Malcolm Gladwell’s Trick for Going Viral? Give Them Candy!
And how to apply it to fundraising, sales, or any message that you want to spread.
I recently watched the Malcolm Gladwell course on Masterclass. One of the sections was about how to convey complex ideas to readers. He discussed the power of charts, visualizations and metaphors to break down esoteric concepts into smaller digestible chunks. But there was one strategy in particular that jumped out at me: include candy with your meal.
His point is that it’s important to balance the intellectually rigorous or complex parts of your story with “candy,” which are fun and memorable snippets that give the reader a break from the “meal” of your story. The candy is the stuff your readers are going to use to tell their colleagues and friends about the story. They’re the parts of your story that are easiest to talk about casually and remember. The meal is the stuff they dwell on and take home with them to process.
The power of this approach is that it helps spread your ideas. People show up for the meal but complex ideas are just that — complex. They are difficult to convey to others. Most people enjoy sharing new knowledge with friends and family and candy helps them do that. Gladwell’s most famous piece of candy was the “10,000 hour rule” that he introduced in Outliers — that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something. Despite how accurate or not that rule is, it helped spread the word about him and the book better than any marketing campaign.
Books are just one vehicle for complex ideas and this strategy is applicable to many different areas. One example is pitching a company to a potential investor. Trying to fully explain your team, product, technology, roadmap, vision and more in a 30 to 60-minute meeting is impossible. The key is to figure out how to distill your hypothesis down to its most fundamental points. i.e. your vision for the future, why you’re the right team for this opportunity, and your progress.
It’s important to realize that in most complex transactions, whether it’s fundraising or enterprise sales, there will typically be one person within the target organization that becomes your internal champion. They will be the spokesman for your company, product, etc. and explain your value proposition to their colleagues. When pitching a VC, there will probably be one partner who takes the lead on diligence. If they become interested, they will eventually be pitching the company to their other partners on why they should move forward. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to explain what you do and why it matters and that’s where candy comes back into play. Your champion will rarely be able to present the company as well as you can, so by including candy into your pitch, you make it that much easier for them to communicate what you do. The most common form of fundraising candy is the analogy — “we are the Uber for X”. But if you’re doing something truly innovative an analogy probably won’t apply. You’ll have to be more creative. And to be clear, no one is going to invest or make a big purchase just off candy, you need to have the substance behind it, but it will help to spread your message.
Paul Graham from Y Combinator was the best I’ve ever seen at this process. In 2013, my cofounders and I went through YC with my start-up Asseta. The culmination of YC is Demo Day where each company gets two minutes to present to the top investors in tech. It’s a short time window and investors are viewing dozens of presentations back to back so it’s critical for the presentation to be as concise as possible. Leading up to demo day, all 50 of us in the batch were instructed to select the top three key ideas that we wanted to communicate to investors. We were then scheduled for a 5–10-minute meeting with the founder of YC, Paul Graham. From what I recall, he met with all 50 companies in one day. We went in there with our prepared points, he mulled it over for a few minutes and then promptly spit out three new, and much more effective, points. We weren’t the only ones, he probably replaced the majority of what came into that room. It was a remarkable display and one of the most impactful parts of the whole program.
My takeaway from the YC experience is it’s important to consult with outsiders in this process because it can be hard to see what will be most exciting to people learning about your story for the first time when you’re so deep into it. To figure out if you’ve found your candy, you should ask for feedback after a presentation about what resonated with the customer, partner, etc. If they have difficulty finding the words to summarize your message then you know you still have work to do on your candy!
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and computing.
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