Inspiration Mode: How Founders Can Break Through and Scale Their Businesses

One of the many pieces of advice that Y Combinator co-founder and Silicon Valley stalwart Paul Graham has dispensed to aspiring entrepreneurs over the years is to focus on one little thing and do it better than anyone else.

One of the little things that Graham seems to do better than anyone else is making big splashes with his provocative musings.

Is Marketing Broken? (Did Big Data Break It?)

Another path to founder success that Graham advocates for entails seeking out a broken or failing industry model of one sort or another and then being willing to shun commonly accepted industry norms in order to fix it.

How about marketing? It may or may not not be broken but marketing has definitely become bland. An overreliance on big data and too little interest in originality has resulted in too many marketing campaigns looking and sounding the same. Data points are de rigueur and that’s fine. Data can certainly point the way. The point that today’s metrics mania misses is that if you target the same fish over and over with the same weak-ass bait, you’re unlikely to get a bite. Substance is what matters, not saturation.

Marketers are sticking to the script and advising their leadership to trust the numbers. All roads lead to Math. Creatives, meanwhile, are eager improvisers. Their willingness to stray from the beaten path feels counterintuitive, but it also yields surprising results – including a deeper connection between the customer and the brand.

Steve Jobs is often invoked as a leader who was all too happy to embrace counterintuitive thinking. He broke convention with product design; he broke protocols with his governance.

What else did Steve Jobs do?

He approved this:

Imagine pitching Ridley Scott’s iconic introduction of the Macintosh computer to your current leadership. A creative execution need not be so iconoclastic to be effective, but originality is always less likely to be tuned out. Creativity feels genuine, especially in today’s increasingly AI obsessed world. It helps brands get noticed, product launches soar, and even emails opened.

Think of creativity as an antidote to noise. It gets people talking. It gets people buzzing. It gets people buying.

Talk of the town or face in the crowd?

Whether you’re launching a new brand, releasing a new product, or creating an activation campaign, whether you’re a founder or a marketing leader eager to blaze your own trail, a creative-forward approach can help your brand or product gain a competitive edge. It’s the difference between standing out or getting lost in the crowd.

If founder mode is a ”vision thing” and manager mode is a “biz school thing,” think of creativity as an inspiration thing. And if reading this inspires you to explore how customized, creative-forward thinking can help your brand stand out, we hope you’ll think of The Break.

Crafting creative solutions for complex marketing challenges is what we’re all about.