Ep. 254 - Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, Co-authors of Just Evil Enough on Getting Noticed & Subversive Go-to Market Strategies

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, co-authors of the upcoming book Just Evil Enough. We talk about the changing role of marketing and how companies can subvert systems, undermine industry norms, and get platforms to behave in unexpected ways that tilt the scales to generate attention and demand. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcript with Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, Co-authors of Just Evil Enough

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have some amazing guests. Today we have Alistair Croll and Emily Ross authors of the new book, Just Evil Enough, which is a book about getting noticed in this noisy environment and subversive go-to market strategies. Welcome to the show guys. 

Alistair Croll: Thanks for having us. 

Emily Ross: Thanks a million. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm super excited to have you on this call to give our audience a little bit of a sneak preview of the upcoming book. But first let me give a little bit of background. So, Emily Ross, you are a founder of a tech marketing consultancy company called Ink Vine based in Ireland. So we appreciate you coming across the pond to give us some insights on what's going on. 

And Alistair and I go back a long time back in the days of Lean Startup. And he's the coauthor of Lean Analytics. We brought him back to Nebraska about six or seven years ago, I guess it was, when I was working with Nmotion to help with our startup teams in that. So thank you for both being on the show. The title of the book, Just Evil Enough. How'd  you come up with that  and what's it all about? 

Alistair Croll: So I'll tell you a quick story. We ran an accelerator in Montreal called Year One Labs. And one of the companies in Year One Labs was a company called Local Mind. And Local Mind was a platform for asking people questions, asking strangers questions about an area.

It was later acquired by Airbnb and Lenny Rachitsky,  the CEO ran supply-side growth there. And he's now the author of one of the most prominent newsletters for startup growth marketing, Lenny's Newsletter. And in the early days they were doing what every startup does, which is building lots of stuff. But because we were very Lean Startup focused, we have them ask what the biggest risk was.

And it turns out the biggest risk was that whether people would answer questions from strangers. So they ran a very quick study, which we talk about in Lean Analytics. And they found that 94% of people on Twitter would answer a question from a stranger. But this happened because I had been asking Lenny, are you being evil enough?

And they were like, we're not evil. And I said, yeah, but just a little evil, because it turns out that people answer questions, but people on the platform won't ask questions. The real risk is the supply of questions. And so they actually built a system that would ask fake questions of new users. So they get in the habit of asking questions. 

Now you can debate the means versus the end, but what we have found ever since that time is that almost every startup that's successful has some little dirty secret in their background, where they were able to take advantage of an emerging technology or subvert the way a platform is supposed to work and turn it to their advantage.

And so the basic idea behind Just Evil Enough is that almost all the time, the problem isn't whether or not you can build something it's whether anyone will care. So your job should be creating attention you can turn into profitable demand. 

Emily Ross: I think the subversive word is really, really important because we want to clearly differentiate between nefarious, which is downright evil and subversive, which allows you to think a little bit differently.

And it's very hard for people who've been conditioned to think a certain way, to try and think differently.  So the book is about trying to teach people how to think subversively, and to show examples and frameworks in order to do that. And I remember working at a platform years ago and one of the engineers said, right, I'm going to put this button on the website to test if people will click it.

And my instant reaction was, but it doesn't go anywhere. That's a terrible idea. They're going to have an awful experience and that's bad for them. And he's like, no, but I don't want to build something unless I know they're going to need it. So I'm just going to put that button there and yeah, I'm going to burn a few thousand clicks and they're gonna have a terrible experience. I don't care. I'll learn something. 

And he was prepared to be disagreeable in order to learn something different and to save an awful lot of time and money. And it was funny. It was like, okay. I need to think a little bit differently about how we're treating users sometimes. 

Alistair Croll: Yeah, we did a similar thing at Gradient. We had a reporting feature. Gradient was a startup that I launched in 2001. Eventually got acquired by BMC, their TrueSight product line. And we were about to launch reports in the product. And so we created our reports tab, and the reports tab went to a survey page. It says, we're going to do reports soon, what would you like to see?

And people put in their email address and the report they'd like to see. And of course we were building a generic reporting tool. So what we did is we then generated like the top 20 requested reports. Made them defaults and then mailed those people saying we loved your feedback. Thank you so much. We've built the report you're looking for. 

Forget about the fact that 40 other people ask for the same report. Every one of them felt like they were a unique and special snowflake. And so we were exploiting the asymmetry between what we knew, which was 20 people asked for it and what they knew, which was, Hey, look at this, I'm special. You listened to me. And the customers loved it. Right? Is that evil? Well, it meant that we were able to build the default reports people wanted, which made the product better, but it's a little subversive. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, I think part of that learning is the fact that I think a lot of people think that they need to build the entire thing, because that's what shows the value. But, you know, again, you have to incrementally de-risk some of these new startup ideas. And so how do you do that with building just enough to get the learning that you need so that you can move it to the next level and build it out if you need to? 

Alistair Croll: Well, I would say that the problem's not minimum viable product, it's minimum viable attention.

Emily Ross: Yeah. And actually, if you think about, and this is the one thing that the book, I suppose, hammers home, is that getting your go-to market strategy right, is as important, if not more important than getting your product right. Because if you can't capture attention and turn it into profitable demand, then no one's going to know about ...