Walter the Dog and the Freak Flag
The Story
Finance is dry. CJ Gustafson’s response was to write about it in dad jokes, memes, and a recurring ice cream rule for his dog.
His own framing of the strategy, told on the Growth In Reverse podcast: “You come for the GIFs and you stay for the CAC payback calculations” (Source 2).
The advice he kept returning to was something Sam Parr had told him: “‘Let your freak flag fly’ was something he’d heard from Sam Parr, and he took that to heart” (Source 2).
The thinking behind it traces back to Bill Simmons writing Grantland: “He made it cool to be a fan of what you’re writing about. A lot of the sports writers back then, they covered it from a grumpy angle: ‘I can’t enjoy what I’m doing.’ Dude, you have the best job in the world, why wouldn’t you enjoy that?” (Source 2). His diagnosis of the rest of the finance internet: “There’s a lot of really shitty business content online” (Source 3) — sterile and overly complex, because “people in the finance and business space often have a scarcity complex and try to make it more and more complex so people can’t understand” (Source 2).
The most concrete output of the freak-flag rule is Walter. The Growth In Reverse deep dive describes the ritual: “CJ’s dog makes a constant cameo as he hits certain subscriber milestones. Every 1,000 subscribers that Mostly Metrics gets, CJ takes his dog Walter out to get some ice cream” (Source 1).
It eventually spun off into its own micro-site: “Walter has become such a staple among CJ’s readers that he even created mostlyicecream.com where he shares more pictures of Walter getting his favorite treat” (Source 1).
CJ’s own line on why the freak flag is defensible: “You may have the recipe, but you don’t have the ingredients to copy it” (Source 2). And: “I think people started to say it’s almost like I’m hanging out with CJ. And he’s not trying to say he knows everything” (Source 2).
Lesson for Creators
In any over-serious vertical — finance, law, medicine, enterprise software — the competitive frontier isn’t more rigor. It’s personality. Rigor is table stakes among the people good enough to be reading you in the first place. CJ added a dog, a milestone ritual, and dad jokes to a topic everyone else wrote in a buttoned-up voice, and the result was that his readers started feeling like they hung out with him. That feeling is the moat. A competitor can copy the topics. They can’t copy Walter.
Related
- Create a social media persona — the general principle this story illustrates
- Give people a greater vision of themselves — the adjacent principle of writing for the reader’s identity
- The Profile Picture That Changed Everything — Charlie Hills: small personality signals having outsized engagement effects
- Three Ugly Graphics Got 480K Impressions — Charlie Hills: breaking pattern in a polished category
- An example of non-obvious idea — the structural principle of doing the obvious-but-undone thing