Podcast appearances and mentions of alistair croll

“ Subversiveness is a way of changing the system. And I think what we're seeing right now is that all systems are changing.” Entrepreneur and Startupfest founding partner Alistair Croll has co-authored a new book, Just Evil Enough: The Subversive Marketing Handbook. If you're wondering why your company is so bad with its go-to-market execution, or which rules need to be bent (or broken) to win in the attention economy, this book might shoot to the top of your summer reading list. Originally aired: Feb 02, 2025 The BetaKit Podcast is presented by The BetaKit Newsletter. Your inbox deserves better, and so do you. Stay informed on all things Canadian tech by signing up for The BetaKit Newsletter today.

To change systems, sometimes you need to bend the rules, or even rewrite them. That's the argument that Alistair Croll and Emily Ross make in their new book, Just Evil Enough: The Subversive Marketing Handbook. In this episode we speak to Alistair about his new book, which offers numerous case studies and frameworks on how to drive change with subversive tactics while keeping in mind how far is too far. Indeed, one chapter in the book is titled: "Don't Actually be Evil"!This is particularly relevant in this year of transition and change. Whether it is elections and new government mandates coming in Canada (and a new Prime Minister, or maybe two!), or the shocking takeover of government systems in the United States by Elon Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency", it's important to understand the ways in which people are able to disrupt systems that resist change.Watch on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I21jkJ98W6ARelated LinksJust Evil Enough: The Subversive Marketing Handbook, by Alistair Croll and Emily RossChapters00:00 Introduction02:04 Interview with Alistair10:18 How Much Change Can Government Absorb?21:55 Are Leaders Equipped to Understand Change?31:42 Looking to the Future38:44 Conclusion

“ Subversiveness is a way of changing the system. And I think what we're seeing right now is that all systems are changing.” Entrepreneur and Startupfest founding partner Alistair Croll has co-authored a new book, Just Evil Enough: The Subversive Marketing Handbook. Why are Canadian companies so bad with their go-to-market execution and is now really the time to be preaching subversion and disagreeableness? Let's dig in. The BetaKit Podcast is presented by The BetaKit Newsletter. Your inbox deserves better, and so do you. Stay informed on all things Canadian tech by signing up for The BetaKit Newsletter today.

Live on location from the FWD50 conference! In the most recent United Nations e-government rankings Canada has dropped from a high of #3 in 2010 down to #47. We are stalled out while other countries pass us by. There is a real question from many in public service about whether senior leaders have the necessary digital era competencies to get us back to the top of the rankings again. That's why the team at Think Digital ran a workshop at this year's FWD50 conference called "What I Wish My Boss Knew About Digital" to spark discussion and reflection on what it will take to build up the digital competencies of the public service.On today's episode, Ryan kicks-off the conversation with this year's FWD50 hosts, Alistair Croll and Hillary Hartley, about what they were hearing on the conference floor. They talk about how Canada's decline in global e-government rankings is a pervasive theme for participants, and also the importance of events like FWD50 to reenergize those working to spark change. Ryan then has a conversation with Meghan and Nick from the Think Digital team for a debrief on what they heard at the workshop, including the continued importance of getting senior leaders to understand foundational aspects of the technologies that impact so much of our lives in today's world. Watch on YouTubehttps://youtu.be/ioolbJQkAoERelated LinksFWD50 ConferenceWhat I Wish My Boss Knew About DigitalChapters00:00 Alistair Croll and Hillary Hartley from FWD5005:46 Themes at FWD5011:43 Workshop reflections from Meghan and Nick13:44 How knowledgeable are public service leaders?17:00 What did you wish your boss knew?24:32 Importance of curiosity32:37 The path forward41:51 Final workshop reflections

Alistair Croll is the co-author of the best-selling book Lean Analytics and a longtime product manager, entrepreneur, and startup advisor. He was also instrumental in my starting a company, funding it, and helping us exit to Airbnb as part of his Year One Labs incubator. He's chaired notable events such as O'Reilly's Strata and UBM's Cloud Connect and founded FWD50. In our conversation, we focus on lessons from an upcoming book by Alistair and his co-author, Emily Ross, Just Evil Enough, which is set for release in late 2024. We cover:• The importance of subversive marketing strategies in most startups' growth• 11 specific subversive tactics that successful companies have used• Examples of companies like Netflix, Airbnb, and Tesla that used clever tactics early on• A framework for scanning your market for opportunities• The importance of finding your “zero-day marketing exploit”• How to apply these tactics ethically without actually being evil• Much more—Brought to you by:• WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs• Hex—Helping teams ask and answer data questions by working together• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security—Find the transcript and show notes at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/just-evil-enough-alistair-croll—Where to find Alistair Croll:• X: https://x.com/acroll• Threads: https://www.threads.net/@alistairish• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alistaircroll/• Website: https://justevilenough.com/• Substack: https://acroll.substack.com/• Just Evil Enough on X: https://x.com/evilenough• Just Evil Enough on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/just-evil-enough/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Alistair's background (02:00) The story behind Alistair and Emily's book Just Evil Enough(06:17) Examples of subversive tactics(07:43) The importance of unfair advantage(10:36) The origin of the title “Just Evil Enough”(14:24) System awareness and novelty(19:16) How to use this thinking successfully (22:37) Normalizing disagreeable thinking (25:49) Recon canvas and market scanning(32:43) 11 tactics for subversive marketing(57:01) Implementing subversive strategies(01:05:01) Ethical considerations in marketing(01:08:19) Lightning round—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Alistair Croll joins the DATAcated Show to talk about how we can go beyond traditional marketing.

If you haven't heard of FWD50, you should! It's one of the premiere conferences on digital modernization in government and exists to help answer one vital question: How do we use technology to make society better for all? Many of this season's podcast conversations were recorded on location at the conference in Ottawa last November.On this episode of Let's Think Digital you are going to get an opportunity to hear directly from some of the participants in last year's conference. We had set-up a Speakers' Corner booth where we invited anyone at FWD50 who wanted to share their views on what their hope for the future of digital government is and what they think is stopping us from getting there.We kick-off this episode with a wonderful conversation with two of the key founders and organizers of FWD50, Alistair Croll and Rebecca Croll. They talk about what it's like to organize the conference, highlights from the 2023 event, and give us a sneak peek of what they have in store for the 2024 edition and why you should go.Make sure to fill out the 2024 FWD50 content survey and help shape the agenda!Learn more about FWD50 at: https://www.fwd50.com Finally a big thanks to Amy Kirtay, Andy Best, Amanda Bernardo, Liz Christie, Charles Finley, Dea De Jarisco, Roy Nader, Derek Alton, Urooj Qureshi, Pascale Elvas, James Duncan, Jeff Outram, and Lewis Eisen for appearing on the podcast as part of our Speakers' Corner segment!Watch on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHlB3ujyh6EChapters00:04 Introduction01:27 Alistair Croll and Rebecca Croll30:50 Who are you and why are you at FWD50?33:23 What is your vision for government in 2030?36:55 What are the barriers to get there?40:58 Conclusion

Data, data, everywhere! And AI needs a drink! In this very special episode of DM Radio, Host @eric_kavanagh interviews the inimitable Alistair Croll, the Chair for Data Universe, the US version of Big Data London. Tune in to hear how AI may well transform society in pleasant, and some unpleasant ways!

Subscribe to my newsletter to learn from the best entrepreneurs and VCs. https://newsletter.prodcircle.com/profileEpisode 14:  This is by far the most interesting episode we have recorded on the show. I had the previlige of sitting down with a great mind of this century, Alistair Croll. Alistair is a serial entrepreneur, event organizer, and bestselling author who works at the intersection of technology and society.After an early career in product management and telecommunications at Eicon, Primary Access, and 3Com, Alistair built web performance pioneer Coradiant and sold it to BMC for $135M. He launched the Year One Labs incubator, chaired O'Reilly's Strata and UBM's Cloud Connect, founded FWD50, and taught at Harvard Business School. He has co-written three books including Lean Analytics, widely considered required reading for startups, and is currently working on Just Evil Enough, the subversive marketing playbook. In this episode, we talked about the important of building purpose driven startups, creating a network that you can rely on, why marketing is more important than your product, how to use venture capital, and how to build dream companies.If you are in entrepreneurial space, this is a mega episode for you. Enjoy :)

We have talked in the past about tools for Product Analytics, but we have not yet talked about why analytics are so important for the product manager. It might seem obvious, but it is still a concept that needs more clarification.For exactly that reason, 10 years ago Ben Yoskovitz and Alistair Croll wrote the book “Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster” (O'Reilly), and it is still relevant today, not only to startups entrepreneurs, but to product people.In this episode, Moshe and Matt met with Ben Yoskovitz to hear about the different ways Product Managers use analytics, and what we can learn from Lean Analytics.In the episode we talked about:Taking the theory of Lean Startup to a more actionable place, based on analytics and dataIdentifying the metrics that matter to you - what to track and what to focus on based on the business you are in and the stage you are atWhat makes a good metric? How do I know a number is a good one to look at? What has changed since writing the book?What product managers should learn and focus on?Balancing qualitative and quantitative data and analyticsAnd much more!You can connect with Ben at:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/byosko/ Twitter: @byoskoFocused Chaos: https://www.focusedchaos.co/ Buy the book on Amazon: “Lean Analytics”You can find the podcast's page, and connect with Matt and Moshe on Linkedin: Product for Product Podcast - linkedin.com/company/product-for-product-podcastMatt Green - linkedin.com/in/mattgreenanalytics/Moshe Mikanovsky - linkedin.com/in/mikanovsky/Note: any views mentioned in the podcast are the sole views of our hosts and guests, and do not represent the products mentioned in any way.Please leave us a review and feedback ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

On this episode we talk about the human factors that can prevent and enable digital government innovation. We start with Alistair Croll, Founder and Content Chair of FWD50, and the results of their 2023 Digital Government Content Survey. There's some really interesting results about what digital government practitioners are seeing as priorities, and the challenges they face in pushing through innovation within their organizations. We then talk with Nilufer Erdebil, Founder and CEO of Spring2 Innovation and an Associate at Think Digital, who talks about her new book, "Future Proofing by Design". She talks about the importance of design thinking, not just as a methodology, but as a way of approaching problem solving in government that can make your life, the lives of citizens, and even your boss' life, easier.Related LinksFWD50 2023 Digital Government Content Survey ResultsFuture Proofing by Design, by Nilufer ErdebilWatch the Video Version of the Episodehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXVsrNi_al8

"We all want AI to do our jobs for us—the boring parts. What we're doing here is making computers more human-like, and sadly, they're getting all the fun jobs. Because those are the jobs that don't have to be perfect." Entrepreneur and author Alistair Croll joins to discuss what will become scarce and what will become abundant in the new economy created by generative AI. Sponsored by International Women's Week.

"Other conferences are phoning it in." Startupfest's Alistair Croll and Olivia Rossi join to explain how Canada's Original Startup Conference has changed in its major return to IRL and the amount of tech they're building to make meeting people easy again. Sponsored by Diuca.

BIO: Alistair Croll is an entrepreneur, author, and conference organizer. His book Lean Analytics has been translated into eight languages and is considered mandatory reading for startup founders. STORY: Alistair needed to raise capital for his startup. He received a series A investment of $20 million and gave up 50% equity in his company. LEARNING: Don't scale prematurely. Capture your market's attention first.   “Risk is a necessary component of progress.”Alistair Croll  Guest profilehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/alistaircroll/ (Alistair Croll) is an entrepreneur, author, and conference organizer. His book https://amzn.to/3upOTWN (Lean Analytics) has been translated into eight languages and is considered mandatory reading for startup founders. He helped create the Data Science and Critical Thinking course at Harvard Business School and founded web performance pioneer Coradiant. He's chaired some of the world's leading tech events, including Strata and Cloud Connect, and is the co-founder of https://fwd50.com/ (Forward50), the world's biggest conference on digital government. He's joining us from Montreal, Canada, where he's hard at work on a new book https://justevilenough.com/ (Just Evil Enough), a still-stealthy mobile startup called Stroll, and launching the 2022 edition of Startupfest, Canada's original startup conference. Worst investment everAlistair started a startup in the business of running websites for people. So instead of having to buy dedicated hardware, web server, firewall, and so on to run your website, the company could have that stuff and let customers use a slice of it. The company got a Series A investment of $20 million. In return, Alistair and his partners gave up half of the company. Alistair didn't anticipate that this trend he'd foreseen was just the start of a much longer trend that led to modern-day cloud computing. Alistair's worst investment ever was receiving funding and giving up 50% equity in the company long before he had adequately understood the trend he was capitalizing on. Lessons learnedDon't scale prematurely. Capture your market's attention first. When pitching an idea, always ask yourself if you can change the behavior of a lucrative target market sustainably. Andrew's takeawaysYour startup is not successful until you can sustainably keep people's attention and focus on what you're doing. Actionable adviceDe-risk the highest and most uncertain thing first. No.1 goal for the next 12 monthsAlistair's goal for the next 12 months is to market his new book https://justevilenough.com/ (Just Evil Enough). Parting words  “We move the world forward by taking risks. So figure out what risks are worth it and then plunge headlong into them and don't pull your punches.”Alistair Croll  [spp-transcript]   Connect with Alistair Crollhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/alistaircroll/ (LinkedIn) https://twitter.com/acroll (Twitter) https://alistaircroll.com/ (Website) https://amzn.to/3upOTWN (Book) Andrew's bookshttps://amzn.to/3qrfHjX (How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market) https://amzn.to/2PDApAo (My Worst Investment Ever) https://amzn.to/3v6ip1Y (9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them) https://amzn.to/3emBO8M (Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming's 14 Points) Andrew's online programshttps://valuationmasterclass.com/ (Valuation Master Class) https://academy.astotz.com/courses/how-to-start-building-your-wealth-investing-in-the-stock-market (How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market) https://academy.astotz.com/courses/finance-made-ridiculously-simple (Finance Made Ridiculously Simple) https://academy.astotz.com/courses/gp (Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence) https://academy.astotz.com/courses/transformyourbusiness (Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming's 14 Points) Connect with Andrew Stotz:https://www.astotz.com/ (astotz.com) https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewstotz/...

Tuto Assad es Co-founder y CEO de Vitau y tuve el gusto con el de charlar sobre las lecciones que aprendimos al leer el libro Lean Analytics de Alistair Croll y Benjamin Yoskovitz

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.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, Co-authors of Just Evil EnoughBrian 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 your product. And it's all about various different approaches that you can use to figure out how to do that. And  asymmetry being just one of about 10, I think that we cover. Brian Ardinger: So, is it a form of customer discovery almost so rather than the traditional customer discovery interviews there, you're looking for different ways to engage with a marketplace, engage with a customer to get that understanding of what their demand is and where they want to go from there?Emily Ross: Well, it's really interesting. Some of the examples in the book are not business examples. There's a lot of historical stuff in there, right back from Machiavelli,  all the way through to The Godfather. There's businesses, oh, tell the Genghis Khan story. I love that one. Alistair Croll: So I mean, the idea behind a lot of this is that if you know something to be true, that other people discount, you can take advantage of that. And there are many times where people knew they could do something better, but didn't Genghis Kahn, for example, knew that women could be very effective rulers. This was something that was not widely held. And so he would conquer a city, marry one of his many, many daughters off to the leader of that city. Send that leader off to war, he'd promptly get killed. Now you have a blood relative in charge of that city. Was that evil? Well, Genghis Khan did a lot of nasty things, but he did have a decent amount of respect for women's ability to run cities, which was something nobody else was factoring in. And this was an unfair advantage. Right. And I think, I mean, we're getting a little ahead of it. One of the things that Emily talks about a lot, is the idea that you need to know the norms of your system in order to subvert them. So do you want to talk a little about the water stuff? Emily? Emily Ross: Yeah so normative versus formative is like super interesting. So there's a story of by two fish and they're swimming along, and a much older fish is swimming the opposite direction. And this is from... Alistair Croll: it's a commencement address, right?Emily Ross: That's it, the older fish says, Oh how's the water? And the fish swim on a little bit and they turned to each other and go, what the hell is water? So, you have to be able to recognize the fact that you're swimming in the medium. And the best way to do that is to use external viewpoints to help recognize what you're swimming in or downing  in.I also use a log jam metaphor, which works as well. And this is a one I use all the time for teaching for problem solving, but it's really, really applicable as well too, to recognizing the difference between normative and formative. So when these to say a logs down the river, to ship them to the log yard, And they would occasionally get tangled up and a team of river pigs used to have to surround the problem really quickly because it's obviously getting worse and worse all the time, and figure out which was the one key log that you could extract to unlock the whole problem.And the only way they could do it really, really well, was through diversity of thought, opinion, and perspective. By surrounding the problem, by sharing ideas, by looking at it from lots of different perspectives. And that's why diversity in your teams, that's why diversity of perspectives is so important so that you can actually recognize what you're swimming in, whether it's water or something, a little bit stinkier. And also getting the sense of looking at it from outside, what you're used to. So ideas from different verticals, from different walks of life. That's going to help you think subversively. Alistair Croll: And that's kind of the supervillain stuff. I mean, Brian, I'll give you an example, that's a concrete example from when I came to visit you .One of your startups was making a rotary sprinkler solution.So to recap, rotary sprinklers, when they're lateral to a strong wind, get blown over and this costs a lot of money to fix. And so they built a thing that could measure the weather and the incoming winds and rotate the sprinkler downwind kind of like a wind sock, so it wouldn't fall over. And they're having a hard time selling. And what the startup revealed to me at the time when we were meeting, was that there's this weird existing system between farmers, farm subsidies, insurance, salespeople, and the makers of those sprinklers.They don't really mind when it gets knocked over because everyone makes some money and then they use that money to go on a fishing trip. If you don't know that you're in that water, all your efforts to sell are going to fail. You've got to recognize that and then go, huh? Maybe this is something I can sell through the maker of the sprinklers, or like maybe I can, you can subvert that system.Maybe you have to create an awareness campaign that farm subsidies being wasted and they could be spent on something else. But if you don't know that strategy, you can't subvert it. And that word subvert just means find another version. By definition, the hardest problems we face are the ones for which we don't have an obvious solution, because the normal approaches don't work.Which means you've got to find an unusual approach and that's normally called hacking, right? Hacking is getting something to work in a way it wasn't intended. Whether you're using a Pringle can to focus wifi signals, or you're getting a computer system to throw an error, so you can own a system. The problem with hacking is that in startups, hacking has a horrible polar reputation. Growth hacking is a bag of cheap tricks.Brian Ardinger: Talk about some of the examples in the book that maybe some people have heard of or can get a visual around. I know you've mentioned in past talks and that I've seen around this is like things like Peloton or Burger King.  Can you give examples from that? Emily Ross: I would quite like to talk about one of the ones that I had the hardest time with is about being disagreeable. And we talked about it slightly there in terms of doing things that you wouldn't necessarily think of as being quite right. But as a woman, I have been raised to be polite, to be agreeable. And actually, if you look at some of the most innovative, interesting entrepreneurs in history, quite a lot of them have been profoundly disagreeable.They've been prepared to be unliked or unloved. And this is something, a behavior that you can adopt or think about as a means to finding new ideas, or it means of finding new ways of doing things. One of the examples that we talked sports a little bit earlier, but Wilt Chamberlain was arguably one of the best basketball players of all time. He has on more than one occasion scored over a hundred points in a single game. But he had a problem. He couldn't shoot free throws to save his life. Back in college, he had a really high score, but over his career, it went down and down and down and he had a career low of like, I think 26% success rate.He was a star player. He got fouled a lot. So this was a really big problem for him. So he went to see Rick Barry. Rick Barry was the guy who could not miss. He actually had a career average of 89.3% and he got better and better as his career progressed in the last two years of his career, he had a 94% success rate from free throws. But he actually threw in a really interesting way. He threw underhand, which is actually kind of a cool word for the, Just Evil Enough book, because he shot underhand. But he was the best at shooting. But this was called the Granny Style. This is, you know, if you throw like a girl, you throw under hand. He didn't care. His father had drummed it into him from a very young age, how to shoot underhand, overhand, underhand, overhand, and he could just nail it every single time.So Chamberlain went to see Barry learned to shoot underhand and his performance doubled. He went from a career low, to a career high, in that same game where he scored a hundred points. So it turns out it's a much better approach. However, Chamberlain didn't have the guts to keep shooting underhand because he cared too much about what people thought. His career best was 61% from the line in 1961, he sank 28 of 32 free throws against the New York Knicks.So after a while, though, he reverted to shooting the way he knew, and his percentages  plunged. And he admitted that he felt like a sissy. He worried too much about what other people thought. And unlike Barry who was rational, Chamberlain was being agreeable and wrong. Barry meanwhile said he could be as selfish as he wanted to without hurting his team. So being a little bit disagreeable or asking yourself what you're prepared to do is a really good first start. Alistair Croll: Just to chime in quickly, we've all heard of growth hacking right? Growth hacking is these little tricks that get people to click a button or move down a funnel or whatever. The problem with any of these known tricks is that they're known.  Andrew Chen talks about the law of shitty click-through rates, which is simply the idea that as you find a vulnerability, if you will, a way to change the market, it becomes widely known immediately.So the first click-through ad on Hot Wired had an average of 44% click-through rate. Some people say it was as high as 70% for a banner ad. What's that at now? Emily? Brian Ardinger: Well, industry averages will tell you, or they'll tell you it's 0.1%. But in my opinion, it's closer to 0.02%, if you're lucky. Alistair Croll: So that's a huge decline. Same thing happened with email and so on. And so there are these known hacks that are the sort of marketing equivalent of a script kitty, who's running an attack on WordPress. And if you haven't patched your site, you'll be selling Viagra off your website. What you should be doing is trying to find the marketing equivalent of a zero day exploit.So in security a zero day, is an attack that nobody knows about yet. And they're incredibly valuable. Two of them were used to retard the Iranian nuclear program and damaged centrifuges. The marketing equivalent of a zero day exploit, we call this zero day marketing, is finding a new way to get a platform to behave in an unintended manner, with which you can create attention you can turn into profitable demand. And there's some amazing examples of like Farmville, for example. When Farmville's app would send you a message saying, Hey, Brian, Alistair's cows need some grain. And you'd click on it. Now you're a user. Well, they got to 30 million users before Facebook went, Whoa, we maybe don't want apps posting to people's friend feeds.There are so many examples of this, and we can tell you those examples. But the point is you can't use those examples because they've already been done. Right? What you have to do is devote much more of your time to inventing your own zero day marketing exploits. Brian Ardinger: So from that perspective, is it a series of experiments that you just have to run? You, you come up with some ideas and you run them like that, or is this, talk me through the process of how you get better at it? Emily Ross: One of the examples that I like to share, if you see it often enough, you begin to understand how you can apply the thinking. It's a model and you just try and apply it to your own environment. So if we take the information asymmetry, and example, the idea of subverting, one thing for another. Or a bait and switch. The idea of you're selling one thing, but actually getting another and Tupperware parties did this, you know, you think you're going for dinner and you end up getting guilt ridden into buying a load of plastic.But when I was working in a comparison platform, we subverted the PR channel for the generation of white hat backlinks. So PR is generally around building brand and brand awareness. But one of the side effects of PR was the generation of backlinks. So this is back in like maybe 2013. So what we did was we mined data. We attached big data trends to celebrities, pushed out, press releases to high value domains, and pretty much one in five hit would generate a backlink. When we started. We had about 1400 high quality backlinks. And we were generating about 60,000 non-brand organic visits to site per day. And after three years of pushing out two releases a month, month in, month out, we had over four and a half thousand unique domain backlinks and almost 200,000 non-brand organic visits per day.And this was a platform that turned traffic into money. I won't tell you how, but what we did for example, was we mined hair transplant trends and prices. And one example of the many, many crazy pushes we did was the Jude Law index of baldness. So here's a scale up from Colin Farrell all the way up to Dr. Evil,  of how bald are you? And you find yourself on the index and you see, Oh, this is how much it would cost for me to have hair transplants. It was a price comparison website for private health clinics. And this was a fun, interesting way to attract attention and turn it into traffic to the sites. But actually it wasn't really about traffic. It was always about the backlinks. So one in five hits generate a backlink, but again, it was channel burnout. It was a zero day exploit because you know, over the course of the three years, the number of backlinks that were being generated, went from maybe one in five to one in 10, because the platforms themselves started to recognize the value that they were accidentally giving away.So naturally you get published in a paper. If there's an online version of it, they print it online and they put a backlink out. It was a side effect of the real, a pure PR. And channel burn happened, those backlinks are no longer as readily available as they were. But it worked for about three years, four years. It was a fun time. Brian Ardinger:  You have to have a continuous funnel  yourself of new things that you need to explore it. Emily Ross: Exactly.  Exactly. So that was a, we had a good run, but it's about thinking about, well, what is the channel? What is the platform? So PR was the channel and we used it in a way. It wasn't intended to be used for our benefits. And so what are your channels? How can you use them differently? And that's a really great question to ask of yourself, no matter what you're doing. Alistair Croll: One of the things we often do is. What has changed in a technology platform. So for example, Travis Kalanick has this new startup Cloud Kitchens. What has changed in restaurants? Well, first of all, there's a huge abundance of restaurants that I could order from. Far more than I would know about. So I'm already overwhelmed with selection when I go to order food, because we're all at home, in a pandemic, ordering food. And second of all, The fact that the storefront is virtual, it means one kitchen can have many restaurant front ends. And so Cloud Kitchens will set you up with brands and their brands have games like Fucking Good Pizza, My Pasta, Dirty Little Vegan Bitch, Don't Grill My Cheese. None of these tell you about food, but when you're overwhelmed, and you have that sort of paradox of choice, you go, no, I'll just order it from that one. That sounds fine. Right? That's only possible because that brand is part of an experiment. You're ordering from an experiment. And they're constantly testing, which ones get more attention and then the restaurant can deliver all of those things that might be the same kitchen. And so Cloud Kitchens has taken advantage of an exploit within the traditional model of food ordering. So it's looking at, you know, what technology changes or combinations of technology, makes something possible that wasn't possible before that you can then subvert to your ends. Brian Ardinger: How do you go from not just creating a gimmick or how do you, I guess also approach being wrong, like trying these things and, and being wrong?Emily Ross: Growth hacking is gimmicks. Growth Hacking is doing something that maybe it's a publicity stunt or, I mean, one of the examples that we use in the book is pairing two things unexpectedly together. That's a great way to draw attention and Heineken did this really well in the UK just last week, where they put out a mobile hairdressing units and bar, so you could get a free haircut and a pint together.So this generated publicity and it's nice, but it's gimmicky, right? Is that really going to move their needle? You know, for the year? Possibly not. It's a nice story. So, but if you look at governments have been doing this for years and they've done it so well, there's a really good example in the book, which I won't go into now about how the government shamed people into stopping spitting in the twenties, as they tried to fight TB. Instead of just saying it's bad to spit, they actually made people feel bad, and socially, and vulgar  by spitting because before that it was perfectly normal.And if you look at the Chinese government, they use Fapiao.  Fapiao  are receipts. And they use Fapiao  as a lottery to fight corruption. So this is really interesting. In China, corruption can be rampant. Merchants will give their customers a discount, if the customer doesn't ask for a receipt.So the merchant doesn't have to report the income and like just pockets to the savings. The government used an incentive to combat this called Fapiao, which is a receipt  from the merchant. And there's a couple of hacks in here that are super clever. So the merchants have to buy the receipts beforehand and then hand them out to customers in return for payment.So the first one is the merchant has to pay tax before the transaction. That's really smart. And then customers demand their Fapiao, because there's a scratch and win lottery element. And then the government runs the lottery and customers can scratch off the panel to see if they've won anything. And so the second hack there is create demand for a receipt by making it a game.And then of course the government can also adjust the prize amount of each lottery to create just the right amount of incentive. So they're literally able to alter the rewards of the game to like tilt the Nash equilibrium, which is just like super smart. So you can do this at a macro level and absolutely get away with it.Alistair Croll: I want to just make sure we address your question about gimmicks. One of the big differences between a Zero Day Exploit and traditional Growth Hacking is that it's not known. But another is that it is intrinsic to your business model. The haircuts aren't intrinsic to Heineken's beer, but when Dropbox launched, they were the first to pioneer this, both of us get something. I invite you, we both get storage. That's built into the product, right. That's intrinsic to the system itself. And I think what it means is that you're factoring in Zero Day Exploits, marketing exploits, to your business model and your product roadmap. Not just to your marketing campaigns. I mean, Genghis Khan's  a good example, right?It wasn't just a tactic. It was a fundamental change in how he thought that societies could be ruled. So the real lesson here is, I'll give you one more example. There's a company that makes software called Energage  and they make workplace surveys. So they would sell to an enterprise and the enterprise would survey their employees and do  360 stuff. And so on. But the way they go to market is they launched this thing called the top workplaces project in concert with the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the Dallas Morning News and so on. And they run this survey and they say to these newspapers, Hey everybody, here's the survey. We'll take care of it.So now you go do it. And like, Whoa, isn't this great. My company is one of the best workplaces. I'll buy an ad in the newspaper. Everything's wonderful. And then Energage can go back and go, Hey, congratulations on being the third best workplace in Nebraska. Too bad about the other results. And you go what other results? Well, you know, we got more data than that, would you like to see it? Okay. And now you have a new customer, right? It's intrinsic to the business model, right. Rather than just being a little trick or hack. Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point. And it also goes to the point where you see a lot of these examples in startups, because you can build it early on into the business model and that. How does this play out for a large existing company that wants to try to use some of these tactics?Emily Ross: So big companies really need to think about reframing and they also need to give themselves permission to think in ways they're not used to. One of the exercises I like to recommend is called a pre-mortem. And you basically give them permission to imagine the worst possible outcome. You invite them to invent the worst, worst, worst thing that could possibly happen and then work backwards from there.And it's amazing what happens in an environment like that, because that group think is real. That tribal behaviors of wanting to be agreeable and wanting everyone to pull together is very much a systematic thing that you see in large organizations. So giving them permission to think disagreeably.  Giving them methods to reframe where they are, what they do. These are all great frameworks for them to try and think subversively. Alistair Croll: First of all, I think that it's really important. I mean, I would consider a marketing department, have a Red Team. Have a second group, hmm, that has the same product and resources, but their job is to put the first group out of business. What do you do? Right. That's just hypothetical. You're going to think better. We Red Team on security. We Red Team on PR. Why don't we read team on go-to-market strategies.  And the second thing is, if you look at great brands that changed how people discussed a product or a service, they found a frame of reference that favored them. For decades we used to talk about electric cars. We would talk about sustainability and range. Pretty boring stuff, right? Lots of hippies sitting around going let's save the planet and look at my Prius. Elon Musk put one of them on a race track against supercar and beat it. And all of a sudden the conversation on electric cars was performance. He'd reframed the discussion about electric vehicles to performance, right?When Gmail first launched, your inbox on Hotmail or Yahoo mail had 10 mgs. That's like one photo, right? We don't remember that. My daughter doesn't believe this. When Gmail came along, Google knew that they did not have strength in folders and archiving and hierarchy and export, but they were good at with search and storage.So they said, Hey, email's not about your ability to manage your folders and your inbox and organization and management. It's about abundance storage. And they reinforced that so much that they actually had a counter showing you how much storage you get. Salesforce, when it first launched, was a web based CRM, but web-based CRMs had very few features compared to Siebel and Vantive and Clarify, companies that you don't see anymore.So they said no CRM is about not needing IT. In fact, their logo was no software. They had us the word software with a slash through it, despite the fact that they own their own programming language called Apex. Right? And so each of these companies found a way to reframe things, even like Listerine. Listerine was this clinical health thing. And then along comes scope and says, Hey, you know what? Mouthwash is actually about being attractive and sexy, not about clinical health. One action that a lot of big brands should take is to step back and say, what is a new frame that favors us and disadvantages our competition. And then what is it about that frame of reference that we can do to prove it that will then allow the customer to find a different way of valuing the product?Emily Ross: I would also chime in there and talk about generally large marketing teams will have, they'll have done their marketing degrees and their MBAs or masters on they'll turn out the four P's from, you know, the 1960s or the seven P's of service. And like there's too much P. Just stop peeing. Guys just stopped doing it.Right. Chuck, all of that in the bin and start thinking about creating attention. And it's as simple and as complicated as that. We talk about human motivation and Alistair  I think coined laid, made, paid, afraid. I tidy that up a bit to the piratey AARG. Which is appeal, authority, risk, and greed. So think about your customers. Think about your competitors. Think about the marketplace through the lens of human behavior and whether you're selling radiator bits or cars or Cola, people have all those very basic triggers. They want to be liked that's appeal. They want power that's authority. They want to feel safe. That's the risk lens.And then greed, you know, people want the things that they want. So. We're just human meat bags, right? We're just walking bags of meat with emotions. We have very simple motivations at the end of the day. And in a B2B setting for a big organization, the AARG framework is a really useful function. Like, so throw out the P. Think about AARG.And if you're trying to convince people to act, you need to appeal to base emotions more than you do plain reason, because most people really aren't very rational. There's also really a good examples of the seven deadly sins. If you look at the big, big enterprises, I think Chris Pack said this on Twitter.I thought it was really, really good. Uber and Amazon are slough. Instagram and Tik Tok are pride. Door Dash is gluttony. Tinder is lust. Pinterest is envy. Twitter is rath. And Bitcoin is greed. So think about the fundamentals. Just think about the basics. We haven't changed all that much. Alistair Croll: But I think the biggest thing here is that big brands haven't realized that the biggest risk they face is that someone else will subvert attention that they could otherwise be getting and turned into their profitable demand. And so if you don't do that, you're going to get eaten alive. If we can get the world to realize that the biggest risk is not whether you will build something, but whether anyone will care, we've already given people a huge headstart.Brian Ardinger: Well, and the fact that the world is changing so fast on the fact that you can go from company like Airbnb in 12 years to being, you know, one of the most recognizable brands, you know, overnight effectively from what used to be to build a business. New technologies, new marketplaces, new access to talent. All of that is just accelerating the opportunities to be disrupted. Alistair Croll: We used to have a new platform come along. You know, we had writing that took a few thousand years. Then we got to radio. It took a few hundred years. And then we got to television that took a decade, the rate of introduction of new platforms. And therefore, if you're thinking like a hacker new attack surfaces, Is incredible, right? The Cloud Kitchens example happened because of the pandemic and the rise of Uber Eats and Door Dash, and so on. The pace at which new exploit opportunities appear is very, very fast. And as a result, there are far more opportunities to subvert the status quo or the norms of your industry with one of these new platforms.So we're trying to get people to be much more opportunistic. And part of what we do, like I said I can't tell you do this thing, because if I tell you, then it's already been done. What we can do is we can say, here are some ways to think about it. You know, is there an innovation that happens? Can you reframe things? Can you do a substitution where people think they're getting one thing and they're actually getting another. Can you appeal to the foibles of human psychology? Emily Ross: Don't be afraid to be disagreeable. Alistair Croll: It's weird because in the past I've written books that are very technical. There is a right answer. And Emily's written lots of articles on like how to do stuff. This is a more subjective thing and candidly more uncomfortable for us as writers, because we want to make sure that there are applicable lessons, but it's almost like, you know, teaching someone Zen. I can tell you what it is, but you're going to have to go sit on a rock and figure it out for yourself.But once you start thinking this way, everything becomes a subversive opportunity. And once you have that subversive lens, you're not being evil, you're just being just evil enough. Opportunities are everywhere. Emily Ross: And actually, if you think about it, just coming back to your very first question, which is a nice cyclicity.  The title of the book is exactly what we set out to do, which is we got your attention and we're turning it into demand. So the book title is a really, really simple and effective way to showcase the thinking. And I think if you take one thing away from it, it's change what you spend your time on. So building a subversive go-to market strategy is just as important as thinking about your product. And if you get the balance, right, you're going to be unstoppable. Brian Ardinger: Well, and you've also from the book perspective, the book's not out yet, but you're doing things to grab attention differently than a lot of, I mean, I get pitched every other day by a book author trying to get their book noticed and that. But I know that you've been doing some things as far as live online course that's leading up to the book. And you have a interesting little survey. I don't, if we got to talking about any of the things that you're doing from a attention perspective to, about the book. Emily Ross: Well one of the things I love, this was so much fun, is that you can't just order the book. You can't just pre-order it. You have to take a quiz so that we can decide if you're evil enough. So you take the quiz and if you're not evil enough, we think, you know, you're not going to be able to handle the book. And if you're too evil, then this book could just perhaps be too powerful. So we have gamified the experience of the pre-order function, which was a lot of fun. And we've done a ton of tons of things, just mostly because we'd like to mess around, but that's just one of the things we've done so far. Alistair Croll: It's also great that Emily has like a whole team of web developers that stand up.  Emily's business is actually, she's like the SWAT team or the MI6 for some very advanced tech brands, who can't really explain what they do well. And Emily figures out how to do that. So she has a team of people to build stuff. So a good example of that is we wanted to do a survey to see whether people would take our cohort based course, which we're going to be running with Maven, the founders of  Alt MBA and UDemy,   set up this new, online cohort based course program. But we wanted to get people to take the survey. So we told them one lucky winner will get a free workshop or talk from us for their organization, which is usually something we charged a lot of money for. But we also wanted to make sure they shared the survey, which is a paradox because I want the greatest odds of winning. So I'm not going to tell my friends, right?So we made two surveys. One was Team Orange, one was Team Black. And we say, we'll choose the winner from the survey that has the most responses. That's a bit subversive. Right. And we found some funny things about people getting kind of tribal and like I'm Team Black and so on. We even did things to tweak the survey questions a little bit between the two.So we ran like six or seven social experiments in the survey. But would you buy a book from people who weren't thinking subversively? I mean, I wouldn't buy a book on subversiveness for someone who went through normal tactics. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Absolutely. Well, I appreciate you both coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share some of this subversiveness and hopefully get more folks to be Just Evil Enough. People want to find out more about yourself or the book itself, what's the best way to do that. Emily Ross: Just Evil Enough.com and I'll actually, I landed Alistair in it on a talk we did last week because we were live Tweeting. They wouldn't let us take live questions. So we just got everyone to jump on Twitter and ask us questions there.And I promised everyone lives that if they hashtag Just Evil Enough that Alistair would read out whatever they wrote. And they all said smart, intelligent things. And I was like, I can't believe none of you are like trying to flog a course or a book or promote something. Like he will have to say anything you like. So people should...Alistair Croll: I think one guy had me mention his podcast, but there's a good example where like, Oh, you think you're getting free promotion in this thing we're recording, but you're actually following the Just Evil Enough account. Emily Ross: But yes, Just Evil Enough.com is where you can take the quiz. You can hear about the cohort class. You can, pre-order the book and there's an Evil Enough Twitter account too. You can check that out. Brian Ardinger: Well Emily, it was great to meet you for the first time here and Alistair. Always good to catch up with what's going on in your world. So appreciate you both for being on here and looking forward to the conversation in the future.Alistair Croll: Thanks so much for having us. Emily Ross: Thanks Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. 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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.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, Co-authors of Just Evil EnoughBrian 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 your product. And it's all about various different approaches that you can use to figure out how to do that. And  asymmetry being just one of about 10, I think that we cover. Brian Ardinger: So, is it a form of customer discovery almost so rather than the traditional customer discovery interviews there, you're looking for different ways to engage with a marketplace, engage with a customer to get that understanding of what their demand is and where they want to go from there?Emily Ross: Well, it's really interesting. Some of the examples in the book are not business examples. There's a lot of historical stuff in there, right back from Machiavelli,  all the way through to The Godfather. There's businesses, oh, tell the Genghis Khan story. I love that one. Alistair Croll: So I mean, the idea behind a lot of this is that if you know something to be true, that other people discount, you can take advantage of that. And there are many times where people knew they could do something better, but didn't Genghis Kahn, for example, knew that women could be very effective rulers. This was something that was not widely held. And so he would conquer a city, marry one of his many, many daughters off to the leader of that city. Send that leader off to war, he'd promptly get killed. Now you have a blood relative in charge of that city. Was that evil? Well, Genghis Khan did a lot of nasty things, but he did have a decent amount of respect for women's ability to run cities, which was something nobody else was factoring in. And this was an unfair advantage. Right. And I think, I mean, we're getting a little ahead of it. One of the things that Emily talks about a lot, is the idea that you need to know the norms of your system in order to subvert them. So do you want to talk a little about the water stuff? Emily? Emily Ross: Yeah so normative versus formative is like super interesting. So there's a story of by two fish and they're swimming along, and a much older fish is swimming the opposite direction. And this is from... Alistair Croll: it's a commencement address, right?Emily Ross: That's it, the older fish says, Oh how's the water? And the fish swim on a little bit and they turned to each other and go, what the hell is water? So, you have to be able to recognize the fact that you're swimming in the medium. And the best way to do that is to use external viewpoints to help recognize what you're swimming in or downing  in.I also use a log jam metaphor, which works as well. And this is a one I use all the time for teaching for problem solving, but it's really, really applicable as well too, to recognizing the difference between normative and formative. So when these to say a logs down the river, to ship them to the log yard, And they would occasionally get tangled up and a team of river pigs used to have to surround the problem really quickly because it's obviously getting worse and worse all the time, and figure out which was the one key log that you could extract to unlock the whole problem.And the only way they could do it really, really well, was through diversity of thought, opinion, and perspective. By surrounding the problem, by sharing ideas, by looking at it from lots of different perspectives. And that's why diversity in your teams, that's why diversity of perspectives is so important so that you can actually recognize what you're swimming in, whether it's water or something, a little bit stinkier. And also getting the sense of looking at it from outside, what you're used to. So ideas from different verticals, from different walks of life. That's going to help you think subversively. Alistair Croll: And that's kind of the supervillain stuff. I mean, Brian, I'll give you an example, that's a concrete example from when I came to visit you .One of your startups was making a rotary sprinkler solution.So to recap, rotary sprinklers, when they're lateral to a strong wind, get blown over and this costs a lot of money to fix. And so they built a thing that could measure the weather and the incoming winds and rotate the sprinkler downwind kind of like a wind sock, so it wouldn't fall over. And they're having a hard time selling. And what the startup revealed to me at the time when we were meeting, was that there's this weird existing system between farmers, farm subsidies, insurance, salespeople, and the makers of those sprinklers.They don't really mind when it gets knocked over because everyone makes some money and then they use that money to go on a fishing trip. If you don't know that you're in that water, all your efforts to sell are going to fail. You've got to recognize that and then go, huh? Maybe this is something I can sell through the maker of the sprinklers, or like maybe I can, you can subvert that system.Maybe you have to create an awareness campaign that farm subsidies being wasted and they could be spent on something else. But if you don't know that strategy, you can't subvert it. And that word subvert just means find another version. By definition, the hardest problems we face are the ones for which we don't have an obvious solution, because the normal approaches don't work.Which means you've got to find an unusual approach and that's normally called hacking, right? Hacking is getting something to work in a way it wasn't intended. Whether you're using a Pringle can to focus wifi signals, or you're getting a computer system to throw an error, so you can own a system. The problem with hacking is that in startups, hacking has a horrible polar reputation. Growth hacking is a bag of cheap tricks.Brian Ardinger: Talk about some of the examples in the book that maybe some people have heard of or can get a visual around. I know you've mentioned in past talks and that I've seen around this is like things like Peloton or Burger King.  Can you give examples from that? Emily Ross: I would quite like to talk about one of the ones that I had the hardest time with is about being disagreeable. And we talked about it slightly there in terms of doing things that you wouldn't necessarily think of as being quite right. But as a woman, I have been raised to be polite, to be agreeable. And actually, if you look at some of the most innovative, interesting entrepreneurs in history, quite a lot of them have been profoundly disagreeable.They've been prepared to be unliked or unloved. And this is something, a behavior that you can adopt or think about as a means to finding new ideas, or it means of finding new ways of doing things. One of the examples that we talked sports a little bit earlier, but Wilt Chamberlain was arguably one of the best basketball players of all time. He has on more than one occasion scored over a hundred points in a single game. But he had a problem. He couldn't shoot free throws to save his life. Back in college, he had a really high score, but over his career, it went down and down and down and he had a career low of like, I think 26% success rate.He was a star player. He got fouled a lot. So this was a really big problem for him. So he went to see Rick Barry. Rick Barry was the guy who could not miss. He actually had a career average of 89.3% and he got better and better as his career progressed in the last two years of his career, he had a 94% success rate from free throws. But he actually threw in a really interesting way. He threw underhand, which is actually kind of a cool word for the, Just Evil Enough book, because he shot underhand. But he was the best at shooting. But this was called the Granny Style. This is, you know, if you throw like a girl, you throw under hand. He didn't care. His father had drummed it into him from a very young age, how to shoot underhand, overhand, underhand, overhand, and he could just nail it every single time.So Chamberlain went to see Barry learned to shoot underhand and his performance doubled. He went from a career low, to a career high, in that same game where he scored a hundred points. So it turns out it's a much better approach. However, Chamberlain didn't have the guts to keep shooting underhand because he cared too much about what people thought. His career best was 61% from the line in 1961, he sank 28 of 32 free throws against the New York Knicks.So after a while, though, he reverted to shooting the way he knew, and his percentages  plunged. And he admitted that he felt like a sissy. He worried too much about what other people thought. And unlike Barry who was rational, Chamberlain was being agreeable and wrong. Barry meanwhile said he could be as selfish as he wanted to without hurting his team. So being a little bit disagreeable or asking yourself what you're prepared to do is a really good first start. Alistair Croll: Just to chime in quickly, we've all heard of growth hacking right? Growth hacking is these little tricks that get people to click a button or move down a funnel or whatever. The problem with any of these known tricks is that they're known.  Andrew Chen talks about the law of shitty click-through rates, which is simply the idea that as you find a vulnerability, if you will, a way to change the market, it becomes widely known immediately.So the first click-through ad on Hot Wired had an average of 44% click-through rate. Some people say it was as high as 70% for a banner ad. What's that at now? Emily? Brian Ardinger: Well, industry averages will tell you, or they'll tell you it's 0.1%. But in my opinion, it's closer to 0.02%, if you're lucky. Alistair Croll: So that's a huge decline. Same thing happened with email and so on. And so there are these known hacks that are the sort of marketing equivalent of a script kitty, who's running an attack on WordPress. And if you haven't patched your site, you'll be selling Viagra off your website. What you should be doing is trying to find the marketing equivalent of a zero day exploit.So in security a zero day, is an attack that nobody knows about yet. And they're incredibly valuable. Two of them were used to retard the Iranian nuclear program and damaged centrifuges. The marketing equivalent of a zero day exploit, we call this zero day marketing, is finding a new way to get a platform to behave in an unintended manner, with which you can create attention you can turn into profitable demand. And there's some amazing examples of like Farmville, for example. When Farmville's app would send you a message saying, Hey, Brian, Alistair's cows need some grain. And you'd click on it. Now you're a user. Well, they got to 30 million users before Facebook went, Whoa, we maybe don't want apps posting to people's friend feeds.There are so many examples of this, and we can tell you those examples. But the point is you can't use those examples because they've already been done. Right? What you have to do is devote much more of your time to inventing your own zero day marketing exploits. Brian Ardinger: So from that perspective, is it a series of experiments that you just have to run? You, you come up with some ideas and you run them like that, or is this, talk me through the process of how you get better at it? Emily Ross: One of the examples that I like to share, if you see it often enough, you begin to understand how you can apply the thinking. It's a model and you just try and apply it to your own environment. So if we take the information asymmetry, and example, the idea of subverting, one thing for another. Or a bait and switch. The idea of you're selling one thing, but actually getting another and Tupperware parties did this, you know, you think you're going for dinner and you end up getting guilt ridden into buying a load of plastic.But when I was working in a comparison platform, we subverted the PR channel for the generation of white hat backlinks. So PR is generally around building brand and brand awareness. But one of the side effects of PR was the generation of backlinks. So this is back in like maybe 2013. So what we did was we mined data. We attached big data trends to celebrities, pushed out, press releases to high value domains, and pretty much one in five hit would generate a backlink. When we started. We had about 1400 high quality backlinks. And we were generating about 60,000 non-brand organic visits to site per day. And after three years of pushing out two releases a month, month in, month out, we had over four and a half thousand unique domain backlinks and almost 200,000 non-brand organic visits per day.And this was a platform that turned traffic into money. I won't tell you how, but what we did for example, was we mined hair transplant trends and prices. And one example of the many, many crazy pushes we did was the Jude Law index of baldness. So here's a scale up from Colin Farrell all the way up to Dr. Evil,  of how bald are you? And you find yourself on the index and you see, Oh, this is how much it would cost for me to have hair transplants. It was a price comparison website for private health clinics. And this was a fun, interesting way to attract attention and turn it into traffic to the sites. But actually it wasn't really about traffic. It was always about the backlinks. So one in five hits generate a backlink, but again, it was channel burnout. It was a zero day exploit because you know, over the course of the three years, the number of backlinks that were being generated, went from maybe one in five to one in 10, because the platforms themselves started to recognize the value that they were accidentally giving away.So naturally you get published in a paper. If there's an online version of it, they print it online and they put a backlink out. It was a side effect of the real, a pure PR. And channel burn happened, those backlinks are no longer as readily available as they were. But it worked for about three years, four years. It was a fun time. Brian Ardinger:  You have to have a continuous funnel  yourself of new things that you need to explore it. Emily Ross: Exactly.  Exactly. So that was a, we had a good run, but it's about thinking about, well, what is the channel? What is the platform? So PR was the channel and we used it in a way. It wasn't intended to be used for our benefits. And so what are your channels? How can you use them differently? And that's a really great question to ask of yourself, no matter what you're doing. Alistair Croll: One of the things we often do is. What has changed in a technology platform. So for example, Travis Kalanick has this new startup Cloud Kitchens. What has changed in restaurants? Well, first of all, there's a huge abundance of restaurants that I could order from. Far more than I would know about. So I'm already overwhelmed with selection when I go to order food, because we're all at home, in a pandemic, ordering food. And second of all, The fact that the storefront is virtual, it means one kitchen can have many restaurant front ends. And so Cloud Kitchens will set you up with brands and their brands have games like Fucking Good Pizza, My Pasta, Dirty Little Vegan Bitch, Don't Grill My Cheese. None of these tell you about food, but when you're overwhelmed, and you have that sort of paradox of choice, you go, no, I'll just order it from that one. That sounds fine. Right? That's only possible because that brand is part of an experiment. You're ordering from an experiment. And they're constantly testing, which ones get more attention and then the restaurant can deliver all of those things that might be the same kitchen. And so Cloud Kitchens has taken advantage of an exploit within the traditional model of food ordering. So it's looking at, you know, what technology changes or combinations of technology, makes something possible that wasn't possible before that you can then subvert to your ends. Brian Ardinger: How do you go from not just creating a gimmick or how do you, I guess also approach being wrong, like trying these things and, and being wrong?Emily Ross: Growth hacking is gimmicks. Growth Hacking is doing something that maybe it's a publicity stunt or, I mean, one of the examples that we use in the book is pairing two things unexpectedly together. That's a great way to draw attention and Heineken did this really well in the UK just last week, where they put out a mobile hairdressing units and bar, so you could get a free haircut and a pint together.So this generated publicity and it's nice, but it's gimmicky, right? Is that really going to move their needle? You know, for the year? Possibly not. It's a nice story. So, but if you look at governments have been doing this for years and they've done it so well, there's a really good example in the book, which I won't go into now about how the government shamed people into stopping spitting in the twenties, as they tried to fight TB. Instead of just saying it's bad to spit, they actually made people feel bad, and socially, and vulgar  by spitting because before that it was perfectly normal.And if you look at the Chinese government, they use Fapiao.  Fapiao  are receipts. And they use Fapiao  as a lottery to fight corruption. So this is really interesting. In China, corruption can be rampant. Merchants will give their customers a discount, if the customer doesn't ask for a receipt.So the merchant doesn't have to report the income and like just pockets to the savings. The government used an incentive to combat this called Fapiao, which is a receipt  from the merchant. And there's a couple of hacks in here that are super clever. So the merchants have to buy the receipts beforehand and then hand them out to customers in return for payment.So the first one is the merchant has to pay tax before the transaction. That's really smart. And then customers demand their Fapiao, because there's a scratch and win lottery element. And then the government runs the lottery and customers can scratch off the panel to see if they've won anything. And so the second hack there is create demand for a receipt by making it a game.And then of course the government can also adjust the prize amount of each lottery to create just the right amount of incentive. So they're literally able to alter the rewards of the game to like tilt the Nash equilibrium, which is just like super smart. So you can do this at a macro level and absolutely get away with it.Alistair Croll: I want to just make sure we address your question about gimmicks. One of the big differences between a Zero Day Exploit and traditional Growth Hacking is that it's not known. But another is that it is intrinsic to your business model. The haircuts aren't intrinsic to Heineken's beer, but when Dropbox launched, they were the first to pioneer this, both of us get something. I invite you, we both get storage. That's built into the product, right. That's intrinsic to the system itself. And I think what it means is that you're factoring in Zero Day Exploits, marketing exploits, to your business model and your product roadmap. Not just to your marketing campaigns. I mean, Genghis Khan's  a good example, right?It wasn't just a tactic. It was a fundamental change in how he thought that societies could be ruled. So the real lesson here is, I'll give you one more example. There's a company that makes software called Energage  and they make workplace surveys. So they would sell to an enterprise and the enterprise would survey their employees and do  360 stuff. And so on. But the way they go to market is they launched this thing called the top workplaces project in concert with the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the Dallas Morning News and so on. And they run this survey and they say to these newspapers, Hey everybody, here's the survey. We'll take care of it.So now you go do it. And like, Whoa, isn't this great. My company is one of the best workplaces. I'll buy an ad in the newspaper. Everything's wonderful. And then Energage can go back and go, Hey, congratulations on being the third best workplace in Nebraska. Too bad about the other results. And you go what other results? Well, you know, we got more data than that, would you like to see it? Okay. And now you have a new customer, right? It's intrinsic to the business model, right. Rather than just being a little trick or hack. Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point. And it also goes to the point where you see a lot of these examples in startups, because you can build it early on into the business model and that. How does this play out for a large existing company that wants to try to use some of these tactics?Emily Ross: So big companies really need to think about reframing and they also need to give themselves permission to think in ways they're not used to. One of the exercises I like to recommend is called a pre-mortem. And you basically give them permission to imagine the worst possible outcome. You invite them to invent the worst, worst, worst thing that could possibly happen and then work backwards from there.And it's amazing what happens in an environment like that, because that group think is real. That tribal behaviors of wanting to be agreeable and wanting everyone to pull together is very much a systematic thing that you see in large organizations. So giving them permission to think disagreeably.  Giving them methods to reframe where they are, what they do. These are all great frameworks for them to try and think subversively. Alistair Croll: First of all, I think that it's really important. I mean, I would consider a marketing department, have a Red Team. Have a second group, hmm, that has the same product and resources, but their job is to put the first group out of business. What do you do? Right. That's just hypothetical. You're going to think better. We Red Team on security. We Red Team on PR. Why don't we read team on go-to-market strategies.  And the second thing is, if you look at great brands that changed how people discussed a product or a service, they found a frame of reference that favored them. For decades we used to talk about electric cars. We would talk about sustainability and range. Pretty boring stuff, right? Lots of hippies sitting around going let's save the planet and look at my Prius. Elon Musk put one of them on a race track against supercar and beat it. And all of a sudden the conversation on electric cars was performance. He'd reframed the discussion about electric vehicles to performance, right?When Gmail first launched, your inbox on Hotmail or Yahoo mail had 10 mgs. That's like one photo, right? We don't remember that. My daughter doesn't believe this. When Gmail came along, Google knew that they did not have strength in folders and archiving and hierarchy and export, but they were good at with search and storage.So they said, Hey, email's not about your ability to manage your folders and your inbox and organization and management. It's about abundance storage. And they reinforced that so much that they actually had a counter showing you how much storage you get. Salesforce, when it first launched, was a web based CRM, but web-based CRMs had very few features compared to Siebel and Vantive and Clarify, companies that you don't see anymore.So they said no CRM is about not needing IT. In fact, their logo was no software. They had us the word software with a slash through it, despite the fact that they own their own programming language called Apex. Right? And so each of these companies found a way to reframe things, even like Listerine. Listerine was this clinical health thing. And then along comes scope and says, Hey, you know what? Mouthwash is actually about being attractive and sexy, not about clinical health. One action that a lot of big brands should take is to step back and say, what is a new frame that favors us and disadvantages our competition. And then what is it about that frame of reference that we can do to prove it that will then allow the customer to find a different way of valuing the product?Emily Ross: I would also chime in there and talk about generally large marketing teams will have, they'll have done their marketing degrees and their MBAs or masters on they'll turn out the four P's from, you know, the 1960s or the seven P's of service. And like there's too much P. Just stop peeing. Guys just stopped doing it.Right. Chuck, all of that in the bin and start thinking about creating attention. And it's as simple and as complicated as that. We talk about human motivation and Alistair  I think coined laid, made, paid, afraid. I tidy that up a bit to the piratey AARG. Which is appeal, authority, risk, and greed. So think about your customers. Think about your competitors. Think about the marketplace through the lens of human behavior and whether you're selling radiator bits or cars or Cola, people have all those very basic triggers. They want to be liked that's appeal. They want power that's authority. They want to feel safe. That's the risk lens.And then greed, you know, people want the things that they want. So. We're just human meat bags, right? We're just walking bags of meat with emotions. We have very simple motivations at the end of the day. And in a B2B setting for a big organization, the AARG framework is a really useful function. Like, so throw out the P. Think about AARG.And if you're trying to convince people to act, you need to appeal to base emotions more than you do plain reason, because most people really aren't very rational. There's also really a good examples of the seven deadly sins. If you look at the big, big enterprises, I think Chris Pack said this on Twitter.I thought it was really, really good. Uber and Amazon are slough. Instagram and Tik Tok are pride. Door Dash is gluttony. Tinder is lust. Pinterest is envy. Twitter is rath. And Bitcoin is greed. So think about the fundamentals. Just think about the basics. We haven't changed all that much. Alistair Croll: But I think the biggest thing here is that big brands haven't realized that the biggest risk they face is that someone else will subvert attention that they could otherwise be getting and turned into their profitable demand. And so if you don't do that, you're going to get eaten alive. If we can get the world to realize that the biggest risk is not whether you will build something, but whether anyone will care, we've already given people a huge headstart.Brian Ardinger: Well, and the fact that the world is changing so fast on the fact that you can go from company like Airbnb in 12 years to being, you know, one of the most recognizable brands, you know, overnight effectively from what used to be to build a business. New technologies, new marketplaces, new access to talent. All of that is just accelerating the opportunities to be disrupted. Alistair Croll: We used to have a new platform come along. You know, we had writing that took a few thousand years. Then we got to radio. It took a few hundred years. And then we got to television that took a decade, the rate of introduction of new platforms. And therefore, if you're thinking like a hacker new attack surfaces, Is incredible, right? The Cloud Kitchens example happened because of the pandemic and the rise of Uber Eats and Door Dash, and so on. The pace at which new exploit opportunities appear is very, very fast. And as a result, there are far more opportunities to subvert the status quo or the norms of your industry with one of these new platforms.So we're trying to get people to be much more opportunistic. And part of what we do, like I said I can't tell you do this thing, because if I tell you, then it's already been done. What we can do is we can say, here are some ways to think about it. You know, is there an innovation that happens? Can you reframe things? Can you do a substitution where people think they're getting one thing and they're actually getting another. Can you appeal to the foibles of human psychology? Emily Ross: Don't be afraid to be disagreeable. Alistair Croll: It's weird because in the past I've written books that are very technical. There is a right answer. And Emily's written lots of articles on like how to do stuff. This is a more subjective thing and candidly more uncomfortable for us as writers, because we want to make sure that there are applicable lessons, but it's almost like, you know, teaching someone Zen. I can tell you what it is, but you're going to have to go sit on a rock and figure it out for yourself.But once you start thinking this way, everything becomes a subversive opportunity. And once you have that subversive lens, you're not being evil, you're just being just evil enough. Opportunities are everywhere. Emily Ross: And actually, if you think about it, just coming back to your very first question, which is a nice cyclicity.  The title of the book is exactly what we set out to do, which is we got your attention and we're turning it into demand. So the book title is a really, really simple and effective way to showcase the thinking. And I think if you take one thing away from it, it's change what you spend your time on. So building a subversive go-to market strategy is just as important as thinking about your product. And if you get the balance, right, you're going to be unstoppable. Brian Ardinger: Well, and you've also from the book perspective, the book's not out yet, but you're doing things to grab attention differently than a lot of, I mean, I get pitched every other day by a book author trying to get their book noticed and that. But I know that you've been doing some things as far as live online course that's leading up to the book. And you have a interesting little survey. I don't, if we got to talking about any of the things that you're doing from a attention perspective to, about the book. Emily Ross: Well one of the things I love, this was so much fun, is that you can't just order the book. You can't just pre-order it. You have to take a quiz so that we can decide if you're evil enough. So you take the quiz and if you're not evil enough, we think, you know, you're not going to be able to handle the book. And if you're too evil, then this book could just perhaps be too powerful. So we have gamified the experience of the pre-order function, which was a lot of fun. And we've done a ton of tons of things, just mostly because we'd like to mess around, but that's just one of the things we've done so far. Alistair Croll: It's also great that Emily has like a whole team of web developers that stand up.  Emily's business is actually, she's like the SWAT team or the MI6 for some very advanced tech brands, who can't really explain what they do well. And Emily figures out how to do that. So she has a team of people to build stuff. So a good example of that is we wanted to do a survey to see whether people would take our cohort based course, which we're going to be running with Maven, the founders of  Alt MBA and UDemy,   set up this new, online cohort based course program. But we wanted to get people to take the survey. So we told them one lucky winner will get a free workshop or talk from us for their organization, which is usually something we charged a lot of money for. But we also wanted to make sure they shared the survey, which is a paradox because I want the greatest odds of winning. So I'm not going to tell my friends, right?So we made two surveys. One was Team Orange, one was Team Black. And we say, we'll choose the winner from the survey that has the most responses. That's a bit subversive. Right. And we found some funny things about people getting kind of tribal and like I'm Team Black and so on. We even did things to tweak the survey questions a little bit between the two.So we ran like six or seven social experiments in the survey. But would you buy a book from people who weren't thinking subversively? I mean, I wouldn't buy a book on subversiveness for someone who went through normal tactics. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Absolutely. Well, I appreciate you both coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share some of this subversiveness and hopefully get more folks to be Just Evil Enough. People want to find out more about yourself or the book itself, what's the best way to do that. Emily Ross: Just Evil Enough.com and I'll actually, I landed Alistair in it on a talk we did last week because we were live Tweeting. They wouldn't let us take live questions. So we just got everyone to jump on Twitter and ask us questions there.And I promised everyone lives that if they hashtag Just Evil Enough that Alistair would read out whatever they wrote. And they all said smart, intelligent things. And I was like, I can't believe none of you are like trying to flog a course or a book or promote something. Like he will have to say anything you like. So people should...Alistair Croll: I think one guy had me mention his podcast, but there's a good example where like, Oh, you think you're getting free promotion in this thing we're recording, but you're actually following the Just Evil Enough account. Emily Ross: But yes, Just Evil Enough.com is where you can take the quiz. You can hear about the cohort class. You can, pre-order the book and there's an Evil Enough Twitter account too. You can check that out. Brian Ardinger: Well Emily, it was great to meet you for the first time here and Alistair. Always good to catch up with what's going on in your world. So appreciate you both for being on here and looking forward to the conversation in the future.Alistair Croll: Thanks so much for having us. Emily Ross: Thanks Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

Petit à petit, le Product Management a su se faire sa place en entreprise, bousculant les méthodes de travail traditionnelles, silotées et centrées sur l'entreprise, pour leur préférer une approche agile et centrée sur l'utilisateur.Derrière ce buzzword, se cache une nouvelle fonction qui accompagne la conception d'un produit avant et pendant sa mise sur le marché. Le rôle du Product Manager est celui d'un chef d'orchestre, à la frontière entre la stratégie, la technique et l'expérience utilisateur.Mais alors, quels changements organisationnels implique le Product Management et surtout, quels en sont les avantages ? Quelles sont les missions du Product Manager et quelle différence entre ce rôle et celui de Product Owner ?Au micro de Laure Constantinesco, Romain Garnier, Product Manager chez OCTO, vous explique tout dans ce cinquième épisode de OCTO Buzzword Bingo !Ressources :A lire :"Hacking Growth" de Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown"Inspired : how to create products customers love" de Marty Cagan"Lean Analytics" de Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskowitz"Lean Startup" de Eric Ries"Team Topologies" de Matthew Skelton & Manuel PaisTous les articles du blog OCTO Talks sur le Product Management Renseignez-vous sur la formation dispensée par OCTO Academy pour devenir Product Manager, s'approprier la démarche et créer des produits digitaux impactants.Crédits :Un podcast proposé par OCTO Technology, écrit, réalisé et enregistré par LACOLAB (Laure Constantinesco et Charlotte Abdelnour). Sound Design et mixage : Paul Love (The Clean Sound). Musique originale : AudioJungle / Ocean_Studio.

Hablamos del ICE Framework y de las etapas de crecimiento propuestas por Alistair Croll y Benjamin Yoskovitz  en su libro Lean Analytics. Dale un play. al episodio si quieres saber más al respecto y si te interesan los temas mencionados te dejo el link para que puedas adquirir el libro.    Libro en Español: https://amzn.to/35G0rs5 Libro en  Inglés: https://amzn.to/2MYNCT3

🎓 CURSO LEAN STARTUP - INSCRIPCION ABIERTA 👉 [https://cursoleanstartup.innokabi.com/] 🎓 CURSO DE 0 A 100 CLIENTES RECURRENTES 👉 [https://innokabi.com/0-a-100] 💌 Suscripción Newsletter 👉 https://innokabi.com/blog/ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ INFO GENERAL ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ► DESCRIPCIÓN: Me alegro que hayas decidido acompañarnos una semana más en el podcast de Innokabi. Soy Alfonso Prim y quiero ayudarte a lanzar tu marca, producto o servicio con éxito empleando lean startup y las herramientas de marketing online más interesantes y experiencias de otros emprendedores que ya lo han conseguido. ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ CONTENIDO ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ► DESCRIPCIÓN EPISODIO: Hoy hablamos con Carlos Iglesias Fundador y CEO de RunRoom una consultora de Negocio Digital que mejora la experiencia de usuario de sus clientes y que cuenta con más de 60 personas. Carlos también codirige inDigital el programa de Dirección de Marketing y transformació Digital de Esade. Pero además, Carlos no ha perdido su espíritu emprendedor, ya que además de su trabajo diario con grandes empresas, también se anima con el empredimiento y de hecho están lanzando un proyecto que comentaremos en nuestra charla. De emprendimiento, de experiencia del cliente, de negocio y sobre todo, de lanzarse y hacer, hablaremos a lo largo de la entrevista. ► PREGUNTAS: 1. ¿Quién eres para los que no te conocen y cuál es tu trayectoria hasta llegar a hoy? 2. Cómo nace RunRoom y cuál es su objetivo. 3. Cómo nace y cómo crece Runroom. Fases, hitos hasta hoy. 4. Experiencia del cliente. Qué es. 5. Cómo la trabajáis. Pasos, metodología o herramientas que empleaos (sin entrar en nada técnico, solo conocer el método y cómo se trabaja). 6. Algún caso o ejemplo concreto de cómo se mejora la experiencia del cliente que nos puedas contar. 7. Además, del trabajo como consultores estáis lanzando un proyecto propio paralelo que se sale de lo que es en sí mismo Runroom. Cuéntanos en qué consiste y cómo nace la idea. 8. Aunque no tiene todavía modelo de negocio para quién está pensado esta herramienta. 9. Cómo habéis detectado el problema y estudiado el cliente, entrevistas de problema, etc. 10. Cómo está siendo el proceso de construcción del software. 11. Cómo esperas darlo a conocer. ¿Tenéis pensado algo? 12. Futuro de Runroom y de este nuevo proyecto. Cómo lo ves. 13. Aciertos y errores que has cometido como emprendedor durante este tiempo y que pueden ayudar a otras personas que se estén planteando lanzar su primer negocio. 14. Algún consejo para una persona que quiera emprender. ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ REFERENCIAS Y ENLACES ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Dónde encontramos a Carlos: ► https://runroom.com/ ► https://carlosiglesias.info/ ► Podcast: Realword https://carlosiglesias.info/podcast-en-el-mundo-real/ Recomendaciones: ► Libro: Lean Analytics de Alistair Croll: https://amzn.to/35cNtlw ► Podcast de K-fund: https://blog.kfund.vc/tagged/podcast ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ INFO GENERAL ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Si te gusta el Podcast de Innokabi por favor no olvides darle al ME GUSTA, dejarme un comentario en tu plataforma de podcasts favorita, y registrarte en: 🎓 PODCAST INNOKABI --> [https://innokabi.com/podcast/] 🎓 BLOG INNOKABI --> [https://www.innokabi.com/blog/] Para que pueda enviarte más contenidos, recursos y formación sobre emprendimiento, lean startup y marketing online.

🎓 CURSO LEAN STARTUP - INSCRIPCION ABIERTA 👉 [https://cursoleanstartup.innokabi.com/] 🎓 CURSO DE 0 A 100 CLIENTES RECURRENTES 👉 [https://innokabi.com/0-a-100] 💌 Suscripción Newsletter 👉 https://innokabi.com/blog/ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ INFO GENERAL ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ► DESCRIPCIÓN: Me alegro que hayas decidido acompañarnos una semana más en el podcast de Innokabi. Soy Alfonso Prim y quiero ayudarte a lanzar tu marca, producto o servicio con éxito empleando lean startup y las herramientas de marketing online más interesantes y experiencias de otros emprendedores que ya lo han conseguido. ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ CONTENIDO ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ► DESCRIPCIÓN EPISODIO: Hoy hablamos con Carlos Iglesias Fundador y CEO de RunRoom una consultora de Negocio Digital que mejora la experiencia de usuario de sus clientes y que cuenta con más de 60 personas. Carlos también codirige inDigital el programa de Dirección de Marketing y transformació Digital de Esade. Pero además, Carlos no ha perdido su espíritu emprendedor, ya que además de su trabajo diario con grandes empresas, también se anima con el empredimiento y de hecho están lanzando un proyecto que comentaremos en nuestra charla. De emprendimiento, de experiencia del cliente, de negocio y sobre todo, de lanzarse y hacer, hablaremos a lo largo de la entrevista. ► PREGUNTAS: 1. ¿Quién eres para los que no te conocen y cuál es tu trayectoria hasta llegar a hoy? 2. Cómo nace RunRoom y cuál es su objetivo. 3. Cómo nace y cómo crece Runroom. Fases, hitos hasta hoy. 4. Experiencia del cliente. Qué es. 5. Cómo la trabajáis. Pasos, metodología o herramientas que empleaos (sin entrar en nada técnico, solo conocer el método y cómo se trabaja). 6. Algún caso o ejemplo concreto de cómo se mejora la experiencia del cliente que nos puedas contar. 7. Además, del trabajo como consultores estáis lanzando un proyecto propio paralelo que se sale de lo que es en sí mismo Runroom. Cuéntanos en qué consiste y cómo nace la idea. 8. Aunque no tiene todavía modelo de negocio para quién está pensado esta herramienta. 9. Cómo habéis detectado el problema y estudiado el cliente, entrevistas de problema, etc. 10. Cómo está siendo el proceso de construcción del software. 11. Cómo esperas darlo a conocer. ¿Tenéis pensado algo? 12. Futuro de Runroom y de este nuevo proyecto. Cómo lo ves. 13. Aciertos y errores que has cometido como emprendedor durante este tiempo y que pueden ayudar a otras personas que se estén planteando lanzar su primer negocio. 14. Algún consejo para una persona que quiera emprender. ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ REFERENCIAS Y ENLACES ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Dónde encontramos a Carlos: ► https://runroom.com/ ► https://carlosiglesias.info/ ► Podcast: Realword https://carlosiglesias.info/podcast-en-el-mundo-real/ Recomendaciones: ► Libro: Lean Analytics de Alistair Croll: https://amzn.to/35cNtlw ► Podcast de K-fund: https://blog.kfund.vc/tagged/podcast ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ INFO GENERAL ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Si te gusta el Podcast de Innokabi por favor no olvides darle al ME GUSTA, dejarme un comentario en tu plataforma de podcasts favorita, y registrarte en: 🎓 PODCAST INNOKABI --> [https://innokabi.com/podcast/] 🎓 BLOG INNOKABI --> [https://www.innokabi.com/blog/] Para que pueda enviarte más contenidos, recursos y formación sobre emprendimiento, lean startup y marketing online.

Is your organization too afraid of trying new things? Do you have an idea for an experiment but are not sure how to pitch it to your boss? Let’s change that. My guest today is David Arnoux, Co-founder, and Head of Growth at GrowthTribe. In this episode, we talk about developing an experimental mindset, why visual storytelling is vital to get buy-ins, and how to run marketing and growth experiments to find huge wins. We covered: The symptoms of companies that are not experimenting enough What companies need to have in place before starting experimenting The danger of “growth for the sake of growth” The type of companies that David won’t train or work with Why experiment culture should begin with the mindset How to change the mindset in an organization Why visual storytelling is essential in presenting your experiments The single data source to help you pick the right ideas to run with A few examples of crazy experiments David ran David’s advice to aspiring marketers What David thinks marketers should learn for the next 5,10, and 50 years Resources: GrowthTribe CXL Booking.com Oracle Claire Suellentrop - Hot to Use Jobs To Be Done to Read Your Customers’ Minds Asia Matos - 5 Steps to Create a Go-to-market Strategy Stealing Fire by Stephen Kotler Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis Jeff Bezos’ 2018 Letters to Shareholders Smartcuts by Shane Snow Takeru Kobayashi (The Hot Dog Eating Contest Champion) Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz Dave McClure Pirate Metrics The GROWS Process by GrowthTribe Hotjar The Brass Framework Occam’s Razor Wait But Why by Tim Urban OCEAN model / Big Five Personality Traits Sandra Matz Deep Work by Cal Newport Edward Bernays a16z podcast Lectures subreddit Growth Tribe Youtube channel David’s LinkedIn GrowthTribe Instagram

Le rapport entre la donnée et le design n'est pas immédiat et lorsque nous creusons, ça paraît assez flou... Pourtant dans tous les autres domaines (marketing, seo, développement, etc.) la data occupe une place de choix, pourquoi ? Comment pouvons nous aborder la donnée dans notre profession, à quoi cela peut nous servir et servir les projet et les équipes ? Dans cet épisode nous abordons la data côté design UX et UI ; deux approches / perceptions totalement différentes.  En UX design, nous avons tendance à faire de la "récolte" de données (qualitatives et / ou quantitatives) - que ce soit via la recherche utilisateurs ou via les outils de tracking utilisés sur les sites web ou dans les campagnes médias. Tandis qu'en UI design, nous avons la tâche de visualiser les données (plutôt quantitatives) afin d'en faciliter la lecture, la compréhension et la communication : c'est la data visualisation. Enfin, voici les références dont nous parlons dans l'épisode, si vous les cherchez suite à l'écoute

After a start in digital software, Kate Rutter realized that qualitative definitions of success could, and needed to be, made more quantitative. Years later, she’s Principal at Intelleto, Adjunct Professor in the IXD program at California College of the Arts, and the instructor of our upcoming UX workshop “Crafting Metrics for UX Success." https://rosenfeldmedia.com/public-ux-workshops/crafting-metrics-for-ux-success/ In this episode, she reflects on the extraordinary success with qualitative metrics she has observed in the UX field, and the room for growth around numerical metrics, as well as the many challenges companies are faced with when trying to determine which metrics really matter. Kate’s four part workshop (August 6-7 and August 13-14) is intended to help designers gain a numerical understanding of success—and determine what metrics they need to measure in the first place (not just the easy ones!) Kate’s recommended reading: • Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Analytics-Better-Startup-Faster/dp/1449335675 • The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Metrics-Jerry-Z-Muller/dp/0691174954 • Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business, Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2019/09/dont-let-metrics-undermine-your-business Kate’s shoutouts Julie Zhuo https://medium.com/@joulee John Cutler https://medium.com/@johnpcutler Laura Klein https://rosenfeldmedia.com/people/laura-klein/ Follow Kate on Twitter www.twitter.com/katerutter

On this episode of The Artists of Data Science, we get a chance to hear from Alistair Croll, a well-established entrepreneur, analyst, and author. He's the author of Lean Analytics, when we co-wrote with Benjamin Yoskovitz. He's also one of the founders of Coradiant, Year One Labs, and the Strata confersence. He shares some excellent tips one how to ask the right questions when working with data, essentials of business communication, and the need to be obsessed as an entrepreneur. WHAT YOU WILL LEARN: [28:28] How to be an intrepreneur [13:39] Incorporate philosophy with data [19:11] Why you need to be obsessed as an entrepreneur QUOTES [14:22] …”as an early stage company, your focus is your biggest currency.” [22:10] …”crises have a way of accelerating the inevitable.” [46:04] “...you got to first seek to engage and entertain and then you have the ability to inform people.” [51:38] …”find a way to capture attention that you can turn into profitable demand better than the competition.” WHERE TO FIND ALISTAIR ONLINE: Twitter:https://twitter.com/acroll LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/alistaircroll/ Website: http://solveforinteresting.com/ SHOW NOTES [00:01:37] Introduction for our guest today [00:03:20] Alistair talks about his early work with Coradiant [00:05:47] What do you think the next two to five years is going to look like for businesses leveraging data and analytics? [00:07:55] Why A.I. will need a therapist [00:08:26] In this new vision of the future then what's really going to separate, like the great data scientists from just the merely good ones? [00:11:03] The importance of privacy and GDPR for data scientists [00:13:56] The concept of "one metric that matters" and how that's going to manifest in terms ofmeasuring privacy [00:15:00] Why Zoom DOES NOT deserve to be the videoconferencing platform in the world [00:17:30] Do you have any advice or tips for anyone who's been toying with the idea of entrepreneurship? [00:19:22] Why we need to instill leaps of faith in people who want to be founders [00:21:06] In terms of data science, entrepreneurship in this COVID/post-COVID area. What do you see as some problems with tackling that in enterprising data? Scientists can can identify and then get into an opportunity? [00:22:29]So you've been writing a lot about innovation at Tilt to the Windmill. How should be incumbents think about innovation? [00:23:02]A deep dive into various models of innovation [00:26:38] An excellent and thorough discussion on intrapreneur [00:30:37] Some great advice for one man data science teams who are on an intrapreneurial journey [00:33:50] The stages of growth intrapreneur developing data products within their organization will face and how to overcome challenges in those stages [00:36:50] We get into music science and its intersection with data science [00:43:13] What's your go to music? [00:43:54] The important soft-skills that a data scientist needs for success [00:47:11] What are some key takeaways from your book - Propose, Prepare, Present - that you think a data scientist should apply when communicating with non-technical audiences? [00:49:27] Let's talk a bit about being evil. You say start-ups should be more evil, that sounds terrible. What are you thinking? What are you trying to communicate with that? [00:53:23] What's the one thing you want people to learn from your story? [00:54:24] What's it mean to solve for interesting? [00:56:00] Jumping into a quick lightning round: What would be the number one book, other fiction or non-fiction or both that you'd recommend our audience read and your most impactful takeaway from it? [00:57:19] If we could somehow get a magical telephone that allowed you to contact 18 year old Allistair. What would you tell him? [00:58:45] What it means to cultivate a personality [01:00:07] What's something you've done at one of your ventures that's been just evil enough? [01:02:57] What's the best advice you've ever received? [01:04:58] What motivates you? [01:06:10]So what song do you currently have on repeat? [01:06:34] How could people connect with you? Where can they find you? Special Guest: Alistair Croll.

A conversation with author and entrepreneur Alistair Croll about the startup scene, the future of high tech, and the post-pandemic world.

A conversation with author and entrepreneur Alistair Croll about the startup scene, the future of high tech, and the post-pandemic world.

Consider again the use of big data, this time to facilitate continuous improvement. Alistair Croll, in an eBook entitled “Planning for Big Data” published by O’Reilly Radar, informs this discussion of continuous improvement in a best practices compliance program. Croll believes that big data will allow continuous improvement through the “feedback economy.” This is a step beyond the information economy because you are using the information that you have generated and collected as a source of information to guide you going forward. Information itself is not the greatest advantage but using that information to prevent, detect and remediate in a compliance program going forward is. The three prongs of any best practices compliance program are prevent, detect and remedy. Whether you consider the OODA loop or the big data supply chain feedback, this process, coupled with the data that is available to you should facilitate a more agile and directed compliance program. The feedback components allow you to make adjustments literally on the fly. If that does not meet the definition of continuous improvement, I do not know what does. Three key takeaways:  Use big data to continuously improve your compliance program. The OODA loop is an excellent way to think about using data to continuously improvement. Always remember the human element.

Have you ever felt like you had no control over a situation? Like your cards were already dealt. Some may feel like they have no control over their position in life. I have struggled for years on how to communicate how much power people actually have. Now, I tell them to look at Mark Metry. Mark has been able to transform himself to help others and watch people change for the better. Mark Metry is only twenty-two and is already a bestselling author of his new book, Screw Being Shy. Mark writes on how to communicate your authentic self and how to achieve a successful and happy life. Mark Metry once struggled with social anxiety. He was able to redesign himself and transform into his true self. Now, Mark is a Forbes Featured and International TEDx keynote speaker. Embracing his true self, Mark is a successful public speaker, author, and podcaster. Mark Metry is the host of a top 100 podcast called Humans 2.0. Mark Metry has made it his mission to spend his life trying to impact and influence others. We discuss the first steps to empower oneself and why you must learn to understand and align your own reality. We also share how you can grow your podcast audience and the common myths that surround being a podcast host. I highly recommend you checking out Mark's book Screw Being Shy which you can find here! jo.my/mark-metry-website/ Listen to the Podcast at https://pod.co/picnic-tmf/ or on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/tmf-picnic/id1495963496/ Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/5Mj5iY8IqefIbAxwX6rr3B/ Google Podcast https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZC5jby9waWNuaWMtdG1m/ Acast https://play.acast.com/s/TMF-Picnic], Stitcher/ https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/podcastdotco/tmf-picnic/ or on your favorite podcast platform. What did you take away from this episode? Let us know! Want more episodes pertaining to Self-Improvement and Personal Branding? Listen to TMF Picnic's episode on Jeannette Bridoux aka The Spiritual, Personal Branding/ Instagram Coach from the West https://pod.co/picnic-tmf/jeannette-bridoux-aka-the-spiritual-personal-branding-instagram-coach-from-the-west/ Listen to TMF Picnic's episode on David Brier aka One Brand-y Boiii https://pod.co/picnic-tmf/david-brier-aka-one-brand-y-boiiii/ Selected Links from the Episode: Want to Connect with Mark Metry? LinkedIn jo.my/mark-metry-linkedin/ Website jo.my/mark-metry-website/ Human 2.0 Podcast jo.my/human-2-0/ Twitter jo.my/mark-metry-twitter/ Books Mentioned in the Episode Clarity by Jamie Smart jo.my/clarity-jamie-smart/ Indistractable by Nir Eval jo.my/indistractable-nir-eval/ Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz jo.my/lean-analytics/

What you will learn in this episodeHow Cliff and Mel from Canva convinced Mahesh to leave his startup (just when he was about to close the seed round funding) to go and work at Canva. Mahesh’s TimTam marketing hack that won him Uber’s as a client Why recruitment has been one of the major factors around Canva’s success Why talent acquisition is just like growth marketing Don’t compromise when hiring – wait for the right skillset Why you should never underestimate anyone How to be commercial when hiringThoughts around business leadership Resources mentionedTake a HR course with Mahesh AirtaskerCanvaTimTamsZapposStack OverflowYouTube Premuim (formerly YouTube Red)(The mighty) Tottenham HostspurMahesh’s ‘hiring in football article’ (coming soon) Book RecommendationsLean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin YoskovitzThinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel KahnemanWork Rules by Laszlo BockReinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux What business would you build on Mars?I have very dry and geeky answers to these kind of things. My first response was, "What do they need? What do they want?" Then I was like, "Let's make some assumptions." I'm a tourist coming into this brand new country. We're not going to sell probably something that I think is cool because it's exclusive. Gold seems to be very attractive to people constantly, so if they don't have a shiny thing or something that smells nice or something that drives an immediate kick of endorphins, I'll find that out and then I'll sell to them. I'll just tell them that this is the coolest thing and make it super exclusive. Reach Mahesh hereMahesh on TwitterMahesh on LinkedIn To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast

https://thecamp.fr/news/alistair-croll-use-artificial-intelligence-fairly-we-need-invent-new-methods-trust “My friend is a nurse, and one day I was typing that into my phone. I typed, “my friend is a nurse and” – and the phone showed me three possible next words. Two of those words were “she”, and “she’s”. This made me wonder, because I didn’t tell the phone that my friend was female. On the one hand, that’s a really good prediction, because 87% of nurses in North America, where I live, are female. On the other hand, it’s a pretty biased prediction because we don’t want the world to have assumptions about what jobs a man or a woman can do. Most of these words are trained off newspaper stories and publications from the last 50 years. And if we want the future to look like the world 50 years ago, that’s probably a good way to do things. But the world 50 years ago wasn’t a very good place.”

What's the best way to go to market? It's by capturing people's attention. And to do that, you need to solve for interesting. In this episode of the Impact Podcast, Jon Prial welcomes Alistair Croll, the Founder and Content Chair of Fwd50, to the show for a discussion about go-to-market and product strategies,  market alignments, market adjacencies, and some of the different challenges that B2B versus B2C brands face in these areas. You'll learn about the: - Importance of focusing on go-to-market strategy to complement product - Critical thinking required among managers for data science and decision making - Role of innovation in go-to-market models Check out the show notes to learn more: http://bit.ly/2LnaWUP

In this continuation of their earlier conversation (see Episode 79), Jon Prial and Alistair Croll, the Founder and Content Chair of Fwd50, discuss GDPR, the critical role of trust and how computing will evolve in the months and years ahead. You'll Hear About: - Personal data and trust - The economic interests of smart agents Learn more by checking out the show notes: https://bit.ly/2NFD8Db

As a business, how do you figure out what your customers need, and how do you apply that customer-centric viewpoint to your internal processes so that it's infused into everything that you do? Jeff Gothelf joins me to dive into why it’s so important for us to understand customer behavior to create success for our businesses, and how to ask questions that really get to the core of your customers' minds and hearts.   Jeff is a coach, consultant, and keynote speaker who helps companies bridge the gap between business agility, digital transformation, product management, and human-centered design. He is the co-author of the award-winning book Lean UX, and the Harvard Business Review Press Book, Sense and Respond, and most recently co-founded Sense and Respond Press, a publishing house for practical business books for busy executives. His passion? Helping organizations build better products, and helping executives build a culture that builds products.   Business agility, digital transformation, product management, and human-centered design — the four pillars of a business that should work together, but are oftentimes siloed in how people think about them. Jeff explains how he approaches bridging this gap, and why it’s so important to work backward from customer behavior and outcomes to create the products customers need. Hint: there is a mindset and culture shift involved here! He also has some great tips on how to build a culture of learning, growing, and experimentation.   If you are ready to: get buy-in from key decision-makers on your next big idea be a high-impact, high-value member that ignites change foster a culture of innovation where everyone on your team is bringing innovative ideas that tackle challenges and seize opportunities… Join us on LaunchStreet — gotolaunchstreet.com   Mentioned in This Episode: Jeff Gothelf Jeff Gothelf on Twitter Jeff Gothelf on Medium Jeff Gothelf on LinkedIn Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams, by Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously, by Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster, by Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz “NPS is a waste of time. Use these metrics instead,” by Jeff Gothelf Net Promoter Score

In diesem Podcast geht es um Fragetechniken, die Dir helfen, um das echte Kundenprobleme zu verstehen. Warum ist das so wichtig? Einer der Hauptgründe, weshalb Startups scheitern ist die Tatsache, dass das angebotene Produkt kein Problem löst. Um das zu vermeiden sollte man noch lange bevor man ein funktionierendes Produkt anbieten kann mit den potentiellen Kunden sprechen. Im Interview erklärt Daniel von Spreadmix alles was ihr braucht, um erfolgreiche Kundeninterviews durchzuführen. Euch reicht unser Talk zu dem Thema nicht? Dann checkt doch folgende Bücher zum Thema aus: "The Sprint" von Jake Knapp - https://amzn.to/2WTIjYj "The Mom-Test" von Rob Fitzpatrick - https://amzn.to/2EWL0yo "Change by Design" von Tim Brown - https://amzn.to/2KCuDL2 "Lean Analytics" von Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz - https://amzn.to/2K8gs0v "Lean Customer Development" von Cindy Alvarez - https://amzn.to/2WUJneM "Disciplined Entrepreneurship" von Bill Aulet - https://amzn.to/2I4aWtV --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/techrap/message

Today, many of the most crucial policy questions are also digital questions, and how we choose to address them has the potential to transform policy-making at the highest levels. Agencies like the Canadian Digital Service are working to innovate within the bureaucracy, but governments are slow to change. Meanwhile, opposition to Sidewalk Toronto's planned smart neighbourhood shows that concerns about digital democracy aren’t going anywhere. Alistair Croll and Amanda Clarke join the podcast to explore the best practices and greatest challenges of digital government. Alistair Croll is an author, tech entrepreneur and co-founder of the FWD50 conference on digital government. Amanda Clarke is the Public Affairs Research Excellence Chair at Carleton University’s School of Public Policy and Administration. Her book, Opening the Government of Canada, was just published by UBC Press. Download for free. New episodes every second Wednesday. Tweet your questions and comments to @IRPP or @jbugiel.

Our guest today has had a long and varied career in technology. Alistair Croll is a serial entrepreneur, much sought after speaker, prolific author - including the best selling Lean Analytics - which is a must read, an organizer of conferences like Forward50, and consultant to companies large and small. Alistair is a big thinker in the area of Data and Analytics, and we got to cover a lot of ground in this episode.

We're back! This week's Truly Social Podcast Tara & Carlos welcome an old friend Alistair Croll. Alistair is an entrepreneur, author, and event organizer. He's spent a lot of time understanding how organizations of all sizes can use data to make better decisions. He has written three books on technology and entrepreneurship: Lean Analytics (2013); Complete Web Monitoring (2009) and Managing Bandwidth (1999).  Alistair recently wrote 'A better definition of marketing' on his Medium blog on how his definition of marketing in the modern age has changed at a fundamental level. "That companies need to capture attention they can turn into profitable demand. They need to stop writing press releases and start hacking markets. They need to find zero-day growth exploits. And they need to be just evil enough to pull them off." Join us in our discussions about that and more but don't forget to stick to the end to hear Alistair's and our picks for this week’s Truly Social Heroes.  This week's Truly Social Heroes:  Carlos' choice: Steward Reynolds aka Brittlestar Tara's choice: The Secret Life of Canada Podcast Alistair's 2 choices: Canadian entrepreneur, founder of AccessNow and Photographer Maayan Ziv and Dot Everyone's Martha Lane Fox. Make sure to learn about this week's truly social heroes.  Follow Truly Social: on YouTube: https://youtube.com/tarahunt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/trulysocial Visit the website: https://trulysocial.ca Follow us on: Twitter: Tara: https://twitter.com/missrogue Carlos: https://twitter.com/carlospache_co

Alistair helps to accelerate startups, and works with some of the world’s biggest companies on business model innovation. As an entrepreneur, he co-founded Coradiant; the Year One Labs accelerator; and a variety of other startups. A sought-after speaker, Alistair has also launched and chaired some of the world’s leading conferences on emerging technology, including Startupfest, Strata, Cloud Connect, FWD50, and Pandemon.io. Alistair is the author of four books on technology and entrepreneurship, including the best-selling Lean Analytics, which has been translated into eight languages and is in its tenth printing in China. A graduate of Dalhousie University, he is a visiting executive at Harvard Business School, where he teaches data science and critical thinking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=QwGVQerp4Bw

We hear a lot about growth hacking, but often forget about the true fuel for any business: organic growth. Today our guest is Ashley Greene, the founder of Instratify. You'll learn how to discover precious customer insights, run interviews and surveys, manage analytics, and achieve sustainable organic growth for your product. Podcast feed: subscribe to http://simplecast.fm/podcasts/1441/rss in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play Music. Show Notes Instratify — Ashley's consulting and training company ZenTribes — peer support group for entrepreneurs by Sherry Walling AARRR! Dave McClure’s “Pirate Metrics” And The Only Five Numbers That Matter "Toyota's 5 Why's — the iterative interrogative technique Rev — Ashley's transcription service of choice FourEyes, SurveyMonkey — survey tools Amplitude, Kissmetrics, Woopra, Mixpanel, [Google Analytics — analytics tools FullStory, Hotjar — more tools for tracking user experience What is a North Star Metric? What Is Net Promoter Score? The Spotlight Framework by David Cancel 5 Habits to Building Better Products Faster — a book by Hiten Shah Hypergrowth — a book by David Cancel Lean Analytics — a book by Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products — a book by Nir Eyal with Ryan Hoover To Sell Is Human — a book by Daniel H. Pink Uncover Insights in 60 Minutes for Rapid Growth with a Single Survey — Ashley's workshop Visit Ashley's website Follow Ashley on Twitter: @AshleyKGreene Drop Ashley a line at ashley@instratify.co Today's Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Jamf Now. This service helps businesses manage Apple devices in the workplace. It makes managing and securing every work iPhone, iPad, and Mac easier than ever. See the power of Jamf Now for yourself! Create an account today at jamf.com/uibreakfast and start managing your first three devices for free. Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here. Leave a Review Reviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here's how.

This show was a real pleasure for me. I got to interview a person I really look up to, Alistair Croll. I’ve been a huge fan of Alistair’s for years   Alistair helps to accelerate startups, and works with some of the world’s biggest companies on business model innovation. As an entrepreneur, he co-founded Coradiant; the Year One Labs accelerator; and a variety of other startups. A sought-after speaker, Alistair has also launched and chaired some of the world’s leading conferences on emerging technology, including Startupfest, Strata, Cloud Connect, and Pandemon.io. Alistair is the author of four books on technology and entrepreneurship, including the best-selling Lean Analytics, which has been translated into eight languages and is in its tenth printing in China. A graduate of Dalhousie University, he is a visiting executive at Harvard Business School, where he teaches data science and critical thinking.   On the show, we spoke about: His gig at Harvard Business School and “Big Data” His conference Pandemonio, StartupFest and Strata How he considers organizations to be living organisms The weaponization of misinformation His blog, Solve for Interesting How he choose projects   I really enjoyed this episode and humbled to have spoken to someone that’s really moving the needle in terms of innovation and thinking. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did.   Let us know what you think. What types of guests would like to see on the show? What topics interest you the most? Send me your thoughts at nectar@thepnr.com   Subscribe to iTunes here | Subscribe to Google Play here

Data and analytics expert Alistair Croll argues that big data is changing business, society and even the human species. Businesses are built faster based on analytics and data. What's coming next for big data and cloud computing? Alistair's answers and examples may surprise you. Listen in and find out.    

  On this episode, we discuss the ins and outs of startup metrics. We also caught up with Alistair Croll, author of Lean Analytics, the definitive guide on startup metrics, published by O'Reilly Media. Music: http://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Moe and Alistair Croll discuss proven steps to take your startup from initial idea to product/market fit and beyond.

What Should You Really Measure? Featuring: Alistair Croll, Danielle Morrill, and Eric Ries Who It's For: Standalone startups; corporate innovators; non-profit, government and education leaders When you're developing a new product, or if you work in a mission-driven organization, measuring profit isn't usually an appropriate way to gauge success. Instead, you need innovation accounting or learning milestones to figure out whether your product is gaining traction. But what should you actually measure? In this advanced discussion, we'll debate the idea that there's just one metric that matters for any given kind of product. You'll come away with fresh ways to approach measurement.

This podcast is produced by The Lean Startup Conference, December 9 - 11, 2013 in San Francisco. Visit leanstartup.co for more information. Speakers: Alistair Croll, Ben Yoskovitz A key concept in Lean Startup is the Build-Measure-Learn loop. But what if you don’t know what to measure? All companies face challenges in determining useful metrics, but non-tech companies often have fewer benchmarks than their tech counterparts. In this free webcast, analytics experts Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz will discuss practical approaches to the this problem. Their conversation will be followed by live Q&A with the webcast attendees, so come with your questions in mind. This webcast is produced by The Lean Startup Conference, December 9 - 11 in San Francisco. Visit http://leanstartup.co/ for more information.

Amy Lewis (@CommsNinja) talks with Dave McCrory (@mccrory, SVP Architecture at Warner Music) and Alistair Croll (@acroll, Analyst/Writer/Start-Up Accellerator) about their keynote talks at DeployCon & CloudConnect, Data Gravity, Lean Analytics and the massive trends that Big Data and Advanced Analytics are having on large and small companies.

Welcome to episode #351 of Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast. Every week (on Saturday), the blog hosts a link exchange between Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, Librivox, etc...), Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks, etc...), and me. It wasn't a random selection of people. I chose Hugh and Alistair because they come from diverse backgrounds and are people who - no matter what the occasion - keep me on my intellectual toes. In short, these two are too smart for their own good, and hanging out with them makes me want to learn more and do more and be smarter. Alistair has had a fascinating career. Most recently, he co-authored a book called, Lean Analytics - Use Data To Build A Better Startup Faster, with Ben Yoskovitz. In this episode, we debunk the whole "lean" model and discuss what data is useful and what data is clouding our judgment. I hope you learn as much as I did from this chat. Enjoy the conversation... Here it is: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast - Episode #351 - Host: Mitch Joel. Running time: 50:19. Please send in questions, comments, suggestions - mitch@twistimage.com. Hello from Beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at iTunes. Please visit and leave comments on the Blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on twitter.  Six Pixels of Separation the book is now available. CTRL ALT Delete comes out on May 21st, 2013. In conversation with Alistair Croll. Lean Analytics. BitCurrent. Year One Labs. Human 2.0. Solve For Interesting. Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks. Follow Alistair on Twitter. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'. Get David's song for free here: Artists For Amnesty. Download the Podcast here: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast - Episode #351 - Host: Mitch Joel. Tags: advertising advertising podcast alistair croll ben yoskovitz bitcurrent blog blogging brand business book complete web monitoring david usher digital marketing gigaom hugh mcguire human 20 itunes lean analytics librivox managing bandwidth marketing marketing blogger marketing podcast online social network podcast podcasting pressbooks social media solve for interesting year one labs

Reuven is solo this week and he’s joined by J.R. Storment (chief customer officer, Cloudability, @stormental) and Alistair Croll (cloud guru, @acroll). J.R. talks about the benefits of the cloud (building and expanding quickly) and addressing the subsequent sticker shock – Cloudability serves as an economic tracking system for the cloud. Visit www.cloudability.com for more information. Alistair talks about CloudOps and the independent research arm that’s looking into cloud performance and the emergence of enterprise cloud usage. Visit www.cloudops.com for more information. Show timeline: • 0:00 – Intros, News of the Week • 10:26 – Interview with J.R. Storment • 24:06 – Interview with Alistair Croll • 36:30 – Wrap up