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

“So access is another one. Now, this sounds obvious, right? Do you have access to something other people don't? And you 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. Jessica Scorpio, when she was launching Get Around, which was a car rental by owner service, she had access to one of her VC's friends who had an early Tesla roadster. So she brought it to CES and she let people drive it around and it got lots of attention and it also proved that you could get fancier cars on the platform, the masterclass, founder of masterclass, went to school with Justin Hoffman's daughter.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, a Caridian, we used to make this web performance analysis thing, and it took me years to figure out we should stop selling its operations and start telling it to the 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”
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 so they partnered with a company called Vibratex, with the only condition being that Vibritex is not allowed to mention the product is made by Hitachi. So sometimes the buyer upgrade is like getting out of your own way. But that's a tactic that people don't often think about. We're sort of stuck with our target market. There's a sense of we were wrong when you acknowledge that a different market wants your product”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was talking to a company that was selling drones invented for bridge inspection. I mean, bridge inspection is actually a really dangerous job. There are people who are continuously exploring the bridge for cracks and stuff. And the city council doesn't really want to pay for it. It's a cost. And if they find something wrong, well, you know, they have to fix it. Who does care? Well, it turns out to insurance companies. So if you go sell to an insurance company and you say, look, just don't sign off on bridges unless they have this drone. You have 100% close rate with everybody who needs insurance for their bridge. So that's a good example of sort of figuring out how to upgrade your buyer. And there's a great example of this. Hitachi makes a personal massager. You may have heard of this device. Hitachi was not selling a lot of these personal massagers, but it turns out there's a very specific use case for these personal massages.”
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 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 prosumers out there who are white labeling that stuff. Oh, okay, that's a new segment, right? So it's this whole strategy. Product managers, I'm a product manager. Our tendency is to want to make the product just one more feature, right? And the reality is your product may already be a perfect fit for a market you're ignoring. In fact, one of the tactics is called buyer upgrade. Buyer upgrade is where you are already selling the perfect thing. You're just selling to the wrong person. Mr. Klean's magic eraser started out as melamine foam for aircraft insulation until the company noticed that people were wetting it and using it to clean stains off things. And it turns out there's a much better market, which is people want to clean stuff. It's an example that I've sort of apocryphal example.”
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 just go through, I'll give you quick ones. Salesforce.com is a classic example of bug into feature. Salesforce had a crappy product at the start of the internet. It was using this thing called Ajax that kind of made the web interactive a little bit if you reload it often enough. But it turns out that that also made them really simple. They were competing against these companies like Vantive and Clarify and Remedy that cost millions and millions of dollars took years to install, whereas they could be installed with a URL. And so they took their weakness, which was we are very low feature. And they're bugged, 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 looking at your weaknesses and turning them into strengths. And that pattern shows up again and again and again and again and again.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we found was these 11 tactics that keep showing up again and again as patterns or meta patterns. And so you can't steal the tactic, but you can apply that tactic. So if you can figure out how to get this disagreeable mindset, and then you can scan your market, your product, and your medium for these vulnerabilities, and then you can apply one of these tactics. That's a very good method for coming up with a set of candidates go-to-market or zero day exploits. And then we have some rules for how to kind of prune through them and figure out the good one.”
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, the real meat of the book once you get beyond the recon canvas and this subversive thinking stuff, we looked through probably three or four hundred 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 Doula Du Martin's, Neville Maskeline, who was hired by Big Telegraph to stop the spread of the radio. Like there's some crazy stories out there. Billy Butlin, who convinced the British to pay for all his theme camps so he could become a holiday camp king in England”
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 that's our second hack. And then the third hack was we documented all this, and then we wrote a blog post explaining how we hacked the launch of lean analytics that was proof that we knew how to do analytics. So I think there's a certain amount of credibility in brand building that comes from how you do this. You're sending a message to the market. Burger King is sending a message to the market. It's pretty cheeky that it's the underdog, which is very consistent. liquid death has some hilarious marketing campaigns and we can't tell you how there's a bunch of things people told us that we can't actually attribute, but they do not go ahead with a campaign or an ad unless it gets 50% disapproval. Like their North Star metric. 50% of people hate this.”
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 we knew who was doing it, right? Julian Smith and so on. So every 12 hours there'd be a new thing, a little more lift, a little more lift. And then when they were all out there, we started comparing them to one another. Well, you know, more people are clicking Julian's, but more people are pre-ordering Tim's. And then these guys started competing with one another.”
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, it's forced unboxing. When Ben and I wrote Lean Analytics. We came up with a strategy to announce the book. We found about 15 people that we knew who would talk about it in CNA's things, Almalik, Eric reused Tim O'Reilly. And over a period of about seven days, we sent each of them a scheduled message with a click-to-tweet message. So each of them, about every 12 hours, one of them would tweet something about it. But each of those things had an analytics tag, a Google Analytics tag in it. So it was like UTM underscore campaign equals Eric Reese, campaign equals Tim O'Reilly.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Subversive. You go into each square and you say, what's the status quo here? What's the normal behavior? What we considered unorthodox or unusual. We have like five or six case studies for each of those rectangles. There's like 160 case studies in the book. There's a reason it took so long to write.”
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 the canvas actually has three rows. That's because there's an objective, a collective, and a subjective way to look at the world. And then it has a section for product, which we defined into the features and the messages, a section for the medium, which is the platforms and the norms, and then a section for the market, which is the attention you capture and the actions you create. And so it's a really good sort of checklist when you're putting together your go-to-market strategy to make sure you've thought about all of those, what winds up being 18 squares.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understood the mechanism of the platform that by liking something from the past, someone would notice it, right? So understanding the mechanics of the platform, the norms of the platform, what are done there, is so important to go to market strategy these days, but we think it often gets overlooked. 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.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In 2019, they started liking all these posts from influential posters from 10 years before. They offered no explanation. And people like, hey, Burger King, why are you liking my old posts? Because the reality is if someone likes your post from 10 years ago, it's either a bot, a stalker, or you're about to get sued, right? It's probably one of those three things. And so Burger King starts liking these things. Now, if Burger King had just liked that person's complete post, they would have missed it. Someone likes one of your posts. You have enough followers that like it may get lost in the noise. But if it's something from 10 years ago, because of the mechanics of the platform, you'll see it. Burger King says nothing. Influencers start getting upset. What's going on? What's going on? And then finally, the reveal. They say, hey, we've been liking some things from 10 years ago because sometimes the past is great. You know what else is great? Funnel cake fries and we're bringing them back. Millions of free impressions. Not just because they understood that they had a funny message, but because they”
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 genius, right? They also edited the Wikipedia page for the description of the whopper and then made all the home speakers go read it by making an ad that said, hey, okay, Google, what's in a whopper? They do a whole bunch of things. But a great example of their understanding of the medium.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we still talk about product market fit. Two companies of the same product sold to the same market. One wins and the other doesn't. It's often because of their medium strategy. And the medium is both the platforms you're in and the norms of that platform. So we hit this thing called the Recon Canvas that helps you scan across the product, the market, and the medium. If you want inspiration for some clever ideas, I think Burger King is better than almost anybody at this stuff. When they launched their mobile app, the thing you want for your mobile app is you want as many installs as possible and you want geolocation turned on. So they said everyone can have a free whopper. Just order it from the app, drive to the store and pick it up. But the catch is, you got to order it from a McDonald's parking lot.”
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 say once you've got the subversive mindset, which again is like system awareness, novelty, and disagreeability, then you have to kind of scan the market. And we have this framework called the Recon Canvas that splits the market up into the product, the medium, and the market. That's another hot take of mine, is I think that product market fits overrated. You have to actually think about product medium market fit. Marketing textbooks were written in a time when the medium was one way, one to many paid broadcast. That's completely changed. Today it's any to any, it's perfectly valid to build an audience first, then figure out what to sell it, then make the product, right?”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I can't sell you a gin and tonic for 50 bucks because you know how much it costs to make one, but I can sell you wine for any price because you don't know you can't make it that way. But when someone shows up at the table with a wine list and hands it to the most powerful looking person at the table who opens it and says red or white, you have now all consented to order wine. So just like the wine industry and the wine in a restaurant is a system and you're beholden to it. I think Rory more than maybe anyone in the world I asked Emily who her perfect like who would she want to read this book if his interlocutor said, Rory, I think more than anyone in the world, he just sees the world through these system lenses that are incredible.”
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 love Rory. In fact, Emily and I are meeting him in London for dinner. He read the book and said some very nice things about it. Oh, I love that. I think Rory's example of the wine list, which you've probably heard, that like the wine list is a system.”
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 very valid strategy, but we don't talk about those kinds of strategies. Was it evil? No. The coat of arms of this town is like two crossed loaves of bread. But we don't talk about that kind of thinking in business and in startups enough. And I think I'd like to normalize this kind of disagreeable thinking, this idea that, and I know from listening to your Evan Lapointe podcast, that you're high on agreeable thinking. So I'm here to tell you you need to embrace some disagreeability”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In poker, there are rules. The rules tell you which cards win, which hands are stronger, whose turn of play it is. But the strength of your cards isn't how you win in poker. If that's how we played, it would just be a game of statistics. It would be incredibly boring. You win by bluffing. You win by subterfuge. You win by looking for your opponent's tails. But we never talk about that in a business school. There's this woman from the 1600s in Her name is Jula D. Martins, and she was married to the king of a city-state who went to war. She was left behind to guard the castle. So the enemy shows up and the castle's pretty well fortified. And she realizes they have about two weeks worth of food. And then they're 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. She throws it over into the awaiting army and says, you look hungry, let us know if he needs some more food. And the army leaves.”
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 Navy has always recruited in the military people who do what they hold 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. One of the things I love as an example of this is poker.”
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 he gave the sailors this dashboard, had four quadrants, one corner was like a fuel gauge, and when it got to a level, he 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 than they hammered on it. They'd do really well. Other sailors did what they were told, super conscientious.”
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'm not a big fan of growth hacks. A growth hack traditionally is sort of product agnostic. So when you move your mouse off the screen and it pops up a little window saying, hey, why are you leaving? There was a time that was cool. Now it's just like that mouse doesn't care what kind of website you are. We like the term zero day marketing exploits because it's the difference between like a script kitty and a proper hacker. In this case, it's kind of like the difference between a growth hacker and someone who is genuinely trying to subvert the dynamics of the industry they're in. And that takes a very big perspective. I'll give you another example that I love. There's a researcher named Zachary Hambrook who did some work with sailors as the Navy was trying to restructure how it hired.”
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, 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. They messed with it. In that case, they delegated one of the stages of furniture creation to someone else. That completely changed the furniture industry. So that's not like a one-off thing. And so the trick is to find these kinds of approaches that are fundamental to your business model. And for that, you have to kind of look at how do you differentiate? Like what do you do for reframing? How do you change the manner in which the product is delivered? Who's doing it? Who provides certain steps and so on. And so we get into that a little later once we get beyond the idea of subversiveness.”
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, there are lots of examples. 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 you delivered to your house.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different, you know, zagging when everyone else is zigging. So if you're aware of the system and you find a novel way to do it, that's like two-thirds of the way to being subversive.”
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 they, of course, think like three or four weeks later, Cameo added 6,000 words to their terms of service for consumer videos. But this way, Gymshark had all these celebrities wishing Gymshark 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 refers graffiti. There's companies that would start to spray signs on the floor, like the British intelligence agency did a recruiting ad spraying it on the sidewalk. Because there's no law against cleaning up. So they just got like a spray hose and wrote stuff. I know these sound like silly ideas, but even Coinbase. Coinbase bought a 60-second Super Bowl app with 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 service fell over. So that's a novelty thing, right? Just like seeing a thing that's...”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once you see the big picture, now it's time to mess with things. And this is the second thing, which is like novelty. And there's a great example of Gymshark, which is a pretty big athletic 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.”
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 let me recap because this is important. You got $5 in seed capital. You got five days to plan, two hours to execute, and then you're going to present your findings in front of this class, the graduate class of Stanford Entrepreneurship for three minutes. So I listed four things there. The winning class sold its three minutes to a company that wanted to recruit Stanford grads. Brilliant, right? They made an ad and like, what are you going to say as the professor? Okay, yeah, well done because they recognize the system they were in They took a step back from what they were told they had, and they looked at what they actually had. So I think that's a great example of system awareness, seeing the big picture of what you're in.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 some money. And it turns out they made even more money when they asked for donation. They did pretty well. They turned their five bucks into like 200 bucks. Another class did a slightly different thing. They went to restaurants and stood in line at fancy restaurants and got the pagers and then sold their space in line during premium lunch hours. They made about 250, right? It's a good exercise. I mean, talk about a thing. You want to find out if your team can innovate. Try this with your company, whether you're a big company or a small company. I guarantee you people will suddenly realize how hard it is to go to market. Winning team made $650, $605 somewhere in that range. Know what 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
“One of my favorite examples of system awareness, there's a Stanford prof named Tina Selig. And she gave the Stanford Engineering Entrepreneur class $5 in seed capital, five days to figure out what to do, and two hours to do it. And then each team in the class would come back for three minutes and present 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 going to go out and they're going to buy a lottery ticket or they're going to buy some lemonading ingredients and set up a lemonade stand. Some of these students, I mean, they're stand for graduate students. They're pretty smart.”
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 underlying idea of the book is that you've got to get the system to behave in a way its creators didn't attend. That's a hugely important idea. But to do that, you need to understand, I mean, your startup is a disagreement with the status quo. So you've got to recognize what is the status quo, right? The first thing that we talk about is this idea of system awareness, to be aware of the system you're in and understand it. And then to find a novel approach within that system. And then, and this is often really difficult for startups, to be disagreeable enough to be willing to do something others either can't or won't. So we think it's subversiveness is a skill you can learn. We spend a lot of time understanding it, talking to neuro. It comes from system awareness, novelty, and disagreeability.”
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 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 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. So it gave the new users a sense of how to behave when they got there. So in your case, asking questions yourself shows people the kinds of questions to ask. And it's obviously one of the good strategies for fixing a cold start problem.”
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, where's the bus crowded? So I was talking to Scott Belsky about Behance. I know you've had him on before. We were both speaking to Tech Stars in New York a little while back. And he said that for the launch of Behance, he reached out and asked all these influential designers to join his platform”
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 you found the problem that people weren't asking questions. And you kind of hit a roadblock. And we were suggesting that you fake asking questions on the platform so people could get a sense of what it was like to answer questions. And as far as I remember the question, we had a conversation about whether this was evil. And you said, I'm not evil. And I think I said, I'm not saying be evil. I'm saying be just evil enough. And that always stuck with me because it is so important to understand the boundaries of what you can do if you are essentially disagreeing with the status quo in order to prove that your idea is better. So I've always talked about this idea of not being evil, but being just evil enough to provoke the change that's required for your product or startup to be successful.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Canada is as cold as they say, And as far as I remember it, Local Mine was this product that would let strangers answer questions about a place. So, for example, where's a good place to get coffee in Times Square? And you guys had tested whether strangers would answer your questions by geofencing tweets and then asking strangers a question and seeing what percentage answer. And it's like 95% of people would answer, which was 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
“Years ago, you and I were part of a startup accelerator called Year One Labs, and it was built on this new idea called the Lean Startup. Ben Joskovic, I think, one of the other founders, with whom I wrote Lean Analytics, had fallen in love with this new lean startup methodology. So Ben was kind of obsessed with this idea of the lean startup, right? This new book from Eric Rees 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 product and hope it sells. So we said, no, let's do it in a period of a year. And so I think we convinced you to move to Chile, Montreal in February from San Diego from WebMetrics.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Position that you believe is very valuable and useful, you still have to recognize that you're going to have to get the world to behave in a different way if you're going to win.”
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, there's a reason for that too. By definition, your startup is like a disagreement with the status quo. And the status quo was created by those in power. So they're naturally not going to like it when you don't play by their rules. They very quickly label you as evil. And so the name's kind of tongue-in-cheek. It definitely gets people's attention. But the rules and the lessons in there, there's a line that we didn't quote in the book from an old song by Christaberg. 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 find a lot of times people on the right side of history believe their causes are so just that they let them speak for themselves as opposed to realizing they have to fight for them. And we think it's pretty important that even if you are coming at it from”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
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 often it's something unprecedented. A lot of these tricks are now known, right? There was a time when things like an invite list where if you invite someone, you get an earlier spot in the invite. There was a time that was the first time 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? So the key isn't like go do those things. By all means, do the things that work. The key is to go find your own. And I think that finding that go-to-market strategy, that unfair, unprecedented, we call them zero day marketing exploits is as important as building the right product feature, you know, having a seamless onboarding process and so on. And so my co-author, Emily and I, it turns out we'd both been obsessed with this stuff for the last 10 years. And so we met and started comparing notes. And Emily lives in Ireland. And so”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where she put up these posters in universities that basically said the universe as if it was made by the university, basically said no Facebook, no Instagram, no Snapchat, no bumble. Well, she's exploiting this medium called University Walls, which are a really unregulated platform for distributing your message. But she's also sending this subversive reminder to people that she's one of the four top applications that the university doesn't approve of. Nobody told her she could do that. Is that evil? No. Is it clever? Hell yeah.”
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, like, an obvious example is Netflix, right? Netflix started out, they needed broadband. They didn't call themselves postal flicks. They called themselves Netflix. Clearly, they wanted to use the network. But a lot of people forget that Blockbuster had streaming first. Streaming wasn't a good play at the start of the online video industry because the penetration of broadband in the US was very limited. So Netflix got the U.S. Postal Service. They misappropriated the U.S. Postal Service and turned it into an on-demand very high bandwidth, but very, very high latency broadband network by sticking DVDs into envelopes. And 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. I love the story of Whitney Hess when she was launching Bumble. She used the tactic we call the top shelf tactic.”
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 think that's an important point. It's not that they did something evil, it's that they did something to use a system in a way its creators didn't intend.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks. Good question. So the reality is that I'm a product manager and I've been a product manager all my life, even as I've been running events. I've been working on the products behind them. And I've worked with a ton of startups thanks to Lean Analytics, which I'm sure we'll get into a bit. And the product managers are, in many cases, missing the point. Like my sense is when you talk to a product manager, they're so consumed the next feature and what to do. And that's the kind of concrete objective thing. I think many of them are doomed because they ignore go-to-market strategy. They ignore distribution of their peril. And the reality is that the only thing that matters is, do you have an unfair advantage? Have you figured out a way to capture attention and turn it into profitable demand? And that's an afterthought or not even a thought. So, you know, the more startups and the more founders that we can remind that distribution matters and that subverting the norms and getting the system to behave.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 because it was ready-made dinner. I think a lot of us don't look at our product and say, how is it being used?”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2024-11-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source