Just Evil Enough: Subversive Marketing Strategies for Startups with Alistair Croll
- Aisha Washington
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
A strong product solves only part of a startup’s problem. The rest is persuading the market to notice, understand, and adopt it. Alistair Croll—entrepreneur, conference organizer, and co-author of Lean Analytics—argues that founders often lavish attention on features while treating distribution as something to solve after launch.
In this conversation, Croll introduces the thinking behind Just Evil Enough, his book with Emily Ross. Despite its provocative name, the concept is not an invitation to deceive or harm people. It is a framework for recognizing entrenched systems, questioning their defaults, and finding an unconventional but defensible advantage before competitors do.
A Product Is Only Half the Solution
Croll opens with a lesson attributed to Harvard innovation professor David Ricketts. Kraft did not merely sell powdered cheese; it combined that ingredient with macaroni and presented the result as a convenient dinner. The commercial breakthrough came from completing the customer’s solution, not simply improving one component.
That distinction matters because product teams naturally focus on what they control: features, interfaces, reliability, and onboarding. Yet a technically excellent product can remain invisible if nobody has a reason or mechanism to discover it. Croll’s central argument is that market strategy deserves the same creativity and rigor as product development.
For startups, distribution cannot be reduced to choosing a familiar growth channel. Referral programs, paid acquisition, SEO, and invite systems may all help, but well-known playbooks lose their edge as more companies copy them. A genuine advantage usually appears when a company discovers a route to demand that rivals have overlooked or dismissed.
What “Just Evil Enough” Actually Means
Croll uses “evil” playfully to describe behavior that challenges accepted rules without becoming malicious. A startup is already a disagreement with the status quo: its founders believe the world should work differently. Incumbents and gatekeepers may regard that challenge as improper simply because it disrupts arrangements that favor them.
The phrase emerged from Croll’s experience with Year One Labs, an accelerator built around Lean Startup principles. One participating company, Localmind, wanted users to ask strangers location-specific questions. Tests suggested that people were surprisingly willing to answer, but too few users initiated questions. A debate followed over whether the team should seed the system with its own prompts so newcomers could experience its value.
Calling that intervention “just evil enough” helped expose the real issue: founders need to understand where experimentation ends and manipulation begins. Provoking useful behavior in order to test a legitimate hypothesis can be defensible; misleading customers in ways that harm them is not. The phrase encourages boldness, but it does not erase ethical responsibility.
Croll offers Behance as another illustration. When influential designers declined Scott Belsky’s invitation to join the young platform, Belsky asked to interview them instead. Those interviews generated valuable material, relationships, and credibility. He did not force adoption; he reframed the request so that a rejection could become a different form of participation.
Finding an Advantage Inside an Existing System
Subversive strategy starts with system awareness: seeing the full environment rather than accepting the task exactly as it has been presented. Croll describes three related capabilities:
System awareness: Identify the rules, incentives, assets, constraints, and gatekeepers that shape behavior.
Novelty: Combine those elements in a way the system’s designers did not anticipate.
Disagreeability: Be willing to question conventions that everyone else treats as fixed.
A classroom exercise from Stanford professor Tina Seelig captures the idea. Students received five dollars, several days to plan, and two hours to earn as much money as possible. Some teams ignored the tiny capital constraint and sold useful services, such as restaurant reservations. The winning team recognized that its most valuable asset was not the five dollars at all—it was presentation time in front of Stanford students. It sold that slot to a recruiter and earned $650.
The lesson is not simply to be clever. It is to step outside the stated frame and inventory what is actually available. A startup may possess an audience, proprietary data, unusual access, a regulatory position, a partner network, or credibility with a niche community. Any of these may prove more valuable than the obvious product feature.
Subversion in Distribution and Media
Netflix’s original DVD-by-mail business demonstrates how an existing system can be repurposed. When broadband access was too limited for reliable mass-market streaming, Netflix treated the US Postal Service as a network with enormous capacity but high latency. Physical delivery provided an on-demand entertainment experience before internet infrastructure could support the streaming model consumers use today.
Other examples focus on understanding a medium’s norms. Croll recounts a Bumble university campaign in which posters resembled official notices warning students about popular apps. By placing Bumble alongside established social platforms, the campaign borrowed the visual language of authority while signaling that Bumble belonged in the same cultural category.
Burger King repeatedly designed campaigns around the mechanics of particular platforms. One promotion offered customers a free Whopper when they ordered through its app near a McDonald’s location. Another revived attention for funnel cake fries by mysteriously liking years-old social posts before explaining the connection. The channel was not merely a container for the message; its location, interface, and social conventions were part of the idea.
Coinbase followed a similarly medium-aware approach with its bouncing QR code during the Super Bowl. Critics could dismiss the commercial as visually sparse, but it prompted millions of visits and briefly overwhelmed the company’s systems. Judged as conventional television storytelling, it looked incomplete. Judged as a mechanism for transferring viewers from television to a digital destination, it was difficult to ignore.
Product-Medium-Market Fit
Croll argues that founders should look beyond product-market fit and examine product-medium-market fit. Traditional marketing models were developed around paid, one-way broadcasting to large audiences. Contemporary channels are interactive, algorithmic, participatory, and governed by both formal rules and unwritten customs.
The medium therefore includes more than a platform name. It encompasses what users expect there, which actions the interface rewards, how material spreads, who can respond, and what behavior feels native. A message that succeeds in email may fail on TikTok; a campaign that works on a university wall may become unconvincing when reproduced as a polished digital advertisement.
Croll and Ross use a “Recon canvas” to scan opportunities across product, medium, and market. Rather than beginning with a stunt, a team examines each area from multiple perspectives, identifies its accepted defaults, and asks where behavior might be redirected.
Useful questions include:
What limitation could be reframed as an advantage?
Is the product being sold to the wrong buyer?
Which step in the value chain could be reassigned?
What privileged access, relationship, or asset can the company use responsibly?
Which channel has mechanics that competitors misunderstand?
What does everybody in the category do simply because everybody else does it?
The purpose is to generate multiple strategic candidates, then reject those that are unethical, illegal, impractical, or too easy to copy.
Reframing Weaknesses and Changing Buyers
One recurring tactic is to turn an apparent disadvantage into a clear promise. Salesforce’s early “no software” positioning transformed a smaller, web-based feature set into evidence of simplicity. Instead of apologizing for lacking the complexity of established enterprise software, the company attacked that complexity as the problem.
Another tactic is the “buyer upgrade”: finding a better customer for something that already exists. Melamine foam, initially associated with industrial uses such as insulation, became the material behind the Magic Eraser cleaning product. The underlying substance did not need to be reinvented; its value changed when it was matched with a more compelling job and audience.
Croll also mentions a drone company that approached bridge operators with inspection technology but found a more powerful buyer in insurers. Insurers could make an inspection a condition of coverage, giving them both motivation and influence. Likewise, a technical performance product may struggle when pitched solely to operations teams but become valuable to marketers once its effect on conversion and revenue is made visible.
These examples suggest that weak traction does not always indicate a defective product. Sometimes the company has chosen the wrong buyer, narrative, use case, or point of leverage.
Attention Spikes Versus Durable Growth
Croll distinguishes subversive strategy from isolated growth hacks. A memorable stunt can produce a “turbo boost”—a sudden burst of traffic, conversation, or sign-ups—but attention decays. If the campaign does not connect to retention, revenue, referrals, or a repeatable acquisition system, the spike may leave little behind.
The more consequential form of subversion changes the value chain. IKEA did not merely advertise furniture differently. It flat-packed products and transferred assembly to customers, reshaping manufacturing, storage, transportation, pricing, and the buying experience. Its advantage was embedded in how the business operated.
Founders should therefore ask what happens after a campaign succeeds. Can the company serve the resulting demand? Does the tactic communicate something true about the brand? Will newly acquired users encounter lasting value? Can part of the mechanism be repeated without losing trust?
A launch itself can demonstrate competence. For Lean Analytics, Croll and his collaborators prepared trackable messages for a group of influencers. The resulting performance data encouraged friendly competition, while the documented campaign reinforced the authors’ credibility in analytics. The distribution method supported the book’s subject rather than merely drawing attention to it.
Making Room for Disagreeable Ideas
Organizations often reward conscientious execution: follow the process, satisfy stakeholders, and avoid embarrassment. Those qualities are valuable, but they can also suppress ideas that initially sound irrational. Croll cites advertising thinker Rory Sutherland’s practice of reserving time for unconventional possibilities instead of spending every working hour on predictable optimizations.
That does not mean adopting every outrageous suggestion. It means separating idea generation from evaluation. A team can first ask what it would attempt if category norms were negotiable, then apply firm filters:
Does it create value beyond publicity?
Is it truthful enough to preserve informed customer choice?
Could it cause material harm or exploit a vulnerable group?
Does it violate laws, contracts, or platform rules?
Would the team remain comfortable if the method became public?
Can the attention connect to sustainable business growth?
“Just evil enough” is most useful as permission to inspect assumptions—not as permission to abandon judgment.
The Practical Takeaway for Founders
Croll’s framework shifts go-to-market work from campaign planning to strategic reconnaissance. Before copying another company’s referral loop or buying more ads, founders should map the system around their product. They can examine who controls access, how customers interpret the category, which channels shape behavior, and where value is created or surrendered.
The goal is a “zero-day marketing exploit”: an overlooked opportunity that works because competitors have not yet recognized it. Such openings rarely remain exclusive. Platforms change their terms, incumbents imitate successful tactics, and audiences become accustomed to yesterday’s novelty. The durable capability is therefore not a single trick, but the ability to keep observing systems and questioning their defaults.
A startup does not need to be reckless to be subversive. It needs a product worth discovering, a clear ethical boundary, and enough intellectual independence to see possibilities that conventional planning leaves out.
