How Cult Products Win Big: Mastering Crowded Markets and Building Devoted Fans

Links
Modern House: https://www.themodernhouse.com/

Summary
In this conversation, the hosts discuss the challenges of standing out in competitive markets, particularly in the context of product differentiation. They introduce the Cult Products Framework, emphasising the importance of having a revolutionary vision and a unique value proposition. The discussion highlights the significance of niching down and creating a unique customer experience, as well as the balance between growth and maintaining brand integrity.

takeaways

• You will always struggle to get people's attention in a crowded market.
• Standing out requires a unique value proposition.
• Niche marketing can lead to better market capture.
• Creating a unique customer experience is essential.
• Differentiation by design is crucial for success.
• Modern House exemplifies a successful niche brand.
• Maintaining brand integrity is challenging as businesses grow.
• It's important to attract the right customers and repel the wrong ones.
• The cult products framework simplifies business growth strategies.
• A strong brand can create a sense of community among customers.

Creators & Guests

Host

Adam Yaya-Durrant

Co-founder of Yaya

Host

Phill Keaney-Bolland

Co-founder of Yaya

Producer

Alexandra Pointet

Producer of the Cult Products podcast

What is Cult Products?

Dive into the essentials of start-up success with Cult Products, hosted by Yaya's co-founders, Adam Yaya-Durrant and Phill Keaney-Bolland. This podcast delivers sharp insights on creating revolutionary products, radical branding, and attracting a loyal following of early adopters. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, each episode is packed with actionable advice and stories from those who've built successful businesses. Join Adam and Phill as they help you transform bold ideas into start-up success.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (00:20)
Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. And welcome to another episode of the Cult Products podcast. It is a hard morning for us because we had a big night out last night at an award ceremony where we were listed as one of the fastest growing companies in the UK.

Alexandra Pointet (00:33)
Thank

Phill Keaney-Bolland (00:49)
So that was good. I'm Phil and I am joined as always by Adam and Alex. Hello. Have a sore head today. Healing, fuzzy. as true professionals do, we're here to provide the content that...

Alexandra Pointet (00:50)
Yeah.

Hello. Good morning. Good morning. Feeling fuzzy.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (01:15)
the world wants to hear. Yes, the WhatsApp group was on the verge of not doing this thing. As Adam said, the show must go on. I've had two liquorzades and a coffee. I've had two coffees. Alex, I don't know what that energy drink that you were having before.

Alexandra Pointet (01:31)
Yeah, 100 plus. Shout out to 100 plus. It's a great isotonic, isotonic drink. Is that what you say? Is that how you say it? Basically, it's just super hydrating. really, I recommend 100 plus. You can't get it everywhere, but.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (01:38)
Got it.

hundred. Good plug. Use the code. It won't work. At your local news agencies. Yeah. So this morning, we're going to talk a bit about the model that we use with our clients at EIR to help them grow their businesses.

Alexandra Pointet (01:52)
Yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (02:17)
We're going to get into the first bit of that today. All right. Should we just dive in? Let's dive in. Okay. Okay. Good. Right. So what the model is called the cult products framework and the reason it's called that, well, two reasons. One is because we wanted a name that was a little bit Marmite.

Alexandra Pointet (02:21)
We are indeed.

I think so, yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (02:44)
and would catch people's attention, but also because the flip side of this is a crap product. And I think that's probably a good place to start by what, what do we mean by that? And what's the thing that we're actually trying to avoid by using this model. So interestingly, when we were trying to pull together examples of what crap products look like, what their brand looks like and their websites and all of those kinds of things.

Alexandra Pointet (02:58)
Ahem.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (03:14)
Adam, you, you started with some very sort of old school stock images of, know, the classic kind of things that, you know, in suits or shaking hands and, all of those kinds of things, buildings, lots of buildings and things like that. But I don't think on a brand level that is it anymore. Cause actually I think that's so, it's such a cliche that nobody really does that anymore apart from.

a few, like I would say it's maybe some management consultants that still still go with that kind of approach. So now I think that the tropes in terms of brand that you might expect from a crack product are just the kind of things that are like readily available, highly highly commoditized. And I'm thinking specifically, illustrations, there is this very specific sort of illustration style, I think for a while every

every tech business started started to have that has now got to the point where it's, it's like, it's so overdone that it's a real obvious indicator that like you've paid about five pounds for your brand. Hard to describe the illustrations on a podcast. say they're like naive illustrations. What I mean by that is that they're very simple and they're very kind of like, sometimes like just very stripped back in terms of the color palette.

I mean, and when they first started being launched into like, you know, tech companies using them, did, was a nice way of like humanizing some of the stuff and like making the brand a bit softer. I think it's got to a stage where it's really difficult for like to, to distinguish like any differentiation from those styles these days. Like even if people have invested money in an illustrator, like it's still kind of like, guess it's in a very flooded, flooded market.

Alexandra Pointet (04:59)
Mm.

Definitely. Do you remember? Sorry. I'm just going to say, do you remember as a visual, the, I think it was Lloyd's TSB or something. Do you remember those very fuzzy animations, animated video? And then I feel like at that point then everybody was then doing the same thing. And it was that kind of very soft style, like people wandering around on bicycles and sitting at computers and,

Phill Keaney-Bolland (05:11)
So, yeah. Go on.

Yeah.

You know, we've had a lot of those like in the past and you know, and also I am a like, you know, I'm a massive, I love illustration. Like I love, I've worked with a lot of very talented illustrators and you know, I love the art form, but unfortunately it's got so kind of saturated. It does like, it does feel cheap and it does feel off the shelf. And that's like, it's quite, it's quite, it's tough, right? Because how do you like communicate stuff without using...

Alexandra Pointet (05:42)
Yeah, definitely.

saturated, yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (06:08)
illustration or using some kind of styling. So, you know, have to think a bit differently and try and approach things differently. Illustrations are not inherently we're not looking at an inherently bad thing. It's just the cutter.

Alexandra Pointet (06:26)
Some of the styles are a bit old hat now.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (06:28)
There's a very specific style that if I said to you, like, it's the style that you see on almost every SaaS platform website, probably would be able to paint it. So I think there's that. We've actually talked about this before, I think like gradients had this like evolution where in the nineties, like you start to be able to create gradients in

PowerPoint and things like that. And it was like, these are like really kind of flashy and cool. And then got really overdone. And then you didn't see gradients and everything kind of went like flat or skeuomorphic and things like that. And then they came back and it's like, actually gradients are cool again. we've got a resurgence of gradients. And now I think we're in a space where again, it's kind of like, it's almost the first thing that you reach for if you like, what says tech?

more than a more than a gradient and some illustrations. Anyway, there's a whole bunch of things like that. And it's not just it's not just about the visuals. It's also about like how you communicate what you do. And I think there's kind of two camps there. There's either just like describing your product like this is this is what it is. Rather than the value that it achieves. Which, you know, is not great, or just being like

super vague and just saying, you know, it's just, it's just a solution. On that point, can you kind of give an example of like the difference between like describing the value and just describing like, I guess what the practical side of things and why that is like, yeah, why is it important to not do the latter? It's sort of the difference between saying this is, this is, this is a CRM platform or saying we help you to.

landlord sales. You know, it's that it's that it's that distinction. It's like one of those things is a thing people want to achieve. And the other is is like a how thing, you know, and I think if you just lead with that, you're losing a bit of the like, psychology and things that people are actually like thinking about what, you know, well, we don't just want to have a CRM platform, we actually want more sales. So that's what you should be selling. And that's how you should be.

of itching yourself. Anyway, that's the that's the crack product side of things. And then and then there are there are some like symptoms of that. And I think one of the symptoms is you aren't really differentiated in terms of what your what your product is or how you talk about it. And that means that you end up in this world where people can go, right. So like,

Alexandra Pointet (08:52)
Mm-hmm.

Does. Yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (09:18)
You're a CRM platform here are all the other CRM platforms, I'm going to like look at them side by side. And then one of the facts I'm going to look at is which is the, which is the cheapest one, which is not a great space to be in for lots of reasons. Then there's like, you are visually just looking like everyone else. So, know, again, you don't stand out and people don't pay attention to you, but the real bad thing,

Phill Keaney-Bolland (09:45)
bad things about being a product are you will always struggle to get people's attention because there is no reason for them to pay any attention to something that looks the same as everyone else, sounds the same as everyone else, just basically puts you in a pack of people. And I think when you're in a really competitive market, we've just done a project in cybersecurity where there's a lot of money flooding into that, you know.

a lot of businesses spinning out doing lots of different things and lots of categories within that marketing. And what you don't want to be is just like one of another massive companies that's fighting for the attention of your, your buyer, because you'll just, you'll just blend in and ultimately like that you'll just get evaluated based on like the one thing that they can differentiate you on, which is, which is usually cost.

And so you need to actually stand out and do something different. That's why we have this called products framework. we've got probably 15 episodes about what value proposition is. So let's not.

Alexandra Pointet (10:49)
Make that make that 20, 25 I think. I don't know what number we are but yeah there's yeah there's a lot.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (10:53)
All right. So again, yeah, so let's not let's not go into that too much. But I think that the key bit of the first part of our model, which we call revolutionary vision is actually making sure that value proposition is going to be genuinely differentiated. And there are three elements within that bit of the model.

Alexandra Pointet (11:09)
yes.

Thank

Phill Keaney-Bolland (11:21)
The first is about niching down. this, think, you know, I had a couple of conversations where this came up this week. One which was in the sort of real estate space. And, you know, that is a very competitive space to try and launch anything in, you know. Here in the UK, we have things like Rightmove and Zoopla. And it's very, it's very difficult when you've got such dominant players in a space.

to capture market share. And we were having a conversation about what to do about that. And one of the things that we spoke about was actually, do you think about a specific target market audience, more of a niche within that space? Because they're able to go after everything in the world. But we use real estate as an example. You could say, we're going to create a portal specifically for cottages in the countryside.

for example, and become really like specialists in that niche. You could say, okay, we're going to go after like a specific area of the country. And, you know, I guess you could have like a Margate property portal, something like that. Or you could go after a specific target person, like say, we're going to go after, you know, first time buyers or people looking for a time at home. So those kinds of things. And you've got a much better chance then of actually capturing that market than you do.

going after everybody in the world because it's really hard to have a, like, firstly to get cut through, but also part of getting cut through is having a really specific product and message. And you can, you can totally, hopefully logically see how it's much easier to say, okay, we're only speaking to, you know, first time buyers who want to live in a cottage for some reason.

Alexandra Pointet (13:03)
Yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (13:16)
how you can create a brand and messaging and a product that really caters to that specific need, actually better than probably the mainstream thing that caters to everyone could, and then you can start to build from there.

Alexandra Pointet (13:26)
Yeah. I'm thinking of a really amazing example of this. The modern house. my goodness. I love that. they're just, they've got every, everything. Yeah. Everything they do, like all their marketing and like the way that they present their properties and do the bit of history about the

Phill Keaney-Bolland (13:33)
Go on.

The modern house is a great example, You'll strive to be on the modern house or to buy a house on the modern house. Lincoln, Lincoln the buyer.

Alexandra Pointet (13:56)
the buildings, and then all the aesthetics obviously are just stunning. It's just perfect and it stands apart from everything else. And so many people now have tried to like join that bandwagon. Like if you think of them like in London specifically, like Stowe Brothers or there's this other one I've seen called Ostrich and they're trying to get into that like modern house space. And it's like.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (14:04)
Yeah, I see this.

Hmm.

Thank you, brothers.

Okay.

Alexandra Pointet (14:24)
These were the trailblazers, they've like really, they've made it.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (14:26)
Yeah, that is that is actually a much better example than my weird cottage idea. Maybe because I guess there's potentially people listening to this who don't necessarily know modern house. What like how does it work? And how is it different from what other people are doing in that space?

Alexandra Pointet (14:47)
I think it's just, well actually they do say your house doesn't have to necessarily be a modern house as in, I think what they started doing was they targeted kind of mid-century buildings and architecture. And I think that was probably taken from the trends in mid-century furniture. So they were like, let's just build that out of it. And at the beginning, I think it was just all these sort of very brutalist style.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (15:07)
except for Friday.

Alexandra Pointet (15:15)
flat blocks and houses and if you think of very, some people might find it really ugly, but I love it. So it's all those very 60s style houses, like lots of lights, but very kind of, you know, square glass concrete structures. And people that have, you know, lived in those houses and really made them their own and looked after them. And that was where think where they started. So if you go onto the modern house website, you'll see a lot of that.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (15:15)
Hmm.

Alexandra Pointet (15:44)
It's actually opened up now a bit more to like, you know, it is just that aesthetic. If someone's got a Victorian terrace house and they have decorated it in a kind of modern-esque way, you'll see a lot of that on there too. you know, it's got a great aesthetic and they have properties all over the country. It's not just the cities. There's some stunning places that they put on online, you know, in middle of nowhere in like something out in Sunderland or something.

They've got these incredible landscapes. really? Well, I don't know. I somewhere like that. And they've got these incredible landscapes around them. dream.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (16:13)
Probably not in Sunderland. never.

I mean, I'm from Newcastle, I can't let you get away with saying anything positive about it sometimes.

Alexandra Pointet (16:30)
Where is Sunderland? Is it like, is it just next to Newcastle?

Phill Keaney-Bolland (16:32)
is it? That's a southern thing. So there's like half an hour from Newcastle. No, it's the other direction. I have actually got quite a lot of friends from Sunderland and my family's from like half halfway between the two. But for whatever reason, these two these two places that are like right next to each other have very similar cultures.

Alexandra Pointet (16:38)
Okay. Is it closer to Scotland? It's closer to Scotland. okay. Okay.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (17:01)
And like where, you know, a lot of people kind of commute to the same places and work together, have this like weirdly intense rivalry that makes no sense. And, and you're just brought brought up on it. And then at a certain point, you sort of like, this is a bit weird, isn't it? Why are we taking lumps out of each other when we've got that bigger fear problems in the world? No.

Alexandra Pointet (17:11)
Okay. Okay.

You don't even remember anymore. You don't even remember what the issue was. Very Shakespearean. But is there some nice countryside between the two of the places? Yeah, there you go. That's what I mean. That's what I mean.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (17:29)
But they're too easy, isn't it? Let's be honest. They... Yeah. But just...

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And there might be. But I think it definitely the creation, the curation of those specific houses, those mid-century ones, because they're really hard to find, like, and ones that done well. And I think that did start, one house was very like, trying to find those in the zoo player and just digging through, digging through is near impossible, but getting that kind of right.

Alexandra Pointet (17:55)
Mmm.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (18:07)
was really key to its success. And also those houses, because a lot of them were kind of ex-council houses, weren't they, at one stage, those ones. So they were quite few and far between in terms of people who often held onto them. So I think it was really kind of centered around those ones in London. And now it's obviously growing a bit of arms and legs, and it's more aesthetic.

Alexandra Pointet (18:17)
Yeah, some of them, yeah.

Definitely.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (18:33)
Obviously they have like their own photography style, have their own like everything around that brand is like just done really really deliberately and very like, yeah, it's just...

Alexandra Pointet (18:44)
I feel like it was probably started as just a passion project, like completely, just like someone just going through and finding all these amazing houses. And then it's, yeah, it's a great brand. We'd all love to have a modern house. Yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (18:54)
Yeah.

Yeah, well I'd love to be featured on there, because I love to do my house and work big features on their site, yeah. There actually, there was a flat on my road that was on Modern House and we saw it and we were like, let's go and have a look at it. And we actually couldn't go and have a look at it because they were so oversubscribed with people going for viewings. And I think...

So I think, I think there's like a load of strategic choices being made there where unlike most estate agents in London, they don't just have like, it's Saturday morning, the house is open, a hundred people are going to turn up and then we're going to like create this sort of urgency and be like, well, you know, if you're to put an offer and you probably, there's been so many people who've been here this morning that you're really going to have to make that in the next couple of hours. They, they seem to say, okay, well, we'll do, you know,

think I didn't actually get to do the viewing, but I think it was more like one-on-one take, you know, take you around, give you a bit more of like a, I'm not sure what concierge feel, you know, I think, think, I yeah. I was actually thinking, cause there's someone who like has marketed their house really well in near where I live in Margaret. And I was thinking if I'm, if I go to South house, I'd actually just do it myself. And I set up a website.

Alexandra Pointet (20:07)
Well, that is the way. That should be the way.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (20:23)
set up a little Instagram page and then like get up there and do that like more like kind of personalised like viewings, cup of tea like make it a bit of an experience and because I think otherwise it's just like a free-for-all I mean that's probably not realistic.

Alexandra Pointet (20:29)
Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it is a free for all. Yeah, I like the idea of actually being shown around a house, rather than just going and looking around. It's such a weird, yeah, the open house thing is an odd development.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (20:50)
it's, yeah, and, and, and, yeah, I guess, like, it's all an experience. And if you're, you know, some of these places, I imagine, like multi million pound things, like the experience of going and spending that much money in any other circumstance, other than property is very much like, and, you know, I don't buy things for multi million pounds. So

I'm not speaking from personal experience here, but you I'd expect to get like a glass of champagne and somebody to hold the door open for me. those kinds of things. And then property is like, you're going to be just basically in a fight with a load of other people.

Alexandra Pointet (21:23)
Yeah, definitely. Yes.

Yeah and also you're gonna not have any information when you get there you're be there for like 10 minutes and then you're okay apparently you're gonna just put a deposit down on something that you've seen for 10 minutes and you're spending the most amount of money you've ever spent in your life it's yeah it's nuts.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (21:37)
course.

Yeah. Also like when you hear, I mean, we're leaving London, like the stage and doing the property, we had a similar situation. She's outside the door. He didn't have a clue about the house. He was showing everyone like this cupboard under the stairs. And I was like, stop showing them that. It's like awful first experience. Like there's a cupboard under the stairs. Like just get into the good stuff. And he was like, then he was like, you're really good at this. You should do it. And I was like, no, it's just like, just, surely like, know, anyway.

Alexandra Pointet (22:11)
Ha ha!

Phill Keaney-Bolland (22:14)
But hey, my old, my old boss, who was the sales director for, it was like a new homes company. And she always, she always used to do the walk. She was like, this is, this is the walk that the, the buyer is going to, is going to do. So I'm literally going to start from the car park and I'm going to walk me into the sales office and then going to walk around the show and do all of this kind of stuff.

so that she knew that the experience that they were having was like absolutely first rate and she would go to every site and she would go and do that. And you know, it's really, really interesting way of doing that. I think, so there's a couple of things here. One is like you mentioned this, if you go on the website, there's actually more than just the modern houses now. I'd hazard a guess that there probably wasn't initially. Like I think probably what's happened there.

Alexandra Pointet (22:57)
That was good.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (23:15)
is what we would recommend, which is a pick a niche and then expand out from that. So as they become known for the style of house, they're actually also becoming known for that great experience as probably a seller and a buyer and for their brand and for the style of photography and for all of those kinds of things. And then they then actually probably either they would have decided, okay, we're going to branch out.

or somebody would have come to them and go, I know this isn't really what you do, but I'd really like you to sell my different style of house. And because because they've got a reputation and then, you know, the the end stage for them is, you know, is, is, you know, in their hands, where do they stop and say, Yeah, actually, that we don't want to do this kind of thing. That's gonna that's gonna damage our brand. But they will want to get bigger. Maybe that's, you know, more expanding into more

Alexandra Pointet (23:48)
Hmm.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (24:10)
territories or it's different types of houses or those kinds of things. So, and then I think there's a good segue here into the next part of the model, which is, which is about being different by design is that we've, we've touched on some of these things is that if you put, and this is what you should be able to do, whatever your business and projects, you put your product and you say, these are all the things that we do. And you take a competitor and you say, these are, these are all the things that they do.

Alexandra Pointet (24:12)
Mm.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (24:40)
you'd have seen this on websites where can do a comparison and it's literally like, yeah, okay. So the table stakes, the things that we both do, let's keep going with going with modern house. We both, we both put your property on right move, like tick tick, great. And then you have a bunch of stuff that you do that they don't do. And then what they would have, I guess, would be like, you know, a real, I mean, everybody would say professional photography. I don't know enough about like how to, how to describe that specific style and they could put a tick in that box and then, and the cross in there.

competitors box. And actually what they can do and actually we can do just by looking at it and having experienced it is really easily tell you what things they've decided to be different by design on are. And that in combination with the niching thing is really important because some people will really like those things.

but other people will want to go to Foxden's. so there is a conscious choice to be the thing that some people want, but that other people don't want. And we actually had this conversation with one of our clients earlier in the week, which was about, the messaging that we take to a conference be really provocative?

because it's not necessarily just about attracting a specific type of customer that we want to have a conversation with. We also want to put off the people who that's not going to be a good conversation because those people are never actually going to buy from us. And we debated it. And I think where we got to is that we should probably...

Alexandra Pointet (26:21)
Hmm.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (26:32)
you know, we should be actually being quite bold about this. We should have confidence in saying, no, we are really different. This is how we're really different. We're not for everybody. And we don't mind if you want to go and talk to somebody else about something. And I will shut up in a second. There are basically two kinds of people in the world. There are the people who will buy something because it is different and because they share that vision about how things should be done.

list of it. And then there people who will buy things because everybody else already has done and you've got a case study and track record and all of those things. they those kinds of people, if you're a relatively new player in the market, and there's a massive mainstream company, like those kinds of people who are just going to go to Foxden's or whoever it is, they're never going to go to the modern house. So you don't want to be in a conversation with them. It's actually, it's a waste of

time, it's a waste of everybody's time. Do you want to buy this thing that you don't want? And they're going to go, no, I want to go, I want to go to Foxden's. Whereas the people who will put up modern house, like that, they're the people you actually want to attract and you're only going to attract them. If you are genuinely different in how you talk about it. I would also add that I don't even think the people who are going to go to Foxden's would even know or be able to discover modern house. think it's kind of.

Alexandra Pointet (27:49)
Hmm

Phill Keaney-Bolland (27:58)
created such like, it's such a niche really, you know, and we have obviously been discussed about bringing up any of this before the call, and we don't think we've ever talked about Modern House itself, but yet we've all had experiences with it and we've all come to the same kind of like, you know, talk about it in a very kind of positive gleaming light. I would say that in that sense, like it probably gets like a big kind of star as a massive cult product because it...

Alexandra Pointet (28:10)
you

Thank

Phill Keaney-Bolland (28:26)
it knows its audience, its audience is niche. There are certain like individual that has like that value style and values like interior values, those kind of things. They've just gone for it. And like it's kind of it does feel like a proper cult product because people is like, you know, you know, know, kind of thing. And I know that sounds, you know, probably a little bit douchey, but it is that and it's like, you feel part of a club, you feel part of like, you know, that you know, this kind of secret space where you can find these really

Alexandra Pointet (28:47)
Yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (28:55)
beautiful homes and you kind of feel like you've got a bit of a one-up on someone else. And I think that's the kind of vibe product that gives. So I think that gets awarded a big old star. I'll learn modern house. Do you think it can stay like that? I mean, this is also another question. Like, you know, when it gets too big, like how do brands retain that kind of, cause a lot we've seen brands who come into the market.

Alexandra Pointet (29:05)
Yeah, I like that. It gets a big old star. Yeah, that's true.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (29:25)
I guess it's really entirely up to them. Sometimes they lose their way or their identity in that kind of mischief, obviously. If it is their desire to scale and broaden that, it's kind of obviously...

Alexandra Pointet (29:39)
Yeah, I think it probably can if it just retains its, you know, initial vision. But I think I reckon it probably is going to expand to, you know, abroad and European places and things on the mainland. But yeah, I hope it does because it's such a good, such a good, good brand.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (30:06)
I, it was, again, just to sort of reference that conversation that we had with, with, with our client. One of the things that they said was, we don't need to have loads of customers to be as successful as we want to be. And I think that is, is the sort of key thing. It's like, turns out your aspiration is if you, if, if modern house wants to be the size of right move, then they have to become.

Alexandra Pointet (30:12)
Mm-hmm.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (30:36)
the broad mainstream thing. But their founders, or don't know who owns them, you might be sitting there going, well, I don't want to be the size of Raymude. We're quite happy being at this size and having a business that we're really proud of and it's catering to as much as it's catering to our...

Alexandra Pointet (30:50)
Hmm.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (31:02)
customer's needs, it's also catering to our own needs and wants and desires and all the rest of that kind of stuff. And there's enough opportunity for us to be able to expand into doing, as I said, maybe it's overseas properties, maybe, there's other things that we can do that will make us be able to grow as a business, because I doubt they want to stagnate. And then I think it becomes actually quite challenging, but this is obviously the challenge with scaling.

A business like that, as opposed to potentially a tech business is how do you maintain all of those things that made you different when you were small as you start to need to have more people executing on that vision who, you know, they, and we're into a slightly different territory here because, we're necessarily talking about how tech businesses scale. This is more of a services thing is that you do find that

the people who were there at the start, the lifers who've lived and breathed the culture in those kind of businesses. You want them to be the people who pick up the baton and then scale it, because it is hard, I think, when you come in new to have the same depth of feeling about all the values and stuff. Not always, obviously. There's lots of examples where that isn't the case. there are also examples of

you know, people coming in, I guess the obvious one would be the guy at Apple who came in and took over as CEO after Steve Jobs and just like didn't really get the same sense of what Apple was as obviously Steve Jobs had, came in from Pepsi, I think. And the company nearly went bust and the way they fixed that obviously was to call Steve Jobs and get him to come back.

Alexandra Pointet (32:57)
Yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (33:00)
And so you know, that I guess is an example of somewhere where the aspiration was to be like this massive sort of machine, they pushed, they pushed the guy who was carrying the vision out of the way, diluted everything lost what made them special. And then, you know, to sort of backtrack to be able to go forwards again. Not really sure what the lesson there is. I I think that's, there's a good

Alexandra Pointet (33:26)
The founders can never leave!

Phill Keaney-Bolland (33:30)
Yeah, we've chained to the businesses that we start up. No, I think it's a really good point. And I think it's really it's a balancing act is not this like pressures of investors and you know, we see in a lot of businesses like that kind of that those decision make that the decisions are being made that not necessarily are like kind of the right ones for like the kind of initial values and initial like kind of direction of the business. So I think, yeah, it's like this.

It must be, it's hard to keep your integrity and keep the kind of those things that made you unique at the start. when you kind of get to that size, guess. but, we, we do, I mean, it is it is a different game as well when you do become a mainstream player. If you're, if you're able to sell based on the fact that everyone already is a, is a user of your products and you've, you know, everyone knows that your product works really, really well.

Alexandra Pointet (34:09)
Yeah.

Mm.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (34:28)
you can't tell on that and that can be a perfectly fine strategy. But I do feel like if you lose that ability to be different over time and you start to, you know, let's go back to modern house, if they're like, do you know what? Don't worry so much about the photography. We've got the brand now that people come to our site anyway, like just, you know, do it on your phone.

And things like that can very easily start to creep in and then it's like, well, you're just the same as everyone else now. And then what happens is somebody else comes along and they do all the things that you were doing. They're like, we're really innovative. And it just becomes a bit of a cycle. Cool. So revolutionary vision. we clicked?

Alexandra Pointet (34:59)
Mm.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think we have the first third of the pie. The pumpkin pie. There you go. Houses on the brain. Always. Anyway, yeah, revolutionary vision then. There we go. There we go.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (35:21)
I think that was a great example that you in Well done, because it does tick that box, very, slice of the pie. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

There we go. Do you know what I actually did want? I wanted to get it printed on a cake, not a pie. because, because we're to film some ads next week and I wanted to film a really cheesy ad where we could, where we could go. The cult products framework makes growing your business a piece of. I've noticed that a lot of videos, people are eating them now. Have you noticed this? Like this is a trend of.

Alexandra Pointet (35:42)
Okay.

What? then I can go cake in your face.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (36:07)
people doing these videos but like eating a banana or like unwrapping something. It's like, there's probably something, there's like a trend going on there. So maybe you could just like just be eating the cake as you talk or something. Yeah, I think I was watching this one, this guy was just eating this banana. It just like, he talking about, yeah, just, just, just seems

Alexandra Pointet (36:13)
Is that like an ASMR thing? Ew.

Nah.

Why? that's gross. That's like...

That's strange. You know, you know the movie Ocean's Eleven, the new one with Brad Pitt eats in every scene. He eats in every single scene in that movie. It's shrimp cocktail, I don't know, I just specifically remember and it's it's actually pretty gross. He's just eating the whole time.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (36:34)
I was gonna say, and at the end... What's he do? Every scene.

Yeah. What if you would just say to her, like, I'm going to do this film, but in every scene I want to be either eating or drinking or consuming something. Yeah. I think Mardin Grande had something similar to me. I quite like finding out those little quirky things in films. Yeah. I guess the banana thing, it's... I'm sending them to you. There's like quite a few going around at the moment.

Alexandra Pointet (36:55)
I must be eating, yeah. I don't know, it's an odd...

Yeah.

Yes, send them.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (37:14)
It does draw your attention. You are like, what's he doing with that? Is he going to eat it? And they of hover around and they peel it a little bit. So anyway, I'll send you. It's a bit like, do you remember when we were at uni, that book, The Game, out? Pickup artists. gosh, And one of the things was peacocking. this? and you have to go in like a bit.

Alexandra Pointet (37:22)
Why? Why?

God, yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (37:44)
wear like a really weird hat or something when you go into a nightclub so that you know, you stand out or a jazzy shirt wasn't it? Yeah, I think it was in wasn't there something is that do do magic tricks. Anyway, it was like, you know, it's the same. It's kind of the same thing with ads, isn't it? like, you know, it probably probably people are getting advice like, yeah, just wear a weird hat in your video. And then people will be like, well, who's that guy in the weird hat? And then they'll watch the ad and maybe you'll get

Alexandra Pointet (37:58)
My clothes.

Yeah, get some traction. Yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (38:14)
cut through. yeah, eat a bit. Have you tried eating a banana in your hand? Just having a banana in your hand? Yeah. Just having the small banana. We'll try it.

Alexandra Pointet (38:26)
Yeah, strange. all right, well, next time we'll be talking about another piece of the cake.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (38:33)
with a piece of cake in hand potentially. wonder if there's still time to get that cake before we film those ads. Are you going to draw it yourself? How are we going to get it? It's pretty complex thing to try and... Yeah. You wouldn't believe that I actually used to work in advertising coming up with ideas for ads. That's the best I can do. It's groundbreaking. But we did have quite a heavy night last night at the awards.

Alexandra Pointet (38:36)
it yeah

play.

Ha ha!

Phill Keaney-Bolland (39:03)
excuse. There's no excuse. didn't think about it. The other day. It wasn't just that was also you know that show. Is it Kate?

Alexandra Pointet (39:13)
yeah, is it cake? Yeah, is it cake? That's what it's called, yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (39:16)
Yeah, that's yeah, that's how do you make a TV show that I don't know but you know

Alexandra Pointet (39:22)
They've really got a lot of episodes on that now and there's a Christmas special coming out so...

Phill Keaney-Bolland (39:27)
Wow, that's a niche. That's a cult product. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Alexandra Pointet (39:30)
cult product, there we go. Anyway, should we wrap it up? Yeah? All right. So we'll see you next time. Or you know, you'll hear us next time. And the weird eating banana link that you were just talking about. So lots of links coming your way. Yeah. Okay.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (39:40)
We'll put a in the bio for Modern House, Instagram, and...

yeah, yeah, I'll find him. He pops up on my Instagram. Yeah. If you're listening to this from modern house as well, we will accept payment for a promotion of you in the form of houses. Please give us a house. Yes, please do. Cool.

Alexandra Pointet (39:59)
You

Yeah. All right then, well, shall we say goodbye? All right, bye everybody. Like and subscribe. Till, till next time.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (40:11)
Let's say goodbye. Goodbye, everyone. Yes, do that.