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Alistair Croll: Why startups need zero-day marketing tactics

Through Croll's lens of awareness, novelty, and disagreeability; subversive startups find zero-day exploits that turn unfair attention into profitable demand.

Alistair CrollguestLenny Rachitskyhost
Nov 3, 20241h 15mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:00

    Alistair’s background

    1. AC

      (instrumental music) People overlook this often. Sometimes people are not buying your product 'cause it's only half of the solution. David Ricketts, who's a Harvard Professor of Innovation, uses the example of mac and cheese.

    2. LR

      Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Dinner.

    3. AC

      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 an elastic, literally combining them, and now you'd buy it 'cause it was ready-made dinner. I think a lot of us don't look at our product and say, "How is it being used?"

    4. LR

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

  2. 2:00 – 6:17

    The story behind Alistair and Emily’s book Just Evil Enough

    1. LR

      Alistair, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

    2. AC

      Thanks for having me. It's awesome to be here.

    3. LR

      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?

    4. AC

      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 with 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, the better.

    5. LR

      To give people some examples of the kind of stuff that you write about in this book and kinda 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?

    6. AC

      And I think that's an important point. It's not that they did something evil.

    7. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    8. AC

      It's that they did something to use a system in a way its creators didn't intend.

    9. LR

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  3. 6:17 – 7:43

    Examples of subversive tactics

    1. LR

    2. AC

      So like an obvious example is Netflix, right? Netflix started out, um, they needed broadband. They didn't call themselves Postalflix. They called themselves Netflix. Clearly they wanted to use the network. But a lot of people forget that Blockbuster had streaming first. Streaming wasn't a good play at the start of the online video industry because the penetration of broadband in the US was very limited. So Netflix got the US Postal Service. They misappropriated the US Postal Service and turned it into, uh, an on-demand, very high-bandwidth, but very, very high-latency broadband network by sticking DVDs into envelopes. And like Blockbuster had 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 used the tactic we call the, the top shelf tactic, where she put up these posters in universities that basically said the univ- as if it was made by the university, it basically said, "No Facebook, no Instagram, no Snapchat, no Bumble." Well, that's, you know, th- she's exploiting this medium called university walls, which are a really unregulated platform for distributing your message. But she's also sending this subversive reminder to people that she's one of the four top applications that the university doesn't approve of. Nobody told her she could do that. Is that evil? No. Is it clever? Hell

  4. 7:43 – 10:36

    The importance of unfair advantage

    1. AC

      yeah.

    2. LR

      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 gonna grow their product. It's gonna be, "Okay, we're gonna win on SEO. We're gonna 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 our business." What you're finding is that most of the successful companies we know about, or, or the most successful, uh, found not just a way to grow, but s- they did something, uh, subversive.

    3. AC

      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 Dropbox model of when you invite someone, you both get more storage. That was cool the first time. If it works, it just becomes marketing. If it doesn't work or it becomes illegal, you stop doing it, right? But so the key isn't like go do those things. By all means, do the things that work. The key is to go find your own. And I think that finding that go-to-market strategy, that unfair, unprecedented, we call them zero day marketing exploits, is as important as building the right product feature, you know, g- having a seamless onboarding process, and so on. And so my co-author Emily and I, it turns out we'd both been obsessed with this stuff for the last 10 years, and so we met and started comparing notes. And, 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 kind of... Even between Europe and North America, there are tactics that have worked there that are untried in the North American market.

    4. LR

      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 advantage of-

    5. AC

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

  5. 10:36 – 14:24

    The origin of the title “Just Evil Enough”

    1. AC

    2. LR

      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 y- we were working on my startup and advice you gave me. Can you talk about that? 'Cause I didn't actually know this.

    3. AC

      Years ago, you and I were part of a startup accelerator called Year 1 Labs, and it was built on this new idea called the Lean Startup. Uh, Ben Gersovitz, 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 Ries, 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 90 days and you kind of polish the wor- 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 chilly Montreal in February from San Diego, from Webmetrics, uh-

    4. LR

      December.

    5. AC

      ... to launch LocalMind. December, right.

    6. LR

      From San Diego.

    7. AC

      I just remember Igloofest in, in February with the frozen eyebrows. Um, Canada is as cold as they say, folks. And, uh, as far as I remember it, LocalMind was this product that would let strangers answer questions about a place. So, uh, for example, "W- where's a good place to get coffee in Times Square?" And you guys had tested that, 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.

    8. LR

      (laughs) Thanks for sharing that. I- I do remember that, actually. Uh, the other phrase I remember from that conversation was that someone said, "We're- we're being Boy Scouts. We're being too- too much- too much of a Boy Scout," and that really helped us think a little more.

    9. AC

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

    10. LR

      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 realized we ha- we could collect data about what's going on there. This was just, like, passive data about what's happening in a bar or restaurant. It's kind of like what, uh ... I don't know if you see- 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 app.

    11. AC

      Yeah. "Where's the bus?" "Crowded." So I was talking to Scott Belsky about Behance. I know you've had him on before. Uh, we were both, uh, speaking at Techstars in New York a little while back, and he said that for the launch of Behance, he reached out and asked all these influential designers to join his platform, and they said no. And then he said, "Oh, okay, pivot. Hey, I'd like to do an interview about you for my platform." And they said, "Oh, sure." And they, and he said, "By the way, is it okay if we go and grab your design content for the blog post?" "Oh, yeah, sure." But the added advantage of that wasn't just the social proof of having all these famous people on the platform. It was that people who then followed could see how these famous people had done their templates, and then 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.

  6. 14:24 – 19:16

    System awareness and novelty

    1. AC

    2. LR

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

    3. AC

      Yeah, the- the underlying idea of the book is that you've got to get the system to behave in a way its creators didn't intend. That's a hugely important idea. But to do that, you need to understa- 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 that subversiveness is a skill you can learn. We spent a lot of time, like, understanding it, talking to neuroscientists, and talking to, uh, 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, $5 in seed capital, five days to figure out what to do, and two hours to do it, and then each me- each team in the class would come back for three minutes and present to the class and say how they had turned that $5 into the maximum revenue. It's a great idea, right? So most people, if you ask them how to do that, they're gonna go out and they're gonna, you know, buy a lottery ticket or they're gonna buy some lemonade ingredients and set up a lemonade stand. Some of these students, I mean, they're Stanford graduate students. They're- they're pretty smart. Some of them went and got bike pumps and they offered to test people's bike pressure for free and then pump it up for, like, some money, and it turns out they made even more money when they asked for a donation. They did pretty well. They turned their five bucks into, like, 200 bucks. Another class did, 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 250, right? It's a good exercise. I mean, talk about a thing, you want to find out if your team can innovate, try this with your company, whether you're a big company or a small company. I guarantee you, people will suddenly realize how hard it is to go to market. The winning team made $650, $605, somewhere in that range. You know what they did?

    4. LR

      I'm so curious to hear. (laughs)

    5. AC

      What would you do? (laughs) What would you do?

    6. LR

      Oh, my God. I- I can't even. I think I just-

    7. AC

      So let me recap, 'cause this is important. You got $5 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.

    8. LR

      (laughs)

    9. AC

      It's brilliant, right? They made an ad.

    10. LR

      That'd be good.

    11. AC

      And, like, what are you gonna say as the professor? "Okay, yeah, well done," because they recognized the system they were in. They took a step back from what they were told they had and they looked at what they actually had. So I think that's a great example of, like, system awareness, seeing the big picture of what you're in.

    12. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    13. AC

      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 leisure, uh, athleisure, 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 a happy birthday. And then they, of course, put s- uh, I think, I think three or four weeks later, Cameo added 6,000 words to their terms of service for consumer videos.But, you know, these, this way, Gym Shark had all these celebrities wishing Gym 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 you are." Is that silly? Sure. Even reverse graffiti. Uh, peop- 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 know these sound like silly ideas, but even Coinbase. Coinbase bought a 60-second Super Bowl ad where they bounced a QR code around the screen for 60 seconds. Is it stupid? Yeah. I mean, they were ranked the worst of 64 Super Bowl ads, but they got 20 million hits and their servers fell over. So, that's a novelty thing, right? Just, like, seeing a thing that's different, 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.

  7. 19:16 – 22:37

    How to use this thinking successfully

    1. AC

    2. LR

      A lot of these sound like they're kind of these one-off marketing stunts, where you probably drive, like Coinbase is an example, you drive a bunch of traffic to your site, it's awesome, you do really well, and then it kind of fades away. I kind of call these things turbo boosts where you, like, you can just boost growth for a little bit and then they go away. Is there thoughts you have around just, like, the 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?

    3. AC

      Absolutely.

    4. LR

      Yeah.

    5. AC

      Yeah, there are lots of examples. So, so I'm giving you kind of funny examples for this. But the companies that do well are the ones that use this kind of thinking to change their value chain. So, think about furniture. For thousands of years, furniture was something that you described and then someone built and then they deliver it to your house. I mean, that was furniture. And then Ikea went, "Hey, if we flat pack this stuff and change the design, we can put it in containers. People can build it themselves at home." So they took the value chain of furniture creation and they, they messed with it. S- in that case, they delegated one of the stages of furniture creation to someone else. That completely changed the furniture industry. So that's not, like, a one-off thing. And so the trick is to find these kinds of approaches that are fundamental to your business model. And for that, you have to kind of look at how do you differentiate, like, what do you do for reframing? How do you, uh, change the manner in which the product's delivered? Who's doing it? Well, 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.

    6. LR

      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.

    7. AC

      For sure.

    8. LR

      Okay. Yeah.

    9. AC

      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 hack traditionally is sort of product agnostic. So, when you move your mouse off the screen and it pops up a little window saying, "Hey, why are you leaving?" There was a time that was cool. Now it's just, like, that mouse doesn't care what kind of website you are. We like the term zero-day marketing exploits, 'cause it's the difference between, like, a script kiddie and a proper hacker. In this case, it's kind of like the difference between a growth hacker and someone who is genuinely trying to subvert the dynamics of the industry they're in. And that takes a very big, 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'd attend to it, right? And then unbeknownst to these sailors, about halfway through the test, he changed the scoring so that one of the four quadrants represented 75% of the points. So now, doing the math would get you more points. And some of the sailors changed their behavior. They recognized this one thing was contributing more and they hammered on it and they did really well. Other behav- other sailors did what they were told. Super conscientious.

  8. 22:37 – 25:49

    Normalizing disagreeable thinking

    1. AC

      Now, the S- the army- 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.

    2. LR

      Hmm.

    3. AC

      There's this, uh, the- this woman from the 1600s in, uh, sh- her name is Julado Martines, 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 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 parapets and she throws it over into the awaiting army and says, "You look hungry. Let us know if you need some more food." And the army leaves. That's a very valid strategy, but we don't talk about those kinds of strategies. Was it evil? No. Was it clever? Yeah. The, the, the coat of arms of this town is, like, two crossed loaves of bread. But we don't talk about that kind of thinking in business and in startups enough. And I think I'd like to normalize this kind of disagreeable thinking.... this idea that, and I know from listening to your Evan Lapointe, uh, podcast, that you're high on agreeable thinking. So-

    4. LR

      (laughs)

    5. AC

      ... I'm here to tell you, you need to embrace some disagreeability, Lenny.

    6. LR

      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, m- spend a lot of time on doing the things everyone all agrees on is-are 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 (laughs) find time for these very disagreeable things.

    7. AC

      Well, I love Rory. In fact, um, uh, Emily and I are meeting him in London for dinner.

    8. LR

      Oh, amazing.

    9. AC

      Uh, he read the book and said some very nice things about it.

    10. LR

      Oh, I love that.

    11. AC

      Um, I think Rory's example of the wine list, which you've probably heard-

    12. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    13. AC

      ... that, like, the wine list is a system. You know, I can't sell you a gin and tonic for 50 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. And 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 was anyone at all, and she said, "Rory." I think more than anyone in the world, he just sees the world through these, these system lenses that are incredible.

  9. 25:49 – 32:43

    Recon canvas and market scanning

    1. AC

    2. LR

      I, uh, I love this idea of zero do- 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, uh, clever ideas to grow your product and business?

    3. AC

      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.

    4. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    5. AC

      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 the product market fit's 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 with 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 had this thing called the, um, the, the m- 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 geolocation turned on. So, they said, "Everyone can have a free Whopper. Just order it from the app, drive to the store and pick it up. But the catch is, you got to order it from a McDonald's parking lot." (laughs) That's genius, right? They also edited the Wikipedia page for the description of the Whopper, and then made all the home speakers go read it by making an ad that said, "Hey, okay, Google, what's in a Whopper?" Um, they do a whole bunch of things, but, but a great example of their understanding of the medium, in 2019, they started liking all these posts from influential posters from 10 years before, and they offered no explanation. And people were like, "Hey, Burger King, why are you liking my old posts?" 'Cause 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 latest post, they would've 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 10 years ago, because of the mechanics of the platform, you'll see it. Burger King says nothing. Influencers start getting upset, "What's going on? What's going on?" Then finally, the reveal, they say, "Hey, we've been liking some things from 10 years ago," because sometimes the past is great. You know what else is great? Funnel cake fries, and we're bringing them back.

    6. LR

      (laughs)

    7. AC

      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 lo- liking something from the past, someone would notice it, right? So, understanding the mechanics of the platform, the norms of the platform and what are done there is so important to go-to-market strategy these days, but we think it often gets overlooked.

    8. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    9. AC

      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.

    10. LR

      So, this recon canvas, I know that 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?

    11. AC

      Yeah. So, so, the c- the canvas actually has three rows.

    12. LR

      Three rows.

    13. AC

      That's because there's an objective, a collective, and a subjective way to look at the world. And then it has a section for product, which we divide into the features and the, uh, 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 a- the actions you create. And so, it's a really good sort of checklist when you're putting together your go-to-market strategy to make sure you've thought about all of those, what, what winds up being 18 squares.

    14. LR

      And the idea is you look within each of these cross-sections to see if there's an opportunity to do something-

    15. AC

      Right.

    16. LR

      ... uh, subversive and interesting.

    17. AC

      You, you go into each square and you say, "What are the-

    18. LR

      Uh-huh.

    19. AC

      ... what's the status quo here? What's the normal behavior?"

    20. LR

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    21. AC

      "How do I... What, what, what would be considered unorthodox or unusual?" And 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.

    22. LR

      Uh, as you're talking about medium, I think of an, a recent example of a really clever marketing stunt/subversive, uh, tactic, uh, this company Runway that does, basically it's 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, 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 lock and 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 bec- 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, a moment, like a launch event, where everyone unlocks it and then starts tweeting, "Oh my God, I got this sweet bomber jacket and all this swag," and, "Oh, Runway's doing something awesome. I'll check them out."

    23. AC

      Yeah, it's forced unboxing.

    24. LR

      (laughs)

    25. AC

      Uh, I'm... When Ben and I wrote Lean Analytics, uh, we came up with a strategy to announce the book.

    26. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    27. AC

      We found about 15 people that we knew who would talk about it and say nice things, oh, Malik, Eric Ries, Tim O'Reilly, and over a period of about seven days we sent each of them a scheduled message with a click-to-tweet message. So each of them, about every 12 hours, one of them would tweet something about it. But each of those things had a, had a, an analytics, uh, tag, a Google Analytics tag in it. So it was like UTM underscore campaign equals Eric Ries, campaign equals Tim O'Reilly. So now we knew who was doing it, right? Julian Smith and so on. So every 12 hours there'd be a new thing, little more lift, little more lift, and then when they were all out there, we started comparing them to one another. "Well, you know, more people are clicking Julian's, but more people are, are pre-ordering 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-

    28. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    29. AC

      ... 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, you're sending a message to the market. Burger King is sending a message to the market and 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 50% disapproval.

    30. LR

      Hm.

  10. 32:43 – 57:01

    11 tactics for subversive marketing

    1. LR

      Um, 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, uh, areas to look. Is there anything else along those lines?

    2. AC

      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 400 case studies, about 160 made it into the book. And these aren't just case studies from business. They're also things like Genghis Khan and Deula Duke Martins, uh, Neville Maskelyne 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 theme camps so he could become a holiday camp king in England. What we found was these 11 tactics that keep showing up again and again a- 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 attacks, uh, or zero-day exploits. And then we have some rules for how to kind of prune through them and figure out the good one.

    3. LR

      This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risk. Plus you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/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 get, gets into all these things, but can you just either run through them real quickly-

    4. AC

      For sure.

    5. LR

      ... or just go through them and maybe share an example?

    6. AC

      I'll give you quick ones.

    7. LR

      Okay.

    8. AC

      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 often enough, but it turns out that that also made them really simple. They were competing against these companies like Vantiv and Clarify and Remedy that cost millions and millions of dollars, took years to install, whereas they could be installed with a URL. And so they took their weakness, which was, "We are very low feature," and they turned it, uh, uh, 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 a while 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 'em into strengths and that pattern shows up again and again.

    9. LR

      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 compe- competitors? And then think about how can we turn that into a, a benefit?

    10. AC

      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. Y- product managers... I'm, 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, you're 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 who want to clean stuff. It's an example that I've sort of ... Apocryphal example; I was talking to a company that was selling drones invented for build- for bridge inspection. I mean, bridge inspection is actually a really dangerous job. There are people who are continuously exploring the bridge for cracks and stuff, and the city council doesn't really want to pay for it. It's a cost, and if they find something wrong, well, you know, they have to fix it. Who does care? Well, it turns out, the 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 100% 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. Hitachi 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 Vibratex, with the only condition being that Vibratex is not allowed to mention that it made- the product is made by Hitachi. So sometimes, the buyer upgrade is, like, getting out of your own way. Um, but that's a tactic that people don't often think about. We're sort of stuck with our target market, and there's a sense of, "We were wrong" when you acknowledge that a different market wants your product.

    11. LR

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

    12. AC

      Or even a different buyer.

    13. LR

      Yeah, different buyer at the same company, essentially.

    14. AC

      Yeah. In fact, at-

    15. LR

      Awesome.

    16. AC

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

    17. LR

      Great example. What else?

    18. AC

      So access is another one. Now, this sounds obvious, right? "Do you have access to something other people don't?" And you've got to 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 Getaround, which was a car rental by owner service, she had access to one of her VC's friends who had an early Tesla Roadster. So she brought it to CES and she let people drive it around, and it got lots of attention, and it also proved that you could get fancier cars on the platform. Uh, the, uh, MasterClass, founder of MasterClass went to school with Justin Hoffman's daughter. Use that access. I mean, it's not necessarily there, but if you've got access, like take a step back and say, "What can I do that other people can't in my personal network? Do I have access to a resource at a different price?" Um, oftentimes, that's the thing that gives someone an advantage, but we're kind of ashamed to admit it.

    19. LR

      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 some. Can I have your address?"

    20. AC

      Oh, for sure. And I mean, uh, for- before Bumble, uh, with Tinder, uh, Whitney was traveling around to sororities because 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 run this app."

    21. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    22. AC

      So, you know, that's- 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-

    23. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    24. AC

      ... also deliver the thing you promised.

    25. LR

      Just evil enough.

    26. AC

      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 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." Uh, there's a company called Energage that does HR software. It's pretty hard to get people excited about HR software. So they launched this thing in conjunction with, uh, local newspapers to promote the best workplaces survey every year, used their tool for surveys. Now every company's employees want a, uh ... Every company wants its employees to fill out this survey. So they have the survey, you fill it out, and then Energage, uh, 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 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?

    27. LR

      And the key, again, is they actually be- have to be excited about this thing that they- they came up out of nowhere and-

    28. AC

      But either the bait has to be free-

    29. LR

      Yeah.

    30. AC

      ... in which case they can't complain.

  11. 57:01 – 1:05:01

    Implementing subversive strategies

    1. AC

      to that, and they will respect you for it.

    2. LR

      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 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 11 ways that people do it. How do you suggest people use this? Is it, like, get a room, get some people together, brainstorm, and go through this list? Any advice on just, like, how to operationalize coming up with ideas knowing that they have this list?

    3. AC

      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 disagorab- disagreeability to temporarily let yourself think like a super villain. 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?

    4. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    5. AC

      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.

    6. LR

      Hm.

    7. AC

      Like, you know, b- they starved th-... 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 Wes Kao talks about, like, the spiky point of view. I think those are super important. There are some other techniques that we found. There's this really interesting innovation formula called TRIZ, which is a combinatorial way of overcoming, uh, o-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 there, 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, pre-mortems, 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.

    8. LR

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

    9. AC

      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. It's been awesome.

    10. LR

      (laughs)

    11. AC

      Uh, uh, you know, I, I suspect that, um, 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 StartupFest, uh, which is... StartupFest is a big conference in Montreal that I've, uh, been running with Phil Teo 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 want to throw, throw out to, um, Wes and Gagan here at, at 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, they're 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.

    12. LR

      This makes me think about a 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.

    13. AC

      Well, I mean, it's- it's... I do a lot of work in digital government with this conference called Forward 50. And last year, I told people, like, "When you're launching a battleship, you can't push a software update and change the hull." Like, it's shipping. And so, you take the risky parts and you put them at the end, and as a result, you write the spec upfront and then you do the plan for testing and all this other stuff. But the entire pattern, every pattern we have in the Western world for mass production of something, whether that's software development or shooting a movie or building a battleship, you do the easily changed stuff upfront, right? You can change a feature in the spec in a day. You can change it in the code in a week. You can change it in production, if at all, in a month. And so, thinking about what's scarce and what's abundant, what's- 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 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 going to get passed by legislators and stuff. So, just because we used to write a spec in the right code doesn't mean that's how we should do it. And I think for any organization, reevaluating the processes that you assume are correct based on what technology has made hard or easy is... That's how big companies fail and small companies win.

    14. LR

      How are you leveraging these lessons and tactics in getting your book out and getting your book, The Word at Well, if I told you- ... out?

    15. AC

      Um, so I- I'll give you an example. Early on, we did a-

    16. LR

      Yeah.

    17. AC

      ... a survey to kind of find some stuff out about pricing and customers, and we said, "Look, if you answer this survey, someone will get a free hour-long consulting Zoom presentation with us," right? "You can use it for your conference or whatever. We don't care." Problem with that is you are disincentivized from sharing that survey with other people 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 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. Uh, I will say that we have built a technology for the readers to be able to, uh, 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. There's a page for that, which we can keep updating over time with, like, new intel. Let's just say that those case studies do some special things.

    18. LR

      Hm.

    19. AC

      Like, there's a tech stack behind the case studies, and it's one of the reasons that we couldn't just go with a 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.

    20. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    21. AC

      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.

    22. LR

      Hm. As maybe a final note, I think it's... Again, I want to come back to you

  12. 1:05:01 – 1:08:19

    Ethical considerations in marketing

    1. LR

      want to make it clear you're not actually saying, "Be 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 people to take that away.

    2. AC

      For sure. And we actually devoted an a- 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, uh, ruining your reputation, which is usually bad. Those are all bad things that 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 were getting flowers for people five years after the funeral. And these guys were charged in criminal court. Like, they were u- like, that's pretty obviously bad. But there's these other nuanced examples. You know the Chrysler PT Cruiser?

    3. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    4. AC

      It's a terrible little car, right?

    5. LR

      (laughs)

    6. AC

      Like, it's the worst car. Do you know why that car exists?

    7. LR

      Mm-mm.

    8. AC

      So, the PT Cruiser was actually built for a very specific reason. It wasn't built to sell cars. In America, every car manufacturer has to meet fuel efficiency standards for its car line and its truck line. And it turns out that Chrysler's trucks were terrible on fuel. So, what happens is, the, uh, 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.

    9. LR

      Hm.

    10. AC

      Removable backseat or something. I don't remember what 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-

    11. LR

      Hm.

    12. AC

      ... 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.

    13. LR

      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?

    14. AC

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

    15. LR

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

    16. AC

      Uh, well, just evelenof.com, uh, has a website there. Uh, we have a few things that are surprising that I think people will see, uh, in the next few months as we open them up. Um, I'm A. Crow and Emily is Emily Jane Ross on most platforms. Uh, so those are probably the best ways.

    17. LR

      Okay, cool. We usually get to that to the end, but I'm glad that people now know. I feel like this episode is going to get a lot of people's minds buzzing. I'm excited to see how people use some of these

  13. 1:08:19 – 1:12:57

    Lightning round

    1. LR

      ideas. But with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Alistair, are you ready?

    2. AC

      I am.

    3. LR

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

    4. AC

      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 Haidt's The Righteous Mind, which really made me lose faith in reason and rationality. And I got to say, the best marketing textbook ever is Dan and Chip Heath's Made to Stick.

    5. LR

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

    6. AC

      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.

    7. LR

      Is there a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you really love?

    8. AC

      Uh, this sounds silly, but yeah. Um, I bought this like hundred dollar folding second screen for my MacBook. They're like 100 bucks now, and they power off a USB-C cable that also is their HDMI 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 dollar second screen LED that plugs on, plugs into USB, uh, C on your MacBook.

    9. LR

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

    10. AC

      I don't remember which brands.

    11. LR

      Okay, cool.

    12. AC

      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, 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.

    13. LR

      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 used to.

    14. AC

      I think Anker, 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.

    15. LR

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

    16. AC

      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."

    17. LR

      Mm. These are both great. Final question. We worked together for, 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.

    18. AC

      Uh, I think, uh, we went tobogganing down a giant hill, didn't we?

    19. LR

      Hmm. We did.

    20. AC

      Didn't we go up to Laurentians to my mom's cottage and we like... With Eva?

    21. LR

      Yes. Uh-

    22. AC

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

    23. LR

      I think so. And also, the, the two words I learned on that trip are toboggan and toque, toque? (laughs)

    24. AC

      (laughs) And definitely, um, I think, you know, as with everything else, you really kind of live life large. So, um, when you got to Montreal, you just lept in with, you know, full in. And I was just so happy. For someone who was from San Diego and, like, I moved from San Diego to Montreal, it's kind of how we met down there, 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 kind of jump into everything, uh, that it had to offer for your time here. And, and I love the fact that you've just kept doing that. It's great.

    25. LR

      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 I-

    26. AC

      So there is, there is one other thing. We don't have to put this in the recording.

    27. LR

      Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah.

    28. AC

      Um, so Year 1 Labs, we used a hackathon to bring people in rather than the usual application form.

    29. LR

      Hmm.

    30. AC

      And I don't know if you remember, it was Sean Lynch, uh, who was, who has done, 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, Foursquare check-ins to figure out where people had been before they, um-

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