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

23:39She was left behind to guard the castle. So the enemy shows up and the castle is pretty well fortified. And she realizes they have about two weeks worth of food and then they're going to get captured. So she rounds up all the flour in the castle. She bakes a bunch of bread. She goes up to the parapet scene. She throws it over into the awaiting army and says, you look hungry. Let us know if he eats some more food. And the army leaves. That's a very valid strategy. But we don't talk about those kinds of strategies. Was he evil? No. Was it clever? Yeah. The code of arms of this town is like two crossed loaves of bread.

24:13But 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 LePont podcast that you're high on agreeable thinking. So I'm here to tell you you need to embrace some disagreeability. I'm glad you're here to help me there. This also reminds me of my chat with Rory Sutherland who is 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 it a 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 fine time.

24:54I love Rory. In fact, Emily and I are meeting him in London for dinner. You 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 that like the wine list is a system. You know, I can't sell you a gin and tonic for 50 bucks because you know how much it cost 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.

25:28So 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 like who would she want to read this book of his interlude? 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 love this idea of zero to zero day exploits that you've mentioned a couple times. Is there anything else there just like 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.

26:08And 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.

26:43One 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 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 launch their mobile app, like 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 at the catches.

27:20You got to order it from McDonald's parking lot. It'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 all 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. They offered no explanation of people like, hey, Burger King, why are you liking my old posts? Because the reality is if someone likes your posts from 10 years ago, it's either a bot, a stalker or you're about to get sued, right?

27:59It'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 complete as post, they would have missed it. Someone likes one of your posts. You have enough followers that like you 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. Influencer start getting upset. What's going on? What's going on? And 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?

28:27Funnel 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, 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.

28:59So let's recon canvas. I know it's hard to visualize a canvas grid thing and willing to it in the show notes, but just to help people get a better sense of what they're going to 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 section for product, which we defined in 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.

29:37And 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 18 squares? And the idea is you look within each of these cross sections to see if there's an opportunity to do something. Right. You go into each square and you say, what's the status quo here with the normal behavior? How do I, what we considered an orthodox train? Usually we have like five or six case studies for each of those rectangles. There's like 160 case studies in the book. It was there's a reason it took so long to write.

30:06As you're talking about media, I think of a recent example of a really clever marketing stunts slash subversive tactic. This company runway that does basically it helps you track your company's runway and finances 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 it's locked unlocks. And so everyone on Twitter is just like, what the hell is this?

30:38We got this lock and I'm on 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 once all it 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 locks it and inserts tweeting, oh my god, I got this sweet bomber jacket and all this wagon. I'll runways doing something awesome. Yeah, it's forced unboxing. When Ben and I wrote Lena 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 see nice things.

31:10Oh, Malik Eric reused him or Ali. 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 underscore campaign equals Eric reused campaign equals Tim O 'Reilly. So now we knew who was doing it, Julian Smith and so on. So every 12 hours, if you knew thing, little more lift, little more lift. And then when they were all out there, we started comparing them to one of them.

31:46Well, you know, more people are clicking Julian's, but more people are preordering Tim's. 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.

32:18Liquid 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 had I 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 talked about this recon canvas that basically gives you a whole bunch of areas to look.

32:58Is there anything else along those lines? Well, I mean, the real meat of the book, once you get beyond the recon canvas in this subversive thinking stuff, we looked through probably through our 400 case studies, about 160 made it into the book. And these aren't just case studies from business. There are also things like Genghis Khan and Dula Dumaartons, a Neville masculine 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.

33:30What 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 products 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 candidates, 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. This episode is brought to you by Vanta.

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34:46Get $1 ,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta .com slash Lenny. That's v -a -m -t -a .com slash Lenny. Well let's talk about these tactics. I love that that's where you went. I know that it's going to be hard for people to remember. Here's all these 11 ways. I know the book gets until these things, but you can just either run through them real quick or just go through them. I'll give you a quick example. 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 reloaded off and enough.

35:21But it turns out that that also made them really simple. They were competing against these companies like Vanta and Clarify and Remedy that cost millions and millions of dollars to years to install, whereas they could be installed with a URL. They took their weakness, which was we are a very low feature. They turned their bug, their weakness, which is we have a very limited feature set. 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. That's a good example of looking at your weaknesses and turning them into strengths.

35:54That pattern shows up a before you move on to the next one. Just to highlight that one, I love that one. Basically, the idea there is, think about what's a limitation, what's actually, where you behind or potentially worse than your competitors. Then think about how can we turn that into a benefit? Often, it's not that you have to turn it into a benefit. It's already a benefit for a target market you have ignored. If your product takes a lot of time to configure, maybe there are prosumers out there who are white labeling that stuff. That's a new segment. It's this whole product manager. I'm a product manager.

36:33Our tendency is to make the product just one more feature. 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 Craft Insulation until the company noticed that people were wetting it and using it to clean stains off things. It turns out there's a much better market, which is people want to clean stuff. It's an example that I've sort of a pocryphal example. I was talking to a company that was selling drones invented for bridge inspection.

37:12I mean, bridge inspection is actually a really dangerous job. There are people who are continuously exploring the bridge for cracks and stuff. The City Council doesn't really want to pay for it. It's a cost. If they find something wrong, they have to fix it. Who does care? It turns out to insurance companies. If you go sell to an insurance company and you say, look, don't sign off on bridges unless they have this drone. You have 100 % close rate with everybody who needs insurance for their bridge. That's a good example of figuring out how to upgrade your buyer. There's a great example of this.

37:47Hitachi makes a personal misoger. You may have heard of this device. Hitachi was not selling a lot of these personal misogers, but it turns out there's a very specific use case for these personal misogers that the Japanese management company did not want to mention. They partnered with a company called Vibratex with the only condition being that Vibratex is not allowed to mention that the product is made by Hitachi. Sometimes the buyer upgrade is getting out of your own way. That's a tactic that people don't often think about. We're stuck with our target market. There's a sense of we were wrong when you acknowledge that a different market wants your product.

38:24Amazing example. The tactic here, just to mirror back is if your product isn't working for people who are trying to sell it to today, maybe there's a different market that loves it. You don't have to change anything about which actually building it's just a different target market. Or even a different buyer. Different buyer. At the same company essentially. In fact, a Caribbean, we used to make this web performance analysis thing. It took me years to figure out we should stop selling its operations and start telling it to the marketing department. Then I learned to say, analytic shows you what people did.

38:57We 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? Access is another one. This sounds obvious. Do you have access to something other people don't? You got to be careful here. Generally, 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 Get Around, which was a car rental by owner service, she had access to one of her VCs friends who had an early Tesla roadster.

39:34She 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 master class, founder of master class went to school with Justin Hoffman's daughter. Use that access. It's not necessarily there, but if you've got access, take a step back and say, what can I do that other people can't in my personal network to 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. An example of runway shared, I think, one of the levers the founder had is he knew a lot of fancy people.

40:09And so he's like, hey, I'm going to send you some. Can I be your address? Oh, for sure. I mean, before Bumble with Tinder, Whitney was traveling around a 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 sheet to the fraternity and say, hey, all the girls are on this app. So 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.

40:45Just 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 amount 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.

41:18So they launched this thing in conjunction with local newspapers to promote the best workplaces survey every year. Used their tool for surveys. Now, every company's employees want to, every company wants its employees to fill out the survey. So now you have the survey, you fill it out and then ENERGAGE, the newspapers publish the best workplaces, they get to sell ads to those companies and then ENERGAGE 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 is an 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?

41:58And the key again is they actually have to be excited about this thing that they came up out of nowhere. But either the bait has to be free, in which case they can't 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. 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 because it's only half of the solution. David Ricketts, who's a Harvard professor of innovation, uses the example of mac and cheese.

42:37So craft 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. You win 800 mattress in the states. Do you still 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?

43:09Delivery install. No removal. Really hard to get rid of 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 business of delivering and selling mattresses. One step before you in the value chain is 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're like, oh yeah, these guys are going to replace our mattress, right? I don't want a new mattress. I want to replace mattress. And it's that kind of mindset.

43:45So what can you combine it with often? It's just before 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 getting 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.

44:25And 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 figures, semiforze, that they would pivot to send messages. So basically you'd sit there and you'd look and when that semiform moved, you break down the message and you'd send it 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 treat on it.

45:05So can you find that that is too evil? But can you find out in advance of something? There was like early on in the days of certain social platforms, the analysts were all trying to figure out where they actually see 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 users 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 advantage. So what can you find out early that others can't? Now a more concrete example, this is Farmville.

45:45So Pinkus and Zuckerberg were very good friends and Zuckerberg told Pinkus 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 portion of 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 going to 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 trading.

46:23There'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 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, 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 yeah, a lot of evil.

47:00Absolutely. 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 trans or just selling the data and 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 Syracant D 'Atair about a guy named LP Maurice and I think you might know LP'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.

47:41And so 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 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 he had to automate this thing.

48:15I 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 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 company 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.

48:47And then the next time he calls the company is 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, you know, putting the bait out there like the catnip for the search engine or whatever. And sometimes it's going to 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 going to complain about Sony.

49:19And 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 have assumed 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.

49:48And you've just found a really interesting way to almost everything. 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 cold gate. And then you have the dimension of clinicality, which is like four out of five densest degree that was crest. So in the early toothpaste wars, you had cold gate versus crest.

50:21And you either brushing your teeth because you want to be sexy or brushing your teeth because you wanted to be healthy. And then along comes Tom's 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 unfloridated. 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.

51:01And 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 hippy natural person, you reject clinical science and you reject traditional beauty norms. So you're orthogonal to both like your perpendicular to both sex appeal and health care. And so it's a perfect position. And Tom's of Maine used that. And obviously two years later, I introduced a Florida deformity line got into grocery stores, but are in a pharmacies. 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 the data and say, how do we compete on those?

51:40Or 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 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. Got it. I have an awesome episode of April Dunford, who's I think also Canadian. Yeah, where she goes deep into positioning.

52:13I 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 Bugatti's. 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.

52:50Before 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 much better dimension for a certain target segment. And I agree, April is 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 Florida. Briefly, my mind went to I'm trying to decide if Florida is actually good or bad for our kid. There's so many debates out there for British person with all my teeth.

53:28It's 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, no for no right. Well, let me talk to you about regulation. Who? 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 is opt out. You're going to deliver your organs when you die unless you explicitly don't want to. In Germany, you have to opt in.

53:59They'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 because the law didn't actually say to be a car that was parked there.

54:46And 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 he built a park on a car. And then the local town government said, well, you're going to have to take your car and get it smog checked once a year. So that's not going to last. So he bought this historically 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 was an otherwise possible.

55:26Okay, let me see how many we've gone through so far. So I'm just going to 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. 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 over -tune window and the realm of what's considered acceptable.

56:01A 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 game -arriage 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 Body Form, 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.

56:44But Emily's point was like every single woman let her 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 has an over -tune window that's different from the mainstream market and 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.

57:19And I love that you 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 and 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 like use the need for novelty and disagreeability to temporarily let yourself think like a supervillain.

57:58We have some tactics for this. Ignoring the guardrails, embracing absurdity, not pulling your punches on wording. I mean, I've had people go, oh, I can't possibly do that in my marketing. Remember Blair Witch? Remember 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 any position things.

58:39And 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 obstacles by combining unrelated fields. There's something called Construel Level Theory, which is how you bring distant ideas closer 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. 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?

59:20Would 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 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 for 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. I will tell you I've worked with four startups using this and every one of them has found to go to market strategies.

59:56It'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 Start -of -Fest, which is Start -of -Fest is a big conference and material that I've been running with Phil Tellio for a while. We did a workshop this summer and people actually have like workbooks they were completing while we did it and stuff. It's definitely applicable and two, I want to throw throughout to Wes and Gagan here at Maven that they asked Emily and I put together a course which we haven't launched yet because we haven't finished the book yet.

1:00:30But 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. So that's the thing you want to not tell anyone about. But 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.

1:01:11This makes me think about 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 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, 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 upgrade and change the hull. 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.

1:01:56But 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, you can change your 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.

1:02:35So 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. Like that's actually the harder part because that's what's getting it 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.

1:03:15How are you leveraging these lessons and tactics in getting your book out and getting your book out? Well, I told you. So I'll give you an example early on. We did a survey that's kind of finds 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. The problem with that is you are disincentivized from sharing that survey with other people because you want to see people on the survey as possible. So we created two teams, Team Orange and Team Black.

1:03:50And 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 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.

1:04:26There'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 rates 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 strike. As maybe a final note, I think it's again, I want to come back to you want to make it clear.

1:05:02You're not actually saying the evil 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. We actually devoted an entire chapter of 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 that we say don't do them. There's some pretty egregious examples. There's a company called afterlife that was crawling obituaries.

1:05:35And 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 used, 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? I think it's the worst car. Do 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.

1:06:13And 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 backseat or something. I don't remember it. 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? Yeah, absolutely. And so I think there's lots of examples that we provide of like we try to draw on Occam's razor.

1:06:53Don'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. And I love that you have touched 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. You can go to buy. Just evil 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.

1:07:25Like 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 learned from it. If we manage 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, just evil enough .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.

1:08:03I'm a crow 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 going to 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 a very exciting lightning round. Allister, are you ready? I am. First question. What are two or three books that you recommend in 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.

1:08:35It's fantastic. Jonathan Heights 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 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 of 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.

1:09:15They're like $100 now and they power off a USB -C cable that also is their HDMI thing. I find myself much more productive with the 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 plugs on 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 I know honestly. I mean, this is another thing we didn't really talk about the reality of branding on Amazon. Brand names don't matter anymore. It's like someone threw up on a keyboard and that's the name of the company now.

1:09:49For half the products you buy on Amazon because that's not how you actually choose the product. There is value to a brand, but it's much less like you. If you don't know the brand, yeah, you don't worry about it as much as you can. I think Anker and KER 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 if I'm useful in work or in life?

1:10:20My company, which is just me, is called Saul 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 work 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 story or something that you think back to during that time when we were working together on this tiny little startup back in Montreal.

1:11:03I think we went to bargaining down a giant hill, didn't we? Didn't we go up to Lurentgen's to my mom's cottage and we like with Eva? Yes. And we went to bargaining 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 toboggan and took. And definitely I think as with everything else you really kind of live life large. So when you got to Montreal you just left him with 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.

1:11:47It'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 Alster. My memory of that is I arrived at the airport. I landed a Montreal from San Diego. 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 choose for those snow and like stuff for my kitchen and there is there is one other thing we don't have to put in their recording.

1:12:22Okay. 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 Sean Lynch who was who has been done a bunch of product stuff but was they had a 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 for a restaurant and where they went after. On on Friday you said this is our plan you went off and did it.

1:13:02And then on Sunday we all did these presentations and you got up and went so our product let's restaurant owners know where they'd been before where where their customers are before 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 is in my head for some reason. I definitely remember building that I don't remember a 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.

1:13:39How 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 if the type four square was new but but all three of us afterwards 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. Allister 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 working folks find you in the book online and how can listeners be useful to you.

1:14:12Buy. Just evil enough .com if they want to preorder the book we're actually going to 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 which you know now and when you actually get the book so you can buy the book on buy. Just evil enough .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 count.

1:14:51It'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 Allister 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 a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'spodcast .com see you in the next episode.