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

**Alistair Croll** (0:00)
People overlook this often. Sometimes people are not buying your product because it's only half of the solution. David Ricketts, who's a Harvard Professor of Innovation, uses the example of mac and cheese.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:08)
Kraft, macaroni and cheese dinner.

**Alistair Croll** (0:10)
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 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?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:31)
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 and helping you build your startup. He's also a multi-time founder, runs conferences all over the world on data, AI and technology in government, and most importantly to me, convinced me to leave a nice cushy job to start a company over a decade ago, then help 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. Alistair, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Alistair Croll** (2:05)
Thanks for having me. It's awesome to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:08)
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 did you decide to write this book? Why does this book need to exist?

**Alistair Croll** (2:29)
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 to 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 an afterthought or not even a thought. So the more startups and the more founders that we can remind that distribution matters and that subverting the norms and getting the system to behave in a way that gives you an advantage is important but better.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:27)
To give people some examples of the kind of stuff that you write about in this book and kind of set some expectations of what we're going to be talking about. What are some of your favorite examples of companies that are today, I don't know, huge, awesome people love them, but maybe early on did some stuff that wasn't either people don't know about or a little subversive.

**Alistair Croll** (3:47)
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.