Find Your Weirdos

Exit through the gift shop

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 07:00:00 GMT

When we started working on this project, summer was coming to a close in the Northern Hemisphere, and the first cool breezes of autumn were beginning to whisper around the days’ edges. Now, as I write these words, snow is gusting into drifts outside my window, blanketing bare tree branches in white, turning the landscape monochrome.

The changing of seasons is perhaps the Velveteen Rabbit² of metaphors — well-loved, but threadbare — but it remains a part of our vocabulary not only because of its universality, but because of how beautifully it captures the constancy of change, and the ephemerality of life.

When we described this project in our newsletter as “The Season of the Weirdo,” we did so very deliberately. There is power in embracing change and mutability³, and in beginning a project with seasonality in mind.

So often, in our businesses, we make commitments that fail to account for ebbs, flows, evolution, and adaptation. We set goals like “publish blog posts twice per week,” or build out content marketing calendars months in advance, hoping that by making things concrete and well-planned, we’ll ease the execution process and infuse it with consistency — and that that consistency will translate to a kind of trustworthiness among the people we’re trying to connect with.

There is power in structure, to be sure, and in routine and discipline. We’re not advocating for tossing these aside.

But working with the ebbs and flows of energy, working with focus and intent, allowing for seasons of rest and creative fallowness, are crucial. We need times of reflection, of processing feedback and listening for input. We need seasons where we listen to our weirdos for what wants to be addressed next, and imagine ways we might address those questions.

Before we retreat into our fallow season, we want to wrap this one up with a few reflections on how we’ve come to see the value of seasonality, and how that approach intersects with a weirdos-first strategy.

We’re big fans of gardening metaphors around these parts, but we also like to use art galleries as an analogy for digital communication strategy. If you’ve visited a larger museum, you’ll know that they typically house both long-term exhibits, where the permanent collections are displayed, and rotating exhibits that are time-limited. Over time, the permanent collection is what a museum may become best known for, while the rotating exhibits keep visitors coming back, and create a sense of urgency⁴. This interplay between two kinds of experiences — one of having one’s expectations met, and the other of novelty — is part of what makes a museum visit pleasurable.

With Find Your Weirdos, we’ve been aiming to create something akin to a short-term exhibit: a focused deep-dive into a particular theme, time-bound and perhaps a little offbeat, and certainly not trying to tell the whole story of who we are as a company⁵.

As you emerge through the doors of the exhibit, and perhaps envision yourself walking through the museum’s gift shop, this might be a meaningful time for both you and us to reflect on what we just experienced together — and how you might wish to apply it to your own work.

Here are three lenses through which you might like to view your Find Your Weirdos experience.

The Practical: we crafted this project to be as useful to you as possible. We hope you’ve not only been inspired by some of the examples we’ve shared, but that you’ve used the questions for reflection to prompt your own efforts to focus on the people who truly get you.

The Meta: Of course, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve likely picked up on the meta level of this project, which is that we created Find Your Weirdos in part to help us find our weirdos. How did we do? Do you feel more or less connected to us than you did before you found this project? How has it resonated with you? Have we given you something worth chewing on?

The Even-More-Meta: There’s a third layer we’d like to invite you to consider, though, as you weave your way through the gift cards, coffee table books, and artful home accessories, and that’s the question of how you might create your own seasonal exhibit.

You might notice, in fact, that many of the examples we’ve shared were relatively short-term: Impossible Burger’s focus on high-end restaurants morphed into a season of fast food, which gave way to international expansion, and so on; Moleskine hosted live events for their weirdos, which is about as timely a project as it gets.

The truth is, the seasons are always changing; it’s just a question of whether we’re changing with them, and adapting to the opportunities and challenges they present, or not. From where we stand, there’s power and freedom in choosing a focal point for right now, without attaching yourself too tightly to where you want to go. After all, your weirdos will have their own ideas, and you want to be responsive to them.

Business, like every human endeavor, is an adaptive process, a relational one, and an experience of constant flux as the environment around us shifts. At the heart of finding your weirdos is a commitment to relationship, to listening and learning, to adapting to new information.

Our hope for you is that the coming season brings you closer to your weirdos, offers you information and insights that enable you to adapt, and gives you opportunities to be generous.

Thank you for visiting. We hope we’ll see you again soon.

Questions to ask yourself:

If we give ourselves permission to change focus a season from now, what would we most love to share with our weirdos right now?
What themes or topics have we been exploring? How could we create a space to talk about them, if we set clear time constraints?
What kind of freedom would it give us to declare a niche focus, just for a short time?

Footnotes

¹A tip of the hat to the excellent 2010 film about Banksy that inspired this title.
²Pretty sure I had the paperback version of this rare edition, as a child — wish I’d held onto it.
³If you aren’t already an Octavia Butler fan, her Earthseed Trilogy is essential reading on this topic.
⁴The Basquiat exhibition might only be there for a few months; better snap up a ticket while you can.
⁵Don’t get us wrong: weirdos are close to our heart. But “Find Your Weirdos” is only one facet of how we help our clients.

Show, don’t tell

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 07:00:00 GMT

With all this talk about generosity, inclusivity, and infusing your work with authentic love, you might be wondering…

What if I just really need to get a message out to my customers? How does all this Weirdos-First stuff apply to a concrete marketing problem?

Sometimes it can feel like putting your weirdos front and center is kind of an oblique way to get what you need — after all, you’ve got something to sell, so shouldn’t you just get out there and start, you know, selling it?

We’re so accustomed to being advertised and sold to in a certain way, that those familiar approaches feel more efficient — or at least, more comfortable. When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail… and when you’ve spent your career surrounded by conventional marketing and outreach approaches, everything looks like an ad campaign, an influencer strategy, an email automation, and so on¹.

But to go back to the questions we opened with: the answers you seek lie within the questions. We know that sounds heady, but let’s break it down.

What if I just really need to get a message out to my customers?

This question embodies conventional marketing in a nutshell: “get a message out.” Nothing wrong with one-way communication once in a while — but where’s the relationship, the connection, the listening? What’s in it for your customers? And what might be possible if you turned the question around, like…

What if our customers were eager to hear from us?
What if every communication with our customers created genuine value²?
What if we looked at every “marketing project” as an opportunity to contribute more value than we capture³?

Now let’s address the second question:

How does all this Weirdos-First stuff apply to a concrete marketing problem?

For this one, I want to bring in a real-world project we’re involved with right now, for Heroku — the cloud platform that’s well-loved and respected by software developers, and with whom we’ve worked in the past on some very fun, weirdo-centric projects. Heroku asked us to help them with a tricky challenge that could well have been framed as a “get the message out” marketing problem, but together, we flipped the script and decided to lead with weirdness and generosity.

Heroku is a platform for coders — the kinds of coders who like to build, tinker, and experiment with new tools and tech. Coders are notoriously allergic to conventional marketing approaches; they’re discerning, practical, and hype-averse.

Of course, the folks at Heroku understand this implicitly, and part of why they’ve remained so popular is their effectiveness at connecting with their customers, and understanding their needs. But they’ve had a lingering communication challenge when it comes to one significant area of their business: their relationship to their parent company, Salesforce, and how its other product offerings can complement Heroku. Heroku’s research has shown that most developers who use their platform aren’t even aware that Heroku is part of the Salesforce ecosystem — or if they are aware, they don’t have a clear sense of how Salesforce could be useful to them.

No one at Heroku wants to take a hard-sell approach to this challenge; they aren’t trying to meet quotas. They just want to do a better job of making Salesforce’s tool set more visible, accessible, and meaningful to their particular weirdos: developers who, let’s face it, are usually more excited about tinkering with interesting coding tools than they are with the business-oriented processes that Salesforce is best known for facilitating.

We met with a team of Heroku’s developer advocates, and we quickly identified one of the core challenges of bridging Heroku and Salesforce in developers’ minds: while Heroku’s platform can be used for all kinds of projects, both professional and personal, Salesforce carries with it a set of business- and organization-oriented assumptions, which means that even though developers can access a free edition of the software for tinkering with, it’s rare for them to consider that possibility for a personal project; they tend to associate Salesforce with “work,” whereas Heroku can be for both “work” and “play.”

So we set out to imagine how one might make something creative, playful, and maybe even (dare we hope) cool, using both Salesforce and Heroku — something Heroku devs could wrap their heads around quickly, play around with, and use to make something they would genuinely enjoy.

Together, our two teams started musing on what aspects of Salesforce might be most appealing and intriguing to Heroku devs. How might we create something generous and playful that would invite developers in, and create space for them to experiment with Salesforce tools, without it feeling too much like work?

We considered: at its best, Salesforce is a tool for better understanding people, by documenting their interests and habits We started to imagine a community of developers trying to get to know each other better. What interests and habits would devs be interested in sharing with friends? What things might they be interested in tracking about their own friends? How might we do that in a lightweight way, that doesn’t smack of setting up yet another social network?

Another thing: Salesforce has been around a long time. It doesn’t have the particular sparkle of a new, cutting-edge thing. But then, newness isn’t the only path to coolness.

Then it struck us: what if we built something a little retro, but decidedly personal — something that would allow Heroku devs to celebrate their weirdness, share their uniqueness, and experiment with Salesforce tools in a way that’s lightweight and fun?

What we landed on is something we’re calling the Wicked CoolKit. It’s still a work-in-progress, so we can’t share a link yet⁴. But it’s an open source toolkit containing a set of playful applications of Heroku + Salesforce technology, designed for Heroku devs to both try out some fresh code, and get a feel for how Salesforce can support more meaningful interactions between real people.

The Wicked CoolKit allows you to generate a digital “trading card,” featuring a profile picture, links, skills, and a selection of stickers that reflect your talents and interests; a hit counter (that, true to old-school form, increases its count with a simple page refresh); and a webring, so developers can connect up a group of friends’ websites.

The through-lines are personality, humanity, connection, simplicity, and a sense of play: all qualities that Heroku embodies, both internally and in its developer community.

And sure, they could’ve chosen to tell their customers that — to put out all kinds of marketing materials explaining benefits, dangling incentives, and so on. But instead, they’re choosing to show, and invite their customers in.

The difference may feel subtle, but in practice it’s stark: by making it easy for customers to try the product for themselves, and come to their own conclusions, you demonstrate confidence in your own product, and trust in your weirdos’ judgment. By designing with your weirdos in mind, you help them feel seen, respected, and valued. And by acknowledging the perceptions (and misperceptions) they might hold of your brand, you show them that you’re comfortable with who you are, and self-aware enough to be trustworthy.

Instead of pushing a message, you’re extending an invitation -- which means that instead of having to pitch your value, you can let people discover your brilliance for themselves. It doesn’t get much more concrete than that.

Questions to ask yourself:

Instead of just talking about ourselves, how could we invite people into the experience of working with our products -- and let them see for themselves?
How could we design that experience in a way that’s tailored to how our weirdos see themselves?
What are some of the perceptions our company struggles to overcome? How might we work with those perceptions rather than against them?

Footnotes

¹To be clear: all of these tactics are perfectly capable of supporting a weirdos-focused strategy! Finding your weirdos is, as we say in the coding world, tool-agnostic.
²What we mean by this: something they can use beyond their relationship with you, that demands no additional transactional investment from them.

What we don’t mean by this: purely transactional incentives.
³Hat tip: Tim O’Reilly.
⁴Right now, we’re thinking it’ll be out in January 2021 — and we'll update this article when it launches.

Weird is practical

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 07:00:00 GMT

On the surface, focusing on your fellow weirdos can seem like a risk only well-resourced organizations can afford to take. When you look at companies like LEGO, Moleskine, and Impossible Burger, you may be equal parts inspired and left feeling like...well sure, they can do that. But what about those of us who don’t have deep-pocketed investors and a runway that goes for miles?

Let’s talk about that.

If you’re responsible for the health and growth of your organization, not knowing how to reach your customers is extremely painful. Your business has real, predictable expenses. When you’re not confident in your ability to reach your customers, revenue feels unpredictable and out of your control.

You may have tried to get specific about your customer, even convincing yourself that you’re speaking to their specific problems and needs. But in the back of your mind, you know you’re not.

You may have a good guess about who your customer is, but you’re scared to commit to serving them to the potential exclusion of others. (And for good reason: what if you’re wrong?) So you speak to them in half-hearted ways, trying to make sure your messaging applies to them and also to anyone else who might be listening.

Or you might not be scared to commit. You may have committed to speaking to a specific customer several times. But then you don’t find people who fit your specific description. Or at least not fast enough to meet your business’ revenue needs. So you revert back to being vague and general when you can no longer stomach the risk of leaving out other potential customers.

Or maybe you’ve given up on being specific about who your customer is, hoping that clever copy, nice visuals, and/or tried-and-true sales language will make up for it.

And here’s what’s even more likely than any of these individual scenarios: if you’re not clear on who your customers are and how to reach them effectively, you end up cycling through all of these phases, endlessly.

If that’s you, ugh, it’s hard. It sucks. I’m sorry. But this is a problem that’s common to all of us, at some point or another. Take a deep breath. It’s okay. And let’s work on changing it.

How finding your weirdos can lead you down the path of truly knowing your customers, maybe for the first time

Step one: Accept the truth.

Be gentle with yourself. Be kind. And be honest.

Do you know who your customers are? Do you know what their biggest problems are in their lives right now? Do you have any indication of what keeps them up at night, what niggles in the backs of their minds, or what gets them excited to wake up in the morning? Do you know the specific ways in which they find you? Do you know what they think about you, in comparison to the other options they have? Do you have any idea what you’re not offering, that they wish they could pay you for?

No? You’re in good company. But until you accept that you don’t know the answers to these questions, you will never learn them.

Step two: Accept that this information is knowable.

The Internet has given us all access to potentially an entire world of customers. And you know what’s bad about that? It’s a whole world. It can be overwhelming, and it can feel impossible to truly know even one tiny slice of that world.

And sometimes this can lead us to (consciously or unconsciously) decide, “Oh well. Since the Internet is so big, maybe if I just put something out there, I don’t really need to know. Something is bound to find its way to someone, somewhere.”

And maybe that’s true. But it’s also an incredibly Sisyphean way to work. Without specific knowledge about your customer, you’re signing yourself up for pushing that boulder up that hill, day after day after day.

You can know your customer. And maybe that hill will still be there, but it’s going to be a lot less steep. And at some point, you’re going to be pushing downhill instead of up.

Step three: Begin on the path to knowing.

Commit to knowing your customer better in a month than you do today, better in six months than you do in two months, better in two years than you will in a year.

It’s going to take some time. But you can start by knowing just a little, and then adapt as you know a little more, and a little more, and a little more.

Break it down quarter by quarter. When we work with our clients on weird web projects designed to reach their fellow weirdos, we tend to break it down into quarters. While it can feel like a risk to say “These are our weirdos! We’re fully committing to them For Life,” it’s no risk at all to say, “We think these might be our weirdos. We’re fully committing to them for the next three months.”
Choose a set of weirdos to focus on. Weirdos aren’t found in “people who like our products.” That’s not a weirdo, that’s a customer. Weirdos are “people who geek out on something we also geek out on...and hey our product or service can help them with that.” Weirdos geek out about their weird thing even (and especially) when they’re not on the clock. What weirdos are relevant to what you put out in the world? Which one would you like to focus on reaching over the next three months?
Choose a set of outposts to focus on. Where are your weirdos gathering online? How can you show up persistently and generously there? How can you talk to specific, individual customers, and find out what’s on their minds and hearts? Not forever. Just over the next three months.
Create a time-specific (and weirdo-specific) offer. Over the next three months, what can you offer to these specific weirdos that is in alignment with their weirdness? What product or service will feel like a gift to them, even after they buy it?
Create a generous resource for your weirdos. What can you create for your weirdos that helps them on their weirdo path? Something that everyone can participate in, even if they don’t buy from you?
How do you connect all of these things together, so that when you’re doing one thing, you’re doing all the things? This is next-level judo skills, but if this seems like a lot, it doesn’t have to be. The trick is alignment. Align meeting your customers needs with helping them be more of who they want to be. Align what you need with what you want to become. Align your work with your play. Align your generosity with your invitation to go deeper.

If you’d like help, reach out to us at &yet. We help businesses big and small figure this stuff out (and make it happen). We’re very into making the world a weirder, kinder place, where all of us get our needs met. Including you.

Questions to ask yourself:

What does our team naturally geek out about, that’s evident in our products or services?
Where do our niche interests intersect with our customers’?
What do our products help our customers be awesome at? (Hat tip: Kathy Sierra.)
What kind of resource could we create over the next quarter to support them in their quest for awesomeness?

A generous business

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 07:00:00 GMT

“Create more value than you capture.” –Tim O'Reilly

As we’ve been thinking about weirdos, what they want and where they gather, I’ve been seeing a recurring story about generosity. For individuals, it’s sharing all that wonderful weirdness that makes you you and experiencing the accompanying joys and challenges alongside others who get you.

And we’ve been encouraging companies to take part in this, too. Seeing your weirdos, valuing them, and inviting them to participate with you feels like a generous way to connect them with your product or service. And we’ve shown how it works and works and works. But is it still generous when “it works” means people ultimately bought what you were selling? Can you run a generous for-profit business?

At its core, a generous company would give more than is expected of it, with intention, to its employees, customers, industry, and community. Time and money immediately come to mind, but if anything, I hope this series has shown there’s so much to be generous with like our presence, passions, creativity, and influence.

But often it does come down to money, so let’s talk about that.

Financial growth and success for a business can feel the opposite of generous. It can feel difficult, even greedy to charge for the true value of your work, especially the farther that number rises above costs. I’ve been there for sure. But I think this feeling hinges on the idea that generosity requires giving things away.

Generosity is not a one way transaction, and the receiver of your gifts is just as active a participant.

One of the first stories of generosity I remember learning is the childhood classic The Giving Tree (which turns out is more of a cautionary tale¹). In the story, a tree finds joy in giving what she has to her favorite boy: her shade for rest and trunk to climb, apples to sell, and branches to build. As the boy ages, his needs grow larger and (spoiler alert) the tree gives so much by the end she is no longer a tree.

It’s a story about giving but also about taking. A story about boundaries, limits, and sustainability.

There’s a lot that companies give away for free, especially in the tech industry. Think about how much software you can use without payment, despite millions of dollars invested. It can seem generous. But the real truth is businesses must make money to continue. We’ve seen ourselves become the product. Our data is sold and our attention is monetized.

People are tired of it. Companies need to earn their customers’ trust and attention back. Finding your weirdos is an approach to doing that difficult work and earning their business: seeing people as they are and where they are, valuing their unique passions, and asking them to contribute in achieving your shared goals. While so many companies take, it is generous to reexamine what and how you give (and the impact that will have on the receiver).

As &yet CFO and all around wise person Mark Brault says, “Business is about people. People do the work and people buy the end product.” And our CEO Sarah Avenir added a hard but true caveat that businesses “need profit to care for people.”²

A generous company takes care of the people inside it and the work they do by finding, valuing, and connecting with the weirdos who not only need what you’re offering, but celebrate in buying it.

Questions to ask yourself:

Are there ways we grow or make money at the expense of our employees, customers, or community?
What boundaries can we hold true to and how can we better respect the boundaries of the people we care for?
What can we do to make what we offer and receive more equitable?
In what ways can we shift our focal point of centering our business to multiple focal points where our we contribute within a thriving system?

The quiet giant: how crafters and DIY-ers made Pinterest bigger than Twitter

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Throughout this series, we’ve been sharing insights and case studies that highlight what we mean by weirdos, why they matter, and how they can transform your business for the better. In the entry that follows, we took a deep dive into the critical role crafters and DIY enthusiasts played in Pinterest’s unprecedented growth rate, and how the company connected with those communities.

But based on news that broke November 30 — a group of Pinterest shareholders are suing the company and its board over “rampant” gender and race discrimination — it’s clear that external efforts to create genuine connection are not enough when you do not listen to, respect, and honor your own employees.

For more on how to keep your “weirdos” initiatives from excluding or harming others, see Come one, come all.

...

When social media companies are in the news, there are a few platforms that dominate the discussion: Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram — and you’d be forgiven for assuming that that’s because they’re the apps used by the greatest number of people. Meanwhile, though, there’s one social media company that has 25% more monthly active users than Twitter¹, grossed over $1 billion in revenue last year, and refers to itself as “the last positive corner of the internet”, but that’s rarely mentioned in the same breath as the aforementioned platforms: Pinterest.

Now, to be sure, Pinterest is a little different than its peers: instead of focusing on user-generated content, it’s a curation tool — more of a platform for collecting things that interest you than a soapbox for amplifying your voice and perspective. And as such, the appeal of following someone on Pinterest is all about appreciating their tastes: What art do they love? What recipes appeal to them? How do they decorate their home? What woodworking projects are on their list?

Pinterest’s simplicity of purpose — its focus on being a source of inspiration, discovery, and visual research — is also its strength from a business standpoint: it’s an incredibly effective advertising platform, as well as a popular tool for researching purchases.

If Pinterest is so popular, then, and earning these kinds of revenues, why doesn’t it get the same kind of attention in the tech and business media as Twitter? I have a pet theory that it’s because tech and business reporters spend a lot more time on Twitter than they do on Pinterest — after all, Twitter is where breaking news lives — and as such, their personal biases are a factor.

Now, that’s not an indictment of the reporters: we all have our biases, and they tend to skew in the direction of stuff we find interesting. Pinterest can be used for all kinds of interests, but if you look at the most popular categories on Pinterest², you might notice a few recurring themes.

At the risk of over-generalizing, most people use Pinterest to explore personal pursuits, not so much work- or business-related ones. The platform’s most popular categories are generally things we do in our leisure time. And this insight is something that helped the company find its footing in the early days.

Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann has said it was his childhood passion for collecting that sparked the idea for Pinterest in the first place: “Collecting tells a lot about who you are,” he told one reporter. So when he and his co-founders set out to build a user base for their product after its 2010 launch, they expected the idea of “pinning” to resonate widely. But it didn’t take off right away. (Silbermann says that in the early days, he knew all five hundred users personally.) In fact, it wasn’t until they found the crafting community that Pinterest found its weirdos.

In 2010, blogging was still in its heyday, and crafters, DIY-ers, and home decor fiends were some of the most avid bloggers on the internet — as well as being communities of people who tended to gather in real life to learn from each other, attend maker fairs, and simply socialize. There were certainly yarn companies, embroidery pattern designers, and stencil makers who were plugged into that community, but it generally wasn’t seen as a goldmine for anything beyond selling crafting materials.

Enter Pinterest, whose founders created a brilliant blogger outreach campaign³ that launched in May 2010 to resounding success. The initiative is amazingly low-tech in retrospect⁴, but it gave Pinterest access to a community of people who loved collecting — and visuals — as much as Silbermann and his co-founder (and Pinterest’s chief design and creative officer) Evan Sharp did. Crafters and DIY design aficionados immediately got Pinterest at a gut level: its functionality was not dissimilar to the mood boards and inspiration folders they were accustomed to, but it added new layers of simplicity, elegant interface design, and of course, all the additional layers that were possible when they shifted to creating their “pinboards” online, and with friends.

The “Pin it Forward” campaign catapulted Pinterest from a modest 3,000 users (their total user base before the campaign began) to millions of daily active users just one year later. And they did it by leveraging networks of very specific weirdos: the ones who were already combing through design blogs for bathroom tile inspiration, keeping the conversations hopping on the Ravelry boards, or writing 2,000 words on the trials and tribulations of whipping up the perfect meringue.

Notably, Pinterest’s founders didn’t come from these crafting or DIY communities; they found their weirdos by tuning in to the early users who really got the power of pinning, and listening carefully to what they wanted from the platform. Crafters and DIY-ers shared Silbermann’s belief that collecting says something about who you are, and they were keen on sharing ideas and projects with their communities. Not only that, but makers were already highly networked, both online and off, and so once they found Pinterest, the platform’s user base grew by leaps and bounds — and then network effects took care of the rest.

By 2013 — just three years after their Pin it Forward campaign first launched — Pinterest was boasting 50 million monthly active users and a valuation of $3.8 billion, and many tech media commentators appeared utterly shocked by that dollar figure. But for those of us who were acquainted with the scale, passion, and purchasing power of Pinterest’s core user base, those numbers came as no surprise⁵. And several years on, those critics may be eating their words, given the company’s stock has risen 250% in 2020 alone.

As it turns out, there are a whole lot of weirdos out there in search of inspiration, and of self-expression through collecting. People describe the experience of using Pinterest as a quiet, creative escape from the anxiety, urgency, and business of everyday life, which is certainly an experience most of us are craving these days. And of course, Pinterest also allows us to find our weirdos: the pinners who are seriously into contemporary British art, lakeside cottages, handmade ceramics, sewing patterns, children’s book art, Japanese menswear, or just straight-up color. For anyone who enjoys collecting visuals, clipping recipes, or finding just the right LEGO cake decorating tutorial, Pinterest is a weirdo treasure trove that just keeps growing.

The company’s co-founders may have had to experiment a bit at the outset to find the weirdos who understood what Pinterest made possible, but once the craft community was invited in, they made the place their own, and brought their friends. What’s perhaps most remarkable is that despite the vagaries of internet trends and the demands of managing a massive social media platform, a decade later they’re still here — and their numbers are still growing.

In a way, perhaps, pinners are Pinterest’s tinkerers, building things that matter to them on Pinterest’s platform. But it seems to us that Pinterest’s real magic lies in the way it enables people to share interests without the pressure to have something to say about them — to quietly sift through a person’s collection of paper-based DIY projects, with no status updates or activity stream to make us feel like we ought to be doing something.

What a joyful relief, to “watch somebody love something” and explore their collections. And what a pleasant surprise to discover that there are, in fact, a third of a billion people quietly bonding over shared sources of inspiration — and communing busily but calmly in a corner of the internet where they can focus not on “what’s new” or “who’s hot,” but rather, on the things they’re seriously into.

Questions to ask yourself:

Of the people our company serves, who are the “community hubs”? Who is gathering people around common interests?
How might we make it easier for people to gather “quietly” around us — to participate and share without feeling pressure to perform, or generate more content?
What opportunities do we have to facilitate people exploring their own niche interests, and finding inspiration, in ways that align with our business goals?

Footnotes

¹In Q3 of 2020, Twitter reported 353 million monthly active users (source); Pinterest had 442 million (source).
²There’s a fascinating round-up of trending topics in this recent article from Pinterest’s marketing team, but recurring themes include food, home, style, beauty, health, travel, and family. In sum, what you might broadly refer to as “lifestyle” topics.
³You can see one example of how the campaign worked here, in SF Girl by Bay’s archive.
⁴Here’s how it worked: Pinterest contacted a slew of craft/DIY bloggers, invited them to create their own pinboards (via private beta invitations), and then invite their readers to do the same via exclusive invites.

They ran the same campaign again in the UK in 2013.
⁵Full disclosure: I wrote a critical opinion piece at the time about the gender bias I believed was at play — and I admit to feeling rather vindicated by how much growth Pinterest has seen in the years since.

There and back again

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 07:00:00 GMT

By Guan Un, guest contributor

When I heard about &yet’s idea for Season of the Weirdo, my first thought was “Finally! A season of my very own.” That was closely followed by my second thought: that for me, being a weirdo is about love.

Here’s why:

“Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.” –Don Miller, Blue Like Jazz¹

For me, that encapsulates what a weirdo is, at their best: someone who loves something deeply, and wants to bring other people to understand something of that love.

I’m not talking about woo-woo, Meg Ryan movie, Princess Bride love. But love as a catch-all word for a careful attention to the craft, process, detail and history that make up the hobby/vocation/sport/interest/product that is the object of that love.

In this case, I think love helps us distinguishes that sort of deep-diving, all-encompassing interest from unhealthy obsession (see footnote below), and the gatekeeping and toxicity that can go along with it.

But why? Why do we even want to hear from weirdos who love something?

Firstly, when we watch someone who loves something, it compels us to watch. In a world where we are bombarded by insincere pitches tainted by commercialism, someone doing something for the love of it is separated by their intention and focus. I often think of this from John Gruber of Daring Fireball: “I never tire of listening to obsessive perfectionists, no matter the topic.”²

The video link that accompanies that Gruber quote is about Anthony Mangieri, who bought an oven from Italy for his pizza shop, decided it wasn’t good enough, ripped it out and rebuilt his own oven by hand. His pizza shop offers four pizzas, all variants of cheese, fresh tomato, basil, and tomato sauce. (One can only imagine the look of consternation if you asked him for pineapple on your pizza.) In other words, he’s a pizza weirdo.

When we see someone like that, our first question might be “Why?” What makes anyone pay such particular attention to one thing? But that question also draws us to weirdos. Sometimes I wonder if Bilbo Baggins is the patron saint of weirdos—like Bilbo, they’ve ventured out from their comfortable surroundings, returned from far off lands, and while some who will think they’re odd, others who will want to hear the stories of where they’ve been, and what they’ve brought back.

Secondly, not only do we want to watch weirdos, we want to hear from them because they can help us focus our attention on the details that matter.

One of my YouTube happy places is this: watching a person make a shot of coffee on YouTube for seven straight minutes. Why? Because that person is James Hoffmann, a former World Barista Champion³ and a coffee weirdo, if ever I saw one.

There is an aesthetic pleasure to both the near-alchemical process of making coffee—and Hoffmann’s soothing British accent—but as I’m watching I’m also asking “How?” How is he making coffee in a way that I can learn how to improve my shots at home?

One of the things I love about the world is that when you dig into almost any subject, you start to see the once-invisible details of that subject emerge. Where once you saw an overarching topic (like coffee), you start to understand there are subsets of that topic (espressos, pourovers, latte art), and each of those is like a fractal: with details in their details.

However, this sort of deep-dive can be overwhelming, as anyone who has gone down an internet search wormhole knows. But because a weirdo has been through this process, they can help you to sort the wheat from the chaff; they can help you to identify the details that actually matter, from the details that might be more superficial. If you are the weirdo who knows more than your customers, how can you help them discern the details, and reduce their overwhelm?

Thirdly, and maybe most importantly, a weirdo’s love can show someone how to love something. As in the quote from Miller: “it is as if they are showing you the way.”

How can you show someone else to get there—how to be a weirdo too? To draw out the Bilbo analogy—how can you give them the map of where you’ve been? How can you show them how to learn to take the first steps for themselves, the best beginner’s equipment for the trip, and just what adventures lie in store from acquiring a love of their own?

Questions to ask yourself:

Who are the YouTube weirdos in our area of interest?
What details emerge as one digs deeper into the topic? How can we make understanding these details easier?
How can we provide a map to becoming an expert?

Footnotes

¹It’s a book about spirituality and Christianity, which I know won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But that aside, it is a lovely example of what I’m saying—it’s an outsider’s guide to something that’s often inside ball, about how and why he’s learned to love it again. Plus Miller as a guide is engaging and funny, which never hurts.
²I do want to add here that while obsession is a popular word to use here, I prefer to steer away from it for some of the above reasons, and the way it can dilute understanding of a disorder like OCD. Similarly, perfectionism and the way that unrealistic ideal can trickle down into unhealthy work and life practices.
³What? You didn’t even know there was a World Barista Championship? For a compelling documentary about it—and the weirdos who train for it, I recommend Barista.

One of my favourite sub-genres is documentaries about weirdos like Barista; Wordplay—about crosswords and crossword weirdodes; and Somm—about weirdos training for the Master Sommelier exam. The structure of these docos echo what I’m trying to say—the viewer moves through why?—why would someone spend so much time on X?; learns something about how X is done, and by the end, can’t help gaining more appreciation—and love of it—for themselves.

Guan Un is a writer and programmer and sentence weirdo based in Sydney, Australia. He writes a free fortnightly newsletter about beautiful sentences (ed. note: it’s one of our favourite reads), and can be found on Twitter at @thisisguan.

What does this mean?!

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 07:00:00 GMT

The proverbial lunchroom

Conferences have a way of feeling a lot like the first day of middle school. You register, look at the schedule (secretly geek out about some of the cool things you’ll be learning), pick out what you’re going to wear the first day, pack your favorite pen, and thennnnn… you show up.

Maybe you know some people, but you’re not sure if they’ll remember you, so you decide to avoid eye contact just to be safe. Maybe you don’t know anyone, and you have to enter the proverbial lunchroom and try to figure out which table to sit at. Better go sit at the empty table, and try not to look too awkwardly hopeful that someone, anyone, will come sit with you.

Let’s make it weird

If you know much about &yet, you know we have a history of creating conferences that are very weird. If you don’t know much about &yet, HI WELCOME WE’RE GLAD YOU’RE HERE WE LIKE WEIRD THINGS DO YOU LIKE WEIRD THINGS LET’S BE FRIENDS. Just kidding. Kind of.

We encourage you to read more about us and our weird conferences here and here and here and here. (Let’s totally be friends too.)

Baaaaack to the lunchroom. When &yet went about creating a vision for &yetConf in 2015, the ideas were big: It was to be a conference about the intersections of technology with humanity, meaning and ethics for people who believe the world should be better and are determined to make it so.

It was clear that this could not be accomplished in a lunchroom.

Ditching the lunchroom

In order to effectively accomplish the vision of the conference, we needed to abandon the idea that a group of people showing up in a room cold, hearing some talks, then leaving at the end of the week, could promote the level of depth, connection, and discussion that was necessary—no matter how incredible the group of people were. &yetConf needed to be truly immersive.

This is what we mean by immersive

The event itself was a presentation—a performance, an adventure. We thought of the conference as a transformative art form beginning with a dramatic and mysterious buildup prior to the event. Our team collaborated with novelist and playwright Mike Speegle to create:

9 episodes of an original choose-your-own-adventure story over text messages (beginning weeks before the conference)
An original play embedded in the conference
Original Conference Soundtrack performed live by Ben Michel and His Post-Post-Apocalyptic All-Stars
Philosophically reflective music and spoken word performances by numerous guest artists
Visual immersion in a new world of art commissioned for this moment by local artists

Say what?

Yes. That did say “choose-your-own-adventure story over text messages”. Imagine signing up for a conference…that’s also a performance…and in the weeks prior to the conference, you start to receive mysterious messages. There are plots to figure out, multiple characters to meet, and decisions to be made. Before you even arrive to the conference, you are a vital part of the narrative. This, my friend, is Textcapades.

The underlying principle is something &yet learned in large part from Paul Campbell and Eamon Leonard. Their three-event Ireland trilogy, Funconf, was shrouded in mystery but included random things like castles, helicopters, islands, chartered trains, and DeLoreans (all on a reasonably affordable conference and three-night lodging price, no less!) By creating one-of-a-kind shared experiences, the playing field was leveled. Everyone had something in common and something to talk about.

Back to the lunchroom…but not.

We loved what Funconf did at the event and wanted to use creative technology to infuse that same spirit into the pre-event experience.

While Textcapades served numerous purposes—it introduced a meaningful narrative that was woven throughout the conference, it sorted participants stealthily into groups of facilitated activities based on their choices—one of its side effects was that it introduced some universal weirdness for people to bond over and made people feel like they were not walking cold into a middle school lunchroom, but that they were walking into a universe in which they already existed and their choices mattered.

Textcapades brought everyone to the conference with a shared experience—some weirdness to bond over. Instead of starting the conference with the dreaded “Hey…can I sit with you?” It was: “Did you get that message about the such-and-such?” “Oh, look! Another message is coming through right now!” (which did happen throughout the conference) “WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?” And the adventure continued from there, comrades in tow.

Questions to ask yourself:

How could we infuse our earliest communications with our community with a little more weirdness?
Are there opportunities for us to begin learning about some of their preferences, interests, and leanings in playful ways?
How might we help our community members feel like when they first “walk on campus”, they already know a couple of people, and have a sense of what to expect?
What unexpected, tools could we use to connect with our community in ways that feel generous and low pressure — and that could give them something unusual to discuss amongst themselves?

Come one, come all!

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 07:00:00 GMT

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one!’” –C.S. Lewis

When I was a kid, I wanted to get into comic books. This was in the time before the internet was part of our lives the way it is now, so that meant about the only way to really dip my toe in the water was to actually go into a comic book store. So one day, I did just that! I ducked into a comic book store and started to look around. The intimidation was instant. There were so many shelves and bins and I was overwhelmed with knowing where to start.

“Can I help you find something?” a teenaged employee asked.

“Uh, I don’t know. I’m just looking. Is there somewhere that would be a good place to start if I don’t know what I like yet?”

“Listen, maybe you should go check out the regular bookstore. This isn’t really girl stuff, you know?”

I looked around. Yep. Definitely the only female in there aside from Wonder Woman and her other two-dimensional pals.

Message received. I apparently was the wrong type of person to fit in as a comic book weirdo¹. I felt like an idiot. Ouch. I left and never looked back.

“You too? I thought I was the only one!”

Years ago a friend gave me a card with that quote (from C.S. Lewis, see above) on the front and I loved it so much that it lived in a frame on my wall for years. I love that feeling that it conveys. The powerful spark of connection where you maybe least expected it. In an instant you go from the shame of feeling like an outsider to the elation of feeling known.

The need for connection is wired into the core of who we are as a species. We deeply need to feel seen and accepted. This is why finding our weirdos is such a powerful thing.

None of us fits perfectly inside a box. We all have idiosyncrasies, quirky interests and experiences that shape our identity. When we recognize evidence of these in others, it’s like a lightbulb lights up in our hearts: “Yes! They get it!” And seeing a bit of ourselves in someone else makes us feel more seen too.

This is how you make your weirdos feel. Seeing you reflect their own interests back at them makes them feel seen. They feel like they can connect with you — maybe even in a way they didn’t know they could. This is where your weirdos transcend just being consumers of your marketing materials and start on their journey towards being one of your hype people.

Customer and business connected: done and done, right? Marketing mission complete. But wait, what if something gets in the way of that budding relationship? What if this would-be weirdo is browsing your site, riding high on that “OMG-these-people-get-me” wave… and something stops them in their tracks, just like that teenaged gatekeeper did to me in the comic shop?

What if something about your messaging tells them that their feelings aren’t reciprocated? It probably won’t be something as blatant as my “no girls allowed” experience. It might be a subtle snub. Maybe in the interest of trying to seem exclusive and elite, you just come across as excluding and pretentious? Maybe you don’t make clothing their size. Maybe you have a membership requirement that they’ll never be able to meet. Maybe they realize that none of the people on your site look like them. Or the language on your site is specific to a different gender. It might be an issue that you aren’t even remotely aware of², but for them it feels like a hurdle, or worse, a wall.

Now they are alone on the outside again, struggling to get in. And somehow that feels worse, because now it feels like a personal rejection.

Being weird is enough

Weirdos are a gift to your company; they shouldn’t feel like they have to prove their coolness or fit into a certain mold to join your circle. A “weirdo” is defined by their interest, not by their demographics. They should feel accepted for who they are, as they are.

Enthusiasm for the weird thing that connects you should be the only requirement to be your weirdo. That is what’s central. Everything else is just details.

I realize it’s not a perfect world, and there may be limits to how well you can accommodate every variable that could be a barrier, but you should definitely consider how you can better accommodate the ones you can.

Fostering Inclusion

Being “inclusive” is a very buzzy concept right now. The problem is, many companies see it as an item to check off on a PR/marketing to-do list. A couple of generic “we love everyone” social media posts, and they feel like they’ve done their duty and moved on. But being inclusive is an ongoing process, not a destination. You never get to “arrive” at inclusiveness. It’s something you have to internalize to your core and let guide you. It’s an active pursuit.

Inclusivity isn’t just passive acceptance. It’s actively taking stock of who you are in the world and breaking down any barriers you may have built. “Finding your weirdos” is not about building walls to keep “others” out, it’s about breaking them down and inviting anyone who wants to join you in.

The sign on your door to the world isn’t “[Our type of] Weirdos only” — it’s “You too? Come on in!”

So what are some considerations we can make so that we maximize the feeling of welcome that we exude to our potential weirdos?

Listen. The most important thing you can do is listen. Listen to your customers, your weirdos, what’s circulating on social media. If someone mentions something that seems like it could be excluding, respect that and work to change it.
Ask. Don’t just wait for people to come to you. Ask your audience what you could be doing to make them feel more welcome.
Check your representations. What are ways you could show your weirdos that they are welcome as they are?
- In your visual and written messaging, are you being inclusive of…
  - Races and ethnicities
  - Body types³
  - Family structures
  - Genders (including non-binary)⁴
  - LGBTQIA+ folks
  - Religions and belief systems
  - Abilities
  - Forms of neurodiversity
  - Ages
Show up for their causes.⁵ If there is an issue that is affecting some of your weirdos, be vocal in your support of them. Ask them what you can do to help.

Diversities are just the beautiful wrapping paper weirdos come in

Stop boxing your weirdos in with demographics and traditional norms, and start celebrating them for who they are: beautiful humans who love the same weird things you do.

Imagine if when I’d walked into that comic book store, instead of telling me that I comics weren’t for girls like me, someone had shown me around — maybe asked me a bit about myself and shared a few suggestions based on my answers? I’d probably would have left that day with a bag full of exciting reading material. And I would definitely have come back for more.

Questions to ask yourself:

What sort of demographics does our current presence in the world represent? How could we be more inclusive and diverse? (Here are some fun examples of how some big companies have addressed this.)
What can we do to make our presence in the world a more welcoming one?
How can we communicate, implicitly or explicitly, that anyone who wants to come along for the ride is welcome and safe?

Footnotes

¹Don’t worry. I certainly don’t feel that way anymore. And I have a neat little collection of comics and graphic novels on my shelf to prove it.
²For example, have you ever considered how your website or marketing visuals might look to someone who is colorblind?
³Chromat’s campaigns are a great example of body type and ability inclusivity.
⁴The beauty industry is historically an extremely gendered space, but lots of brands are changing the way they approach that. After all, everyone has a face right?
⁵There are lots of special days, weeks and months chosen to raise awareness for many diversity related causes each year. Consider ways you might acknowledge events like Black History Month or LGBT Pride Month.

Not just any notebook

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Conventional business wisdom tells us that commoditization is something every business owner ought to fear and resist. If your product or service becomes commoditized, most experts would tell you to expect an inevitable decline in profit margins, increased competition, and lower prestige.

How, then, to explain the longevity, year-over-year growth, and seemingly evergreen appeal of the Moleskine notebook?

On its surface, a notebook is a notebook is a notebook: any scratchpad might do, really, if you need to jot something down, or sketch out an idea. But no other notebook brand comes even close to the mind- and market share Moleskine commands — especially among a certain subset of the population.

Take, for instance, the “interesting people¹” profiled in Claudia Dawson’s is-it-a-style-column-or-a-productivity-geek-out newsletter, “What’s in my bag?”: of the five recent entries that mention a notebook, three of them carry a Moleskine journal or planner in their bag, and a fourth (Team Human author Douglas Rushkoff) offers an apologetic note² about why he doesn’t use a Moleskine. (The fifth states a preference for cheap, lightweight notebooks that can be purchased for two or three dollars.)

Admittedly, that’s a highly unscientific sample, but there’s something about the way Moleskine has captured the imagination, and the patronage, of people who still write things down on paper despite the ubiquity of digital alternatives.

Moleskine appears not to be concerned in the least about competing with other notebook brands. Instead, they’re focused on the thing their notebooks make possible for the people who use them — and they’ve determined that that thing is something far less tangible than “writing something down.”

If we imagine a Maslow’s hierarchy of notebook needs, the base layer would be something like, “Paper.” The middle layers might contain things like portability, paper quality, and the ability to physically record writing and drawing. But Moleskine’s all about the top of the pyramid, and there are three things that hover up there:

Space to think - the notebook as thinking tool, container for nascent ideas and practice runs
Craft - the notebook as physical embodiment of tactile, thoughtfully made, timeless artisanship
The muses - the notebook as conduit to inspiration, be it in the form of famed Moleskine users of yore, or more ineffable sources of creativity

It’s these three possibilities that Moleskine focuses on in everything they share. They understand that the only way it makes sense to spend twenty dollars on something you could buy for three is if it reminds you, each time you use it, of the things you’re really reaching for.

Since Moleskine’s weirdos are creatives who care about thoughtful craft, it makes perfect sense for the company to invest in projects like the Moleskine Drawing Jam, where an art instructor and live model set up a life drawing class in Bloomingdale’s³ for anyone who wanted to join. Similarly, their Detour Tokyo exhibit invited visitors to don white gloves and leaf through others’ notebooks — an absolutely irresistible combination of voyeurism and inspiring art.

The company has also invested in a “moleskineart” YouTube channel featuring videos like mini-docs on how their debossing is done, a fascinating watch for anyone with an affinity for obscure skills.

It’s clear that Moleskine understands why their weirdos choose them — why their signature, pocket-sized booklet with a flat elastic signifies so much more than a tool for jotting down ideas. It’s a talisman, a reminder of why creativity and craft matter to those who carry it. Even more than a writer’s favourite pen, a metalsmith’s Dremel, or a photographer’s lens collection, the Moleskine can provide the space and the function, the lineage of tradition and the unwritten future.

Most things get commoditized, eventually. But you can build resiliency into your business by shining a light on what your products and services make possible for your weirdos.

Questions to ask yourself:

If our work became commoditized, what layers would sit above pure function in our own version of Maslow’s pyramid?
What do those things tell us about who our weirdos are?
How could we emphasize those layers in how we engage with our weirdos?
What collaborations might be possible with other folks who embody those “top of the pyramid” qualities?

Footnotes

¹They really are interesting — think writers, artists, game designers, retirees, chefs, executives, yoga teachers… the newsletter is itself a great example of a weirdos-oriented project.
²Rushkoff: “I always wanted to be a Moleskine person but I wrote my first book proposal on a legal pad and somehow they bring me luck.” Can’t argue with that!
³If you spent $30 or more from the store during the Drawing Jam, you got a free notebook, custom illustrated in gold ink by artist Molly Crabapple.

Where the weirdos roam

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 07:00:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago, my partner and I invited two friends over for our first socially distanced meal since the pandemic started. I was a little nervous, being an introvert who hadn’t had to engage with people in-person for over 6 months.

Our friends arrived, and we engaged in small talk while I put the finishing touches on my new favorite food to make for people. I was nervously fishing my brain for topics of conversation when suddenly, my friends pointed at a stack of books I’d recently ordered that my partner had conveniently¹ left on the counter.

“Oh, look at these books! Tell us about them!”

That was all it took. For the rest of the night, I forgot my fear. I was lively and relaxed, even after I finished sharing all about the reasons I ordered those particular books, and why I was excited about reading them. Because my friends are also book weirdos (one is the executive director of our local library system, and the other is an academic), this was a topic of conversation that brought out the enthusiast in all of us.

Weirdos like to talk about the things they weird out on.

This makes them incredibly easy to talk to and learn about, no matter how introverted they might be. Simply ask a weirdo about the things they love, and you will never be at a loss for conversation.

A well of weirdos²

Because weirdos love to talk about their weird passions, they tend to congregate. Especially online.

At the beginning of August, I started wondering “where are all the CEOs who care about people-first ways of serving and growing?” I wanted to connect with these people because I’m one of them. They are the people I’m interested in sharing knowledge with. They are central participants and beneficiaries of the work we’re focusing on at &yet. But they also tend to guard their time and focus with their very lives, making them particularly hard to reach. I was at a loss for where to find them.

People-first CEOs aren’t exactly weirdos, at least in the sense we’re talking about here. They have a particular role, and a similar point of view, but they may or may not be weirding out over people-first approaches to growth to the point of seeking it out even if they were never to get paid for it. That is what makes a weirdo, a weirdo. I needed to find another layer of weird that would help me connect with these people on that level of mutual, genuine passion.

And then I discovered Roam Research. Roam is a “tool for networked thought.” Its most useful feature is how you can interlink ideas to other ideas, just by using brackets as you type. So if I type [[Roam]], a new [[Roam]] page will be created, and that page will include all references to [[Roam]] that I’ve ever made within the tool.

As a lifelong learning nerd, I loved the tool and immediately saw its potential for helping me to build a body of knowledge around the idea of people-first growth, particularly in my role as CEO. But I quickly discovered that I could use it for so much more than my own personal collection of notes and ideas. I could use it to find other CEOs thinking about people-first approaches to growth. And that’s because I found the #roamcult.

Now, if you use Roam to any particular degree, you might have concerns about the way I described it above. That’s because Roam has a devoted set of weirdos that call themselves the #roamcult on Twitter. They are so devoted that when anyone calls Roam a “note-taking tool,” they are instantly on alert. “A note-taking tool?!” they ask, bewildered. “The Notes app on my iPhone is a note-taking tool. Roam is a tool for thinking.”

And they’re right (if a bit fanatical about it). Roam weirdos geek out about Roam because of the nuance in what the tool allows them to do, that no other competitor can.

So I created a public Roam project and posted it on Twitter to the #roamcult. Within minutes I had Roam weirdos from academic, scientific, and business communities telling me that were following my project and were fascinated by it. Not only that, but other CEOs who cared about people-first approaches to growth starting tweeting and emailing me about things I was sharing in my project. This happened even though I’d been off of Twitter for several years and in consequence, mostly heard crickets in response to my tweets.

But weirdos don’t care about whether you’re a Twitter influencer or not. The only thing you have to do to belong is weird out about the same things they’re weirding out on. Show up, talk about the things you both love, and you’ll be embraced as part of a community of fellow weirdos that can’t wait to hear about what you’re contributing to the weird world you both live in.

Questions to ask yourself:

What “layer of weird” can we find that is related to our work, and also rooted in genuine, spontaneous devotion?
Where do these weirdos go to talk about their passions?
How can we whole-heartedly join in?

Making an honest buck

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 07:00:00 GMT

“Move at the speed of trust.” –Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy

“Nothing is as fast as the speed of trust. Nothing is as profitable as the economics of trust. Nothing has more influence than a reputation of trust.” –Stephen M.R. Covey, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything

“When you do not trust people, people will become untrustworthy.” –Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

…

Anyone who’s worked in the service industry, even for a single day, can tell you the customer is not always right. In fact, if you want to hear some truly astonishing stories about human foibles, ask anyone who’s worked in hospitality, tech support, or customer service to tell you about their most memorable customer encounters.

But there are times when you absolutely need your customers’ input¹, in order to make key decisions about your offerings, pricing, and positioning. The trick is getting the right kind of input, from the right customers.

This question — of how to tune in to the most meaningful customer input, and find the right signals amidst a whole lot of noise — is at the heart of our obsession with weirdos, because weirdos are an excellent source of feedback and insight.

The very qualities that make your weirdos such loyal and risk-tolerant customers — their depth of devotion, their willingness to tinker — also make them the folks who’ll tell you flat-out if the emperor has, uh, Zoom-bombed the royal ball². They’re the ideal customers to consult on product decisions, because their interests are most closely aligned with yours. They want your business to succeed, whether it’s because they’re grownups who’ve built a serious hobby around the toys you make or world-famous chefs on the lookout for the next big food trend. They’re always first in line to try a new prototype, or weigh in on whether your latest idea is worth pursuing.

Your weirdos deserve your ear, and your trust, because they’re invested in your success. Their relationship with you may be a business relationship, but it’s far from transactional. There’s a mutuality to your connection, because your work is helping them do something that matters to them.

So how can you ensure that you hear from them when it counts?

The short answer is: you cultivate mutual trust, and build them a hotline.

Heart and craft breed trust

Trust is an underrated quality in business — so much so that Stephen M.R. Covey has sold two million copies of The Speed of Trust, a book that basically articulates the business case for trust, and step-by-step instructions on how to be a trustworthy business associate³. But mutual trust is absolutely essential to doing business with your weirdos. You can’t get to devotion (or tinkering, for that matter), without cultivating trust:

Trust that you’ll deliver what you said you would, when you promised it.

Trust that you’ll respect your customers’ privacy, feedback, time, and intelligence — their attention, and the intentions they have for their lives.

Trust that your prices are fair.

Trust that you care about the things you say you care about.

Trust that ultimately, you value people more than profits.

Cultivating trust is an art, not a science. But it’s a natural product of working with heart and craft — that is, doing work you genuinely care about, with skill and attention to quality.

Calling 1-800-WEI-RDOS

Here’s a hard truth: your weirdos will sometimes tell you hard truths.

And they’ll do it because they care enough, and trust you enough, to stick around and give you a chance to put things right. That’s a gift — a generous one, even if it might not feel that way at first.

While all of us need boosters from time to time, we need truth-tellers even more, especially if we’re looking to grow. Our weirdos are the ones unafraid to tell us we’ve got something in our teeth — and we don’t know about you, but we’d rather know that before we turn on the camera.

So there’s enormous value in setting up a “weirdos hotline” for your company, whether that’s curating a short list of customers you can reach out to with questions, embarking on a large-scale research project⁴ , or attending events where your weirdos gather.

The shape your hotline takes⁵ matters far less than listening with a truly open mind and heart, and setting your ego aside as much as humanly possible.

When Impossible Foods approached top-tier restaurants about selling their burgers, they were setting themselves a very high bar: not only did the burger have to taste amazing, and sizzle like meat, but it needed to sell to meat-eating restaurant patrons who’d never heard of it before.

How many taste tests did they perform before they got a yes from David Chang⁶, do you think? Hundreds? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

When LEGO went camping with customers, they learned that kids simply didn’t play with the sets that LEGO’s executive team had come up with. They wanted ninjas, skeletons, and snakes — so LEGO gave them Ninjago.

These companies were prepared to hear hard truths, and adapt accordingly. And they were able to grow precisely because they stopped to check with their weirdos first.

This is why cultivating connections with your weirdos is so important: they’re the chefs who’ll tell you if your burger isn’t up to par, and exactly what you need to do to make it into something they’d confidently put on their menu. They’re the geeks who care about the same qualities you do — and care about them enough to want your best effort.

Questions to ask yourself:

Where are we succeeding at being trustworthy?
Where do heart (care) and craft (quality) show up in our work?
Where could we improve our trustworthiness?
How are we demonstrating (or not demonstrating) that we value people more than profits?
What kind of “hotline” could we create for our weirdos?
How will we make it easy, meaningful, and mutually valuable for them to give us their input?

Footnotes

¹We’re using the word “customers” here to mean everyone who might buy what you’re selling — not just existing customers, but prospective, past, and present ones.
²Or if your product just isn’t up to snuff… or that marketing campaign you were about to run is off the mark.
³We aren’t trying to be snarky here; it’s a fine book, and articulates a framework that’s much-needed in today’s business environment.
⁴For an example of this, have a look at our article about LEGO’s “camping with consumers” initiative.
⁵It’s important to note that a “weirdos hotline” is not the same as “market research” in the way it’s usually practiced; we aren’t talking about surveys and focus groups. We’re talking about real, on-the-ground, experiential research: getting into restaurant kitchens and family homes, and observing what actually sells, what patrons order, which toys kids play with for a day and then never pull out of the toybox again, and which ones pass the test of time.
⁶By the way, Chang’s memoir, Eat a Peach, is a fantastic read: stark, unflinching, and refreshingly honest about the interconnections between mental health and work life. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are connections to the “weirdos stuff” we’re writing about here, as chef Chang recounts the story of an outsider taking underground food culture mainstream.

Don’t call it a veggie burger

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 07:00:00 GMT

If you’ve heard of Impossible Burger, odds are good that you’ve heard that it’s… different from other vegetarian burgers.

You might have seen breathless reports of restaurants with lineups around the block; or of skyrocketing sales, surpassing anything seen before in the meat alternatives market. If you’re a foodie, you might know that Impossible Burger food scientists discovered a way to make plant-based heme, a molecule found in red meat that lends some foods their signature umami¹ flavor, as well as the key to Impossible Burger’s rich red colour and its ability to “bleed” like a beef burger.

There’s a lot that’s fascinating about Impossible Burger, but we want to focus on one particular aspect² of Impossible Foods’ (the parent company behind the burger) business strategy that’s radically different than how other meat alternatives have approached their product, marketing, and sales.

Before we do that, though, let’s zoom out so we can see the larger landscape. There are a lot of plant-based proteins available, and “veggie burgers”³ have been around since at least the 1970s. Various brands have made small inroads into the carnivore market here and there, but not in significant numbers, despite rising awareness of the adverse environmental impacts of factory farming. The vast majority of consumers are still eating meat — so why make another veggie burger when that niche is already crowded?

While there are many friction points at play in customers’ decision making — force of habit, cost, and availability are just a few — Impossible Foods decided to tackle one of the biggest ones head-on: deliciousness. Rather than vying for a slice of a small pie (vegetarian burger alternatives), they went all-in on competing in the big leagues: against savory, mouth-watering beef burgers.

For this gamble to work, they had to do two things: develop a product that could truly hold its own, and convince mainstream consumers the Impossible Burger was the equal of a premium, organic-beef option — since they knew that their production costs would require the end product to be sold at the same price point as organic meat.

They put their best food scientists to work on the product, but how to convince people to buy the burgers? The company landed on an unexpected, but brilliant, strategy to focus first on a handful of individuals who — if they could be convinced the Impossible Burger was truly great — could influence an entire category of customers.

They went straight to the top of the (ahem) food chain, and found a single celebrity chef with the power to make or break the Impossible Burger brand: David Chang, of Momofuku fame.

This was the company’s gambit: they reasoned that foodies — the kind of people who go out of their way to eat at top-tier restaurants — would furnish the ultimate social proof that Impossible Burgers were not just another bland veggie burger. If they could convince the kinds of people who obsess over terroir and sous-vide, and cultivate genuine enthusiasm for the food they were making for its own sake, as a tasty addition to their already diverse and adventurous menus, then everyone else who cares about food would follow.

Their weirdos weren’t vegetarians and vegans. Their weirdos were meat eaters who care about the environment, and millennial foodies who are trend-conscious but also concerned about climate change.

So, long story short: David Chang loved the burger, and other, equally influential chefs followed suit⁴. Here’s an abbreviated timeline:

July 27, 2016: The Impossible Burger is introduced at Momofuku Nishi, chef David Chang’s Manhattan eatery (according to Eater, Chang sought out the partnership), and gets advance coverage in places like Gothamist and Eater.
October 2016: A handful of San Francisco restaurants with “celebrity chefs” get in on the action.
January 2017: According to The New York Times, the burger is exclusively available in “a handful of high-end restaurants.” (Also, it’s getting coverage in the NYT — no small feat.)
February 2017: Total number of high-end restaurants: seven, including one with a Michelin star⁵.
2018: Impossible Burger makes its international debut via Hong Kong, which has the highest per capital meat consumption in Asia.
September 2018: White Castle becomes the first fast food restaurant to sell Impossible burgers (in the form of sliders). After trialling the burger in a small subset of locations, CEO Lisa Ingram announces the sales exceeded expectations, and Impossible sliders become a menu staple nationwide.
April 2019: Burger King joins the party, adding the Impossible Whopper to their menu.
September 2019: the burgers finally make their way into grocery store chains, starting with less than 150 stores. Within a year, they’re available in over 11,000 stores and supermarkets.

Notably, the three-year product roll-out started very small, and very focused: not only did limiting availability to high-end restaurants brand the Impossible Burger as a high-end, gourmet food, but it also meant that the company could gradually scale up production over time and focus on wholesale customers first, before tackling all the business complexity that comes with consumer-facing products.

Meanwhile, consumer demand grew as reviews and media coverage appeared — so by the time the burgers were available in fast food restaurants, there was a huge market of customers eager to try the product.

Grocery stores brought up the rear, along with direct-to-consumer sales; but by the time these options were introduced, the writing was already on the wall: Impossible Burger was well established as the meat alternative to beat, in terms of taste and cachet.

And proving the company’s hunch correct, their sales come primarily from customers who would otherwise be buying meat.

So what did they do to cultivate relationships with their weirdos? They got to know the restaurant industry, and how to support their weirdos’ own businesses. If you visit the Impossible Foods website, there’s a whole section devoted to restaurateurs and helping them succeed with the products. In it, you’ll find cooking, handling, and storage tips for kitchen staff; talking points to help servers speak knowledgeably with patrons about the meat; and a form restaurant managers can submit to be featured on the Impossible Foods map (a much-used resource, given the level of demand for the burgers).

They’ve also been cautious about over-committing on the production and distribution side, ensuring they can fulfill their promises — not just in terms of quality, which continues to be their most precious asset, but in terms of their capacity to fill orders and keep their weirdos well-supplied.

What’s clear about this business strategy is that it relies on a few key factors:

Quality, quality, quality. The product is best-of-breed and stands alone in its field. That’s a clear advantage in any competitive category.
Generous runway. The company is privately held, but it’s investor-backed and must have had deep pockets to invest so much in product development and this small scale, restaurant-focused approach.
Rock-solid alignment with customers’ goals. By putting flavour and texture first, and catering exclusively to restaurants for three full years, Impossible Foods’ business success was predicated entirely on the success of its customers. That’s the ultimate weirdos-first approach.
A greater-good mission. When your business is founded on trying to make good food and save the planet, there’s a feel-good factor that’s undeniable.

Whether your business can check all the same boxes or not, though, there’s much to be learned from the rise of the Impossible Burger, and the weirdos that made it possible. For just about every business, there are equivalents to “meat eaters who might try this if it tastes good enough.” And for most of us, too, there are individuals and groups — those with high standards, high integrity, and major influence — who can singlehandedly grant you credibility by proxy, if you earn their partnership.

Once you get those weirdos on board, so long as your ultimate destinations are linked, you might just be in for the ride of your life.

Questions to ask yourself:

Who are the folks who care the most about quality in our field?
Who’s most likely to tell us flat-out if our product doesn’t make the cut?
Whose business could benefit from ours, and set us apart from the competition altogether?
What’s the equivalent of a Michelin-star endorsement in our world, and how might we earn one?

Footnotes

¹If you’re unfamiliar with the term, there’s a good, two-minute explainer here. In short, it’s the reason Parmesan cheese, soy sauce, cooked mushrooms, and even ketchup taste so rich and satisfying.
²If you guessed, “They focused on their weirdos first,” you get a thousand imaginary, non-redeemable points.
³With apologies to the good people at Impossible Burger, who never use this phrase, and prefer to refer to their products as “meat from plants.”
⁴And let’s not give these chefs short shrift. After all, as Derek Sivers put it, “the first follower transforms the lone nut into a leader.”
⁵The sadly defunct Public, which closed in June 2017 — through no fault of its burger options.

A field guide to finding your weirdos

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 12:00:00 GMT

Most of us, when we want to grow a business, look to expand our customer base — and when we do that, the natural tendency is to broaden out, to try and appeal to more people.

However, there’s another way to grow: by going deeper.

See if you can bring to mind a company (or product) with which you have a seriously devoted relationship. It might be an app that helps your remote team stay focused and aligned, a coffee shop that’s as obsessed with the perfect pour-over as you are, or the insightful and creative consultancy that’s been helping your business thrive. (Heck, Lauren’s mom felt this way about an elevator company, back when she managed apartment buildings for low-income seniors.)

By “devoted,” we mean:

You look forward to hearing from them. They rarely feel like an intrusion in your inbox, because they show up with valuable contributions, not just things to sell you.
You feel seen and understood by them on some level. You believe that they’re genuinely invested in the thing you “hire” them to do¹, whether that’s organizational focus, an artisanal coffee break, or to sort through complex issues and point out the bits that matter most to you. There’s a sense of alignment between your interests and theirs.
They do what they do brilliantly. You feel confident that your needs are well taken care of, and would recommend them to anyone because they consistently meet high standards.
Because you feel understood, appreciated, and well-supported by this company, you’re loyal. It would take a lot to lure you away to a competitor.

Now, cast your mind back to how you became a devotee.

We’re going to make a few educated guesses about how it might have happened: you heard about it from someone you know and trust. Or from someone with whom you share a niche interest. Or through a grapevine that’s used pretty much exclusively by people who are seriously into a specific combination of things — coding and art², maybe, or natural wines and feminism³, or business and personal development⁴. Either way, our path to building this kind of close affinity is usually through the specific kinds of earned trust, respect, and overlapping interests that feel special, unusual, and maybe even a little bit weird.

Now, all businesses have customers who fall outside the devotee category — the ones for whom your products are a convenient option, a solid choice, but not necessarily something they feel emotionally and mentally invested in.

You need both kinds of customers — but we believe that you need your devotees more.

These people — your devotees, or as we’ve been calling them affectionately, your weirdos — are your people. They care as much as you do about the weirdly specific things you care about, whether that’s “code as craft and the digital commons,” or “sustainable viniculture and gender equity,” or whatever intersection of obsessions lives at the root of your company’s purpose.

Your weirdos aren’t just your most loyal customers — they’re also:

your most crucial sounding boards for new features, products, and service offerings;
your #1 source of new customer leads and referrals;
your “most likely to say yes to an up-sell” customers;
and importantly, they are part of your community, which means they will let you know if you veer off-course.

Bottom line: they’re the weirdos who care as much as you do.

Questions to ask yourself:

Who are the (past or current) customers with whom we’ve had the highest degree of trust and mutual support?
What do they care about?
Why do they love our products?
What else are they passionate about?

Why we love weirdos

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 11:00:00 GMT

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.” –Lester Bangs, Almost Famous

We started this series by inviting you to reflect on the roles of devotion and care in business, but you may be wondering: where do the weirdos come in?

Well, as Lester Bangs¹ knew, devotion and care mean the most when they’re divorced from trends, or anything else we pursue in the name of cool. Genuine devotion is that band whose music we fell in love with before we even knew who was playing it, before we saw their faces or how they dressed². It’s that topic we never tire of learning about, that hobby or skill we geek out on because it brings us intrinsic joy and satisfaction. It’s the things we find so fascinating and motivating that we can’t help going deep with them, even if our love of them makes us weird.

Weirdos, as we’re using the word here, are devotees of unusual interests (or unusual combinations of interests)³.

And the reason we love weirdos so much that we’re dedicating a season to them is that they’re the enthusiasts who make the world go around. They power every community event, every awesomely niche museum, every great fan website, every so-uncool-it’s-seriously-cool thing we’ve ever seen.

But also, they power really great businesses in often under-appreciated ways. (We’d bet there are some serious weirdos who keep your favourite companies in business.)

First and foremost, they increase the quality of your leads, by referring their friends and colleagues. The leads your weirdos generate are usually the most qualified and easiest to convert.
Your weirdos reduce your churn rate, because they’re not just doing business with you out of convenience. They tend to be less price-sensitive, too.
Got a new product offering you want to test? Your weirdos are likely to be first in line for testing, early bird specials, and the like.
The bottom line is: deep trust, combined with shared enthusiasm, leads to traction and sustainability — and you cultivate trust by showing you care about something more than making your next sale.

When we build a business, we’re often told to define a “target market,” as if you can just show up in the world with a product and sell it to everyone who checks a particular set of boxes. Online advertising is built with the same notion: demographics + interests = target audience/market. But that’s not really how people function. To go back to the example from our first entry, it’s not like Lauren’s mom is just really into elevators, and wants to see lots of ads for elevator companies.

What she wants is to have an important need handled, in the right time, place, and context, by people she trusts.

But you can’t plug “people who will trust me” + “people who need this” into an ad engine.

So how do you reach those folks? Let’s return to our list of what inspires customer devotion — but this time, we’ll look at it from your company’s standpoint:

~~You look forward to hearing from them.~~ — You consistently and generously contribute to your customers’ growth, supporting them in getting where they need to go. You listen more than you talk, and in the words of Tim O’Reilly, you focus on creating more value than you capture.
~~You feel seen and understood by them on some level.~~ — Your enthusiasm for your niche obsessions is genuine⁴; you aren’t just paying them lip service.
~~They do what they do brilliantly.~~ — You consistently meet or exceed your customers’ expectations for quality and integrity.

That’s how you connect with the people who will share your stuff whether it’s cool or not.

Questions to ask yourself:

What would be possible if we had enthusiastic, high trust relationships with our customers?
What are the things our company seriously geeks out about? (Set aside the things you think your customers want you to care about — what do you genuinely obsess over? What fuels you, really?)
Of our current and past customers, who sends us the most qualified leads? What enthusiasms and motivations do we have in common with them?

Footnotes

¹Lester Bangs is the unforgettably named, jaded music journalist character, played to perfection by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Cameron Crowe’s excellent film, Almost Famous.
²Or for that matter, a band we remained in love with long after everyone else had moved on.
³And weirdos don’t have to be individuals, either — there are plenty of teams and organizations that behave like weirdos, too, because any group of humans that comes together for a purpose will have its own quirky interests.
⁴You can test this by asking, “Do we have a clear point of view on this that would make some customers choose a different company?”

Camping with customers: how LEGO rediscovered its true north

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 10:00:00 GMT

LEGO is not only one of the world’s most beloved children’s toy brands — it’s also a company that staged a dramatic comeback following several years of substantial losses and failed growth initiatives. Their turnaround story is remarkable on many levels¹, but one facet that’s especially interesting is that their recovery was fuelled in part by reconnecting with their customers in unprecedented ways — and not just the school-aged ones.

Let’s start with a snapshot of what precipitated the change. LEGO had grown steadily for the first sixty-five years of its existence, posting profits and increased revenue year after year — only to plunge into decline and debt in the late 1990s. By 2003, sales were plummeting by 30% a year and the company was almost a billion dollars in debt. Rumor had it that LEGO was six months away from declaring bankruptcy².

They’d been flailing for several years, attempting to replicate the success of other toy brands by following a well-worn playbook: diversify the product lines, open theme parks, build an in-house video game division… but the accepted conventions that had produced successes for other toy companies resulted in losses across the board. It appeared that “standard practice” was not only not working for LEGO, but was actually threatening to sink the business.

Fast-forward a few years, though, and LEGO had bounced back, and by 2014 (when The LEGO Movie came out), it was nothing less than a juggernaut. The company’s profits quadrupled between 2008 and 2010, and by 2015 their sales topped $1 billion in North America alone.

What changed?

In short, they tossed convention aside, found their weirdos, and focused on them relentlessly.

For LEGO’s recovery effort, the company turned to two groups of weirdos they knew mattered enormously. The first group goes by the acronym “AFoLs”: Adult Fans of Lego. These are the diehard collectors who were hosting (and attending) fan conventions³, devoting entire rooms at home to their LEGO projects, making stop-motion animations, and queuing up when new sets were released.

The executive team at LEGO did something a little odd for a toy company: they decided to invest significantly in their adult customers — the AFoL community⁴. LEGO staff started attending fan conventions and getting to know some of the grownups who build with LEGO bricks; in the process, they learned more about what appealed to adult fans and kept them not only interested, but investing significant amounts of time and money, into their LEGO hobby. They started consulting with adult fans on product research and running customer design competitions⁵. They even hired several as designers and community leads.

Jorgen Vig Knudstorp was promoted to CEO in 2004, at the height of the company’s financial crisis; by 2006, he had overhauled how all design direction was set⁶ , recruiting a whole team of new creative leads that included both adult fans of LEGO and design graduates who had grown up playing with LEGO. The result was a significant expansion of complex and sophisticated LEGO products, such as the plastic-brick replicas of architectural icons⁷ like the Sydney Opera House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, and the Burj Khalifa.

Of course, adult fans weren’t the only weirdos LEGO needed to connect with: they also had to rethink their relationship with kids — arguably the most eccentric, passionate, and skeptical weirdos among us. They couldn’t hire kids to lead design teams, but they did the next-best thing: they established a customer research program they call “camping with consumers”⁸, where they embed ethnographic researchers into families to observe how kids play alone and in collaboration with others, to inform all of their product and marketing decisions.

Through “camping” with their customers, LEGO developed all-new lines like Ninjago (along with a companion TV show and movies) and the aforementioned Architecture series, while also trimming a huge number of unprofitable products and options — like superfluous brick colors — that were bringing down their margins and their popularity with their core customers. And the company regained its north star: supplying kids and adults with the materials and inspiration to bring their ideas to life.

There are many aspects of this turnaround story that resonate with us, but here are a few that we find particularly interesting, and that apply to just about anyone who wants to connect with their weirdos:

Don’t make your weirdos come to you — meet them where they are. You may not have LEGO’s resources for ethnographic research (or customers willing to host a researcher in their own home!), but attending customer-led events, building partnerships, and supporting your devotees in their own initiatives goes a long way to demonstrating that you’re committed to their success, not just your own.
Let your customers influence all aspects of your business. LEGO didn’t just survey customers about new product ideas: they listened deeply enough to what customers really wanted that they were able to tailor their marketing and creative, retail experiences, and product design with the things their customers value most. In the process, they re-thought every aspect of the company to align more closely with the needs and goals of their weirdos.
Quality is the foundation of customer loyalty. LEGO wouldn’t have been able to maintain their fan base through the tough years if their product weren’t meticulously well-designed, and iterated to perfection. The company’s motto is, “det bedste er ikke for godt” (“only the best is good enough”), and it’s clear they stand by it.
A narrower focus can result in more meaningful diversity. LEGO’s turnaround involved handing its theme parks over to an entertainment company, and cutting many unprofitable lines from its product catalogue — not to mention ignoring the people who insisted that a broad, diversified product portfolio is necessary. While it might seem scary to concentrate on the weirdos who totally get you, those people are the ones most likely to spend more with you, recommend you to equally passionate friends and colleagues, and help you identify future opportunities.

There’s much more to this story, of course — a book’s worth of additional context and nuance — but we love that LEGO’s comeback was at least in part the result of a weirdos-first strategy.

From where we stand, it makes perfect sense that the path to rediscovering that clarity of purpose was illuminated by cultivating deeper, more responsive, and more generous relationships with the weirdos who were every bit as committed to LEGO’s success as its most dedicated employees — the folks who were investing thousands of hours of their free time in designing their own creations, exchanging tips and videos online, and convening other fans together to bond over their shared passion.

This more relational, less transactional approach may not look like the kind of marketing and product research you’re used to, but it’s wildly effective. We’ve all tried mimicking another company’s strategy in the hope of replicating success — but behind every great strategy is a clear, strong alignment between a bunch of oddballs obsessed with making a product, and another bunch of oddballs just as obsessed with whatever they might be able to do with that product. That’s not something you can just copy and paste into your own three-year plan.

Once your weirdos find their weirdos, though? Don’t be surprised if you want to hire some of them — or at least take them camping.

Questions to ask yourself:

Who are our diehard, longest-lasting fans?
What’s our current relationship with them?
Are they finding “off-brand” uses for our products, or self-organizing in other ways? How might we support their efforts in non-intrusive ways?

Footnotes

¹So much so, there’s a bestselling business book on the subject.
²Per this Reddit thread from Mark Stafford, a LEGO designer since 2006.
³Like Brickworld, for instance.
⁴If you’re curious about the kinds of things Adult Fans of LEGO get up to, browsing through the LEGO Certified Professionals section of the LEGO website is absolutely fascinating.
⁵From a fantastic article in The Guardian:
A year before James Surowiecki’s landmark book The Wisdom of Crowds was published, Lego launched its own crowdsourcing competition: originators of winning ideas get 1% of their product’s net sales, designs that so far include the Back to the Future DeLorean time machine, the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine and a set of female Nasa scientists.
⁶According to Business Insider:
“Knudstorp led a charge to put creative control into the hands of hardcore fans of the brand rather than in those of top designers who had skills but lacked a real understanding of Lego's history.”

One fun footnote here is that Mark Stafford, who wrote the Reddit entry referenced in an earlier sidebar, was one of the design team’s first two AFoL hires.
⁷The LEGO Architecture product range was introduced in 2008, and was a partnership with an AFoL named Adam Reed Tucker, a former architecture student who was making a name for himself in the AFoL community by designing and building LEGO models of well-known buildings.
⁸To give you a sense of scale: one article suggests that LEGO’s “camping with customers” research might be “the largest ethnographic study of children in the world.”

Look for the tinkerers

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 09:00:00 GMT

“The only secret of magic is that I'm willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth.” –Penn Jillette

One of the fastest ways to find your weirdos is to look for the tinkerers — the folks who create with and on top of your work, the ones who come to you with ideas for improvement or new features. Tinkering is a sign of deep care — a love language, if you will¹. If I care enough to try to improve your product or service, I’m invested.

The companies that connect most meaningfully with their weirdos understand that it’s not their product their customers love — it’s what that product allows them to do.²

It’s not the LEGO bricks they love; it’s what they can create from them.

It’s not your software they’re obsessed with; it’s what they can do because of your software.

It’s not this website you’re excited about; it’s how you can apply these ideas in your work.

But of course, our products don’t always get them 100% of the way there. Software is always evolving, and ironing out bugs. This website will be updated with more content over the coming weeks, and — we hope — become more useful in the process. So a crucial part of your company’s relationship with your weirdos is establishing trust that you’re committed to growing in alignment with your customer’s goals.

This is tricky to do, and involves both:

establishing sufficient confidence in your current product(s), and
making sure your customers intuitively understand the qualities that drive your decision-making.

In other words: What do you stand for? What does your company care about?

These intangible qualities form a sense in your customers’ minds of what they can expect from you in the future, and they’re a key aspect of building loyalty.

We communicate these things all the time, usually without giving it any conscious thought. But what happens when you make these things conscious, intentional, and concrete?

You might get something like the playing card decks that Heroku made for some of their most cherished fans.

…

Why would one of the world’s biggest cloud application platforms devote time and energy to creating exquisitely crafted, custom-designed card decks to give away to software developers? It might be hard to imagine how a deck of playing cards could convey anything meaningful about a digital technology platform, but let’s look a little closer.

Coders are a huge, and massively diverse group — but Heroku’s niche weirdos are web and software developers with an appreciation for detail, and for well thought out design. They are most definitely tinkerers and craftspeople: the kinds of people who like things to be both beautiful and useful, and who place value in the tools of their trade. And their choice to build their work on Heroku’s platform is not one that the company takes for granted: Heroku knows that as tinkerers, those developers are experts in their own right, and deserve the very best tools.

So when Heroku wanted to show their appreciation for their weirdos, they set out to create something that would make them feel truly seen and celebrated. Not a product they would offer for sale, but a gift — something unique, meticulously crafted, and designed with the kind of thought and care that a devout tinkerer would invest. A way of saying, “We share your love of these qualities, and we want to show you just how deep our love goes.”

First came a standard 52-card deck, lovingly designed to reflect Heroku’s respect for culture and tradition — both the conventions of card deck design, and coding cultures. The design process was a quest to reimagine what playing cards for coders might look like: what might digital craftspeople value in a tangible product? What playful references could we³ weave in, to appeal to this particular group of weirdos?

In came diverse representation for all the face cards; symbols⁴ of the core programming languages Heroku supports; and subtle details that reflect the technology that Heroku developers use every day. Every aspect of the deck was created with the meticulous care that’s infused into Heroku’s products.

The cards were gifted to developers at Heroku events — a far cry from typical conference swag. And they were so beloved by recipients that two years later, Heroku decided to make a second deck, this time a reimagined Hanafuda (“flower cards”) deck.

This Japanese deck style has twelve suits, one for each month of the year, and each suit features a different flower. The choice of deck felt apt, since Heroku’s name and brand were intended to pay homage to Ruby creator Matz Matsumoto, and his Japanese heritage.

The Heroku and &yet teams invested huge amounts of time and research into designing the cards in a way that would respect traditional Hanafuda, while also bringing in elements of Heroku’s brand style, and some of the same kinds of subtle symbolic gestures that had been woven into the standard playing card deck — this time in the form of icons widely used in the Heroku interface. Anyone who uses Heroku regularly would recognize them immediately, but to a layperson, they’d be indistinguishable from the flower designs — a wink-and-a-nod decipherable only to Heroku’s weirdos.

A hundred understated details make these card decks a perfect weirdos offering: they’re a beautiful reflection of the qualities that coders cherish most about Heroku; they speak to insiders in ways that make them feel special; and they embody an element of surprise and generosity.

For those of us who spend much of our lives creating things that live on screens and in the cloud, we feel something particularly poignant when we are given something made by hand⁵, just for us. That’s not a feeling we can typically replicate withsoftware, or anything related to it.

Add to that a sense that we’re being encouraged to log off, shuffle the cards, and play a good old-fashioned game of cards with some friends, and we really feel seen.

Questions to ask yourself:

What are the qualities our company stands for, first and foremost?
What are some ways we could create a gift for our weirdos that embodies those qualities?

Footnotes

¹We love tinkerers here at &yet. We’re all tinkerers ourselves — predisposed to roll up our proverbial sleeves and look under the hood — and we feel a kinship with anyone who gets really into their hobbies. Our team includes a lot of digital tinkerers, of course, but we are also amateur gardeners, carpenters, makeup artists, gamers, home decorators, musicians.
²We learned this by way of one of our most-cited influences, Kathy Sierra, whose book Badass: Making Users Awesome (affiliate link), is an absolute must-read. (It’s also beautifully concise, so it’s a quick read.) You can get a taste of her brilliance through this conference talk.
³We’re using “we” here, because &yet’s designers worked with Heroku on this project. Talk about a dream gig.
⁴Hint: look for elephants, gophers, and pythons, among others. If you’re a developer yourself, see if you can find all eight of the languages that got the easter egg treatment.
⁵One detail that’s difficult to see in digital photos of the cards is that each card is individually hand-taped around its four edges, in accordance with Hanafuda tradition. This lends a lovely heft and textural interest to the cards, but it also clearly communicates: “We invested time and care in this gift.”

Find Your Weirdos

Exit through the gift shop

Questions to ask yourself:

Footnotes

Show, don’t tell

Questions to ask yourself:

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Weird is practical

How finding your weirdos can lead you down the path of truly knowing your customers, maybe for the first time

Questions to ask yourself:

A generous business

Questions to ask yourself:

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The quiet giant: how crafters and DIY-ers made Pinterest bigger than Twitter

Questions to ask yourself:

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There and back again

Questions to ask yourself:

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What does this mean?!

The proverbial lunchroom

Let’s make it weird

Ditching the lunchroom

This is what we mean by immersive

Say what?

Back to the lunchroom…but not.

Questions to ask yourself:

Come one, come all!

“You too? I thought I was the only one!”

Being weird is enough

Fostering Inclusion

Diversities are just the beautiful wrapping paper weirdos come in

Questions to ask yourself:

Footnotes

Not just any notebook

Questions to ask yourself:

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Where the weirdos roam

A well of weirdos2

Questions to ask yourself:

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Making an honest buck

Heart and craft breed trust

Calling 1-800-WEI-RDOS

Questions to ask yourself:

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Don’t call it a veggie burger

Questions to ask yourself:

Footnotes

A field guide to finding your weirdos

Questions to ask yourself:

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Why we love weirdos

Questions to ask yourself:

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Camping with customers: how LEGO rediscovered its true north

Questions to ask yourself:

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Look for the tinkerers

Questions to ask yourself:

Footnotes

A well of weirdos²