Startups rarely launch the way they are intended. Jeff and Todd had spent the better part of a year working on the groundwork for their apparel company, Out of Print Clothing.
They had spent months obtaining license rights for the original cover art from a number of cult classics such as Atlas Shrugged, Brave New World and On the Road. Tracking down the artists that had created artwork 80 years ago took a bit of work. In one instance they traveled to an old mansion in Brooklyn to meet with the widow of one of the artists.
Both Jeff and Todd were pursuing a certain look in their shirts. The quality of the shirt and silk screening was essential - they tried lots of shirt/printing variants until they were satisfied.
More importantly they struck a relationship with Books for Africa to donate one book for every shirt purchased.
They had a launch date planned for several weeks down the road. Everything was coming together nicely. They were lining up influencers to wear their shirts and had developed a media list to reach out to.
Then JD Salinger died.
And they had license rights to the original cover art from Catcher in the Rye:
They had a few more weeks of solid work before launch, but knew they couldn’t miss the opportunity. They worked through the night, polishing as much as they could, cutting requirements where they could and launched the day after the news broke about Salinger.
The result is pretty awesome. Check out their line-up of shirts. In addition to the JD Salinger shirt, these two are probably among my favorites:
Oh and of course, they have the cover art to this post’s namesake:
Comments Off on The Best Laid Plans
While there are tons of measures of a startup’s success, one of the more amusing ones is the degree to which your competitors take notice.
We have been fairly quiet in public about BrandVerity and our growth, so I always take a special interest in how new prospects find us (good practice at any stage of a company). We make trials incredibly easy to start, so we often know very little about the party on the other end that creates the account. Occasionally, someone will create an account that just doesn’t seem to fit with what we do.
So far we’ve had at least two accounts that I can directly trace back to a competitor. In one case, the CEO of a peer opened an account using an email address from her husband’s company. She never contacted us directly, but looking at her usage patterns in the site it was pretty clear that she was conducting a feature comparison.
The more recent one was particularly brazen though. An employee of a larger competitor created an account (using a hotmail address), and then sent a note asking to speak. The employee represented themselves as a marketing consultant that managed campaigns for several brands, but over the course of the conversation it became pretty clear that she wasn’t a typical customer. Questions about unrelated aspects of the service, size of company, and customer counts just didn’t fit with a typical customer’s behavior. I declined to answer the more sensitive questions, and after the call I created an excuse to call her back to clarify something. The response at the other end of the call was ‘Hello, ’.
Competitive research is an imperative in business and I certainly expect competitors to try and learn as much as they can about us. I actually think that more direct approaches yield better success (eg just reach out and introduce yourself), but as a startup you should just be aware that anything you say to customers and prospects becomes generally available information.
Oh, and it is great if your competitors accept your Terms of Service!
