The Three Pattern-Breaking Actions
Movements, storytelling, and disagreeableness — how you get people to move to your future
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 92%
Once you have a pattern-breaking idea, you must persuade others to abandon the familiar for an uncertain tomorrow. Maples identifies three actions the best founders take: build a movement, tell a what-is/what-could-be story, and be productively disagreeable. Use it when moving from idea to early traction and team/customer/investor recruitment.
Origin
Maples frames all startups as fundamentally disagreeable acts — a disagreement with how things are done. Asking people to change habits is provocative, so founders need a repeatable set of persuasion behaviors, which he distilled into three.
Core principles
- 01Early customers, employees, and investors are animated by belief, not pragmatism — they act for aesthetic reasons
- 02A movement leverages a grievance of a minority against the tyranny of a majority
- 03You can't stand out if you always fit in; only people who are different can make a difference
How to run it
- 1
Build a movement
Assemble a set of early believers who share one belief and move together to a different future, rallying around a higher purpose rather than a feature comparison.
Pro tip Turn the incumbent's greatest strength into its weakness. Airbnb's 'live like a local' made the Four Seasons' consistent-everywhere experience something to apologize for — without ever saying hotels suck.
- 2
Tell a what-is / what-could-be story
Use the hero's journey: describe the painful world that is, the better world that could be, and bounce between them. Position early believers as the hero and yourself as the mentor.
Pro tip You are Obi-Wan, not Luke — the early believers are the heroes; your job is to emote them to move and co-create the future.
Watch out Tell a different story to employees, investors, and customers, because each has a different idea of what being a hero means to them.
- 3
Be productively disagreeable
Have the courage to be disliked, pursue what you're obsessed with even at the cost of status, and wield both carrot and stick to create enough activation energy for people to move.
Pro tip The 'right kind of disagreeable' listens and understands your view, then chooses to believe a different truth — versus covering their ears.
Watch out People will use your desire to fit in against you ('you can't do that, that's unethical/illegal'); before you win they think you're stupid, and after you win they say you cheated.
In the wild
Chesky created a movement around living like a local: in Paris you can stay at a Four Seasons like everywhere else, or live like a Parisian. He never said hotels suck; he showed the weakness in the incumbent's strength and let the customer decide.
→ Turned the incumbent's consistency into a liability and animated a movement of believers.
Maples advised Ev Williams not to raise so much money ('Mike's law': startups spend it all in 18 months regardless). Ev listened, understood, then raised a lot anyway and it worked — the 'right kind of disagreeable.'
→ Maples cites it as why he values disagreeable founders who hear advice and still back their own truth.
Common mistakes
Marketing by targets and programs instead of belief
Early customers aren't moved by pragmatic inbound/outbound programs; they move because they believe what you believe.
Casting yourself as the hero
Founders who make themselves the hero fail to make the early believer the hero, and the story doesn't move anyone.
Optimizing to be coachable and liked
Excess conformity and agreeableness prevent the differentiation a breakthrough requires.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders moving from idea to early traction who must recruit believers across audiences
Not ideal for
Mature organizations optimizing an accepted category where conformity and reliability are the job
From the transcript
“one is movements the other storytelling and the other is uh disagreeableness”
“it leverages a grievance of a minority against the tyranny of a majority”
“your job as the founder is to be obi-1 not Loop”
“before they win they they have to have the courage to be disliked”
From the episode
Pattern Breakers: How to find a breakthrough startup idea
Mike Maples, Jr. (Founding Partner at Floodgate, ex-Product