YouSaid · the spoken record

Alistair Croll

lines on the record: 99
first: 2024-11-03
most recent: 2024-11-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Buy.jestevilenough.com if they want to pre order 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 now and when you actually get the book so you can buy the book on buy.justevilenough.com. 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 have. It's too bad Emily couldn't join us here. She's brilliant and hilarious. So make sure you follow her. She's Emily Jane Ross on social platforms too.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went for a restaurant and where they went after. On Friday, you said this is our plan. You went off and did it. And then on Sunday, we all did these presentations, and you got up and went. So our product, let's restaurant owners know where they'd been before, where their customers have been 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.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is one other thing we don't record So, year one labs, we used a hackathon to bring people in rather than the usual application form. And I don't remember it was Sean Lynch, who has done a bunch of product stuff, but was the head of Google Cloud came up and we all built stuff on this new Google Cloud platform that they wanted some users on. And we gave a bunch of the different startups a weekend to build something. And I think you went out with someone and built a thing that used Foursquare check-ins to figure out where people had been before they...”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And definitely, I think, you know, as with everything else, you really kind of live life large. So when you got to Montreal, you just leapt in with, you know, full in. And I was just so happy. For someone who was from San Diego and I moved from San Diego to Montreal, it's kind of how we met down there Moving to Montreal is a lot, and it's a different language, it's a different culture, as Colbert says, it's Europe with normal toilets. And I think it was just 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.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My company, which is just me, is called Solve for Interesting because all my life when I've tried to solve for fame or for safety or for wealth, it hasn't gone as well as when I've just solved for what's interesting. But I think the motto that informs things the most that I work on these days is it's amazing what can get done when nobody cares who gets credit.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think anchor ANKER 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.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't remember which brands. And honestly, I mean, this is another thing we didn't really talk about. The reality of branding on Amazon. Like, brand names don't matter anymore.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This sounds silly, but yeah, I bought this hundred dollar folding second screen for my MacBook. They'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 a second screen and being able to put one in my laptop bag that's the same size. There's a bunch of different brands. But yeah, just $100 second screen LED that plugs into USB C on your MacBook.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Fastbender. It is the absolute embodiment of self-awareness. I just loved it.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dan Davies has a book called The Unaccountability Machine that I have literally made an entire conference theme out of this year. It's fantastic. Jonathan 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.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, just evilenuff.com has a website there. We have a few things that are surprising that I think people. I'm A. Kroll, and Emily is Emily Jane Ross on most platforms. So those are probably the best ways.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they should all buy the book, obviously. I mean, it's dumb not to ask. You can go to buy.justevilenoff.com. If you're interested, but more importantly, we really want to hear examples of this. This stuff is just fun to talk about. Like every one of these stories is hilarious. We really wanted the book to feel like part frameworks and useful text because lean analytics was very prescriptive and that worked really well. But also partly like going to a cocktail party and sitting next to a fascinating person with weird stories to tell that you kind of learn from. And if we 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 them.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Removable backseat or something. I don't remember, but what it did is it brought the average fuel consumption of Chrysler's truck line below the federal guidelines so that it could continue to sell bad trucks. Is that illegal? No. Is it too evil for us? Absolutely. And so I think there's lots of examples that we provide of like we try to draw an Occam's razor. Don't ever assume consent. Don't act without permission. Don't punch down. Don't break the actual law. Don't use dark patterns and so on.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the PT cruiser was actually built for a very specific reason. It wasn't built to sell cars. In America, every car manufacturer has to meet fuel efficiency standards for its car line and its truck line. And it turns out that Chrysler's trucks were terrible on fuel. So what happens is the automakers decided they would make this terrible little car called the PT Cruiser that's technically a truck according to the definitions of a flatbed truck and there's certain things about it.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure. And we actually devoted an entire chapter 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. We say don't do them. There's some pretty egregious examples. There's a company called Afterlife that was crawling obituaries. And so then when you'd search, you'd find out that someone had died. And like funeral home operators are getting flowers for people five years after the funeral. And these guys were charged in criminal court. That's pretty obviously bad. But there's these other nuanced examples. You know the Chrysler PT cruiser? Terrible little car, right? It's the worst car. Do you know why that car exists?”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's just say that those case studies do some special things. There's a tech stack behind the case studies. And it's one of the reasons that we couldn't just go with the traditional publisher because traditional publishers don't like it when you have a QR code. They don't like it when you own and retain the intellectual property rights to the book. And so in order to mess with the world a little bit and practice what we preach, we had to actually go through a fairly unusual publishing structure.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 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.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if I told you So, I'll give you an example early on. We did a survey to kind of find some stuff out about pricing and customers And we said, Look, if you answer this survey, someone will get a free hour long consulting Zoom presentation with us, right? You can use it for your conference or whatever. We don't care.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 is made hard or easy is that's how big companies fail and small companies win.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 update and change the hull. Like it's shipping. And so you take the risky parts and you put them at the end. And as a result, you write the spec up front and then you do the plan for testing and all this other stuff. But the entire pattern, every pattern we have in the Western world for mass production of something, whether that's software development or shooting a movie or building a battleship, you do the easily changed stuff up front, right? You can change a feature in the spec in a day. You can change it in the code in a week. You can change it in production, if at all, in a month. And so thinking about what's scarce and what's abundant, what's hard and what's easy generally informs the process that we use to deliver any product to market. And we do not step back and say, what has technology done to change the relative risk and the relative fungibility of each of those steps? So if I'm building software, it may”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We will have done the right thing when I go to product management meetings and instead of people talking about their feature, they're alluding to their zero-day marketing exploit. But the dumbest thing in the world is to talk about. So that's the thing you want to not tell anyone about. But if you're talking to an investor and 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.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will tell you, I've worked with four startups using this, and every one of them has found a go-to-market strategy. It's been awesome. You know, I suspect that Emily and I are both going to get a lot of consulting requests after this, just because it's really interesting to implement this. We did a workshop at Startifest, which is Startifest is a big conference in Montreal that I've been running with Phil Telio for a while. We did a workshop this summer and people actually had workbooks they were completing while we did it and stuff. It's definitely applicable. And too, I want to throw out to Wes and Gagan here at Maven that they asked Emily and I to put together a course, which we haven't launched yet because”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a lot of techniques for how well can you test this? What would convince you if you were wrong? This is kind of like deep canvassing yourself.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Got so much attention because they were hyperbolic about the opposition things. And Wes Cow talks about 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 construal 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? Would this be better if I did it a year ago or a year from now? What does a smart coach conclude given the same information without you sharing their conclusions?”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, this is somewhat magic. Like, it takes a lot of time. It's a skill you can learn. It's a muscle you develop. I would say spend some time thinking about how to be disagreeable, understanding the system you're in, then use the need for novelty and disagreeability to temporarily let yourself think like a supervillain. We have some tactics for this during 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 the Blair Witch project? They literally killed their actors. Well, not literally, but according to the web, like they had people out there trying to find the actors. They listed them as missing on their movie page.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of marketing conversations, but Emily's point was like every single woman led a sigh of relief. Like, finally, someone said the quiet part out loud. And there is a tremendous advantage to understanding that one part of the market is already. Has an Overton window that's different from the mainstream market, and then you can appeal to that and they will respect you for it.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then earlier on, we talked about misappropriation with Netflix misappropriating the U.S. Postal Service. And then the last one is sliding the window. And sliding the window is a bit more nebulous, but it's about the Overton window and the realm of what's considered acceptable. A lot of companies have strategies that rely on a certain segment of the market being okay with something that wasn't. So we talk about some examples of like the normalization of gay marriage through will and grace and things like that in there. There's a good example of this. There's a company in England, I think it's called Body Form, that was the first to use red liquid in ads for female hygiene products and tampon products. Like for a while, it was literally illegal to use red liquids in those ads. And when they finally did it, all the women were like, and this is, I'm telling Emily's version of the story, one of the nice things about having a female co-author, you get to see a whole other perspective that isn't normally part of them.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say it to be a car that was parked there. And then there's this guy in England who said, I want to make a little park in front of my house, but the law says it has to be a car. So he built a park on a car. And then the local town government said, you're going to have to take your car in and get it smog checked once a year. So it's not going to last. So he bought this historically, this historical van that was not required to be smog checked. And so he just has a park in front of his house that's the back of a van parked there. Loopholes happen all the time. We think they're funny. We think they're clever. But there are a lot of cases where you can find a loophole and use that to do something possible that wasn't otherwise possible.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“German and Austrian populations are almost identical. Austria's opt out. You're going to deliver your organs when you die unless you explicitly say you don't want to. In Germany, you have to opt in. They're not donated unless you explicitly do so. Germany has 12% organ donors. Austria has like 99.6. So all your growth hacks ain't going to get you from 12 to 99.6, right? So there are way, it may be important for your business to change the regulations either to allow what you're doing or to compel people to do the thing that's currently optional. But a lot of startups don't look at regulatory change as a viable strategy. And yet it can be. It's also a great way to find loopholes. I love the story of parklets. So for a while, urban agitators would build these little two-hour long parks in the parking spot in front of their coffee shop. And every two hours they take it away and put it back because the law didn't actually...”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me talk to you about regulation. So regulation is like a thing people often don't think about. In Germany and in Austria, you have organ donor cards where you get to approve whether or not someone gets your organs if you're killed in an accident.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I agree. April's absolutely right. If you're in an established competitive market where you're bidding for RFPs and B2B, but if you want to, if you're disagreeing with the market, you're probably disagreeing with how it scores value.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Bougattis. And for a certain segment of the market, meaning like rich coastal VCs, faster better performance was a new way to think of electric cars. Before that, if you look at the ads from the Prius and stuff like that, they didn't mention acceleration time. They explicitly didn't put it in there. Tesla came up with a much better dimension. For a certain target segment.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A different, better way to think about the value you offer. Reframing isn't just about competing on existing dimensions. It's about giving the customer a different set of dimensions. And that won't happen for the whole market, but it'll happen for one of those segments. And in this case, the framing was orthogonal. If you are a hippie natural person, you reject clinical science and you reject traditional beauty norms. So you're orthogonal to both, like you're perpendicular to both sex appeal and healthcare. And so it's a perfect position. And Tom's of Maine used that and obviously two years later introduced a fluoridated formula and got into grocery stores. But or into 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 there and say, how do we compete on those? Or they go, hey, we're really good at this thing. Let's make that the dimension. The dimension only matters if a lucrative reachable target market thinks that it is the crazy”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 a reframing. When you look at positioning, you're looking at two dimensions, right? Let's say for toothpaste, you have the dimension of sex appeal, you know, fresh breath lasts all night. That was Colgate. And then you have the dimension of clinicality, which is like four out of five dentist degree. That was crest. So in the early toothpaste wars, you had Colgate versus Crest, and you were either brushing your teeth because you want to be sexy or brushing your teeth because you want it to be healthy. And then along comes Toms of Maine. And remember, this is 1970s. You got your tofu from a health food store. Dr. Strange Love has lines about fluoride being a government conspiracy. And so you show up and go, oh, we're unfluoridated. We're natural. We'll tell you the ingredients on the label. You've given a segment of the market.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 money. So he puts a button on this, says buy my ticket and sends them to those companies. And then the next time he calls the companies, he goes, hey, have you noticed on your analytics that like 20% of your traffic is coming from me? We should probably talk. Now they're willing to trade. 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 too evil is get satisfaction was a complaint site on the internet where you basically, they went and crawled the internet for all the complaints about Sony and then that's the first place you're going to complain about Sony. And then they'd extort Sony and say, unless you buy from us, we're going to tell the customers you don't care about.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Busbud, LP was traveling the length of South America and he was trying to find bus schedules and they're almost impossible to get. And so when he got home, he decided to make an app so you could order kind of like kayak for bus rides, which doesn't sound that exciting, but bus tickets are a multi-billion dollar industry. And so he got people around the world to send in these bus schedules. He put them all in one place. And then he went to the bus companies and said, hey, how about you let me sell bus tickets? None of them wanted to hear from it. So what he did was he used automation to create thousands and thousands. I think it's millions and millions of pages of bus tables properly structured JSON data. And you had to automate this thing. I think you actually had to get like three separate Google Analytics accounts to manage all the data because it was beyond the capacity of one of them. And then the search injects for search engines, this is like Catnip, like well-structured data that's not available everywhere else.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 just selling the data, not that interesting. But one of my favorite examples, and I actually helped put together a case study at HBS when I was teaching there with Srikant Datar about a guy named LP Maurice. And I think you might know LP. He's a Montrealer. He had a company called Bustbud.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's actually a case of the Nikkei terminals which computed the Nikkei index. They weren't getting the Nikkei index from Tokyo. They were getting it, and it was being computed locally on the terminal. And someone figured this out so they could compute the Nikkei index from the source stocks rather than waiting for the terminal to tell them and they could beat the market for like a significant amount of time. Rob also told us, I think it was him, he said, a hedge fund is an organization formed to discover something that will be illegal and do it until it is.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really? It's right there, but it's certainly an advantage. So, what can you find out early that others can't? Now, a more concrete example of this is Farmville. So Pincus and Zuckerberg were very good friends, and Zuckerberg told Pincus that apps were going to be allowed to post to users' timelines. This is why Farmville grew almost overnight. At one point, it represented a massive proportion of Facebook's revenue, is that Farmville would post these things saying, hey, Lenny, 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.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great. So, of course, because there's an advantage here, some bankers figured out how to pay off the shop telegraph operator to introduce an error in the message in Paris, which would allow the person in the stock market in Burgundy to know what the Paris markets were doing before the news got there and trade on it. So can you find that that is too evil? But can you find out in advance of something? There was early on in the days of certain social platforms, The analysts were all trying to figure out were they actually seeing growth. And it turns out that in some of the early social platforms, you could look at the number of the message or the number of the user's account in the API. And you could infer growth from that. I mean, the data is right there. Is that illegal”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So in, I think, 16th century France, obviously the speed of messages is very important for the war effort. And so the French set up this optical telegraph. There's a bunch of towers. You could see each tower from the other. And they had these gigantic stick figures, semophores, that they would pivot to send messages. So basically, you'd sit there and you'd look. And when that semaphore moved, you'd write down the message and you'd send it to the next one. And so this way a message could travel across France at like 500 miles an hour, way faster than a horse.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a great one called Arbitrage. Arbitrage is knowing something other people don't. And obviously you can achieve that by lying to them. You can achieve that by finding out sooner. There's all kinds of ways you can commit arbitrage. One of my favorite examples, this came to us from a guy named Rob Passerella at New York. There's something called the SHAP Optical Telegraph.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really hard to get rid of a mattress in New York City, right? Some people would like. Oh, yeah, we'll take away your old mattress. So you just look at the value chain and you go, wait, I'm in business of delivering and selling mattresses, one step before you in the value chain is get rid of the old mattress. 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. I don't want a new mattress. I want a replaced mattress. And it's that kind of mindset. So what can you combine it with? Often it's just before or just after the product that dramatically simplifies the offering for the consumer.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Combination is a big one. People overlook this often. Sometimes people are not buying your product because it's only half of a solution. David Ricketts, who's a Harvard professor of innovation, uses the example of mac and cheese. So Kraft had figured out powdered cheese to support the war effort, but you can't really sell powdered cheese on its own. And then they found the sales guy who was putting the powdered cheese and a box of macaroni together with an elastic, literally combining them. And now you'd buy it because it was ready-made dinner. So I think a lot of us don't look at our product and say, how is it being used? There's an example, 1-800 mattress in the States. They used to have this thing where what's the one thing you care about that should be added to your product if you are trying to sell product a mattress to New Yorkers?”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 switch them with that very few complain and you can resolve those complaints equitably. And we make that point. Like here's how to actually not be a con man.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 want it to sell?”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So a classic example of this is Tupperware. Tupperware promoted dinner parties in post-war America where women were being told to go back to the home after having helped out in the war effort and weren't very happy with that. Tupperware came to market. There was a huge number of people out there who wanted to run their own businesses. So 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 Entergauge that does HR software. It's pretty hard to get people excited about HR software. So they launched this thing in conjunction with local newspapers to promote the best workplaces survey every year, used their tool for surveys. Now, every company's employees to fill out the survey. So now you have the survey, you fill it out, and then the newspapers publish the best workplaces. They get to sell ads to those companies. And then energy.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, for sure. And I mean, before Bumble with Tinder, 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 get all the girls to install it. And then she'd go across the street to the fraternity and say, hey, all the girls are on this app. So that's 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.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That access. I mean, it's not necessarily there, but if you've got access, like take a step back and say, What can I do that other people can't in my personal network? Do I have access to a resource at a different price? Oftentimes that's the thing that gives someone an advantage, but we're kind of ashamed to admit it.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source