Podcast appearances and mentions of emily ross

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

Welcome to the UNLEARN Podcast! Today, we're joined by Emily Ross, co-author of Just Evil Enough and a leader in brand strategy and creativity. With a career spanning tech innovation, marketing, and even circus performance, Emily approaches challenges from unconventional angles.As Director of Brand Strategy at X (formerly Twitter) for EMEA, Emily also serves as an Advisory Board Member at SXSW and GoGreen Routes, an EU funded, pan-European research project on nature-based connectedness, as Co-founder of Resonance Festival (Resonance-Lough Derg), and a mentor to startups across Europe.In this episode, she shares her approach to subversive marketing, reframing obstacles as opportunities and using bold tactics to achieve extraordinary results. Drawing inspiration from disruptors like Tesla, Emily reveals how creativity and curiosity can transform business outcomes. Whether you're looking to reimagine your marketing strategies or disrupt the status quo, Emily's expertise is an invaluable guide.Key Takeaways:Unconventional marketing tactics involve reframing challenges and using bold strategies like zero-day exploits to help brands stand out.The power of creativity lies in applying attention-grabbing skills across industries, as seen through lessons from a diverse career.Turning flaws into strengths, as seen with Tesla and Space Invaders, shows how weaknesses can become powerful advantages.Consistency over brilliance emphasizes that success stems from daily effort and experimentation, not rare moments of genius.Additional Insights:The Recon Canvas Framework uncovers market opportunities and shows the need for constant adaptability as strategies evolve.Capturing attention in the digital age requires standout marketing in a noisy, distracted world.Subversive thinking from Just Evil Enough shows how breaking rules can drive business success.Get ready for a fascinating conversation with Emily Ross on rethinking traditional approaches, embracing creativity, and crafting strategies that disrupt the status quo!Episode Highlights: 00:36 - Episode Introduction"We talk a lot about electric vehicles, and we talk about how originally when EVs hit the market, it was all about range and affordability."01:20 - Introducing Emily Ross"Emily is a powerhouse in brand strategy, creative leadership, and co-author of Just Evil Enough. She's reshaping how global brands stand out in noisy markets."04:00 - Lessons from the Circus The Power of Attention"I spent years as a fire performer, and it taught me that attention is a superpower. Learning to capture and hold attention is a skill every marketer needs."05:59 - Subversive Marketing Tactics Explained"Subversive marketing is about being bold, counterintuitive, and creative. It's not growth hacking, it's about playing the long game to stay ahead."10:32 - Turning Bugs Into...

Julia Hobsbawm and Stefan Stern are joined by John Bond, founder of Whitefox Publishing to discuss the business of publishing.  We hear about how the industry has changed since the 1980s and 1990s when huge advances were handed out at the drop of a hat and books were acquired on professional instinct. That's been replaced by data-driven metrics and a clearer understanding of what consumers want. The episode provides advice for anyone looking to have a book published, explaining the current market, the steps involved and the roles that agents play. The episode features clips for Rebecca Frayn's novel Lost in Ibiza and Emily Ross and Alastair Crowl's Just Evil Enough. Both are published by Whitefox. This episode is brought to you in association with Whitefox—exceptional publishers for exceptional stories. Learn more at wearewhitefox.com. The Nowhere Office is a Fully Connected Production in partnership with Sandstone Global Productions. Music by Julian Brezon. Discover more at workathon.io. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We had the good fortune to talk with Marcia Clark and John Valeri about TRIAL BY AMBUSH, Marcia's first foray into the true crime genre, for which John served as her researcher. TRIAL BY AMBUSH is an investigation into the 1953 trial of Barbara Graham, a petty criminal whose life took a hard turn the night of a home burglary that ended in murder. Graham's trial was sensational, and the press coverage was a circus. Who better than famed prosecutor Marcia Clark to be the first to dig into the records to find out what really happened during the trial? Should Graham have ended up on death row? During Clark's investigation, her prosecutorial hero, J. Miller Leavy, surprisingly ends up on trial himself. Neither Chris nor Emily is a true crime reader, but we were both riveted to the pages of TRIAL BY AMBUSH and think you will be, too! Emily has been carrying on with her short story project and discusses four stories: “The Statue and the Bust” from THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES OF SHIRLEY HAZZARD edited by Brigitta Olubas “Let the Chips Fall” by Emily Ross from the collection DEVIL'S SNARE: Best New England Crime Stories by 2024 edited by Ang Pompano, Leslie Wheeler, and Susan Oleksiw “Debris” from the collection A KIND OF MADNESS by Uche Okonkwo “Good Enough” from the collection A SMALL THING TO WANT by Shuly Cawood Chris finally finished her #Victober book, ARMADALE by Wilkie Collins, and then read two picture books, WHAT FEELING DO WHEN NO ONE'S LOOKING by Tina Oziewicz, illustrated by Aleksandra Zajac and translated by Jennifer Croft and SOMETHING, SOMEDAY by Amanda Gorman, illustrated by Christian Robinson. Some other books we discuss are: THIS CURSED HOUSE by Del Sandeen SHRED SISTERS by Betsy Lerner THE NEW MENOPAUSE by Mary Claire Haver, MD WHERE THEY LAST SAW HER by Marcie R. Rendon Chris also read A LITTLE BIT COUNTRY by Brian D. Kennedy. She loved it but doesn't discuss it in detail as it's our fourth quarter readalong. To join our Zoom discussion on December 8th at 7 pm ET, please email us (bookcougars@gmail.com). The conversation is free and open to all. As always, we discuss biblio adventures we've gone on and more books than we can include here. We hope you enjoy this episode. Happy Reading!

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

Around this time last year, we spoke about a new micro festival that was due to take centre stage in the twin towns of Killaloe and Ballina on the shores of Lough Derg in early September. That festival was Resonance Lough Derg: a ‘festival of ideas'. The festival is making its return on the 4th and 5th of September. To find out more, Alan Morrissey was joined by Emily Ross, Co-Founder of the festival.

In this episode Emily comes on to share the unmedicated birth of her SECOND baby. Emilys first birth story is EP 91 of the podcast! ____________________ If you enjoyed this episode please subscribe and share with your mama friends! wanna be on the podcast? https://www.whatthebumpclt.com/podcast  connect with me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whatthebumpclt  our website / blog: www.whatthebumpclt.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/what-the-bump/support

We're talking about two listeners' questions today. The first worries that her book has lost its “freshness” after so many revisions and worries how to “get it back.” Is this a common worry among writers? Oh, yes it is. The second worries whether it's time to break up with her book, how a writer knows, and how best to make decision. We have authors Emily Ross and Virginia Pye on board to help us out.Watch a recording of our live webinar here. The audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.Emily Ross is the author of Half in Love with Death, an International Thriller Writers Thriller Awards finalist for best young adult novel, and she's currently shopping her second novel, The Black Sea, an adult mystery / thriller set in her hometown of Quincy MA.Virginia Pye is the author of four award-winning books of fiction, including two post-colonial historical novels set in China, River of Dust and Dreams of the Red Phoenix, the short story collection, Shelf Life of Happiness, and her fourth book that debuted this last fall, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann. Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 7amnovelist.substack.com

We hear from a short story writer today dipping her toes into her first novel and having trouble getting her characters to commit. How is character development different between a novel and short story? And how can you wrangle with a character who suffers from a short attention span? We've got authors Christine Murphy, Emily Ross, and Joanna Rakoff to help us out.Watch a recording of our live webinar here. The audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.Christine Murphy is a graduate of Grubstreet's Novel Incubator program. Her novel, Notes on Surviving the Fire, is forthcoming in Spring 2025. Emily Ross is the author of Half in Love with Death, an International Thriller Writers Thriller Awards finalist for best young adult novel, and she's currently shopping her second novel The Black Sea, an adult mystery/thriller set in her hometown of Quincy MA.Johanna Rakoff is the author of the bestselling memoir My Salinger Year and the novel A Fortunate Age.  Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 7amnovelist.substack.com

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy. Andrew Rogers was joined on 'The Extra' by Aikta Marcoulier, US Small Business Administration Regional Administrator  Along with  Korky Von Kessel, Owner/Managing Partner of iFly in Colorado Spring, a Veteran Owned business and Emily Ross, Owner Yobel Market. Yobel is a fair-trade men's and women's boutique located in Downtown Colorado Springs specializing in ethically produced fashion. Yobel also recently went through a fire that started at Taste of Jerusalem next door.         For info on the Pikes Peak Small Business Development Center call 719-667-3803  For info on the Veterans Business Outreach Center at Mt Carmel call 719-772-7000  For info on SBA's programs and services visit www.sba.gov   

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy. Andrew Rogers was joined on 'The Extra' by Aikta Marcoulier, US Small Business Administration Regional Administrator  Along with  Korky Von Kessel, Owner/Managing Partner of iFly in Colorado Spring, a Veteran Owned business and Emily Ross, Owner Yobel Market. Yobel is a fair-trade men's and women's boutique located in Downtown Colorado Springs specializing in ethically produced fashion. Yobel also recently went through a fire that started at Taste of Jerusalem next door.         For info on the Pikes Peak Small Business Development Center call 719-667-3803  For info on the Veterans Business Outreach Center at Mt Carmel call 719-772-7000  For info on SBA's programs and services visit www.sba.gov   

What does good planning look like? In this episode, Dr Emily Ross from the University of Queensland joins us to discuss the importance of planning for effective teaching. We ask: what do we need to consider when planning, and how do we craft good learning outcomes and success criteria? Host: Allan Dougan, Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers (AAMT) Guest: Dr Emily Ross, University of Queensland Producer: Martin Franklin, East Coast Studio Find all episodes of Strategies for explicit teaching on the Mathematics Hub  Learn more about explicit teaching in the article The seven essential components of explicit teachingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What are the differences between YA and adult, and why do I have to pay attention to them if I want to write something in between? Emily Ross and Desmond Hall help us navigate this thorny issue that involves voice, content, audience, marketing, and what it means to stay true to your vision (and how genre rules might just help you).For a list of my fave craft books and the most recent works by our guests, go to our Bookshop page.Emily Ross is the author of Half in Love with Death, an International Thriller Writers Thriller Awards finalist for best young adult novel, inspired by a true crime from the sixties.  She received a Massachusetts Cultural Council finalist award in fiction for Half in Love with Death. Her work has appeared in Boston Magazine, Five South, and other publications. She is an editor at Deaddarlings.com. She used to work in tech. Now she writes full time and is currently working on The Black Sea, an adult mystery set in a fictional version of her hometown of Quincy MA.Desmond Hall was born in Jamaica, West Indies, and moved to Jamaica, Queens. He has worked as a high school biology and English teacher in East New York, Brooklyn; counseled teenage ex-cons after their release from Rikers Island; and served as Spike Lee's creative director at Spike DDB. Desmond has served on the board of the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and the Advertising Council and judged the One Show, the American Advertising Awards, and the NYC Downtown Short Film Festival. He's also been named one of Variety magazine's Top 50 Creatives to Watch. Desmond is the author of the gritty YA novel Your Corner Dark which confronts the harsh realities of gang life in Jamaica and how far a teen is willing to go for family. It's been listed among the best YA books of the year by Bank Street, Essence Magazine, and was a New England Book Award Finalist. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and two daughters. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 7amnovelist.substack.com

How do you offer your reader enough mystery on the page to keep them reading and spark their thinking caps while also avoiding the problem of withholding too much or outright confusing them to the point that they close the book in frustration? Helping us find that fine line are mystery authors Emily Ross and Jessica Bird. Emily Ross is the author of Half in Love with Death, an International Thriller Writers Thriller Awards finalist for best young adult novel, inspired by a true crime from the sixties. She received a Massachusetts Cultural Council finalist award in fiction for Half in Love with Death. Her work has appeared in Boston Magazine, Menda City Review, and Yarn (Young Adult Review Network).  She is an editor at Deaddarlings.com and reviews mysteries and thrillers for New York Journal of Books. She used to work in tech. Now she writes full time and is currently working on The Black Sea, an adult mystery / thriller set in a fictional version of her hometown of Quincy MA. When not writing she enjoys art, crime fiction, bourbon, and attempting to train her delightful and uncontrollable kitten, Obi.Jessica Bird, a former academic and current novelist, completed Novel Incubator program as a scholarship recipient. She grew up in the age of missing kids printed on milk cartons, and as a younger sister attuned to sibling dynamics, wondered what life was like for brothers and sisters who didn't disappear. This fascination inspired her book, THE ONLY BROTHER, a character-driven narrative with elements of mystery, about grappling with grief, and building relationships through loss. Jessica has taught literature and composition, ghost-written a business textbook, temped at a variety of high-drama workplaces, and published television recaps for now-defunct websites. An avid baker, Jessica lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two persnickety dowager cats. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 7amnovelist.substack.com

Do you need reliable accounting software? What does it take to make informed decisions about your finances as a therapist? How much money do... The post Ask Joe: Emily Ross wants to know what accounting software to use in private practice | PoP 670 appeared first on How to Start, Grow, and Scale a Private Practice| Practice of the Practice.

Do you need reliable accounting software? What does it take to make informed decisions about your finances as a therapist? How much money do... The post Ask Joe: Emily Ross wants to know what accounting software to use in private practice | PoP 670 appeared first on How to Start, Grow, and Scale a Private Practice| Practice of the Practice.

Storysmith Books is an independent bookshop in Bristol, on North Street in Bedminster, England. Owners Dan and Emily Ross stock a tightly curated range of fiction, non-fiction, and children's books.We chatted about books, babies, and what they love about living and being indie business owners in Bristol.Storysmith Books Sing Backwards And Weep, Mark Lanegan Brown Baby: A Memoir of Race, Family and Home, Nikesh Shukla Not Even This, Jack Underwood The women Who Built Bristol, Jane Duffus Old Lady Voice, Elisa Victoria A Long Way From Douala, Max LobeSupport the show

In this episode my good friend + coworker Emily comes on the podcast to share her birth story! Emily's water broke at 35 weeks just after her baby shower. She had her baby the very next day just a few rooms down and a few hours before me! ____________________ If you enjoyed this episode please subscribe and share with your mama friends! wanna be on the podcast? https://www.whatthebumpclt.com/podcast connect with me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whatthebumpclt/ our website / blog: whatthebumpclt.com Emily on instagram: https://instagram.com/lavenderandlightphotography?utm_medium=copy_link --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/what-the-bump/support

After 6 full episodes of self love and healing, lets dive deeper into a world of acceptance. Featuring Alonni Whitaker, Emily Ross, and Christopher Silva, welcome to acceptance in a different light. Welcome to acceptance through the eyes of a few amazing human beings…. 

Ustanoviteljica in CEO podjetja Inkvine, kjer se ukvarjajo s strateškim komuniciranjem za deep tech podjetja, se je v Sloveniji mudila v zacetku meseca septembra, ko se je kot govornica predstavila na dogodku podjetniške skupnosti Ceed Slovenija. Z uspešno podjetnico smo se pogovarjali o njeni podjetniški poti, vplivu pandemije na odnose znotraj tima, delu od doma, ki je v podjetju Inkvine stalnica že od njegovih zacetkov, pa tudi o njeni novi knjigi ‘Just Evil Enough', ki se osredotoca na to, kako se na spletu prebiti skozi hrup digitalnega marketinga.

Senior Demand Generation Manager at Planful, Emily Ross, was instrumental in the design and implementation of a large cross-functional marketing campaign that targeted an untapped segment of their target market, people who were pain-aware but not product-aware. Not only was the campaign successful, but it ended up becoming their first evergreen campaign. 

Senior Demand Generation Manager at Planful, Emily Ross, was instrumental in the design and implementation of a large cross-functional marketing campaign that targeted an untapped segment of their target market, people who were pain-aware but not product-aware. Not only was the campaign successful, but it ended up becoming their first evergreen campaign.

I'm so excited to continue our On Air Coaching Series with Emily Ross of Lavender & Light Photography. Emily has recently gone all-in with her photography business and is feeling the squeeze of needing automation to stay on top of her work. Listen as she shares her concerns and we tackle some of the ways to uplevel your client exposure through simplifying.    Emily lives in a small town where most of her work comes from people she already knows, knows through acquaintances, or who are referred to her. She loves the community that she is slowly building and doesn't want to lose that personal touch.    That being said, it's very time consuming to still be managing all of the details of the lead, intake, and client management process when some things really can be automated.    We touch on her need for a streamlined communications process as well as scheduling process. While she has her Google Calendar connected to her HoneyBook there are still some issues with her availability that we work through as well.    So that she can keep that personal feel, we also chat about ways to update the automated emails within HoneyBook so that they read more like personalized emails coming directly from her.    Are you struggling with some of these issues as well? Listen in to learn ways that you can uplevel your client experience, simplify your processes, and continue to grow and scale while remaining personable and customer-focused.   In This Episode: [01:04] Emily shares her background and what she is doing now. [03:01] She speaks about what inspired her to make photography her full-time business. [06:46] I asked her to tell me three things that she needs help with around her business. [06:50] Listen as Emily talks about what her process is right now and where she gets her inquiries. [08:20] Scheduling is an issue because her process isn't streamlined. [09:11] She knows she could do better with the automated workflow through HoneyBook. [11:16] I share how she can streamline all the communication she has with her clients. [15:45] They discuss HoneyBooks followup capability. [20:25] I talk about the different responses you can set up in your workflow that send out information automatically. [22:46] With Google calendar you have the opportunity to tell whether you are free or busy during times you have blocked in your calendar. [24:22] Create a scheduler that can read your Google calendar. [27:50] I am taking a few minutes to talk about automation. [31:03] If you have regular check-ins with your clients, they are more likely to keep you informed of last-minute changes. [35:59] “Actually I can.” Is Emily's favorite quote. [37:02] Google Sheets is her favorite business tool right now. [38:29] She talks about where she would take me if I came to Charlotte and we went out for drinks. [40:58] Thank you for being on the show!   Links and Resources: LucidChart Find Emily: Lavender & Light Photography Instagram | Facebook Find Jenn: Success Beyond The Lens @successbeyondthelens Instagram  @successbeyondthelenspodcast Facebook | Picbabun   Grab your Boundaries Resources Editable Welcome Packet Template Pinterest Freebies

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.  

Come listen to a conversation with one of my long-time friends, Emily Ross. about how the myth of the perfect mate can impact the view of what a healthy relationship looks like. Spoiler alert, relationships take work and effort and there are key elements that you need to be able to grow in a healthy connection. Resources mentioned in the podcast: https://www.thehotline.org/get-help/

Women have many questions when it comes to pregnancy, so in this episode, Midwife Emily Ross discusses the maternity care process of supporting women in their first and second trimester of pregnancy.   This episode is great for those wanting to understand more about their pregnancy but hasn't had the time or appointment to speak with their midwife or OBGYN     

Emily Ross is a business strategist, advisor, and startup mentor. She is founder of Inkvine, an international growth partner for award-winning technology firms across AI, IoT, Cybersecurity and ecommerce. She writes, lectures and speaks on communications in a digital age. She co-founded SportsTech Ireland in 2017 to help position Ireland as a leading destination for sports innovation and investment. She holds multiple qualifications in Marketing, PR and Analytics, and is an advisory board member for SXSW Pitch, Sure Valley Ventures and GoGreen Routes, a H2020 funded, pan-European research project on urban sustainability and health. In our conversation, we talk about entrepreneurship, mentoring, and diversity. Show Notes (link) [01:08] Emily's interest in science and technology. [06:25] Growing a business internationally. [07:48] Kenichi Ohmae's 3Cs model. [09:12] Case Example: Volograms volumetric holograms. [11:44] Getting involved with SXSW Pitch. [12:06] Founding SportsTech Ireland. [13:40] What being on a VC/investor advisory board entails. [14:36] Giving back through mentoring. [15:22] On mentoring relationships. [19:26] "What We Can Learn from Lobster About Stress" - Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski [20:31] Rowing, and learning resilience. [21:18] On the qualities of a mentee. [24:09] "No Assholes, Money Doesn't Actually Matter". [24:47] Filtering the wheat from the chaff in pitches. [25:55] The human element of success in business. [26:53] The importance of diversity in teams. [27:44] Teams and Problem Solving: Key logs and logjams. [31:02] Goals for this year. [31:58] Bonus Question 1: What hobby or interest do you have that is most unrelated to your field of work? [33:14] Bonus Question 2: Which childhood book holds the strongest memories for you? [34:34] Bonus Question 3: What advice you would give someone who wants to do what you do? Or what advice should they ignore? [36:11] The importance of diverse skillsets in the future. Connect with STEAM Powered: Website

Emily Ross is an entrepreneur, public speaker, and founder of Inkvine Consulting, which helps tech and commercial companies to scale and grow. Emily has never been afraid to play with fire – she was a fire dancer and was regularly seen at event venues throughout Ireland, juggling balls of fire. As if that wasn't enough, she's also an advisory board member for South by Southwest this year. Emily is also co-founder of a non-profit called Sportstech Ireland, which brings real meaning into her life. In an uplifting Fireside Chat with Richard, she advises aspiring public speakers to share their expertise with organisations that have meaning for them. Not only will they grow their network, but they'll deliver talks that will bring real meaning to their audiences. She also reveals the secret of finding time to prepare speeches when she's juggling so many balls in the air – she does it while she's driving. Learn more about Emily Ross here. We're proud to partner with Simplecast to bring you our Fireside with Voxgig podcast. To get a weekly dose of public speaking tips, information, videos of great talks, conference news, book reviews and more, sign up to the Voxgig newsletter. View all show notes, links, and more brilliant public speaking resources at voxgig.com. If you like what you hear on Fireside with Voxgig, don't be shy―tell everyone! Use #firesidewithvoxgig on your social media.

Emily Ross is an entrepreneur, public speaker, and founder of Inkvine Consulting, which helps tech and commercial companies to scale and grow. Emily has never been afraid to play with fire – she was a fire dancer and was regularly seen at event venues throughout Ireland, juggling balls of fire. As if that wasn’t enough, she’s also an advisory board member for South by Southwest this year. Emily is also co-founder of a non-profit called Sportstech Ireland, which brings real meaning into her life. In an uplifting Fireside Chat with Richard, she advises aspiring public speakers to share their expertise with organisations that have meaning for them. Not only will they grow their network, but they’ll deliver talks that will bring real meaning to their audiences. She also reveals the secret of finding time to prepare speeches when she’s juggling so many balls in the air – she does it while she’s driving. Learn more about Emily Ross here. We’re proud to partner with Simplecast to bring you our Fireside with Voxgig podcast. To get a weekly dose of public speaking tips, information, videos of great talks, conference news, book reviews and more, sign up to the Voxgig newsletter. View all show notes, links, and more brilliant public speaking resources at voxgig.com. If you like what you hear on Fireside with Voxgig, don’t be shy―tell everyone! Use #firesidewithvoxgig on your social media.

What does the 4th of July mean and what should it mean? It’s Independence Day in the United States and so Casper sits down again with Professor Matt Potts to talk about tradition. They touch on marriage equality, Lectio Divina, and Matt’s favorite Christian Theologian - Julian of Norwich.This episode we also hear owl post from Rachel, Emily Ross, Ariel Weeks, Rachel Quint, and Mike Murphy.We’re taking two weeks off before we start Season 6: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. But do check back July 16th to listen to our first episode of Hot & Bothered! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hear what The Book Doctors – two of the British Isles' best indie bookshops – recommend for readers from up and down the country. This episode it's Jess Paul from Max Minerva's and Emily Ross from Storysmith in Bristol. The Bookseller Podcast is a Heavy Entertainment Production.

What to expect from Episode 2: Hosted by acclaimed author Cathy Rentzenbrink, the second edition of The Bookseller Podcast features a special interview with Dr Rangan Chatterjee about his new book “The Stress Solution” which explains how we can combat the “health epidemic” that is stress, symptomatic of this modern, digital life. Our very own managing editor, Tom Tivnan, and associate editor Caroline Sanderson assess what's new for January and how this month is not just about health titles; we can also expect some of the biggest fiction books of the year to be launched. Find out which books have managed to unite the critics (in a good way!) from The Bookseller's new reviews aggregation service – Books in the Media – and get an extensive overview of the best books coming out in 2019, including Margaret Atwood's much anticipated sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, due in September. Hear what The Book Doctors – two of the British Isles' best indie bookshops – recommend for readers from up and down the country. This episode it's Jess Paul from Max Minerva's and Emily Ross from Storysmith in Bristol. And playing us out – an extract from “The Binding” by Bridget Collins, read by Carl Prekopp. The Bookseller Podcast is a Heavy Entertainment Production.

Emily Ross discusses her experience being a parent of young boy in Belmont, MA, her academic experience in America and New Zealand, and remodeling an early 20th century home here in Belmont.

Lish can’t stop making these wee hats! This episode is sponsored by Main Street Gallery. Main Street Gallery is a local art and craft studio and offers a variety of services for individuals and businesses including custom screen printing, vinyl decals, graphic design, t shirts, custom art work, murals and much more. Main Street Gallery carries products from local artists and crafters including hand knitted items and cigar box guitars. This week’s segments include Interview with the Masters, Craft with us, Masterpieces, In our Hands, In the news, Study Hall, Simply Selfie, On the Road, and Comfort Zone.   Thank you Twinset and Just One More Row Podcast for our shout out!   Interview with the Masters (2:18) Natalie had the opportunity to catch up with Maureen aka knttinmoe on ravelry.     Craft with Us: (16:40) ElvesWorkshopalong:  We are so excited to announce the ElvesWorkshopAlong!  This will be a craftalong for all those, like us, who plan to knit/sew/create holiday gifts for their friends and family.     This craftalong will run from Sept 1st to Nov 30th.  Each item has to start on or after Sept 1st. You have until Nov 30th at midnight to complete the project or multiple projects. To enter we will have an official FO thread on our ravelry group. It will be locked until the start of the along and we ask that you post one entry for each item you finish.   We have some seriously amazing prizes!  We will be selecting winners from the FO thread after the end of the along.  We will also have some prizes in store for superlatives!  We will select one or more winner from those that post their progress or finished items pics on instagram using the hashtag #elvesworkshopalong.     Social media will just be an extra prize. You can post random pictures of the process with the hashtag. If you have are friends with them on rav- complete the post but do not include your picture. You can put a dummy picture in if you would like and send one of us a rave message with your complete post, or email it to masteringtheknits@gmail.com   Santa Sponsors: Check out our wonderful sponsors!  Please check out and support these sponsors who have been gracious enough to donate to our Elvesworkshopalong. Knitting Rose   Coupon Codes: Rainstorm Studios Etsy - Closed Sept 3rd through Sept 8th and will open with a new update. Use code: ELVES2015 for 15% off through November 30, 2015 Mint Rain Hand Dyed Yarns: ELVESWORKSHOP 15% until nov Sew for Ewe on etsy masteringtheknits15 for 10% off to run from sept 1- nov 30th Erin.lane bagsELVES15. FOR 15% the entire shop KnittyKittybags on Etsy elves2015.  20% and active until 12/1/2015. Stash-A Place for Yarn: FiberSeed10. Unwind yarn company Quince and Co - donating a copy of their new book Top Down - Reimagining Set-In Sleeve Design Knitting Rose The Unique Sheep - a cute children’s book with patterns that we will be reviewing. The story of the Unique Sheep.  We will be reviewing this book in a future episode too. Marianne - Jamberry Consultant - saw some new wraps that I need to get! Byvikink Letterpress Co. Sarah Lamantia - Gold Canyon Candles Karen Bachman from iKNITitiaves Ottlite Anne Weil of Flax and Twin donating http://amzn.to/1LAa35Y  Knitting without Needles coming out sept 1st. Bohemia Fibers- 2 skeins… 2 for you or if you want to be generous, you can give to a friend.   Natalie’s finished her shawl! Masterpieces: (23:25) Alicia finally finished up  Harvest Cardigan by Tin Can Knits with Cascade 220 Superwash Quatro in Fiji. She also knit lots of Wee Hats by Kym Hretz in various leftover sock colorways. Natalie finished up Haruni by Emily Ross in the Unique Sheep eos which is a 50/50 silk/merino laceweight in the Barknknit gradient colorway. She also dusted off her wheel and finished 3 ply fingering weight yarn from Long Dog Handspun Panda in a pink/purple colorway.   In our hands: (36:29) Alicia is working on Sock Recipe: A Good Plain Sock by Stephanie Pearl- McPhee, with Patons Kroy Socks in Summer Moss Jaquard. She also needs some leftovers if anyone would like to donate them! Natalie is still plugging away on Crackerjack by Stacey Simpson Duke using Knitpicks Swish DK in White, Honey, Dusk, Twilight.She is continuing to work on Uncle's Christmas Stocking by Dorene Delaney Giordano using Knitpicks Wool of the Andes Sport in white and Amethyst Heather.   In the News: (44:00) Top Down: Re-imagining Set-In Sleeve Design by Elizabeth Doherty. This book retails for $24 US and $31.72 Canadian when I checked.   We were sent an e-copy of this book from Quince & Co. for us to review. Thank you Quince & Co.   Study Hall: (57:51) Natalie will be teaching a sock knitting class at Stash - A Place for Yarn on Oct 10th at 9 am.   Simply Selfie: (58:39) Alicia is clearing off the needles, prepping for the festival. She had a bridal shower and her friend’s birthday party. BYOB as in baby! Natalie attended her sister’s birthday Shuffleboard party. She and her niece won! Carmen is signed up for soccer and got her a new small soccer ball, shin guards, and cleats.   On the Road: (1:03) Natalie is heading to her first ever retreat NEXT WEEK!  Into the Wool Retreat Sept 3-6th in Crossville, TN hosted by Dana of Unwind Yarn company and Just One More Row podcast, Daniela and Allie of the Caffeinated Knitting podcast, Fru from the Sassypantsknitter Podcast.   Comfort zone: (1:04) Alicia is enjoying small town living. - Summer Concert Series in the middle of town. Natalie gives a follow up about North and south.  Fibernerd shared on ravelry group that Craftlit read North and South. Natalie mentions cognitive anchoring blog. Natalie mentions playing the Disney song guess game in the car is currently taking her to her happy place. Thank you for joining us for episode 20 of Mastering the Knits.We’d like to thank our sponsor Main Street Gallery and those donating to the ElvesWorkshopalong. You can find shownotes at www.masteringtheknitspodcast.com or on our ravelry group Mastering the Knits Podcast.   You can email us at masteringtheknits@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter @MtKnitsPodcast.  Alicia is knottyknitter17 on Ravelry, Twitter, Instagram. Natalie can be found on twitter, Instagram, and ravelry as barknknit.

    This episode is sponsored by Main Street Gallery. Main Street gallery is a local art and craft studio and offers a variety of services for individuals and businesses including custom screen printing, vinyl decals, graphic design, t shirts, custom art work, murals and much more. Main Street Gallery carries products from local artists and crafters including hand knitted items and cigar box guitars.   (1:37) We would like to give a shout out to Knitting Daddy! Thank you for listening. Check out his blog. Natalie mentions she heard about his blog through the Knitting Pipeline podcast.   This week’s segments include Master Status, Master Plan, Craft with us, In our Hands, Spread the Love, Study Hall, Simply Selfie, On the Road, and Comfort Zone.   Master Status: (2:28)   Alicia blocked what she had knitted. She is going to block ones she plans to reknit- just in case they will turn out ok. Natalie knit cable swatch 14. She really had to focus on tightening her gauge and giving an extra tug the stitch before and after the cross. She is not sold on it being tight enough but she is going to see if what happens during the blocking process. Here is the link to thread on ravelry about 2 references.   Master Plan: (5:32) Natalie is going to knit more swatches and start answering questions. Alicia is just going to  keep knitting.   CRAFT WITH US: (6:20) ANNOUNCEMENT!!!   ElvesWorkshopalong:  We are so excited to announce the ElvesWorkshopAlong!  This will be a craftalong for all those, like us, who plan to knit/sew/create holiday gifts for their friends and family.     This craftalong will run from Sept 1st to Nov 30th.  Each item has to start on or after Sept 1st. You have until Nov 30th at midnight to complete the project or multiple projects. To enter we will have an official FO thread on our ravelry group. It will be locked until the start of the along and we ask that you post one entry for each item you finish.   We have some seriously amazing prizes!  We will be selecting winners from the FO thread after the end of the along.  We will also have some prizes in store for superlatives!  We will select one or more winner from those that post their progress or finished items pics on instagram using the hashtag #elvesworkshopalong.     PinsandNeedles brought up a great point- What if the special person I am crafting for are my friends on social media and ravelry?  Thank you for bringing that up!   Social media will just be an extra prize. You can post random pictures of the process with the hashtag. If you have are friends with them on rav- complete the post but do not include your picture. You can put a dummy picture in if you would like and send one of us a rave message with your complete post, or email it to masteringtheknits@gmail.com   Check out our wonderful sponsors!  We will talk more about the prizes and announce the coupon codes closer to the start of the KAL.  Please check out and support these sponsors who have been gracious enough to donate to our Elvesworkshopalong. Knitting Rose   In our hands: (12:08) Alicia: Harvest Cardigan by Tin Can Knits with Cascade 220 Superwash Quatro in Fiji Sock Recipe: A Good Plain Sock by Stephanie Pearl- McPhee, with Patons Kroy Socks in Summer Moss Jaquard Natalie is still plugging away on Crackerjack by Stacey Simpson Duke using Knitpicks Swish DK in White, Honey, Dusk, Twilight. Haruni by Emily Ross in the Unique Sheep eos which is a 50/50 silk/merino laceweight in the Barknknit gradient colorway.   Natalie knits along on some beautiful lace.   Spread the Love: (20:33) WINNER! The winner of our giveaway is………... Crookedknits on ravelry!  Thank you for entering our giveaway and Thank you again Bohemia Fibers for the donation of the skein of sock yarn. Our current giveaway is a lovely skein of 400 yards of 80% superwash merino/20% nylon sock yarn from Bohemia Fibers!  Amy, the dyer behind Bohemia Fibers, and specialize in custom colors and inspirational photo replication.   Study Hall: (21:31) Natalie will be teaching a sock knitting class at Stash - a place for yarn on Oct 10th at 9 am.   Alicia and Jax knit along on her Harvest Cardigan. Happy Birthday Jax.   Simply Selfie:(22:25) Alicia is back from Myrtle Beach. She has been helping friends in a hard time. She is feeling good by getting back into the swing of making healthy choices- Gym/Eating right. She also has her nephew-Jax- 1st  birthday party. Natalie has been enjoying the Rays games and keeping up with the work week craziness.   On the Road: (27:55) Natalie is heading to her first ever retreat!  Into the Wool Retreat Sept 3-6th in Crossville, TN hosted by Dana of Unwind Yarn company and Just One More Row podcast, Daniela and Allie of the Caffeinated Knitting podcast, Fru from the Sassypantsknitter Podcast.   Comfort zone: (31:11) Alicia has found a love for AMAZON PRIME! Natalie has been loving her  TV shows...North & South, Arrow   Thank you for joining us for episode 18 of Mastering the Knits.We’d like to thank our sponsor Main Street Gallery and Bohemia Fibers for donating the prize and those donating to the ElvesWorkshopalong. You can find shownotes at masteringtheknitspodcast.com or on our ravelry group Mastering the Knits Podcast.   You can email us at masteringtheknits@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter @MtKnits.  Alicia is knottyknitter17 on Ravelry, Twitter, Instagram. Natalie can be found on twitter, Instagram, and ravelry as barknknit.

Natalie enjoying knitting on Crackerjack at the Rays Stitch n Pitch   This episode is sponsored by Main Street Gallery. Main Street gallery is a local art and craft studio and offers a variety of services for individuals and businesses including custom screen printing, vinyl decals, graphic design, t shirts, custom art work, murals and much more. Main Street Gallery carries products from local artists and crafters including hand knitted items and cigar box guitars.   This week’s segments include Master Status, Master Plan, In our Hands, Masterpieces, Spread the Love, Simply Selfie, Raise your hand, On the Road, and Comfort Zone. How are you organizing your program?  Master Status (1:48): Alicia knit swatch 9. She also has a reminder when you are working SSK. Natalie worked on her binder and organized it. She snagged an idea from Lish when she was visiting Ohio. Hint** Place your swatch in zip lock bags and label them. Then there is no chance of forgetting which swatch is which. She is going to get some help from her friend Mara to identify some of her mystery swatches. Alicia reminded Natalie of some of the resources she used to identify her mystery swatches. Arenda Holladay and Knitting Help.   Master Plan (8:04): Natalie plans to Re-knit the swatches and make sure to put them in the ziploc bags so they are ORGANIZED!! She plans to update more of the notes and start the questions.  She is going to meet up with my friend Maureen to get some advice on her swatches.  Maureen is  currently finishing up her Level 3.  Look forward to an interview on her journey! Alicia is planning to move forward on swatch 10, 11, and 12. She would like to block and start questions.   Against the Grain KAL (9:41): **REMINDER: Be sure to participate in our ongoing knit along. Be sure to post your pictures on all social media with #AgainstTheGrainKAL The goal of the knit-a-long is to go contrary to the natural inclination of your craft or technique. We aren’t limiting the KAL to just those who want to learn a different style of knitting but crafting anything that is opposite of what you normally do.   In our hands (10:12): Alicia is coming towards the end of her Harvest Cardigan by Tin Can Knits with Cascade 220 Superwash Quatro in Fiji. She also cast on Natalie cast on Haruni by Emily Ross using The Unique Sheep Eos a 50/50 silk/wool blend in the barknknit colorway.  She is still plugging away on Crackerjack by Stacey Simpson Duke using Knitpicks Swish DK in White, Honey, Dusk, Twilight. Finally, she cast on another Luuk by Annis Jones using some leftover Knit Witch Celestial in the Sagitarius colorway.  She used Swirl Hat by Mandie Harrington to assist with adjusting the numbers for size.   (17:30) Harry Potter Knit/Crochet House Cup:  Lish and Natalie are struggling with their house cup mojo. Anyone else?   Master Pieces (20:29): Alicia has been occupied with Harvest and does not have anything this week! Natalie finished  Headband (child/adult) by Rachel Bishop using the yarn the same yarn as she is using for Crackerjack cowl. Spread the Love (22:25): Our current giveaway is a lovely skein of 400 yards of 80% superwash merino/20% nylon sock yarn from Bohemia Fibers!  Amy, the dyer behind Bohemia Fibers, and specialize in custom colors and inspirational photo replication. To enter this episode’s giveaway, we ask that you visit Bohemiafibers.com and pick one of their many colorways that inspires you and share your favorite with us in a comment on the shownotes page.  There will also be several other ways to enter this giveaway!  Check outwww.masteringtheknitspodcast.com to see all the ways you can win. Closing for entries will be August 7, 2015. Some of Lish’s favorite moments from Simply Selfie   Simply Selfie (23:44): Alicia reports her wedding duties are over. She had a wonderful opportunity to make her friend Taylor a cathedral length veil.  She and her husband had a lovely cookout. She is looking forward to a quick Myrtle Beach trip with her friend Sierra.  Let her know of any local yarn shops in the south Myrtle area! Natalie has been organizing more and more! She still has plans to organize stash but started the culling process.  She attended the Rays Stitch n Pitch. She hung out with friends new and old.  She met a lot of her knitting guild and hopes to attend more often.  If you are local, you should check out the Bay Area Knitting Guild! She reconnected with a LONG time listener Mara.  It was great to talk to a listener and get encouragement to keep going.     Raise your Hand? (31:54):   This week we ask: As we prepare to head into the fall and start planning out gift knits, how do you pick who and what to knit people?   Natalie struggles with this one. She notes she has a very large family and it can quickly become overwhelming. She LOVES giving things to people but she says her follow through is rotten.  She plans to knit gifts this year but wants to get organized. Alicia finds herself over gift knitting. She shares her spread sheet method on how to stay organized with her gift knitting. She also tries to stick to one pattern for multiple people with just changing it up with color options. She also notes that her brother in law, Josh, is one of her more knitworthy gift recipients.   On the Road: (40:27) Natalie is heading to her first ever retreat!  Into the Wool Retreat Sept 3-6th in Crossville, TN hosted by Dana of Unwind Yarn company and Just One More Row podcast, Daniela and Allie of the Caffeinated Knitting podcast , Fru from the Sassypantsknitter Podcast.   Comfort zone (41:44): Alicia is excited about new eager students. New friends wanting to learn to knit at work. She is also excited about that just finished feeling of a new sweater. Natalie is enjoying lace knitting.  Since she have been out of wine she is trying to stay away from lots of sweets. Lace has been her stress reliever because it’s working with silk and it’s oh so satisfying.   Thank you for joining us for episode 17 of Mastering the Knits. We’d like to thank our sponsor Main Street Gallery and Bohemia Fibers for donating the prize. You can find shownotes at masteringtheknitspodcast.com or on our ravelry group Mastering the Knits Podcast.   You can email us at masteringtheknits@gmail.com.Follow us on Twitter @MtKnits. Alicia is knottyknitter17 on Ravelry, Twitter, Instagram. Natalie can be found on twitter, Instagram, and ravelry as barknknit.

Episode #7: Should be Swatching     Natalie and Lish welcome back listeners as well as talk about where they have been.   (1:28) Natalie shares some exciting news about a new local yarn shop in St. Pete,  Stash a place for Yarn. She also shares some of the yarns the shop will carry.   Master Status:(4:47) Natalie and Lish have confess they have not completed swatch #7 and #8. They also reviewed Cast On Magazine published from The Knitting Guild Association.   Master Plan:(17:10) Natalie and Lish are going to work on the decrease swatches 7 and 8 and block swatches 1-6.   In our hands:(17:45) Alicia is keeping things simple while she tries to find her knitting mojo. She is working on a Basic Hat by Jennifer Jackson with Knit Picks Shine Worsted in an Ice Blue colorway. Natalie is working on Toddler Tube socks using Lorna Laces Sport in the Cubs colorway. She continues to work on Kenny’s stocking using Cascade 220 Sport in yellow and blue usingA NEW Family Portrait - A Collection of Three Christmas Stockingsby Dorene Delaney Giordano.   Dropped stitches:(22:05) Natalie realized after knitting 6 inches and 3/4ths that she was supposed to start increasing at 6 inches.  She decided she just didn’t care enough to rip back and let his be longer.   Master Pieces:(23:42) Alicia finished up a purple basic hat using Vanna’s Choice acrylic yarn. Natalie finished up a  Sockhead Hatby Kelly McClure in The Unique Sheep Verve base in the Inspecta gradiance colorway. Natalie’s family make great knitwear models! Future Stitches:(27:49) Natalie plans to knit  Pomme de Pin Cardigan by Amy Christoffers for SPAKAL. She shares her friend, NaturallyKnitty’s Pomme de Pin Cardigan and Effortless Cardigan. She bound off where she was for her Moonfleetby Janine Le Cras. She plans to knit Haruni shawl by Emily Ross for my Summer of Lace and Beads with the remaining yarn.  The yarn is the Barknknit gradiance colorway in Eos base from The Unique Sheep. Alicia plans on knitting a shawl using Bohemia Fibers Sock Yarn in the “I got the right to sing the blues colorway.” A yarn inspired by Eric Northman from True Blood.     Simply Selfie: (29:35) Alicia has survived the end of the year, her students’ graduation and went shopping for a mother of the bride dress. Her mom knows to break for yarn shops. Summer is here and she has been going to her nephew’s tball games. Natalie had her birthday but has been sick. She discussed her adventures with her mother in law, cousins, brother, and dad visiting. She celebrated her dad’s 80th birthday. Lish and Natalie discussed how they spent their Father’s Day.   Happy Tails: (48:13) The Story of How Hugo became a Humphrey.   To submit your own story, please go towww.masteringtheknits.com and fill out a form.  We will read your animals rescue story on future podcasts.   Comfort Zone:(53:04) Alicia is loving all of her surprises from Natalie including the wedding shawl and gifties. She has been having tea parties with her friends. It is the last last week of work and she is excited for the endless possibilities of summer. Natalie explains the #100happydays. Natalie started blogging again! Thank you for joining us for episode 7 of Mastering the Knits. You can find shownotes at masteringtheknits.com or on our ravelry group Mastering the Knits Podcast.   You can email us at masteringtheknits@gmail.com. Alicia is knottyknitter17 on Ravelry, Twitter, Instagram,  Natalie can be found on twitter, Instagram, plurk, everlapse, and ravelry as barknknit.

Celebrating Bupa Walk to Work Day on September 28, this podcast aims to motivate you to get moving more. Champion Ironman and Bupa Health Ambassador Guy Leech, Bupa's Chief Medical Officer Dr Paul Bates and compere Emily Ross talk about the reasons why walking is so good for you, the results of recent research into Australians' attitudes to walking and work and some creative ways that you can fit walking into your daily routine.

Featuring Steph but with a cameo by Isitt the cat. Currently working on the BFF Socks by Cookie A featured in the book Knit. Sock. Love by Cookie A Seaside shawlette by Wendy D. Johnson published on Wendy Knits website Hurani by Emily Ross is a free Ravelry download Steph is Knittingsamurai on Ravelry The … Continue reading Expectant Knitter: Week 8! The Inaugural Episode →