How do you stand out from the crowd?

So many people talk about customer service or their passion - that’s like going to buy a car and the sales sleaze saying “this one comes with tyres!”

Years ago there was a guy who was a Ruby on Rails Core Contributor (basically he was famous in my part of the tech world) and he used to come to our meet-ups.

One month he excitedly announced he was starting a new agency with this guy Zach - called Made in London. Except every time he said it, people replied “what? Like french maid?” He got angrier and angrier as the night went on.

The next morning I set up a site called Maid in London, photoshopped his face onto a saucy maid photo and then linked through to his real site. My friends and I had a laugh about this.

Weeks later Zach (who I didn’t know) asked on Twitter who had built this site - he had seen traffic from it going to the real site. I owned up and he thought it funny.

Months after that, Zach got a request for some work he couldn’t do. He remembered me, got in touch and I got a six month contract out of it.

All because I did some stupid stuff with a hangover to poke fun at someone I knew.

So you don’t have to be bland or corporate or slick to get noticed. Just don’t be an arsehole.