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

People overlook this often. Sometimes people are not buying your product because it's only half of the solution. David Ricketts, who's a Harvard professor of innovation, uses the example of mac and cheese. Kraft. Macaroni and Cheese Dinner. So Kraft had figured out powdered cheese to support the war effort, but you can't really sell powdered cheese on its own. And then they found this sales guy who was putting the powdered cheese and a box of macaroni together with on elastic, literally combining them and now you'd buy it because it was ready to made dinner. I think a lot of us don't look at our product and say, how is it being used? Today my guest is Alister Kroll. Alistair is the author of Lean Analytics, which was one of the most influential early books on how to use data in helping you build your startup. He's also a multi time founder.

Runs conferences all over the world on data, AI, and technology and government. And most importantly to me, convinced me to leave a nice cushy job to start a company over a decade ago. Then helped me build that startup and eventually to Airbnb. And in many ways was one of the most central figures in my life that led me to doing what I do now. And lucky for us, Alistair is about to release a new book that I am very excited about. It's called Just Evil Enough.

And essentially it's a study of loopholes and how to get people to pay attention to what you've built. Which increasingly is the hardest part of launching a startup. Alistair shares eleven specific strategies for finding subversive ideas to get your ideas out. How to shift your mindset to think more subversively. Why it's so essential for startups and founders to think this way these days, plus dozens of examples and stories that make this advice very real.

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