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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/cc432f69421e9cfc

People overlook this often. Sometimes people are not buying your product because it's only half of the 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 this sales guy who was putting the powdered cheese and a box of macaroni together with
on elastic, literally combining them and now you'd buy it because it was ready to made dinner. I think a lot of us don't look at our product and say, how is it being used?

Today my guest is Alister Kroll. 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 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 eleven 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 it helps the podcast tremendously.
With that, I bring you Alistair.
Craig.

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 do you
Why did you decide to write this book? Why does this book need to exist?
Thanks. Good question. So the
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.
Uh, and I've worked with a ton of startups thanks to Lean Analytics, which I'm sure we'll get into a bit.
Um
And
the product managers are m in in many cases missing the point. Like my sense is
When you talk to a product manager, they're so consumed of 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 at 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
Is 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 gonna be talking about.
What are some of your favorite examples of companies that are today, I don't know.
Huge.
Awesome people love'em, but maybe early on did some stuff that wasn't
Uh
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 um 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 the blockbuster head 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
Uh 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. Uh I love the story of Whitney Hess um when she was launching Bumble.
She is the tactic we call the the top shelf tactic, where she put up these posters.
that basically said the univers as if it was made by the university. It basically said
No Facebook, no Instagram, no Snapchat, no Bumble.
Mm
That's you know
She's exploiting this medium called university walls, which are 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
uh 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 gonna grow a business.
What you're finding is that most of the successful companies we know about or
Or the most successful
uh found not just the way to grow, but s they did something
Uh subversive.
And often it's something unprecedented. Uh a lot of these tricks are now known, right?
Uh there was a time when
Um, things like an invite list, where if you invite someone, you get an earlier spot in the invite. That was there was a time that was the first time.
You know, the drop box 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, g having a seamless onboarding process and so on.
And so my co author, Emily and I
It turns out we've both been obsessed with this stuff for the last ten years.
And so we met and started comparing notes and uh
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 kinda 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 it.
When b 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 gonna like it when you don't play by their rules.
They very quickly label you as evil.
And so the name's kinda tongue in cheek. It definitely gets people's attention.
Uh but the rules and the lessons in there
Uh there's a line in that we didn't quote in the book.
For an old song by Christaberg.
I think we didn't want to pay royalty rates for it.
Called Spanish Train.
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 find 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 from a position that you believe is very valuable and useful.
You still have to recognize that you're gonna have to get the world to behave in a different way if you're gonna win.
As we were starting to record this, I didn't actually know this until just like a few minutes ago that
The title of the book and the concept originated with when you we were working on my startup.
And advice you gave me. Can you talk about that?'Cause 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.
Uh, Ben Yoskovitz, I think, one of the other founders with whom I wrote Lean Analytics.
had fallen in love with this new le you know, lean startup methodology.
So Ben was kind of obsessed with this idea of the lean startup, right? This new book from Eric Rees.
Uh 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 ninety days and you kinda polish the work the 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 webmetrics.
December. Right. I just remember Igloo Fest in in February with the frozen eyebrows.
Um Canada is as cold as they say, folks.
And uh
As far as I remember it, Local Mind was this product that would let strangers answer questions about a place.
So
Uh for example
Where's a good place to get coffee in Times Square? And you guys had tested
the 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 kinda 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
Uh 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 so important.
to like 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.
Mm. Thanks for sharing that. I I do remember that actually.
Uh the other phrase I remember from the conversation was
That someone said we're we're being boy scouts.
Or being too too many too much of a boy scout.
Yeah, that really
helped us think a little more. It sounds like Ray.
Oh man. And what's interesting is uh once we started doing that, sending questions to
People in location that were from the app itself.
Uh we realize we have we could collect data
about what's going on there. This was just like passive data about what's happening in a bar and restaurant.
It's kinda like what uh
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 where's the bus crowded?
So I was talking to Scott Belski about Beehance. I know you've had him on before.
We were both uh speaking at Techstars in New York a little while back.
And he said that for the launch of Beehance, 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 f 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 a 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'm gonna think of some ideas.
What are some steps that you recommend?
Folks go back to
Come up with some ideas.
The the underlying idea of the book is that you've gotta 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 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.
Um 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 it's subversiveness is a skill you can learn.
We spent a lot of time like understanding it, talking to neuroscientists and
Talking of 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.
Uh five dollars in seed capital.
Five days to figure out what to do.
And two hours to do it.
And then each mem each team in the class would come back for three minutes and present the class and say
how they had turned that five dollars 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
Buy some lemonade ingredients and set up a lemonade stand.
Some of these students I mean they're Stanford.
graduate students, they're 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 donation.
They did pretty well. They turned their five bucks into like two hundred bucks.
Another class did
Um
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 two fifty, 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 six hundred and fifty dollars, six hundred and five dollars somewhere in that range.
You know what they did?
Mm.
Oh my god. I I can't even
So let me recap.
Because this is important.
You got
Five dollars in seed capital.
You got five days to plan.
Two hours to execute.
And then you're gonna 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.
Brilliant, right? They made it mad.
And like what are you gonna say as the professor? Okay, yeah, well then.
Because they recognize 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.
Right.
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 uh there's a great example of Gymshark, which is a pretty big athletic weasure uh 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 Shark.
Uh happy birthday.
And then they of course put s I think like three or four weeks later, Cameo added six thousand words to their terms of service for consumer videos.
But you know these this way Jim Shark had all these s celebrities wishing Jim Shark 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 referse graffiti. Uh people there there's companies that that would start to spray signs on the floor, like the British intelligence agency did a recruiting ad spraying it on the sidewalk.
'Cause there's no law against cleaning up.
So they just got like a spray hose and wrote stuff.
I don't think these sound like silly ideas, but even Coinbase.
Coinbase bought a sixty second Superbowl app where they bounce the QR code around the screen for sixty seconds.
Is it stupid? Yeah. I mean they were ranked the worst of sixty four Superbowl ads, but they got twenty million hits and their service fell over.
So
That's a novelty thing, right? Just like seeing a thing that's different.
uh you know, zagging when everyone else is zigging.
Um 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 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 kinda call these things turbo boosts, where you're 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. 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.
Sure.
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 IKE 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.
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 uh change the manner in which the product's delivered, who's doing it, who 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 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 act 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.
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 kinda 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
Uh 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.
Uh 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 attend to it, right?
And then unbeknownst to these sailors about
half way through the test.
He changed the scoring so that one of the four quadrants represented seventy five percent 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 do really well.
Other behavior other stealers did what they were told.
Super conscientious.
Now
The the Ar the Navy has always recruited
you know, 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
But the strength of your cards isn't how you win in poker. If you 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
uh subterfuge. You win by
looking for your opponent's tells, but we never talk about that in business school.
There's this uh
The this woman from the sixteen hundreds in
Uh sh her name is Jula Du Martins.
And she was married to the king of a city state who went to war.
She was left behind to guard
the 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 he needs 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 cross 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 LePoint uh podcast that you're high on agreeable thinking, so
I'm here to tell you you need to embrace some disagreeability, Lady.
I'm glad you 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 that 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. In fact, um
Uh Emily and I are meeting him in London for dinner. Um he read the book and said some very nice things about it.
Oh, I love that. I think Rory's example of the wine list, which you've probably heard.
That like the wine list is a system.
You know, I can't sell you a gin and tonic for fifty bucks'cause you know how much it costs to make one, but I can sell you wine for any price'cause 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
The wine industry and the wine in a restaurant is a system.
And you're beholden to it. I I I think Rory
More than maybe anyone in the world.
Uh I asked Emily who her perfect
Like
Who would she want to read this book? If it's in well, she said Rory.
I think more than anyone in the world, he just sees the world through these these
system lenses that are incredible.
I I love this idea of zero to zero day exploits that you've mentioned a couple of times. Is there anything else there just like as a way to think about how to come up with
uh clever ideas to grow your product in business.
I would say
Once you've got the subversive mindset, which again is like system awareness, novelty, and disagreeability.
Uh then you have to kind of scan the market.
And we have this framework uh called the Recon Canvas.
That splits the market up into
uh the product, the medium, and the market. That's another hot take of mine is I think that 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
Uh we we have this thing called the um the the recon canvas that helps you scan across
um 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 geo location 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 WAPP and then made all the home speakers go read it by making an ad that said
Hey, okay, Google, what's in a
Whopper?
Um
They do a whole bunch of things, but but a great example of their understanding of the medium.
In twenty nineteen, they started liking all these posts from influential posters from ten years before.
They offered no explanation. And people 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.
Right. 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 completed post, they would have missed it.
Someone likes one of your posts. You have enough followers that like
It may get lost in the noise.
But if it's something from ten 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, then finally
The reveal, they say.
Hey.
We've been liking some things from ten years ago because sometimes the past is great. You know what else is great?
funn 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 look liking something from the past, someone would notice it, right? 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 this 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
So the cli 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
uh section for product, which we define the features and the um messages.
A section for the medium, which is the platforms and the norms.
And then a section for the market.
uh which is the attention you capture and the 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 what winds up being eighteen squares.
And the idea is you look within each of these cross sections to see if there's an opportunity to do something.
And you go into each square and you say, What are the what's the status quo here? What's the normal behavior? How do I what what what we considered unorthodox or unusual? And we have like five or six case studies for each of those rectangles. There's like a hundred and sixty case studies in the book. It was
There's a reason it took so long to write.
Uh, as you're talking about medium, I think of an a recent example of a really clever marketing.
stunt slash subversive uh tactic. Uh this company runway.
That does basically it's helps you track your company's runway in finances, finances and things like that.
They did this really clever strategy where they sent
All these influencer types on Twitter.
uh 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's just like, what the hell is this? We got this locked, 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 because 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 lunch event.
Where everyone unlocks it and then starts tweeting, Oh my God, I got the sweet bomber jacket and all the swag and
Oh, runway's doing something awesome. Yeah, it's forced unboxing.
Uh I'm when Ben and I wrote Lean Analytics.
Uh, we came up with a strategy to announce the book.
Mm.
We found about fifteen people that we knew who would talk about it and say nice things, oh Malik, Eric Reese, 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 twelve hours one of them would tweet something about it.
But each of those things had a had an analytics uh tag, a Google Analytics tag in it. So it was like UTM underscore
Campaign equals Eric Reeves, Campaign equals Tim O'Reilly.
So now we knew who was doing it, right? Julian Smith and so on.
So every twelve hours it'll 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 Well, you know, more people are clicking Julian's, but more people are
Or pre ordering Tim's.
And then these guys started competing with one another.
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 in brand building that comes from how you do this. You're you're sending a message to the market. Burger King is sending a message to the market. It's pretty cheeky.
Um you know, that it's the underdog, which is very consistent.
Liquid Death has some hilarious marketing campaigns.
And uh 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
Um
with a campaign or an ad, unless it gets fifty percent disapproval.
Yeah.
That's like their North Star metric. Fifty percent of people hate this.
That's awesome. I love that just as a hearistic for how to know if your thing is subversive enough.
Yeah.
Um
Is there anything else along the lines of just someone's like, Okay, I wanna think of ideas to come up with really clever
Subversive ideas get people's attention. You talked about this recon canvas that basically gives you a whole bunch of
Oh.
areas to look. Is there anything else along those lines?
Well, I mean, the the real meat of the book, once you get beyond the recon canvas and this subversive thinking stuff.
Uh we looked through probably three or four hundred case studies, about one hundred and sixty made it into the book.
And these aren't just case studies from business. They're also things like Genghis Khan and Dula Du Martins.
Neville Mascaline who was hired by Big Telegraph to stop the spread.
of the radio. Like there's some crazy stories out there.
Uh, Billy Butlin, who convinced the British to pay for all his team camps so he could become a holiday camp king in England.
What we found was these eleven tactics that keep showing up again and again.
uh 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.

Or zero day exploits. And then we have some rules for how to kind of prune through them and figure out the good one.
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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 eleven ways. I know the book get gets into all these things, but can you just
Either run through them real quickly or just go through. I'll give you a quick one example. Um Salesforce dot 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 Vantive 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 uh oh we 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, right?
So
That's a good example of like looking at your your weaknesses and turning them into strengths. And that pattern shows up again 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 is what's a limitation, what's actually
Were you behind or
Or potentially worse than your compet competitors.
And then think about how can we turn that into a
uh 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.
Yeah.
Product managers, I mean I'm a product manager. Our tendency is to want to make the product just one more feature, right?
And 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 and just selling to the wrong person.
Um
Mr. Clean's magic eraser started out as melamine foam for aircraft insulation.
until the company noticed that um 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.
Is an example that I've sort of apocryphal example.
I was talking to a company that was selling drones invented for build uh 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, turns out 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 of an of uh
sort of
figuring out how to upgrade your buyer. And there's a great example of this. Um
Hitachi makes a personal massager.
You may have heard of this device.
Hitashi
was not selling a lot of these personal d massagers. Um
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 VibroTex.
With the only condition being that Vibrotex is not allowed to mention that is made the product is made by Hitachi.
So sometimes the buyer upgrade is like getting out of your own way.
Uh but that's a tactic that people don't often think about. We're sort of stuck with our target market. It does a
sense of we were wrong when you acknowledge that a different market wants your product.
Amazing example.
So the tactic here.
Uh just to kind of mirror back his
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 Caradian, we used to make this web performance analysis thing.
And it took me years to figure out we should stop selling its operations and start telling it to the selling 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.
Uh, Jessica Scorpio when she was launching Get Around, 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.
Uh the uh master class.
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?
Um, oftentimes that's the thing that gives someone an advantage, but we're kind of ashamed to admit it.
An example of runway shared, I think one of the I don't know, levers the founder had is he knew a lot of fancy people.
And so he's like, Hey I'm gonna send you something I have your address.
Oh, for sure.
And I mean, uh for before Bumble, uh with Tinder, uh Whitney was traveling around the sororities'cause she was a sister.
She'd give a talk at a sorority.
About her startup.
And then she would
Uh 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 that's a that's an access strategy.
Uh 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.
Uh 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 beat was
Hey, come to a dinner party and the switch was, Oh, by the way, become a part of this multi level marketing scheme.
Uh there's a company called Entergate.
that does HR software. It's pretty hard to get people excited about H R software.
So they launched this thing in conjunction with
uh local newspapers.
to promote the best workplaces survey every year.
Use their tool for surveys.
Now every company's employees wanna every company wants its employees to fill out the survey.
So then you have the survey, you fill it out, and then
Energy age uh the newspapers publish the best workplaces, they get to sell ads to those companies.
And then Energy 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 be 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.
Yeah.
The bait um has to be you have to also give them the thing you promised.
More than
Uh they'd be so happy about the
thing you switch them with that very few complain and you can resolve those complaints equipment.
And we make that point. Like
Here's how to actually not be a con man.
Great.
All right, what's next?
Uh combination is a big one.
People overlook this often. Sometimes people are not buying your product'cause it's only half of a solution.
Uh
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'cause 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?
Uh, there's an example I can one eight hundred 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 uh mattresses to New Yorkers?
Um
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 to do it.
Oh yeah, we'll take away your old mattress.
So you just look at the value chain and you go, Wait, I'm in business of delivering and selling mattresses. One step before you in the value chain.
Just get rid of the old mattress.
But if you just change your product and slide the value chain over by one block.
Yeah.
We include mattress removal.
People barely f 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?
Uh, there's a great one called Arbitrage. Uh Arbitrage is knowing something other people don't.
Uh, and obviously you can achieve that by lying to them.
You can achieve that by
Um
Finding out sooner.
There's all kinds of ways you can commit arbitrage. Uh one of my favorite examples, this came to us from a guy named Rob Passerella in New York.
Uh there's something called the SHAP.
Optical telegraph.
So
In um
I think sixteenth century France, obviously the speed of messages is very important for the war effort. And so the French set up this optical telegraph is 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 then you'd send it the next one.
And so this way a message could travel across France at like five hundred 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 shop 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?
Um, in advance of something.
Uh there was a uh 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's right there. Is that illegal?
Not really. It's right there.
But it's certainly an advantage. So
What can you find out early?
uh that others can't. Now a more concrete example this is Farmville.
Um
So Pincus and and Zuckerberg were very good friends. 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
Facebook's revenue.
is that Farmville would post these things saying
Hey, Lenny, Alistair needs your help getting some grain for his cows or they're gonna die.
So
There's a good example of like 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 like buying land right next door to where the
There's actually a case of
The 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 Nikke 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 it will be illegal and do it until it is.
Yep. Uh makes me think about billions, which feels a lot of evil.
Absolutely.
Cool. So let's do a few more.
Okay. Aggregation.
Uh, this is a pattern we see over and over again.
Where one uh player in the market takes data from many places.
And then
modifies it in some way.
Uh that could be that they are using it for affiliate links. That's pretty easy, or trans or just 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 uh
Sirkant Ditar about a guy named L P Maurice.
And I think you might know LP he's a Montrealer.
Uh you got a company called Bus Bud.
Mm-hmm.
Bus budget.
Uh, 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
Um when he got home, he decided to make an app so you could order
Kind of like kayak for bus rides.

Bus tickets are a multi billion dollar industry.
And so
Hm.
got people around the world to send in these bus schedules. He put'em all in one place.
And then he went to the bus companies and said, Hey, how about you let me, you know, sell bus tickets? And none of them wanted to hear from it.
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 you had to automate this thing. I think you 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 for search engines, this is like catnip, 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 gonna pay him money. So he puts a button on this 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 twenty percent of your traffic is coming from me? We should probably talk.
Now they're willing to trade.
So
Aggregating data.
Consolidating it.
You know
Putting the bait out there, like the catnip for the search engine or whatever.
Uh and sometimes this can be done badly. One of the examples we think is 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 gonna go complain about Sony. And then they'd extort Sony and say unless you buy from us, we're gonna tell the customers you don't care about them.
probably too evil. You shouldn't assume consent.
Uh 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.
Um
I mean, some of these are very basic things. So so one of the most basic marketing tactics and Rory can talk about this better than I ever could, is a reframing.
When you look at positioning, you're looking at
Two dimensions, right?
Let's say for toothpaste, you have the dimension of
Um
Uh sex appeal.
H you know, fresh breath lasts all night. That was Colgate.
And then you have the dimension of clinicality, which is like four to five dentists agree. That was crest.
So in the early toothpaste wars you had Colgate versus Crest.
Yeah we either
Brushing your teeth'cause 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 nineteen seventies.
You got your tofu from a health food store.
Doctor Strange Love.
has lines about fluoride being a government conspiracy.
And so you show up and go, Oh, we're unfloridated, we're natural.
Will 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 reject traditional beauty norms.
So you're orthogonal to both like you're perpendicular to both
Sex appeal and health care.
And so it's a perfect position. And Tom Zame used that and obviously
two years later introduced to Florida to do Formula and got into grocery stores, but
Um
Or in a pharmacies.
So so being able to reframe things, I mean I mentioned liquid death, but
When people talk about positioning, they often look at the dimensions of 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 criter the dominant criteria for deciding about the product.
And is reframing one of the tactics? Yep. Reframing would be one of the tactics for sure. Okay, awesome. And uh is it a s is it interchangeable with positioning or do you think of those two. So we actually think that
Positioning is simply where you are on a grid. Reframing is drawing the grid.
Mm.
Got it.
I have a 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,'cause 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.
Uh 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 about electric cars. Before that, if you look at the ads from the Prius and stuff like that, 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 a in an established competitive market where you're bidding for RFPs and B to B, but if you want to
If you're disagreeing with the market.
You're probably disagreeing with how it scores value.
Uh you're talking about Florida briefly, my mind went to I'm trying to decide if Florida 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 for that's my current position, it feels like a good thing.
There's so much stuff out there. Ah, enough, right?
Well let me talk to you about regulation.
Oh. Um 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 gonna 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.
Uh, Germany has twelve percent organ donors.
Austria has like ninety nine point six
So
All your growth hacks ain't gonna get you from twelve to ninety nine point six, 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.
Uh it's also a great way to find loopholes. I love the story of parklets.
So for a while urban
uh agitators would build these little two hour long 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 to 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 in front of my house, but the law says it has to be a car.
So you built a park on a car.
And then
The uh the the g the local town government said you but you're gonna have to take your car in and get it like smog checked once a year. So it's not gonna last. So he bought this historically
Uh um this
historical van.
That was
uh not required to be smogjecked. 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 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 uh
Turning bugs into features.
Upgrading.
Buy your upgrade.
Access.
Bait and switch.
Combination.
Arbitrage
aggregation.
Reframing
And regulation, I think was the last one you shared.
And then earlier on we talked about uh misappropriation with Netflix misappropriating the US postal service.
And then the last one is sliding the window.
Um 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. Um
There's a company in England, I think it's called Bodyform.
That was the first to use red liquid in in ads for female hygiene products and tampon products?
Like
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 the
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 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
Eleven.
Very concrete ways to think about ways to
Get above the noise, get people's attention.
Be a little subversive.
And I 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
have put together here's like the eleven 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 than just like how to
operationalize coming up with ideas knowing that they have this list. Yeah. I mean it 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 like use the the need for novelty and disagreeable disagreeability to temporarily let yourself think like a supervillain.
Um, we have some tactics for this, ignoring the guardrails.
Uh embracing absurdity.
Not pulling your punches on wording. I mean, s I've had people go, Oh, I can't possibly do that in my marketing.
Remember Blair Witch? Remember the Blair Witch project? Mm-hmm.
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, but they starved that 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.
Um, and West 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 TRIS.
Which is a combinatorial way of overcoming
Uh
uh overcoming obstacles by combining um unrelated fields
Uh, there's something called construal level theory, which is how you bring
Distant ideas closer.
to to change how you think about them. So that we go through a lot of the sort of neuroscience of
how to pick good exploits and brainstorm properly.
Uh and then finally I would say
We talk a lot about like premortems figuring out how things might go wrong.
Uh 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 do what does a smart coach?
conclude given the same information without you sharing their
your conclusions. So there's some 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 startups kind of apply these
tactics if there's a story there of something that's emerged out of a company you've worked with.
Thinking
This way.
Uh, I will tell you I've worked with four startups using this and every one of them has found a go to market strategy that's been awesome.
Uh
You know, I I suspect that
Um
Emily and I are both gonna get a lot of
consulting requests after this just because it's really interesting to implement this.
We did a workshop at Starter Fest, uh which is Starterfest is a big conference in Montreal that I've uh
Been running with Phil Telio for a while.
Uh, we did a workshop this summer and people actually had like workbooks they were completing while we did it and stuff. Uh it's definitely applicable and and to uh I wanna throw throw out to uh Wes and Gagan here uh
Maven that 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.
Uh less about anecdotes, more about frameworks you can use.
Yeah, I think um
We will have done the right thing.
when I go to product management meetings
And instead of people talking about their feature
Their
Alluding to their
Zero day.
Marketing exploit.
But the dumbest thing in the world is to talk about it.
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 uh tweet I just saw about how
With AI, it's so much easier to just build stuff. Just build a quick app.
That
the skill and the the success, the chances 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 it's
I do a lot of work in digital government with this conference called Forward Fifty.
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 up front, right? You can change a feature in the spec in a day.
You can change it in the code in a week.
Can change it in production, if at all, in a month.
And so
Thinking about what's scarce and what's abundant, what's 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
Um, if I'm building software, it may now be easier
to use an LM in Figma to build ten 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. Like that's actually the harder part because that's what's gonna 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
re evaluating the processes that you assume
are correct based on what technology has made hard or easy.
Is
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. Well, where I told you. Um
So I I'll give you an example early on. We did a a survey to kinda 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 because 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 winn 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.
Uh I will say that we have built a
technology for
the readers to be able to
uh C case studies. So each of the case studies in the book has a QR code next to it.
That takes you to a web page 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, but 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 an a fairly unusual publishing structure.
Mm.
As maybe a final note. I think it's again, I wanna come back to you wanna make it clear.
You're not actually saying be evil, do evil things, do things that are gonna hurt people. Maybe just share that that sentiment again,'cause I think it's easy for you. For sure. And we actually devoted an act an entire chapter to this called Don't Actually Be Evil.
Uh, there are certain things like abuse, like assuming consent and acting without approval.
uh 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. We say
Don't do them.
Um
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 and like
funeral home operators are getting flowers for people
Five years after the funeral.
And
These guys were charged in criminal court. Like they were used the like
That's pretty obviously bad. But there's these other nuanced examples. You know the Chrysler PT Cruiser?
Mm-hmm. It's a terrible little car, right?
Like it's the worst car. Did you know why that car exists?
Mm mm.
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 it's truck line.
It turns out that
Chrysler's trucks were terrible on fuel.
So what happens is
the uh automakers decided they would make this terrible little car called the P T 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.
Um
Don't break the actual law, don't use dark patterns and so on.
I love that you have touched on that. I'm glad that we came back to that point.
Alistair, 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. Um
You can go to buy dot just evil enough.com.
Um if you if you're interested.
Uh but more importantly, we really want to hear examples. 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 kinda learn from and
If we manage to navigate those two, then we're happy. So
If people have examples of subversive thinking they wanna share with with Emily and I, we'd love to hear
And what's the best way for them to share that?
Uh well, just evil enough dot com uh has a website there. Uh we have a few things that are surprising that I think people
We'll see uh in the next few months as we open them up.
Um I'm a Krull and Emily is Emily Jane Ross on most platforms.
Uh 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. Alistair, 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.
Uh it's fantastic.
Jonathan Heights the righteous mind.
Which really made me lose faith in reason and rationality.
And I gotta say the best marketing textbook ever is Dan and Chip Heath's Made to Sti.
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?
Uh, this sounds silly, but yeah, um I bought this like hundred dollar 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 HTMI thing.
uh 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.
Uh but yeah, just hundred dollars second screen L E D plugs on plugs into USB on C on your macro.
Is there a brand that you like best that people can search or 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.
You there the 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, like you you don't worry about it as much as you I think Anchor A N K E R 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 like 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?
Uh, 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.
Um but I think the motto that
uh informs things the most that I work on these days is it's amazing what can get done when nobody cares who gets credit.
Mm.
These are both great.
Final question.
We worked together for m for many years back in the day in Montreal on my startup.
I'm curious if there's a
another memory that comes to mind or a story
Or
Uh something that you
Think back to during that time when we were working together on this.
Tiny little startup back in Montreal.
Uh, I think uh we went to Bogging down a giant hill, didn't we?
Mm. Didn't we go up to Laurentian's to my mom's cottage and we like
Yeah. With Eva.
Yes. And we went to Bogning down a giant sled, like you got into this big inter tube, was that right?
I think so. And uh also the the two words I learned I on that trip are toboggan and uh
Uh took?

And definitely um
I think you know, as with everything else, you really kinda live life large, so
Um when you got to Montreal you just left him with w 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 kinda how we met down there.
Um
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.
Um, and I think it was just it was so great to see you kinda jump into everything.
uh that it had to offer for your time here. And and I I love the fact that you've just kept doing that. It's great.
Thanks, Alistair. 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.
Uh
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 like uh stuff for my kitchen and
So there is there is one other thing. We don't recording. Okay. Um
So year one labs, we used uh hackathon.
To bring people in rather than the usual application form?
Mm.
And I don't know if you remember it was Sean Lynch, uh, who was who has done done a 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 uh a weekend to build something.
And I think you went out with someone and built a thing that used um
Four square check-ins.
To figure out where people had been before
They
Um went through a restaurant and where they went after.
Yeah. And 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
Um
So
Our product lets restaurant owners know where they've been before.
Uh where 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 d I don't know if I remember that correctly, but that story is in my head for some reason.
I definitely remember building that. Uh I don't remember us selling it to anyone.
I imagine maybe we got some folks using it, but the whole idea there was
Uh 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 see your restaurant? And so maybe
Find that place and then go advertise there so more people come to your restaurant.
Yeah, it was people analytics. And that was like if the time Foursquare was new, but but all three of us afterwards like
Dude, even if that's a bad idea, he can make fifty one more of those and one won't suck.

It all worked out.
Alistair, 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?
Uh buy dot just evil enough dot com if they want to pre order the book.
Uh, we're actually gonna do a bunch of webinars um 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 between now and when you actually get the book.
So you can buy the book on buy dot just evil enough dot com.
There's the usual newsletter, sign up, subscription stuff. We have uh I think the account is evil enough.
on most social platforms. Um 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.
Uh so we'd love to hear all the examples we can.
Uh it's too bad Emily couldn't join us here. She's brilliant and hilarious.
Uh so make sure you follow her. She's Emily Jane Ross on social platforms too.
Amazing. Alistair, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you.
By everyone.
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