Alistair Croll is a founder, bestselling author, and conference organiser. After a decade as a product manager in deep tech at Eicon, Primary Access, and 3Com, he co-founded Real User Monitoring pioneer Coradiant, raising a $20M series A in 2001 (the largest investment of its kind in Canadian history at the time). Coradiant’s groundbreaking TrueSight traffic performance technology was acquired by BMC in 2011 for $135M. 

In 2010, Alistair co-founded the Year One Labs accelerator, an early-stage incubator that turned $350K in investment into $10M in valuations in six months, launching companies like Localmind (acquired by Airbnb to build their local experiences offering.) He also spent three years as a visiting executive at Harvard Business School, where he worked with Srikant Datar (now the dean of the school) to create the MBA course Data Science and Critical Thinking, and has been a guest lecturer at McGill and Stanford. 

Throughout this time, Alistair has been a sought-after public speaker and the founder of several leading technology conferences, including UBM’s Enterprise Cloud Summit and Cloud Connect, O’Reilly’s Strata, and Data Universe. He is also the co-founder of Startupfest, Canada’s original startup event; FWD50, which is now the world’s leading conference on digital government; and Scaletech, Georgian’s annual conversation on scale-stage startup growth. 

Alistair has co-authored several books, including Managing Bandwidth (a definitive text on QoS and network performance); Complete Web Monitoring (one of the first books to tackle social media monitoring in depth); and the bestselling Lean Analytics (which has been translated into 8 languages, and is widely considered required reading for startup founders). His latest book, Just Evil Enough, looks at subversiveness in business and will be available in early 2025. Alistair lives in Montreal, Canada. 

• In this episode, Alistair Croll talks about his latest book, “Just Evil Enough”, which is about subversive marketing. In the era of the Attention Economy, the first hurdle any message must cross is of relevance— is it relevant to the target audience? In such an environment, marketing must engage through unique methods to be able to stand out. 
• All strategies eventually burn out in the field of marketing, and the only way forward is to find new ways of staying relevant. Also, in the era of digital, the medium of messaging becomes extremely important in being able to locate the target audience. The author calls this “product-medium fit”, which, according to him, is much more important than the concept of product-market fit. 
• Buyers are constantly evaluating the value of the product for themselves, but also factoring in into the calculation the cost of being wrong in their assessment of the product. A business can compete either through differentiation of the offer or through reducing costs, both of which are essentially value chain disruptions.  

Run time – 00:54:05 mins.