. Two final questions. You already mentioned this, but just remind people, where can folks find you in the book online? And how can listeners be useful to you?

Buy.JustEvilEnough.com if they want to pre-order the book. We're actually gonna do a bunch of webinars for people who pre-order because we see their email addresses unlike when you just buy it on Amazon. So we're planning on doing a few things now and when you actually get the book. So you can buy the book on Buy.JustEvilEnough.com There's the usual newsletter, sign up, subscription stuff. We have, I think the account is evil enough on most social platforms. And then, yeah, tell us your examples of subversiveness in action. We would love to use our own aggregation play and be a clearinghouse for subversive thinking that doesn't suck. So we'd love to hear all the examples we can. It's too bad Emily couldn't join us here. She's brilliant and hilarious. So make sure you follow her. She's Emily Jane Ross on social platforms too.

Amazing, Alastair, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.

Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com See you in the next episode.