What's Your Business Rebelling Against?

Hey! - it's Brian 🦄.

What you'll learn in the next 7 minutes:

When to use selective rebellion vs. rigorous conformity in your business to create value.

Let's get to it!

🏴‍☠️ Every entrepreneur is a rebel against the status quo.

Creating something new is a declaration that the future can be better.

Real value is created by rebelling against the existing way of doing things and replacing it with something better.

Given that a startup founder is beginning from zero, it’s a natural question to ask:

What is your business rebelling against?

Having a clear answer to this question can define your mission.

What you do differently should align with a user's perception of value.

Equally important, though, is asking the inverse:

What conventions should your business conform to rigorously?

This essay is going to help you answer both questions.

Product Differentiation as Rebellion

The most obvious form of rebellion that creates value is a novel solution to an existing problem.

If you solve a problem better than competitors in a large market, you will benefit enormously as customers begin to prefer your solution.

The iPhone was a great example of a product creating value by breaking conventions:

A phone with no keypad.

But Product isn't the only area where your business has to make choices around conformity and convention.

As a rebel, you may want to abandon convention everywhere you see it.

This can lead to reinventing the wrong wheels: differentiation that doesn't drive value.

Let's consider a few areas for potential rebellion, beyond your product itself.

Where You Sell: Rebel or Conform?

Sam Altman, former President of Y-Combinator, wrote in his Startup Playbook:

One mistake that CEOs often make is to innovate in well-trodden areas of business instead of innovating in new products and solutions. For example, many founders think that they should spend their time discovering new ways to do HR, marketing, sales, financing, PR, etc. This is nearly always bad. Do what works in the well-established areas, and focus your creative energies on the product or service you’re building.

In other words, fighting convention when it comes to your industry’s marketing and sales strategy is a waste of your time.

Let's consider why:

Your competitors have primed your future customers for you:

• Potential customers are aware of their problem and the value of solving it

• Potential customers are open to buying from you in the prevailing way

Called the “mere-exposure effect”, this principle states that people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them.

Inventing a new marketing approach to sell to an existing market is usually a fool's errand.

UX Rebellion Can Be Fatal

User experience is how someone interacts with your business.

There are well-established UX patterns for specific industries.

For example, if you look at ecommerce, lead gen and SaaS companies, you'll notice that most websites of a given type follow the same conventions.

There's a good reason for this:

Going back to the mere-exposure effect: society has 20+ years of refining how each business type operates online. Example: Amazon has trained us to look for a shopping cart in the top right.

Your company benefits enormously by following these conventions, because they reduce friction and signal that your site is familiar and trustworthy. Deviating from these conventions will likely cost you business.

It only makes sense to deviate from UX conventions when the deviation itself is core to your value proposition.

Otherwise, rigorous conformity is key.

Nonconformity In Advertising Creates Value

Advertising is the most visible way to rebel against the status quo. You are creating a story for the public about how your company is different.

One brilliant example of this was when Avis redefined second place:

Instead of accepting the loser’s frame of second place, they defined the underdog as having to work harder to win (and thereby being better for customers).

Whether they actually worked harder than the number 1 or not: this ad campaign created a lot of value by inverting the public's perception against conventional wisdom.

In my affiliate marketing days, the difference between a mediocre affiliate and super affiliate often came down to how innovative their advertising was. After all, everyone was pitching the same products.

Similarly, in highly regulated and old industries, there’s a tendency for competitors to huddle in the safe center like sheep. I rarely see a commercial for a financial services firm or automobile that stands out in a meaningful way.

There’s a large opportunity for companies to rebel in these spaces with novel, bold messaging.

Why Too Much Novelty Is Net Negative

To rebel is to be different.

However, going back to the mere-exposure effect, we know that humans are wired to favor the familiar.

As a result, there’s an inflection point at which too much nonconformity actually hurts your ability to create value.

Unsurprisingly, I’m not the first person to realize this.

Raymond Loewy (1893-1986) was an industrial designer who created many iconic products during the mid-20th century.

He coined the “MAYA Principle: Most Advanced. Yet Acceptable.”

"The adult public's taste is not necessarily ready to accept the logical solutions to their requirements if the solution implies too vast a departure from what they have been conditioned into accepting as the norm."

The more unfamiliar your product, the more familiar you must make it appear to users.

The more familiar (undifferentiated) your product, the more differentiated it must be presented to users.

Here are two examples on opposite ends of the spectrum:

iPhone: the iPhone made calls, but it was hardly just a telephone. In reality it was a handheld supercomputer. By calling it iPhone, it made the innovation familiar.

Liquid Death Water: what could be less differentiated than water? The value of this brand is created almost entirely through rebellious advertising.

Choose Your Forms of Rebellion Wisely

Your business's value may depend on how it differs from the status quo. But it's wasteful to either a) go against norms in areas that don't add core business value or b) increase the novelty of your offer beyond what customers recognize as familiar.

The future you promise should not be too foreign for those living in the present.

That's it for today.