Tim Duggan - Cult Status

Consumers are changing, and the businesses forming around them are principled, purposeful and creative. The next generation of entrepreneurs thinks differently, andCult Statuswill show you how you can too.

Enough has been written about huge cult brands founded last century Nike, Apple, Red Bull. What will the cult companies of tomorrow look like? Who is amassing the kind of passionate community that gives them the best chance of getting through difficult times to build a long-term, sustainable success?

Tim Duggan, co-founder of one of Australias most innovative and awarded new media companies, has studied hundreds of successful entrepreneurs and change makers over the last decade to uncover what they all have in common.

Learn from the founders of modern brands like Blake Mycoskie (TOMS), Zoe Foster Blake (Go-To), Tim Brown (Allbirds), Daniel Flynn (Thankyou), Lucy Moss (SIX), Oscar McMahon (Young Henrys) and more. In this book youll discover:

The 7 Steps to building a business with cult status

The one thing you should do before starting something new

Why every business of the future needs to balance profit and purpose together

How to have just as much impact working inside a company as you can from outside

The traits every leader needs

How to create a passionate community that will rally around you in tough times

14 practical exercise you can do today to set up for success tomorrow

Armed with this book, anyone from anywhere can help create the next business with serious cult status.

CULT STATUS

CULT
STATUS

How to Build a
Business People Adore

Tim Duggan

This book is dedicated to my first mentors who taught methe real power of community: my dad, Phil, and my mum, Anna.

Contents

CULT STATUS

How to Build a Business People Adore

Introduction

T heres never been a better time to have a good idea.

Look beyond the daily drumbeat of negative news that blares from most nightly TV bulletins, and youll quickly realise that this is one of the most remarkable times in human history to be alive.

Sure, that sounds like hyperbole, but hear me out.

Right now, as youre reading this, someone in the world is throwing an idea around their head that will overhaul an industry thats been dominated by multinational companies for generations. Someone else has just launched a first prototype of a device that is going to save millions of lives.

Theres another person out there whos had that flashing moment of realisation that their current job no longer fulfils them, and has made a firm commitment to begin the hunt for a career thats going to mean they start each day with a genuine buzz. And theres someone whos been slaving away for years who has no idea theyre about to discover an untapped audience that will supercharge their business in a major way.

All the old ways of thinking are being rewritten in real time. Clever ideas travel around the world in days, entire industries are getting disrupted by accelerating trends, and theres an emerging group of people who are grabbing onto these opportunities to create businesses that will have meaningful impact in the future.

Anyone from anywhere can take advantage of the shifting tectonic plates right now. It doesnt matter if you work inside a company or for yourself, someone is going to use this pivotal moment in time in a positive way, and it might as well be you.

I often joke that Im the worlds oldest living millennial. As a member of the front flank of my generation born in the early 1980s, Ive watched business break as advances in technology, shifting global politics and changing behaviours have taken hold.

Ive been fortunate over the past two decades to watch as the traditional channels through which people got their daily news have crumbled and been rebuilt by social media. Ive taken advantage of some of the opportunities, co-founding my first media title in the mid 2000s; it has proudly evolved into an innovative business with multiple award-winning titles and was acquired by one of Australias largest media companies.

In that time, technology has evolved as fast as our ambitions. When I started my first website in 2006 the national gay and lesbian website Same Same it took a technical team of ten people over six months to build it from the ground up. We planned and built everything from scratch using complicated wireframe thoughts sketched out on A3 sheets, which were then interpreted and hand coded by an experienced team of front-and back-end developers.

By 2013, when we launched pop culture title Junkee, it took a team of three people six weeks to spin it up, using open-source technology such as WordPress as the base. Today you can create and publish a website in minutes. The playing field has finally been levelled so much that youve now got a fighting chance of competing with bigger companies, even if youre a first-time creative sitting in bed armed with only a laptop and a good idea.

The company I co-founded, Junkee Media, is now Australias leading digital publisher and content agency for millennials. Our aim has always been to know more about young people than anyone else, and one of the most rewarding parts of my work over the last decade has been to observe, study and respond to how young Australians are changing so we can evolve the type of content we create for them. In that time, we have conducted one of the largest youth studies in Australian history, partnering with independent research agency Pollinate. Weve spoken to over 25,000 young people over ten years, tracking their opinions, behaviours and actions as they matured through early adulthood, and weve analysed over five million data points in the process.

When you observe something that closely, even the tiniest of changes are noticeable before they show up anywhere else. Two small things that we first noticed years ago have slowly morphed into large trends that are meeting each other in the middle right now, with huge consequences and exciting opportunities.

On one side is the changing attitude of young people. The simplest way to think of millennials is roughly everyone in their twenties and thirties right now, with Gen Z our younger siblings who are currently late teens and early twenties. Weve grown up straddling technological change, becoming adults in a fast-paced world thats beamed directly into our hands every single day. At Junkee weve tracked millennials and Gen Z as theyve become increasingly engaged with big, important issues like news, politics, the environment, and gender and social equality. Weve watched the rise of wokeness, a word appropriated from African American culture and applied to someone who is awake to the social injustices in the world. As our global spending power increases to an estimated US$14 trillion in millennials will be the biggest contributors to the global economy out of every generation for the next 15 years.

How we are spending our money is changing dramatically. We care about these big issues, and were demanding that decision-makers within any company we buy from not only care about us, but be vocal, active and genuine in their concern. Its a huge movement thats growing louder as we age and our disposable income grows. This increasing demand that businesses change their behaviour to help solve some of these issues is the biggest change weve tracked at Junkee over the past decade of data.