In this episode of the AlchemistX Innovators Inside, host Ian Bergman sits down with entrepreneur and author Alistair Croll, founder of Fwd50 to unpack the bold ideas from his new book, Just Evil Enough: The Subversive Marketing Handbook.

Alistair challenges conventional thinking about marketing and innovation. He argues that success today depends less on building great products and more on understanding systems, mediums, and legitimacy—the new foundation of trust and attention in business.

Here are the five key takeaways from their conversation:

1. Move Beyond Product-Market Fit — Aim for Product-Market-Medium Fit

Traditional marketing frameworks are no longer enough. Founders often perfect their products but neglect the channels that connect them to their audiences. Croll explains that each platform has its own norms, algorithms, and expectations. Winning today requires aligning your message and your offer with the specific medium where your audience lives.

2. Treat Go-To-Market Like a Product

Marketing should not be an afterthought. Instead of separating product development from marketing, innovators should build and test their go-to-market strategy as deliberately as they build their products. Experimentation, iteration, and creative risk-taking drive growth more effectively than static campaigns or one-size-fits-all tactics.

3. Legitimacy Is the New Competitive Advantage

As AI and low-code tools make it easier to launch new products, legitimacy becomes the final differentiator. Customers gravitate toward brands that feel authentic, credible, and aligned with their values. Earning legitimacy means creating real trust, building engaged communities, and communicating with transparency.

4.  Be Chosen, Not Compared

Competing on features is a race to the bottom. Instead, focus on creating something incomparable—a product, story, or experience that resonates so deeply with a specific audience that alternatives become irrelevant. The most effective marketing moves people emotionally and gives them a clear reason to choose you.

5. Subvert Systems and Think Asymmetrically

Innovation happens when you challenge assumptions. Croll encourages founders to look for weak signals and asymmetries—situations where small, creative actions lead to outsized impact. Whether it’s reordering steps in your value chain, redefining customer roles, or exploiting a new medium before competitors do, strategic subversion can unlock massive advantages.

Alistair Croll’s approach to subversive marketing redefines what it means to grow a business. It’s not about being unethical—it’s about being strategic, bold, and adaptive in systems that change faster than ever before.

Have a question for a future guest? Email us at innovators@alchemistaccelerator.com to get in touch! 

Timestamps

🎙️ Introduction to Alistair Croll & the Book Just Evil Enough (00:00:21)

💡 Why Subversive Marketing Matters in Today’s World (00:02:22)

⚙️ From Product-Market Fit to Product-Market-Medium Fit (00:03:47)

🧠 The Hacker Mindset and Building Go-To-Market Like a Product (00:06:57)

📈 Marketing as Behavioral Change and the Misplaced “Growth” Function (00:08:33)

🏗️ The Rise of Vibe Coding, Legitimacy, and the Outcome Economy (00:11:18)

💥 Subverting Systems and Competing Through Legitimacy (00:20:52)

🔎 Finding Weak Signals and Value Chain Disruption (00:23:22)

💘 Be Chosen, Not Compared: Creating Incomparable Offers (00:26:23)

🌱 Legitimacy, Niche Building, and the Era of a Million Tiny Horses (00:28:24)

🎭 Remarkability, Authenticity, and the Power of Standing Out (00:31:43)

🤝 Ethics of Subversion: “Don’t Actually Be Evil” (00:34:19)

📚 Global Case Studies and Final Reflections (00:35:23)

✅ Wrap-Up and Where to Find Just Evil Enough (00:37:31)

Full Transcript 

00;00;21;20 - 00;00;51;20
Ian Bergman
Welcome to season six of Alchemist x Innovators Inside the podcast, where we explore the world of corporate innovation and dive deep into the minds and stories of innovation. Thought leaders crafting the future. I am your host, Ian Bergmann, and if you're an innovation agitator like me, then this is where you want to be. Alistair Krall, like you are an unbelievable entrepreneur, event organizer, community organizer, and for time book author.

00;00;51;24 - 00;00;52;05
Ian Bergman
I get that.

00;00;52;05 - 00;00;56;27
Alistair Croll
Right. 4 or 6, depending on how thick you want to say a book has to be.

00;00;57;00 - 00;01;13;08
Ian Bergman
There you go. So it has to be at least that much. And so we're going to go for books. But, you know, up to six I want to welcome you to Innovators Inside because you have just published a new book called Just Evil Enough, The Subversive Marketing Handbook, and it is definitely a little bit of a maybe a hot take of a name.

00;01;13;11 - 00;01;18;29
Ian Bergman
Right? It's a name that is intended to be controversial and subversive. And I think we're talking about some of these things.

00;01;18;29 - 00;01;19;29
Alistair Croll
Literally going to go grab one.

00;01;19;29 - 00;01;22;10
Ian Bergman
Look, there it is. Just evil enough.

00;01;22;12 - 00;01;25;15
Alistair Croll
Actual book here with a QR code that you can actually take a photo of.

00;01;25;19 - 00;01;44;09
Ian Bergman
And available on Amazon. Available on other bookshops, available on audible. The version that I've been listening. Narrated by you, by the way. That's right. Yeah. And so, you know, you've done a lot of thinking about this topic. You've done a lot of thinking about challenging the status quo, being subversive. Why is that important today?

00;01;44;11 - 00;02;05;16
Alistair Croll
So first of all, I want to say a lot of thinking was done with Emily Ross, my coauthor, who is a fantastic thinker about all sort of shenanigans and subversive ideas, comes from more of an agency and marketing background, whereas mine is a startup background. So it's definitely a book that is straddling the worlds of incumbent entrepreneurs and disruptive startups, which is kind of nice, which.

00;02;05;16 - 00;02;07;16
Ian Bergman
Is an amazing intersection, by the way it.

00;02;07;16 - 00;02;19;12
Alistair Croll
Is. And I think there are people reading this book to figure out what to look out for. Yeah, like they're in their comfy status quo kind of world. They're trying to figure out what's going to disrupt them, which is an important tool to.

00;02;19;14 - 00;02;21;28
Ian Bergman
So why does the world need this book right now?

00;02;22;01 - 00;02;43;00
Alistair Croll
If you want to change the world, you need to recognize the system you're in and get it to behave in a way that wasn't intended by its creators. There are a lot of people who want to change the world for a lot of reasons. Some of them want to change politics, or they want to launch the new startup, or they want to introduce their product, or they want to champion an idea.

00;02;43;02 - 00;03;07;11
Alistair Croll
But the reality is that we've kind of lost the thread when it comes to marketing. I often ask startup founders how many of them show of hands are worried about whether they can build the product, versus whether anyone will care. And almost unanimously, everyone raises her hands to I'm worried that no one will care, of course. Right. I'm sure you've seen the same thing.

00;03;07;13 - 00;03;23;22
Alistair Croll
And then I ask them of the the amount of time you spend, how much of it is spent building your products, and how much is spent getting people to care. And they 90% of them put up their hands saying they're spending all their time on building the product. Yeah. And there are hundreds of books on product innovation out there.

00;03;23;25 - 00;03;27;10
Alistair Croll
There are almost no books on go to market innovation.

00;03;27;13 - 00;03;46;16
Ian Bergman
Well, and there's many of the books that are on, I'd say that intersection of go to market and product are talking about things like product market fit. They're talking about customer evidence and sales traction. That proves that you have a right to win in the market. You have a little bit of, maybe a problem with that. Take.

00;03;46;16 - 00;03;47;15
Ian Bergman
Do you want to tell me about that?

00;03;47;15 - 00;04;13;21
Alistair Croll
Yeah. Product market fit was great for a world where the medium that you connected between the product, you and the market, your customer was a one way, one to many boring broadcast medium sales guys picking up the phone, newspaper ads, TV commercials, broadcast radio buzz fliers. Right. Like that was when I took marketing. And I'm old enough to remember this as being a fairly early take on marketing.

00;04;13;23 - 00;04;31;23
Alistair Croll
We talked about four P's the product, the place, the price, and the promotion. Yeah. Which one of those is the channel? It's not the product, it's not the promotion. It's probably not the pricing. Oh, it's place. The place is the channel. But like, let's be honest, that person wanted to make up for Letter P's. And the best they could come up with for channel is P.

00;04;31;25 - 00;04;39;22
Alistair Croll
Yep. So place okay. What is the place? It's where the exchange happens between the buyer and the seller. I don't even.

00;04;39;22 - 00;04;42;25
Ian Bergman
Know. Is it is it a linear foot of a retail shelf like what is.

00;04;42;27 - 00;05;10;11
Alistair Croll
And so the reality is that the medium, which is the thing that connects the product to the market, is much more mature now, it is entirely possible for you to research a product category, find a vendor, select a product, provide payment, get the product, use the product, get support for the product all on the same platform. That's a perfectly normal thing in the digital world.

00;05;10;13 - 00;05;38;12
Alistair Croll
Yes, and to take this idea of the medium as this sort of afterthought is, is asinine. You need to have product market medium fit. Some products do really well in some mediums. Some markets are only accessible on some mediums. We need to think about the platforms on which we transact and the the norms of those platforms. You say very different things on X from LinkedIn, from Facebook, for example.

00;05;38;14 - 00;05;57;13
Alistair Croll
You behave very differently in their different mechanics in a WhatsApp chat thread than there are, on a public post or something on Snapchat. And so understanding what are the norms, what are the business mechanics? What are the algorithms on those media? What are the governance and the regulations? Those things is incredibly important in your go to market strategy.

00;05;57;13 - 00;06;12;05
Alistair Croll
But because we don't spend time thinking about a go to market strategy, we just make a long list of features and hope someone will care when we yell it. We are neglecting thinking about the medium, and I think we think that the medium is as important as the product in the market.

00;06;12;08 - 00;06;32;03
Ian Bergman
And so as you and Emily were kind of batting around ideas for this book and as you, I know you've worked together for a while and you're sharing your lessons and learnings. You know how did you deal with the question of how do I get these builders, a term that we often use for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs to care about the go to market, the distribution?

00;06;32;03 - 00;06;56;07
Ian Bergman
Because to your point, like we recognize and reward the builders of the world, and in fact, we lament when, you know, we as people, as organizations and as society, these are perceived as, you know, stopping building. So how do you make the case? Not only that it is important, but how do you make the case for, you know, something tactically that people can do to shift their time appropriately to thinking about go to market?

00;06;56;07 - 00;06;57;24
Ian Bergman
If the question makes sense?

00;06;57;26 - 00;07;14;00
Alistair Croll
One of the analogies we use is hacking. We talk a lot about what a business person can learn from a hacker. There are two kinds of hackers. At a very broad level. There are script kiddies who run an exploit a million times and hope somebody hasn't patch their software, send out a million spams. Right?

00;07;14;00 - 00;07;15;02
Ian Bergman
We've all been there. Don't tell.

00;07;15;02 - 00;07;38;10
Alistair Croll
Anyone. Yeah. And then there are these zero day architects who craft a surgical first strike that nobody's aware of yet. And we liken marketers to those two things. There are marketers who are like zero t script could easily just spam things out and do whatever you know is the latest thing they read on LinkedIn. And then there are people who are quietly devising a new go to market strategy, like an old example would be Dropbox.

00;07;38;13 - 00;07;57;26
Alistair Croll
When Dropbox launched, they had this thing where if I invited you, we both got more storage. Yep. And that was built into the products, a product feature, but it was built. So I think what we do is we say you can build go to market strategies in the same way you're still building. You just reframe. It's not it's not you're building the product or you're goofing off.

00;07;57;29 - 00;08;02;05
Alistair Croll
It's you're building the product or you're building your zero day marketing exploit.

00;08;02;08 - 00;08;12;26
Ian Bergman
And you're building the product and the feature set that perhaps touches those folks that are disadvantaged by the status quo and, for instance, are disadvantaged by not having that extra gigabyte of storage or whatever it might be.

00;08;13;03 - 00;08;33;21
Alistair Croll
Yeah. And there's another important point here, which is that when we talk about the go to market strategy, we're talking about the plan for creating attention and turning it into profitable demand. Like everyone says, go to market strategy. Yeah. What is that? It's a plan for how to capture people's attention. And generally you have to create that attention.

00;08;33;21 - 00;08;54;02
Alistair Croll
You can't just hope they see you and then turn that attention into the behavior you want. Marketing is the art and science of behavioral change. Yep. And I've seen these incredibly long definitions that are like word salads designed by committee of what marketing is. No, it's the art and science of behavioral change.

00;08;54;04 - 00;09;03;07
Ian Bergman
Can I constrain that by behavioral change through communication? Or is it really just as broad as everything that is deliberate about behavioral change as marketing?

00;09;03;11 - 00;09;25;01
Alistair Croll
Oh, if you put in a feature that changes people's behavior, that's still marketing, right? That's why product falls under marketing. If you change your pricing, it changes people's behavior. I don't think there's anything you could do that isn't trying to change behavior. It's just that people think that one more feature is going to change behavior. It might, but it's unlikely that that's the best way to change people's behavior.

00;09;25;03 - 00;09;34;09
Alistair Croll
So there's another hot take. My lead analytics coauthor, Ben Yankovic and I were talking about last week when I was in Toronto. We have this idea you've probably heard of the term growth hacker.

00;09;34;12 - 00;09;35;05
Ian Bergman
Of course.

00;09;35;08 - 00;09;58;02
Alistair Croll
And chief growth officer. Yeah, and maybe even products led growth, right. And they're like, oh, product led growth is a is a person in charge of growth who kind of messes around with the product of it. And the product manager me goes, when did we abdicate growth to somebody else. Like what is the product manager's job. Is just to read JIRA and turn it into a roadmap documents.

00;09;58;02 - 00;10;24;19
Alistair Croll
No, that's I don't want that's a job for an AI. By now. If you aren't thinking about product features as a tool for growth, you're a bad product manager. And it's sort of like product managers abdicated this role of figuring out what to build to some other department. When did that happen? When did we decide it was okay for some newcomer to show up and say, I'm going to be the chief growth officer, and I'm going to be in charge of all the growth oriented product features.

00;10;24;23 - 00;10;29;07
Alistair Croll
Your job is just to make a laundry list of what people would like in the product. You've already bought it.

00;10;29;10 - 00;11;07;13
Ian Bergman
It is really interesting because I do wonder when we hyper specialized in small organizations, right, right. Like and that that has such a risk. But like today, we're in a world where you can vibe code an app that, you know, may or may not work, but let's pretend it does. So you can vibe code and app on replit or cursor or whatever in a matter of hours, which opens up a whole world of building to people for whom that maybe wasn't accessible before, but people for whom perhaps the idea of understanding channel and distribution and content and fit to, you know, something subversive is there, you know, in this world is it becoming more or

00;11;07;13 - 00;11;18;07
Ian Bergman
less important than it previously has been to think about, go to market, or are you just sort of highlighting that maybe we're going through ebbs and flows where we're forgetting about this, and we need to kind of reset to the norms?

00;11;18;14 - 00;11;39;14
Alistair Croll
No, I think we could not have stuck the landing better. In terms of the timing for the book. Think about what you just said and the logical conclusion now, the ability to build a new product. I'm working on a piece on the for mis capitalizations of recent history. If you were a company that bought a bunch of hardware before cloud computing came along, then once cloud computing existed, you were mis capitalized.

00;11;39;17 - 00;11;57;28
Alistair Croll
You'd bought enough hardware for the peak. That was a bad investment, right? When social media came along, if you had a big ad budget and now you were able to put stuff out on social media, you were mis capitalized. I would say that the move from client server to software as a service was also a mis capitalization. Companies that were selling client server software when SAS came out.

00;11;58;00 - 00;12;09;26
Alistair Croll
We are at what I call the fourth mis capitalization in the startup world, which is that we now have the ability to generate new products very, very quickly with call it chat oriented program. I mean, if you don't want to call it vibe coding.

00;12;09;26 - 00;12;11;12
Ian Bergman
And so we're now doubling down on the.

00;12;11;12 - 00;12;40;28
Alistair Croll
Engineers, right. And the problem here is one of legitimacy. Instead of having a CRM, I now have 50 CRMs I could buy. Right. Because it's so much easier for someone to build a CRM, for example. And so now how do I choose which one? I can't go based on features because they've all got roughly the same features. I, I can sort of go on like taste and whether it looks right and how targeted it is at me.

00;12;41;01 - 00;13;02;22
Alistair Croll
And I think that taste is an undervalued skill that will become incredibly important. If you want to vibe code, you want people who can choose the right vibes. But the reality is that the last bastion of competition is legitimacy. Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, has this great example. You wrote a post once about legitimacy, and he said there was a case of a blockchain currency.

00;13;02;22 - 00;13;25;02
Alistair Croll
I don't know what it was called where the creator of the currency, like, took 30% of the currency for himself, but everyone else just went, okay, we don't trust you anymore. We're going to copy the remaining 70% to an entirely new currency, and you're not part of it. I mean, got the numbers wrong, but the basic idea was, no matter how good the math in blockchain for a cryptocurrency, the one thing they can defeated is legitimacy.

00;13;25;08 - 00;13;42;12
Alistair Croll
Yes, 51% of people decide it's legitimate. They can just take it and go. And so the defining characteristic of successful companies in a vibe coding era is legitimacy. I think that's a huge, huge factor that we don't understand yet.

00;13;42;14 - 00;14;10;07
Ian Bergman
It is interesting as we talk about sure, we talk about vibe coding. We talk about lowering the cost of production of software, of tools, whatever that may extend to physical goods and hardware in the not too distant future. But it's there's parallels in music, there's parallels in art, there's parallels in all kinds of creative endeavors where the cost of production is going asymptotically to zero over time.

00;14;10;10 - 00;14;30;28
Ian Bergman
And so, you know, there has been this really interesting question of like, where is the value, right? Like if an AI can create a beautiful painting, then perhaps the act of actually the skill of painting has less value. Unless you have people talk about brand, you'll talk about whatever I think you're saying, unless you have legitimacy. And legitimacy is something that is perceived right.

00;14;30;28 - 00;14;34;21
Ian Bergman
It is not inherent to something that is perceived and reflected from the people around you.

00;14;34;21 - 00;14;58;28
Alistair Croll
Banksy was way ahead of his time, right? Seriously, I think that idea that, you know, I think we're going to see movies now where it says, no way, I was used in the creation of this movie in the same way that we saw things saying no animals were harmed in the creation. This movie, I think that we're also going to see I Love Cassie cause of assertion that AI gives us infinite right answers, each right in its own way.

00;14;59;01 - 00;15;17;12
Alistair Croll
So then who chooses it? Right? And so I wrote a thing a while back about what comes after the attention economy. And I think it's the outcome economy. And the reason I say that is it's almost paralyzing to be able to do anything. You can go find a YouTube video or talk to an AI about what you could do.

00;15;17;18 - 00;15;25;23
Alistair Croll
And so I think an entire generation is going to be like, well, I could do all these things, and I love just reminding people, you just do stuff like, you can just do stuff, you.

00;15;25;23 - 00;15;26;28
Ian Bergman
Can just do stuff.

00;15;26;28 - 00;15;27;13
Alistair Croll
And.

00;15;27;15 - 00;15;28;26
Ian Bergman
That's a meme online right now.

00;15;28;26 - 00;15;29;25
Alistair Croll
Is it?

00;15;29;27 - 00;15;33;16
Ian Bergman
Yeah, it's been going around. It's been going around mostly around vibe coding.

00;15;33;22 - 00;15;56;04
Alistair Croll
Okay. I mean, yeah, that's the underlying idea here is that you can do stuff and you can try it out and you can be methodical and you can, you know, keep iterating and all that kind of stuff. But the if you imagine a Smith training an apprentice at some point, they've worked the bellows long enough and the Smiths says, hey, come over here and make me a sword.

00;15;56;06 - 00;16;13;03
Alistair Croll
He hands the person a chunk of iron, and if they can produce a sword, they're a smith. Sure. In education, we used to test people for math by seeing if they could get the right answer. And then calculators came along and we had to say, show your work. Yeah, we could test whether they'd read something based on whether they could recall the facts.

00;16;13;03 - 00;16;34;05
Alistair Croll
And then Google Search came along and we said, no, no, no, you got to synthesize your ideas. Yep. Now we have something that can do idea synthesis. And so teachers don't know how to value a student. The only real answer is a simulation is to go build a sword. But the thing is you can't really say build a sword when it comes like business school, right?

00;16;34;05 - 00;16;40;02
Alistair Croll
Like, what are you going to say? Go take your parents money and start a business. And if it's successful, you pass. And if you don't, I'm sorry. You're also bankrupt.

00;16;40;08 - 00;16;43;11
Ian Bergman
I mean, yes, sometimes. By the way, there are business schools that do that.

00;16;43;11 - 00;16;43;27
Alistair Croll
Absolutely.

00;16;43;27 - 00;16;46;12
Ian Bergman
Maybe not a parent's money scale, right.

00;16;46;12 - 00;17;09;03
Alistair Croll
And also not at the grade nine level. Right? Right. True. But the ability to create simulations just got much easier. Yeah. So like, educators can vibe code testing things and synthesize things and question things and so on. So I think we're going to see a huge it's always important to look at changes in technology and not think of them as fixed.

00;17;09;03 - 00;17;32;28
Alistair Croll
Right. The response to AI is going to change things. One of the first music generative applications that came out, my family and I spent an evening goofing around with the 32nd song that generated. They were pretty funny, but by the end of the evening, we were making. My sister was making an invite to her friends in song form that she sent to invite them to a party in Montreal, and I'm like, oh, I get it.

00;17;33;01 - 00;17;40;18
Alistair Croll
When music is scarce, you pay for a song. When music is cheap, you use it as an invite. Like that's new use cases.

00;17;40;18 - 00;17;44;20
Ian Bergman
Yes. And it opens up an infinite fractal set of use cases.

00;17;44;24 - 00;18;06;03
Alistair Croll
And so I think the question is, can we harness as a society enough of the, the benefits of that to pay the creators, either those on whom it was trained or those who are you know, behind the source material or whatever, that that as long as we can avoid this becoming a huge concentration of wealth or power. Yeah.

00;18;06;04 - 00;18;18;05
Alistair Croll
And that may involve, like Bill gates once said, you know, taxing the robots. I just don't think society is set up to make rational decisions about how to share the abundance we're getting from technology right now.

00;18;18;08 - 00;18;43;13
Ian Bergman
Well, then, if you read Ben Thompson and Steph Curry and aggregation theory, you know, you do see sort of a theory that says that systemically, all of these advances and the lowering the friction of production, everything else actually does lead to aggregation of wealth. And I, you know, I think look, I think it's pretty easy to say that there's political and societal upheaval happening all over the world that might be tied to some of what we're talking about here, for sure.

00;18;43;13 - 00;19;04;15
Alistair Croll
Yeah, these are weird times. But it's also, I mean, in a little over my lifetime, maybe one and a half of them post-World War two, there was the accord with the US said to other countries, we will help you get back on your feet. Sure. Right. You fought World War two. If you are enemies, you don't get any help.

00;19;04;17 - 00;19;12;25
Alistair Croll
If you are our allies, we will literally train you on how to make things using our technology and we'll give you preferential treatment. Bretton Woods, I think, was the name of the.

00;19;12;25 - 00;19;15;21
Ian Bergman
Bretton, Bretton Woods. And so you the Marshall Plan for.

00;19;15;22 - 00;19;33;20
Alistair Croll
Right? Yeah. And then a little while after that, there was the because this had driven up the US currency, because one of the Bretton Woods conditions was to make it the currency of record. The US currency was now an investment vehicle because everyone's trying to pegged to the foreign exchange rate. And as a result, the US had to detach itself from the gold standard.

00;19;33;23 - 00;19;57;18
Alistair Croll
Yep. And so that was the second sort of big financial where I think seeing the third big financial change right now, we're seeing an attempt by the US to they say if we are the central currency, people are willing to trust us because of our military might, but we are unable to monetize our military might. That allows us to be the currency of record.

00;19;57;18 - 00;20;20;03
Alistair Croll
So the way we're going to get you to pay us for that military might is tariffs. And I think very predictably, the countries that are unwilling to pay for that military might, such as China, for example, are not on that list. And you're just like, if you understand what happened with Bretton Woods, if you understand what happened, the gold standard that's, you know, within a human lifespan.

00;20;20;06 - 00;20;30;27
Alistair Croll
So I think these are changes. But we got to remember that for the vast majority of human history, it was not a friendly, democratic place where people got along and were nice to one another and solved things with laws.

00;20;30;29 - 00;20;42;09
Ian Bergman
No, it was not. And I think similarly for the vast majority of human history, you didn't have complete systems changes, whether driven by tech, whether driven by economics, etc., within human lifetimes.

00;20;42;09 - 00;20;43;05
Alistair Croll
Yeah, absolutely.

00;20;43;08 - 00;20;52;06
Ian Bergman
And you know, now we're seeing generational changes happening every five years, it seems like or years or months. It's really a fascinating time.

00;20;52;08 - 00;21;12;16
Alistair Croll
And this comes back to the idea of why the book's timing is so good. Is that, yeah, subverting a system gives you great advantage, but the rate of systemic change means there's a much higher rate of advantage to be found in subverting a system. If you put a dollar into subverting a system versus a dollar into building a feature, the moment you build a feature, it gets more out of date.

00;21;12;18 - 00;21;17;19
Alistair Croll
The moment you subvert a system like you're able to find it and capitalize on very quickly.

00;21;17;21 - 00;21;33;02
Ian Bergman
So I want to come back to this topic of legitimacy a little bit, and I want to use it to talk about some of the other lessons in the book. Some of are absolutely fascinating. But you mentioned Banksy maybe being ahead of his time. And I think, you know, there's one that occurs to me that maybe Taylor Swift is a little bit ahead of her time with Taylor's version of her songs.

00;21;33;02 - 00;21;44;11
Ian Bergman
Right? There's inferred legitimacy by basically saying, this is Taylor's version and her fan base and that, like, I don't know if it's marketing, but it sure was some subversive. It sure was a system shock.

00;21;44;15 - 00;21;45;15
Alistair Croll
I was also really good.

00;21;45;15 - 00;21;47;09
Ian Bergman
Revenge and really good revenge.

00;21;47;09 - 00;22;13;08
Alistair Croll
Scooter. Scooter got what he deserved. Yeah, I do think the idea like that's the thing that was that's a hack. So for the sake of people who don't know, Taylor Swift had produced a bunch of very lucrative albums, and someone she hated bought the rights to them, but she retained the rights to rerecord those songs. So she rerecorded them herself and gave them the name Taylor's version and put them on streaming platforms and told her fans to go and listen to the more recent ones.

00;22;13;10 - 00;22;34;21
Alistair Croll
And this they've now bypassed the original Spotify plays by far, and it almost created a stigma among her very loyal fans that you shouldn't listen to the Not Taylor's version. That only works if you have a large fan base that's willing to do what you want, aka Swifties. But also if you have a streaming model where each listen pays you some money.

00;22;34;21 - 00;22;46;00
Alistair Croll
Because if you've already bought an album, you're unlikely to buy an album again. New version? Maybe you would if you're a big fan, but if you are listening to a stream, it's very easy to replace a song in your stream.

00;22;46;01 - 00;22;47;01
Ian Bergman
Zero switching off.

00;22;47;08 - 00;23;00;21
Alistair Croll
Right? And so the the this is a hack that worked because of a change in the medium's business model. The music medium changed from by the album to pay per listen. That was a thing that allowed this hack to work well.

00;23;00;21 - 00;23;22;21
Ian Bergman
And so let's stick with entrepreneurs right now versus entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs right now who are listening to this and who are thinking, okay, like I need to help my audience sift signal from noise. I need to confer legitimacy on what I'm trying to do. What are some of the hacks that you think they should be looking at? Or maybe what are some of the frameworks or mechanisms that they should be using to find the hacks?

00;23;22;23 - 00;23;40;24
Alistair Croll
So the first thing to do, I think to find the hacks, you look for something called weak signals. Yeah. The weak signal is something that if it were actually true, like it's an indicator that something might be there, that if it were actually true, would give you a disproportionate advantage. And we talk about how to find weak signals in the book.

00;23;40;24 - 00;24;09;15
Alistair Croll
The second thing you're looking for is some kind of asymmetry. So is there a place where a small amount of action on your part gives a big amount of action reaction, that there are often things where your competitors can't or won't respond to what you're doing. So if I am Robinhood, for example, and I change, who pays for bank transfers or I'm, you know, I'm a stock trading company that makes my money by training for free and then selling the ability to use those trades to market makers.

00;24;09;19 - 00;24;30;27
Alistair Croll
It's very hard for a stock trading company to come in and go, yeah, I'm going to do that too, because they kill their own business. That's right. So like it's the same thing I mentioned earlier with blockbuster versus Netflix is that when blockbuster became dependent on its late fees for revenue, they were vulnerable. And so a good way to do this is to find out the things on which your competitors are dependent or the people are trying to unseat are dependent.

00;24;30;28 - 00;24;56;10
Alistair Croll
We have a concept in the book. This chapter in the book that someone told me could just be a book called Value Chain Disruption. So Michael Porter talks about a value chain as the series of steps through which value is created. If you look at the inputs to a business, your resources and your employees and stuff like that, and you look at the value, the outputs, everything that happens in between, including R&D and branding and so on, that adds value to the product as part of your value chain.

00;24;56;17 - 00;25;23;06
Alistair Croll
Okay? And traditionally, you would compete by either differentiating yourself at one step of the value chain or by reducing the costs a step of the value chain. So someone like an Amazon obviously very focused on cost reduction, someone like a supreme, very focused on differentiation within one particular segment. We think that it's actually much easier to disrupt industries by merging, splitting, reordering, or reassigning a step.

00;25;23;06 - 00;25;25;09
Ian Bergman
So like, in Ikea, for instance.

00;25;25;09 - 00;25;48;03
Alistair Croll
Exactly. Ikea reassigned the task of assembling the furniture to the customer. Right. It also kind of reordered it by moving the purchase before the assembly. In the old days, you would order a sofa and then four months later, someone would bring it to your house. I think that that idea of how do you, you know, talk is a restaurant reservation company that makes people pay for the meal before they get to the restaurant.

00;25;48;05 - 00;26;14;00
Alistair Croll
Who on earth would do that? Well, it turns out that fancy restaurants who have lots of people calling up and then canceling at the last minute because they were just saving the reservation, would really like to do that. And so figuring out how to merge, split, reorder, or reassign a step of your value chain and then asking if that happened, is there a lucrative, reachable segment of the market that would definitely choose me.

00;26;14;02 - 00;26;20;11
Alistair Croll
And this is another really important point is that in marketing, you don't want to be compared to others, you want to be chosen over others.

00;26;20;13 - 00;26;23;07
Ian Bergman
What an interesting statement. Say that again.

00;26;23;09 - 00;26;42;02
Alistair Croll
You don't want to be compared to others. You want to be chosen over others. Yeah. If I am buying a fridge, I have this little sticker that tells me how many kilowatt hours it consumes or whatever, right? If I'm buying a car, it tells me miles per gallon. Those are comparable features of the product. You can compare across all products.

00;26;42;05 - 00;27;10;26
Alistair Croll
Let's say I'm selling you a house and I say to you, oh, this house has two bedrooms and two bathrooms and it's 20 minutes from a good school district. Okay, I just made it really easy for you to compare it to other houses. But if I say to you, this house has a tree house and I know you're an expecting couple, and can you imagine when you're three years old and you climb up there with your son or daughter and you take some photos and share them on Instagram, because your kids out there in nature, even though everyone's on their screens.

00;27;11;01 - 00;27;31;15
Alistair Croll
And then by 7 or 8, you go up there and have a little picnic together, and at 14 you find your son or daughter crying over their first breakup, and you comfort them in that little tree house. And as they're about to leave for university at 18 years old, they climb up to that tree house with you, and you just give them a hug and you kind of cry a little.

00;27;31;18 - 00;27;53;25
Alistair Croll
I just made that house incomparable. No other house without a tree house is going to be on that person's mind, right? That is an example of making someone choose a thing instead of compare. You want to find those incomparable things that make a particular segment of the market. In that case, you know, expecting parents decide that it is the dominant reason for buying the product.

00;27;53;28 - 00;28;07;26
Alistair Croll
And if you can do that, then you can find yourself a change to the value chain that a lucrative, reachable target market will make. The reason for choosing you over anybody else.

00;28;07;29 - 00;28;24;12
Ian Bergman
Do you have a example? Early stage company a young company that you think has done this exceedingly well in the last 5 to 10 years? Because it's a hard thing to do to stand out. And, you know, we can look at the Teslas, we can look at the Tupperware.

00;28;24;13 - 00;28;38;11
Alistair Croll
Yeah, I'm thinking of the younger ones. I mean, Nikita Bear is the best at doing this kind of stuff because he just such a such a good job of of framing like it. Honestly, if there were one endorsement I could get for the book, it would be him. I'd love to know what he thinks of it. He's probably like, yeah, you're being too soft.

00;28;38;11 - 00;28;39;03
Alistair Croll
You're pulling your punches.

00;28;39;03 - 00;28;41;05
Ian Bergman
But I send a bunch to his new blockchain accelerator.

00;28;41;05 - 00;28;58;26
Alistair Croll
That's right. But I do think that when you look at, I mean, I think linear Chesky has done a really good job of this. Lenny is a medium first entrepreneur. He just started producing good information that was out there. And once he had legitimacy from all the people that followed him, he was able to launch a conference in a day.

00;28;58;26 - 00;29;22;06
Alistair Croll
He was like, who do you want to see speak? People told him, okay, who's going to sponsor? People offered, we're going to run it. People told him, okay, you know who wants tickets? It's sold out. I think once you get the medium part right and you build that legitimacy, the other stuff just is so easy by comparison. I'm not not for a second to say Lenny doesn't work hard, but legitimacy is an incredibly strong currency in the modern world.

00;29;22;13 - 00;29;25;28
Ian Bergman
Is Mr. Beast an example? I mean, that's very kind of entertainment forward.

00;29;26;00 - 00;29;59;09
Alistair Croll
I mean, we use Mr. Beast and there's a woman named Viva Valentina. She's a TikToker who started cleaning stuffies on camera. And then it turns out that there was a market that really wanted stuffy cleaning services and then stuffy cleaning equipment, and now she does it full time. And to your point about the ease with which people can start new businesses, the second installment of this post I'm writing on mis capitalization is called a million Tiny Horses because I think instead of a unicorn, we're going to see a million tiny horses, and they will each be sort of small niches and you can form a niche.

00;29;59;12 - 00;30;19;23
Alistair Croll
It's very hard to get all home buyers to care about your value proposition. It's much easier to say, I'm going after expectant first time parents right? And so you can create more legitimacy within a niche than others. And I think the mechanisms for this are hilarious. We have a couple of examples of this from two sides of the political aisle in the book.

00;30;19;28 - 00;30;47;10
Alistair Croll
When Borat, when Sacha Baron Cohen wanted to do his new show in America, he needed ways to create legitimacy. One of them was these fake characters he was creating. He had them write fake books. Because most people, if you're a publicist, let's see if this person's legitimate. You go look at their books. And these were up and coming books that still haven't been published, but you can go see them on Amazon because it turns out it's really easy to, to like, enter an ISBN and say a book is coming.

00;30;47;12 - 00;31;08;19
Alistair Croll
And so that's a good example of like arbitrage using legitimacy to make people think it's legit. Now you can't do it anymore. But at the time that was a good hack. And so I think there are a lot of people who have done things to give you a way of perceiving legitimacy. I mean, Banksy's Shredding Pictures was a great example of like, I still don't care about art.

00;31;08;21 - 00;31;43;22
Ian Bergman
Yeah. Well, and so, you know, there's always wonderful hacks to achieve, you know, legitimacy and try and game that and also just, you know, try and be deliberate about your strategies to achieve legitimacy. Achieving legitimacy also requires having actually reached your target audience requires understanding who they are, but it requires having actually reached them. And in a world of a million tiny horses, for instance, in a world where the noise level is just higher and higher because the cost of production is so low, how do you think about the actual act of outreach and, you know, communication?

00;31;43;24 - 00;31;45;22
Alistair Croll
I'll tell you a story I haven't told anybody.

00;31;45;24 - 00;31;48;07
Ian Bergman
Oh, first time here on Innovators Inside.

00;31;48;09 - 00;32;10;28
Alistair Croll
So a few few weeks ago, I realized that someone who had ordered four copies of Just the Enough at Startup Fest last summer had not received them. For some reason, they got stuck in the backlog and this guy had been waiting almost a year. So I wrote a letter. Big apology letter, and I apologize. But in the letter I was like, each time I mentioned something, I'd go and find a thing in the book that reference that.

00;32;10;28 - 00;32;32;00
Alistair Croll
So like, I wanted to do something unusual, an unexpected brackets page, 3 or 2 standing out or whatever. And then at the end of the thing I said I wanted to give you like a almost a proverbial pound of flesh, please find enclosed the titanium screw that was in my ankle for two years. But I convinced the doctor to give me in a drug induced haze after the surgery.

00;32;32;03 - 00;32;50;09
Alistair Croll
And it's quite literally a titanium screw. I have like a plate and eight screws for my leg, and I sent him four old books and a letter and a metal screw from my leg. Wow. Now the letter was well written. It was kind of funny. It was on brand for this and of course he took photos, sent it back to me.

00;32;50;09 - 00;33;05;27
Alistair Croll
He's like, what a coincidence. My leg is broken and I have to get my foot healed. Maybe you could use your screw. Whatever. But that's remarkable, right? And. And this guy, his name is Eve. This guy also said I'll do a free consulting firm because he made. I had to wait so long. That's something that he's never going to forget.

00;33;05;28 - 00;33;19;16
Alistair Croll
He's going to do. Yeah. This one time, some author sent me a piece of his leg. There's nothing weird about that. It's a maybe some people might go, that's kind of gross. I said in the letter, I promise it's been properly cleaned. But it's remarkable.

00;33;19;18 - 00;33;20;12
Ian Bergman
It is remarkable.

00;33;20;12 - 00;33;40;05
Alistair Croll
And I think just doing stuff like that, like I'm kind of a weird guy. I work in digital government stuff and startup stuff and like lots of different fields. I think we have to embrace that, that sort of weirdness and, and live that. And we're so afraid to stand out. But the real risk should be not standing out.

00;33;40;06 - 00;33;52;25
Alistair Croll
The real risk should be doing like we should be much more afraid of sameness. Tim O'Reilly has this great line. He says, how come we have to write a document to explain why we want to change a product, but not a document to justify keeping it the way it is?

00;33;52;27 - 00;34;16;22
Ian Bergman
What a what a wonderful question. So as we kind of come to the close here, you in writing this book, obviously had to comb through a lot of ideas, a lot of history. You did it in partnership with Emily. I want to know what are some of the hardest conversations you and Emily had as you were putting the book together?

00;34;16;22 - 00;34;18;26
Ian Bergman
Where did you argue and how did that go?

00;34;19;01 - 00;34;40;23
Alistair Croll
Well, we argued a lot. I mean, we argued over dumb logistical stuff like, should we discount the book? Very practical stuff. But when it comes to content, I think the biggest discussions we had one was around disagree ability for sure. Yeah. Is it okay to tell people to be disagreeable because disagree ability is simply one of the five personality traits agreeable disagree ability.

00;34;40;23 - 00;35;01;11
Alistair Croll
But it's not contrarian as it's it's a willingness to take a position even if it's not supported by others. And I think Emily was much more aware because she's a woman and has been successful in tech, but has had to fight tooth and nail to get there. She's much more aware of just how hard it is to be disagreeable when you're already disadvantaged.

00;35;01;14 - 00;35;23;16
Alistair Croll
So we talked. I wouldn't say it was a disagreement, but we had a lot of conversation about that. There's a whole chapter in the book called Don't Actually Be Evil. And so it's interesting when you try to come up with like first principles for evil. Yeah. So, you know, don't assume consent. That's evil, don't commit fraud. I think the other thing that was really interesting is there's a lot of case studies that I knew really well that she'd never heard of, and vice versa.

00;35;23;18 - 00;35;34;02
Alistair Croll
So, like, have you ever heard of a company called Gymshark? Now, see, they're like under armor for Europe. They're huge. They're massive, like billions of dollars. But I'd never heard of them.

00;35;34;08 - 00;35;37;06
Ian Bergman
Incredible. Just because the geographic difference right.

00;35;37;06 - 00;35;59;22
Alistair Croll
Yeah. When cameo first came out, they asked a bunch of celebrities to including like Dionne Warwick and Tom Felton to make a happy birthday ad or a happy birthday video for their friend Gymshark, who really liked exercise and and so they got a bunch of social media ads from like, you know, Tom Felton going, happy birthday Gymshark, I hear you love exercise, which they then posted.

00;35;59;22 - 00;36;18;29
Alistair Croll
And three weeks later cameo updated its terms of service by 6000 words. That's a good hack. I mean, we use it as an example of a medium hack where you find an advantage and in many ways, like a hack, it's going to get patched, so act before it gets patched. But I'd never heard of of Gymshark. She'd never heard of In and Out.

00;36;19;02 - 00;36;39;22
Alistair Croll
We talked about the secret messages in an empire. And so one of the things that was really interesting is we realized just how much, we don't know, studies from elsewhere in the world that have lessons. So there's a study about fat people, which is a Chinese tax receipt model. There's a study about the tigerbalm brothers that founded tigerbalm and how they brought that to the world.

00;36;39;27 - 00;36;50;17
Alistair Croll
So we tried really hard to find like it opened our eyes to the fact that there's so many examples around the world that we don't know, which is itself one of the hacks is arbitrage. Of course, you know something others don't write amazing.

00;36;50;19 - 00;37;14;12
Ian Bergman
Well. So, Alistair, I want to say thank you for joining us on The Innovators inside, I have Alistair Crawl, who's been with us, who and partner with Emily Ross has written Just Evil Enough, The Subversive Marketing Handbook, and has chapters including things like don't Actually Be Evil. But I think it is, as you've said, a book that is really kind of the right book for the time.

00;37;14;12 - 00;37;31;17
Ian Bergman
A book where being contrarian, being anti-pattern, and frankly, maybe being a bit disagreeable at a time when all of those things are actually give folks an advantage. And so thanks for sharing some of the lessons for folks who want to learn more, for folks who want to get a hold of it besides sending them to Amazon, where should they go?

00;37;31;17 - 00;37;38;10
Ian Bergman
Are you on LinkedIn? Is there a website? How should they learn more about Just Evil Enough and the the ideas and content around it for sure.

00;37;38;10 - 00;37;53;25
Alistair Croll
So we have a website just evil enough.com. You can buy books directly from the author there. It's actually nicer than buying it through Amazon, because we lose money on every copy sold on Amazon because publishing is broken. But also when you buy direct from us, there's a bunch of other resources we can give you because we have your email address.

00;37;53;28 - 00;37;57;17
Alistair Croll
And yeah, we have a Substack. Just evil enough dot some psychology.

00;37;57;19 - 00;38;04;10
Ian Bergman
Amazing. Well I'll start. Thank you so much for joining us today. Have a wonderful rest of your day and your weekend as we record on the Friday.

00;38;04;17 - 00;38;05;16
Alistair Croll
You too. Thanks again.

00;38;05;18 - 00;38;28;25
Ian Bergman
Cheers. And that's a wrap for today's episode of Alchemist x Innovators Inside. Thanks for listening. If you found value in today's discussion, be sure to subscribe to our podcast and check out our segments on YouTube. Links and follow ups are in the show notes, and if you have questions you want us to feature in future episodes, email innovators at Alchemist accelerator.com.

00;38;28;27 - 00;38;33;17
Ian Bergman
Stay tuned for more insider stories and practical insights from leaders. Crafting our future.