A few weeks before the whole Sam Harris bonanza, a few changes occurred on the team. First, Katie Bloom made her departure. We always knew she would leave us since her heart and soul were within writing, but this foresight did not mitigate any sadness when the day finally came. We had begun to turn up the work intensity, and my sense is that was when Katie knew it was her time to move on. Her comforting presence and brilliant mind were missed the moment she was gone.
The second change was that I was officially shifted off of travel and schedule management. As Zach put it, "Frawls, I want you doing one thing, and that's marketing. You need to be thinking about how we're going to build our army."
When Zach shared the news of my transition with me, I felt sad, and I genuinely couldn't believe I was sorry about it. All I had done as the scheduler was bitch and moan, and now I'm sad?!
It turns out being within the proximity of cool people, especially the leader of your (aspirational) movement, is an exceptional ride for the ego. Despite hating it, it seems I enjoyed feeling cool, powerful, and important. It's almost as if important people carry with them an experience warping aura. As I look back, memories of meetings that I definitively found boring at the moment now sparkle in my mind. Meanwhile, the agonizing seven-day workweeks spent in airport terminals are suddenly smudged out of my memory completely. My sadness about my departure from this role only lasted about five minutes, but it was there, and I spotted that bastard. Thankfully, I've played enough mental gymnastics that I knew my mind was playing tricks, and I could knock some sense into it. I have a job to do — a movement to build.
In my first few days as a liberated marketer, I wanted to vomit. This is what I do when I'm nervous or feeling out of my league if you haven't noticed. My task was to effectively sketch a plan from the position of "mostly irrelevant" to the position of "national movement." It turns out you feel like a real idiot when you have to sit down and actually do the impossible task you've been saying society “just needs to do.” You realize you weren’t being bold with crazy dreams but you were mostly being delusional and self-righteous. If we were serious about winning, I calculated that we needed to grow our marketing numbers by a multiple of about 50,000x in two years on a current marketing budget of $500/month. I was a 24-year old (at this point in time) marketer who had only worked a lone-wolf and had never really had to put my work up against adults or professionals. So, to say the least, I was consumed with panic.
I eventually realized my job as the scheduler had served as the perfect safety blanket preventing me from having any real accountability for our lackluster growth. The scheduling job allowed me to complain that there was a terrible burden preventing me from being the world-class marketer I claimed to be. I could grumble all day and night without having to ever face the music. I find this to be a cornerstone of the human experience. We loudly protest burdens that we secretly appreciate because they protect us from learning whether or not we're capable of actualizing our dreams. Why risk our identity when the fantasy of being capable is almost as good as having the dream itself?
When I wasn't sick with nausea, I would sit in my wheelie chair doing busy work and mostly staring at my computer. I would genuinely wonder what I was supposed to do now. The infinite canvas of strategic possibilities is a decision fatigue I had never prepared for.
For a week I wandered around my mind aimlessly. Then, slowly, I discovered my marketing knowledge. It had been hidden away and guarded by fear. It took a few more days to entirely fight off my fear, but eventually, I prevailed, and my mind was functioning again. With fear beaten, the task seemed possible — break it down, one day at a time. My rational brain also gave me a fantastic reminder that there is no marketing playbook for 50,000x in two years. This means there are no rules. In this sort of territory, any idea is a good idea. With my marketing cronies and me ruling the hills of my mind again, I felt comfortable and capable. I know what I am doing.
Now the thing is, I clearly had no idea what was going on in politics, but after nearly five years fighting to end up in this seat, I was desperate to prove I belonged.
One of the benefits of feeling like you have something to prove in life (at the cost of your mental health) is that you are ready to burn the ship, leave behind everyone that loves you, and battle to the death for your cause. The employment market loves this and will reward you handsomely. This mindset is rampant in Silicon Valley and is how I ended up training amongst one of San Francisco's most buzzy marketing cliques in 2017 — growth hacking. Growth hacking is a type of marketing that tries new things at record speed, breaks the rules if necessary, and relentlessly pursues exponential growth. Plenty of growth hacking is banal and bland, like tricks for more blog shares, but it's the obsessive mindset and neurotic focus on radical growth that sets the group apart from your standard corporate marketer. I learned all sorts of black magic and white magic within the community, but what I really picked up mindset.
One of my first self-appointed projects was trying to make us not look downright pathetic online. When we launched for president, we had 300 Instagram followers, 4,000 Twitter followers, and zero Facebook followers. If you want to talk about people laughing at you because you lack credibility, that'll do it.
One of the most basic principles in growth hacking is to read through every corner of the settings on a social media app looking for accidental loopholes. The most impressive loophole I ever heard of was on Medium.com, a popular blogging website. On Medium, in 2016, you could connect your Twitter account. Anyone who followed you on Twitter would automatically become your follower on Medium. My friend paid a handful of people with millions of followers to connect their accounts to his Medium account. All of a sudden, he was the most followed person on Medium.com. This is "growth hacking" or simply being a scrappy mother fucker.
On Instagram, in 2018, you could connect your phone's contact list to your account. For those contacts who have accounts, you can invite them to follow your business account. When I looked around with my hackery eyes, I discovered that you can connect as many phones as you want. This is way less cool than the Medium.com trick, but as a marketer pulling in 25 followers a week, by golly, let me tell you, I was beating my chest in excitement. I connected Yang's phone, my phone, and Zach's phone, then began itching for more. I started tapping friends. I'd be out to lunch when I'd casually meander over to ask, "by the way … can I connect your phone to Andrew Yang's Instagram?" This is how we broke our first 1,000 (and it still took a month).
***
My initial approach to our marketing is simple. Do all of the little things, streamline them into a James Clear-like daily routine, then spend the rest of my time looking for massive exponential home runs. It is both a patient strategy (understanding that the little things add up over time to be a meaningful advantage) and a neurotic strategy (understanding that to win the presidency, we need cosmic growth.)
Traditional wisdom says to only have one strategy, and I say traditional wisdom can take a hike. One of the things I tell Muhan is that, "I believe I can have my cake and eat it too. The only thing stopping us from both in life is that we don't work hard enough."
"When I look back on my life," I say, oozing with unhealthy masochistic Frawley-Family-workaholic pride. "All of my breakthroughs have come from a ravenous work ethic — epic WoW achievements, 100-pound weight loss, making it in San Francisco, and making it through my existential crisis." Muhan, who believes trade-offs are necessary, has yet to be convinced by my pitch.
Doing small things means weaseling my way into every little crevice of value to be gained. To begin with, I do all of the standard gritty social media fare. I respond to every direct message we receive. I respond to three comments on every social media post we make. I scan who liked our posts and invite them to like our pages. I comment on the posts of other thinkers to get our name in the conversation. Plus around 25 other things, so far.
All of the little things, and the big things, is where Obsessive Compulsive Disorder takes on an entirely new meaning for me. I am so obsessive and compulsive about doing every little thing that it often leads to disorder. At least that's what other people think. To me, I am like John Nash and his crazy wall in A Beautiful Mind. The wall in front of my desk even resembles his wall. I've printed out and taped all of my routines, key activities, and marketing wisdoms from marketing legends folks like Ryan Holiday.
Ryan Holiday wrote a book years ago, Trust Me I'm Lying, about his escapades as "a media manipulator." In the book, he shows off a playbook on how to recreate his successes of winning his client's free press. Any shank-carrying marketer has read the book like a bible (plus, Ryan now chills on a farm in Texas writing about philosophy. Very Sam Harris-like, very aspirational.)
One central theory that Ryan Holiday presents is something called Trading Up the Chain. The idea is that if you're a nobody, but you want the media to talk about you, you must drum up the conversation at the lowest level of media and use that to work your way up to bigger media. It's like a pyramid. Three crappy blogs can be cited to get one legit blog to talk about you. Three of those and so on. Theoretically, you can work your way up to the mainstream media. Trading Up the Chain is a strategy that aligns seamlessly with building a grassroots movement as they both use small blocks to win big blocks. Ryan's book sits on my desk in my routine designed workspace for quick reference.
In my obsessiveness of small things, I've outlined a master plan for Trading Up the Chain. The idea is straightforward — dominate every pocket of the internet. In my mind, it's hard for big media to not talk about the guy who shows up everywhere you go online — right? This is the vision: You're on Reddit? Yang. On Yahoo News? Yang. On Home Depot's review section? Yang. You're playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure? Yang.
Now, the internet is large, and I'm one measly fellow, so to begin this strategy, I googled Andrew Yang and sifted through the first 50 pages of results. I pulled out every single website, forum, subreddit, or errant blog that has mentioned Yang since our launch. If these people are talking about him, they've already proven to be warm to the message and potential early adopters. Thus, the seed is planted. My job is to ensure the seed grows by chanting about Yang on those forums in my free time. At least until they begin chanting his name for me. It's not astroturfing. I just happen to be an active daily user of 50 forums, and I just happen to be talking about him each time I visit.
When I'm not working on these small items, I'm focused on moonshots. To me, a moonshot strategy needs to be big like Oprah or original like the Snuggie. Thankfully, almost anything you do in politics is original. My headline moonshots are the ones I've been beating Zach over the head with — Quora, LinkedIn, and Podcasts — but I have many more. There's a lot to be gained by exploiting the newer social media platforms. Commonly, new apps will be desperate for users. Hence, they often bake in generous algorithms that spread content like butter. Or they'll secretly leave loopholes for ways to gain lots of followers like Medium.com.
Podcasting is the idea keeping me awake at night with eagerness. Long-form content is a no-brainer. Podcasts are not only one of the rare places where Yang can prove he's not a lunatic but also one of the places where there are no other politicians. I mean, seriously, you have millions of deep thinking, eager to learn people in one place and no one is politics is talking to these people! Also, considering the mainstream media has no interest in acknowledging we exist, this may be our only real path.
Since April, I have been mounting a campaign to reach out to the top podcasts across business and politics. It turns out finding Dan Carlin's actual email is more challenging than expected, so it's been a slow-moving process. I was also busy kissin' babies with Yang. However, now that I'm no longer traveling, I'm feeling giddy. I can't help but feel like I'm only a few cold emails away from breaking this thing wide open. Since Yang sells, our team’s belief is that once we can inject him into the mainstream, his popularity will blow up. My ego is bursting at the seams at the thought of figuring out how to do that. I try to diffuse my inflating self-image, but it's a tricky beast to tame when you believe you've found the one untouched linchpin in society that could catalyze a world reshaping movement. For someone who grew up feeling like they were never good enough, this anticipation is a drug-like high I wish I could bottle up and abuse for eternity.
***
I moved out of Brooklyn recently. I like to tell people, “Spiritually, I am a Brooklyn guy, but I can’t handle that commute.” After working 12-hours a day, there’s nothing worse than being thrown around in a smelly tube for an hour. I guess this means I’m too career-focused to be a genuine Brooklyn guy.
I moved into a Manhattan neighborhood named Kip’s Bay. I didn’t know it until after I moved in, but the area is the “still hanging onto college” frat kid central, and that makes me want to vomit. A different type of vomit. This one is shame. The worst part is that now when I tell old friends where I live in the city, they immediately narrow their eyes and crack a grin, “oh, of course, you do.”
“No! I swear! The apartment was a good deal! I’m really a Brooklyn Guy!”
But when I tell them how good of a deal, and they begin to actually believe me. Muhan found me the place on Craigslist using some sort of bot he set up to find deals. The apartment is at 29th and 3rd, right next to the Trader Joe’s and across from the Target. People on TripAdvisor described Kip’s Bay as “the only quiet part of Midtown.” The apartment is modern, and the rent is a jaw-dropping, unbelievable, deal-of-a-lifetime, $1,100 a month (which is cheaper than my mattress-on-a-floor Brooklyn apartment).
All I need to do is tell any New Yorker my location and the rent, and they’ll be furious. Some of them with genuine anger. Oh my god! You’ve been here three months. Why can’t I get a fucking break like that! I’ve been here seven years!
I thought the apartment was a hoax, especially when the guy said his name was Craig (off of Craigslist), but when I went to check it out, truth be told, Craig was a real guy. Craig is a 67-year-old former artist living his best life. I was hesitant to live with him given the age difference, but he was cool and well-adjusted to the times so I committed to the apartment thinking, “I mean, age is just a number. Plus, he has a dog! How fun!”
Like with any New York City apartment, though, it has its “things” that I’ve gradually discovered upon moving in. To begin with, I had been totally blind to the fact that the apartment is on the sixth floor and is only accessible by a staircase. The shower water also has only two temperatures: 2nd-degree burn (only mildly exaggerating here) or one-degree away from frozen. The worst part is that there is no system to the temperatures because the temperature dials operate more like a wheel of fortune. Craig’s dog has also turned out to be a big jerk. Technically the dog’s breed is some sort of Terrier, but as far as I can tell, it may be a senile automaton because it has no feature other than hoarse barking until you peg him with a treat to shut up. Craig calls the dog Theo, but I resent the dog for being such a grumpy bastard that I strictly refer to him as Scooter or shit head. Shit head also sheds fur with every step he takes, and I view the fur as a personal attack on me. My last gripe with the place is that we are attached to a firehouse and are next to “hospital row,” so I hear sirens more than I don’t hear sirens: way to go, TripAdvisor. By New York standards, though, if these are my major problems, the apartment is pretty dreamy.
Most importantly, the apartment solves my original problem: I don’t have to commute in a smelly tube. I now can walk to work in 26 minutes if I am brisk. The walk isn’t a peaceful one — it’s midtown after all — but I’m in control, and that makes it worthwhile. Along my commute, I’ll walk amongst tourists, sad people in suits, and at night, rats and trash bags.
I’ve also learned why New Yorkers never say sorry when they bump into you. The sidewalks are anarchy during the morning rush hour. You bump into people, people bump into you, it’s not personal, it’s chaos, so let’s not waste time acknowledging what we already know. I skip the morning rush by sleeping until 9:30 a.m., dressing in seven minutes, then arriving consistently at 10:03 a.m. It’s late, but not enough for someone to care. Matt and Yang usually arrive at 8:00 a.m. Zach is a 9:00 a.m. guy, and Muhan is a 9:57 a.m. guy.
When I arrive, I’m gross and sweating like a pig because the summer sun is ragingly fierce. As I wipe off the sweat from my face, I give the gang a wave.
“Hey Andrew,” Yang says, without losing focus from his laptop.
I take a seat in my red wheelie chair, drink some water, and take a deep breath. I look up, and my eyes meet a massive poster way above my desk. The poster reads, “Andrew Yang is a longer than long shot for president of the United States.” It’s from our launch article in the New York Times. Zach printed it off and stuck it on the wall as motivation for the team — what did I say about that desire to prove yourself? I next look at my taped-to-the-wall routines. I’ve been awake for 30 minutes, and I’m pretty happy my morning is automated. I find task number one and get to work.
The Sam Harris-high only lasts us two weeks. We are now on track to raise $25,000 in July, which means we are losing money again at a hefty pace.
One of the things keeping me motivated is our Facebook Group, which I had the good fortune of launching a few weeks before Sam Harris. I had debated launching a Facebook group for months because they’re an exhausting and time-consuming asset to manage. Plus, if you screw it up, there are no do-overs. I saw this first-hand while in San Francisco. Facebook groups were the hot way to build a community for whatever the fuck you were doing out there in 2016, so I ended up in nearly 40 groups. I saw first-hand how easy it was to fail. In a Facebook group, the moment you fail to entertain or, worse, you allow carte blanche posting (which always leads to shit and junk), people will mute your group. Once you’re muted, it’s over. You get forgotten, and the people never come back. The next thing you know, you’re talking to yourself in a public space while some dude spams the group with links to obscure Indian news outlets.
All of these things considered, I knew we needed it. There is no community on the internet like Facebook, and nowhere else do you get as much control over the group as you do on Facebook. This was essential.
If we portal back to the house part analogy seen in Chapter 8, the idea follows as such: We are throwing a party, the house is empty. Eventually, by not being idiots and choosing to not charge $10 at the door, we get 10 curious people inside the party. That’s still a problem because the house is big and empty. We can’t let people wander. We have to gather them into one place, so they know others exist. If they don’t know about the others, they’ll feel like a loser in an empty house and leave. But once they find others, they feel camaraderie and validation for being at the party. Plus, you can now entertain them all at once and set the party's culture, which will ultimately determine the direction of the party. Are we classy with hors d’oeuvres or doing body shots? How you entertain early sets the culture for the whole movement.
I waffled in uncertainty until one day in June. Zach was tired of hearing me talk about it.
“Frawls,” he said. “Just do it, see what happens.”
That’s all the nudging I needed. I set up our Facebook group and designed our marketing funnels to prioritize gathering people over gathering money. If you signed up for our email list, you got an email inviting you to join the Facebook group. Typically, in politics, that is an ask to donate. If you did happen to donate to us, you got invited to the Facebook group instead of being told to buy merchandise. On Facebook, our page directed visitors to our Facebook group instead of our website.
Thanks to Zach and the Facebook optimized marketing funnel, the house party doors were open and ready for business when our new mini-horde of true believers showed up after Sam Harris. Good things happen when your people are in the same room.
Even though Yang sells, I take a lot of responsibility for making sure Yang really really sells. When an article about Andrew Yang comes out, I view it to be in the campaign’s best interest for that article to be zooming across the web. If Yang’s name gets clicks and likes and shares, content creators have a selfish incentive to talk more about Yang.
This is supported by one of the main life lessons Yang has taught us on the campaign so far. “Always look at the incentives of a system, and try to work within those incentives,” he says.
So, in a Yangian-inspired manner, I have created a system to blast any new articles about Yang with page views. We don’t have many, so it’s not that hard. This is how it goes:
First, I have a fancy tool that alerts me when a Yang article has dropped.
Second, I take that article and I post it to all of my favorite communities. I have a ton of online accounts for everything, especially Reddit. In two hours, Yang’s article is across the web and on at least 12 different subreddit from 12 different accounts.
Third, I use a software called HitLeap to boost traffic to those articles. HitLeap is a tool that operates on my desktop and visits websites automatically all day long. By doing this, I get HitLeap credits, and I cash them in when a Yang article drops. By cashing in HitLeap credits, the HitLeap network will send tens of thousands of other computers to whatever website URL I submit.
Conclusion? Yang sells.
But not really. Despite these efforts and plenty of other scrappy marketing initiatives, our numbers have bottomed out, journalists don’t give one shit about Yang, and the team is discouraged. Usually when you launch a new company, people care, then you enter a phase where no one cares. Startup-folk refer to this latter phase as the Trough of Sorrow. We thought our Trough of Sorrow came in April, but July is without a doubt the Trough of Sorrow. Sam Harris was the rush of people we had expected at launch. Now that the Sam Harris people have cooled down, we are back at the drawing board.
***
The day has finally arrived! I have at last assembled the contact information for over 100 different podcasts, thanks to the good help of a few volunteers. I am now squared away to help our campaign shape history.
I arrive at the office a little earlier than usual, with an extra bit of pep in my step. I wheel around our tiny room in my red chair. I stop by Zach’s desk to share the excitement. At the moment, Zach is hammering away some emails on his tiniest little Surface Pro. I can’t help but laugh at the sight of it.
“Dude,” I say to Zach. “I am going to email the top 100 podcasts about Yang. This is going to be huge. And now we can link them to the Sam Harris podcast which made a huge splash. It’s impossible we don’t land a few of these!”
Zach stops to look at me and leans back in his chair with his stainless-steel thermal mug. A tea bag hangs out as he rests coolly. “Should be good, Frawls.”
“You’re damn right it will be!” I shout before zooming back over to my desk.
What no one on the team knows is that I have a trick up my sleeve. Our podcast outreach today isn’t going to be from Andrew Frawley, but it’s going to be from “our supporters” using a variety of online personas I have had assembled for years. Now this could be qualified as astroturfing.
My astroturfing army began all the way back in 2007 when I was first on Reddit in middle school. I made a lot of accounts because I would forget the passwords. It was banal and innocent at the time. In 2016, however, I worked with a virtual assistant in the Philippines to create ten fully comprehensive online personas. I was selling business to business software at the time, but I figured I would need them someday and it’s far better to make them now. This is because fake accounts are like credit cards, the long they’re active, the more powerful they become.
My ten personas have unique photos, personalities, ages, genders, hometowns, industries, emails, and social media accounts from Reddit, to Twitter, to LinkedIn, to Facebook, to Instagram. Over the last few days, I’ve drafted up a unique email from each one of them demanding Andrew Yang to be on the show of each one of these podcasts.
Those ten emails will be spread out over this upcoming week, which I will then conclude with an email from me offering Andrew Yang as a guest on the show.
*** ***
THIS IS WHERE I STOPPED WRITING.
I have summarized the rest of this chapter below.
After that, I have included a summary of all remaining chapters of the book.
Thanks for reading.
I’ll see you on the internet.
Find me at AndrewFrawley.com or Twitter.com/TweetAtAndrew
*** ***
The astroturfing story above continues with me blasting out the emails too quickly and getting identified by the podcasts as astroturfing. One of them emails Yang and says ‘someone’ is astroturfing them for him. Yang asks me if it is me. I say yes. He tells me to stop. I stop. But he applauds my creative thinking and suggests I apply it in a more morally sound way. Truly emblematic of a forgiving leader!
***
The next section talks about the emotions to which I designed our marketing ideas and strategies towards citing the marketing legend Eugene Schwartz, “"Choosing the desire to which you advertise is the most important thing you will do" — Eugene Schwartz.
I list off all of the emotions and desires that Ryan Holiday had talked about in his book Trust Me, I’m Lying.
Sensationalism, Extremism, Sex, Scandal, Hatred, Conflict, Triviality, Titillation, Dogmatism, Anger, Fear, Outrage, Laughter, Excitement, Controversial, Strange, Weird, Hilarious, Polarizing.
I had these taped to a wall in front of me. As a marketer, I often wondered when designing content or a marketing promotion, do we at least hit one of these?
***
I tell the story of how I created Google Andrew Yang. The TLDR is that I was in Washington Square Park with my then girlfriend. I was lost in my head stuck on the central problem of our campaign:
We have so much to educate people on with our guy. Who he is. What he's doing. What UBI is. and how it's not dumb ... how can you possibly communicate this to the masses when the bandwidth and fidelity of your message gets squeezed the more broad you go?
This problem had led our campaign trying to summarize Yang’s message on fliers and marketing materials as “FREE MONEY,” or other stupid shit because those were at least provocative. Unfortunately, those reduce credibility and are unbelievable. My solution hit me out of thin air. Three words. GOOGLE ANDREW YANG.
I couldn’t believe it at the time. It was brilliant beyond measure to me. The slogan was provocative. It was a call-to-action. It was three words. It didn’t distort Yang’s message at all. If anything, it enhanced it. Most importantly, in those three words, it would send any curious individual into the internet which was now a pandora’s box of long-form content where Andrew Yang did best.
I freaked out, told it to my girlfriend, and promised her the slogan would be across the country one day. And it was. To such an extent, the Chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party once referred to the poster as the best political sign he had ever seen.
***
The chapter ends with a visualization of how desperate the campaign team is. We are not succeeding in any way. I talk about how badly I am burning out, working beyond 10:00 p.m. every single night.
A silver lining is that our summer interns are presenting to the team their summer project: how the primaries and Iowa caucus work.