When Everyone Is Talking About Your Brand, Know Who Matters

About two years ago, my advertising agency evolved into a software startup, analyzing data across platforms. But with the switch came a problem: Without any stores or campaigns to run experiments on or integrate with, I needed to create an ecommerce shop. But what should I sell? I happened to have a pretty cool domain, MaximumComfy.com, and the 2020 election had just happened. My friend and I had a small Discord server and liked to troll each other about politics, so we developed two products to poke fun at both parties. The rhetoric about the election had gotten so heated that we assumed people would have some awkward Thanksgiving dinners. We made two gifts: a Trump-inspired red hat that said “Cope” for your QAnon uncle, and a mug that said “Antifa’s tears” for your niece that went a little overboard in Portland. Facebook ads had gotten too expensive, but 4chan had just launched self-service advertising—and because no one in their right mind would want to advertise on 4chan, the CPM was 5 cents. Perfect for our experiment: We were able to reach 1 million users for $50. The ad was simple: both products and the tagline, “Holidays could get awkward. Let’s make them comfy.” To my surprise, people actually bought a few of the items. Not only that, but they were very curious who was behind it. And not everyone was happy with us. Our Discord, which was 20 to 30 of our closest friends, exploded into hundreds of people overnight. My phone and email inbox for the fake brand were full, half the people hating what we did and the other half seeming to like it. People made requests for their own merch, and we were happy to turn them into products. We were joined by a third creator, a young woman by the name of Cosmic obsessed with Terry Davis, a schizophrenic programmer who had built a computer he claimed could talk to God. We learned about the project's huge fanbase and made some affordable hoodies because our Discord users were lamenting they couldn’t afford the premium fan-made merch—though Davis had died, fans were maintaining TempleOS.org. I thought moving away from politics and toward something more innocuous like a strange operating system would lead to less harassment. But I was wrong. My phone started ringing, with callers asking why we weren't donating the proceeds to charity. Once we agreed to this request—we were doing this for research, not money—people demanded proof. Once we posted proof, we started receiving hate mail about not releasing it fast enough, or that the donation must be fake. With the never-ending stream of headaches the brand caused, I almost shut it down. I didn’t know how to handle the hate—and most of all, I didn’t know if what they were saying was true. Right-wingers yelled at us about our pro-trans shirts; left-wingers yelled at us about our Antifa’s Tears mug and shirts making fun of mask mandates. How would I find clarity, let alone peace? That’s where customer reviews saved the day. Among all the drama and hate mail, I realized we could prevent review bombing by only allowing verified buyers to post reviews. All of a sudden it was like finding calm in the storm. Because we had over 600 customers in the first year, and almost 100 of them had left reviews, we had a way forward. First, we realized that all of the noise really didn’t matter. If we had listened to the noise, we’d have thought our brand was the worst thing to ever exist. But if we checked the reviews of paying customers, we’d have seen a 4.9 star average. The people yelling were never going to buy anything anyway, so we could just ignore them. Second, if we did get nasty emails or phone calls, we asked for their email so we could look them up and solve their problem. Did they need a refund, an exchange or have a specific question about the products? The people harassing us would hang up. The 'Happy Customers' tab on MaximumComfy.com. Third, we put some basic safety measures in place for our Discord. We added a door, like a nightclub, where people had zero permissions except writing text. If you read the rules, you'd figure out all you had to do to get in was to ask, “Can I come in?” at the door. Basic reading comprehension filtered 90% of trolls, even the persistent 4chan types. Spamming slurs would get people automatically kicked, thanks to some bots we set up—and it went from a total shitshow to something true to its name, Maximum Comfy. At the end of the day, what kept me going was the purpose of it all: Internet nerds aren’t cool, but I wanted to make them feel cool with what I called “American Apparel for basement dwellers.” I made the brand I wish had existed when I was a terminally online nerd growing up. And with a few safety measures to make sure the more hardcore and disgruntled nerds stopped blowing up my phone, I was able to keep it running while maintaining my sanity, now that I (somewhat) have a life. When Intuit, a company many thousands of times our size, found out about the brand while my company, Aphrodite, was taking part in their accelerator, I was worried about getting kicked out. Instead they said, “This is awesome. Can you make swag for the accelerator?” Watching their smiling faces in Intuit hoodies, it cracked me up knowing how much I had dealt with learning how to make them. Wrap-up meeting of the Intuit Prosperity Accelerator.