F2F #80: Roles and anti-roles

It's as important to have roles in life and in business as to have anti-roles. Roles are people you look up to, while anti-roles are people you don't want to become.

When you're starting out, you are figuring out who you want to become. You're yet to become someone recognisable, so you blurt out stuff like "we're the airbnb for cats" or "uber for diapers" - whatever that means. Because you still haven't figured out the whole thing, it's easier to explain who you are and what you do through another company.

This helps to set the direction: where do you want to go, what your mission is and how you're going to get there.

In our case, at MarsBased, we didn't draw inspiration from many agencies. Perhaps only from thoughtbot and a couple others, because they really liked their craft, they had taste and they were an independent company of experts. We were largely inspired by Basecamp, on the other hand: bootstrapped, opinionated people with great taste for products and strong convictions, who questioned the status quo and treated their employees like people, not like cattle.

Mixing both of them, we wanted to be the bootstrapped, lifestyle business kind of company that is largely respected for being professionals, experts in their craft but also highly opinionated and media-friendly. We haven't gotten there - especially not in the media-friendly department - but we're on the right path.

Anti-roles, conversely, serve a different purpose. They're useful for three reasons, and it's fundamental that you find your anti-heroes early on if you want to be someone in business.

One: they set red lines you don't want to cross. For instance, I don't want MarsBased to become a generalist company that grows at the expense of quality, churning out hundreds of burnt-out juniors every year that I've previously enslaved and billed thousands of dollars a day for them to big companies in exchange for bullshit advice. I don't want to be a McKinsey or Deloitte. I have worked in such companies and learnt how not to do things.

These red lines are the guardrails for your business integrity, they will keep you on track to your mission.

Two, they rally your troops against a common enemy. For instance, Basecamp have always shit on JIRA and enterprise software, or even VC-backed companies. Also, DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails, famously explained - in one of his books, can't remember which one - that one of his strategies, early on, was to make fun of Java. Tribe vs. tribe. Works every time.

Three, they generate business for you. That's right, your enemies - or, more politely, your anti-roles - send you dealflow very indirectly.

"I want an agency that's not a generalist, also not too big" works for us, or just plainly "not deloitte". Yeah, that's us.

Unfortunately, in our case, a lot of our prospective clients made the mistake of actually hiring our anti-roles, which turned out to be a costly mistake, and then come to us, afterwards, to fix the mess. That's about 30-40% of our dealflow, and I have to explain what we don't do, or what we do differently than the company they had gone for in the first place.

Roles and anti-roles. Heroes and villains. Black and white. Light and darkness.

One cannot exist without the other. Be the good ones.